'Ah!' suddenly interrupted Maurice, 'look at that smoke on the Hattoy hill. They've captured it; they'll be leading us a nice dance now.' For a moment the sight he beheld supplied some food for his anxious curiosity, into which the first quiver of fear was stealing. He could not take his eyes off the round summit of that hill, the only acclivity that he could perceive, above the fleeting line of fields, level with his eye. It was, however, much too far away for him to distinguish the gunners of the batteries that had just been established there by the Prussians, and, indeed, he only saw the puffs of smoke rising at each fresh discharge above a plantation, which probably concealed the guns. As Maurice had instinctively divined, the capture of this position, the defence of which General Douay had been compelled to renounce, was a very serious matter. The Hattoy hill commanded the surrounding plateaux, and when the German batteries installed there opened fire on the Second Division of the Seventh Corps, they speedily decimated it. The enemy's practice was now much improved, and the French battery, near which Beaudoin's company was lying down, had a couple of gunners killed in rapid succession. A splinter at the same time wounded a quartermaster-corporal of the company, whose left heel was carried clean away, and who began shrieking with pain as though he had suddenly gone mad. 'Shut up, you brute!' shouted Rochas. 'Is there any sense in making such a row over a flea-bite?' Suddenly calmed, the wounded man became silent, and sank into a senseless immobility, with his foot in his hand. And, meanwhile, the formidable artillery duel, growing more and more serious, steadily went on over the heads of the prostrate regiments, across the hot, mournful stretch of country where no one was to be seen in the fierce sunlight. There seemed to be nothing but this thunder, this destructive blizzard rushing backwards and forwards athwart the deserted expanse. And hours and hours were to elapse before it ceased. But the superiority of the German artillery was already becoming manifest; nearly all of their percussion shells exploded at tremendous distances, whereas the French shells, on the fuse system, did not travel nearly so far, and more frequently than otherwise burst in the air before reaching their destinations. And, meantime, for Captain Beaudoin's men there was no resource but that of trying to make themselves as small as possible in the furrows in which they were lying, close-pressed to the soil. They were not even able to ease themselves, intoxicate themselves, shake off their thoughts by firing a few shots. For whom could they fire at, since there was still nobody to be seen along the blank horizon? 'Aren't we going to fire?' Maurice kept on repeating, quite beside himself. 'I'd give five francs to see one of those Prussians appear. It's exasperating to be fired at like that without being able to reply.'