For this information the impatient gunners seemed to be waiting. At once they broke into the same feverish motions at the guns, setting the hand on the shrapnel clock, so the burst would come "_Verzig metres tiefer_"--or forty meters further on--then the breeches snapped shut, and I saw them clap their hands to their ears--just as I had seen the boyish gunners of the 7.7s do in the West--while in salvos the guns roared and a multitude of specks filled the air, and there came back to us the loose rattling sounds of four shells, getting under way on their trip to the enemy's lines. In the unreal stillness that followed, I heard the telephone buzz and drone. "_Schön!_" called the officer to his battery. "_Viele Russlanders tot!_" "Do they get back the results so quickly?" I asked Tzschirner. "How is it possible?" "You would wish to see?" he asked. "I shall try." He said something to the officer, who immediately telephoned something to whoever was at the end of the line. After a brief conference Tzschirner saluted the officer and came to us with a smile. "We shall go now. We can see the battle--if you should like." What a wonderful little officer he was!--a Miracle Man, who now was granting the one great desire. "What luck!" I was saying, "a battle!" With his pistol drawn--for, "were we to meet Russians, they would not know who you were and I should have to protect you,"--Rittmeister Tzschirner followed the telephone wires, along the edge of the woods until skirting a frozen reed grown pond, he moved cautiously into the forest, pausing every few strides to listen, while the feeling came upon me that I was utterly hollow and my throat was dry as a board. Once we saw tracks in the snow, a wet red stain and a sleeve of a Russian army coat, which seemed to have been slashed off; once we heard a shrapnel pang behind us on the tops of the trees; and then there came no sound to break the crunch of our boots in the snow. As we proceeded I began to experience a curious sense of security in contrast to the passage through the forest that croaked with rifles. By the time we came out on a ledge that overhung a yellowish frozen swamp, I forgot myself in the interest of the drama before me. As we gazed across the kilometers of the Netta swamp toward where the Bobr lay among the weeds, a monstrous smoking serpent, the shrapnel puffed like the clouds of June, drifting with serene white beauty, while those who had stood near, lay stricken below.... I heard Tzschirner call to some one. From the great pine at our back there came an answer in German. "You may go into the observing post," said Tzschirner. "Do you wish?" And I climbed up a ladder that had been nailed on the pine and squeezed my way up through the floor of a little house, hidden amid the boughs of the tree; and there I found the captain of the battery, crouching, for the pine thatched house was tiny, and staring with his glasses through a hole in the wall.