But we were going still nearer to the German lines, and the next day we set out for Recicourt and arrived there about noon. It is a little bombed village where a few thousand soldiers are quartered, and a few score villagers huddle in cellars and caves by night and go forth to their farms by day. The village lies in a ravine. The railway runs in front of the town, and the week we were there a big naval gun was booming away on the railroad throwing death into the German lines eight or ten miles away. At the back of the town, across a bridge over a brook the white wagon road runs, and that day the road was black with trucks going up to the front line with supplies. We could hear the big guns plainly over in the woods a few miles away. But we had no thought of danger as we tumbled out of our car. We should have known that bombed villages don't just grow that way! Something causes the gaping holes in roofs, the shattered walls, the blear-eyed windows and battered out-buildings! Generally it is German shells, but we had been seeing bombed towns for days, and we forgot that sooner or later we must meet the bombs that did the miserable work. As we stood by the automobiles at Recicourt, kicking the wrinkles out of our cotton khaki riding breeches--and mine, alas, had to be kicked carefully to preserve that pie-slice cut from my shirt tail that expanded the waistband from 36 to 44 inches--little did it seem to Henry and me that we should first meet a German shell face to face in a place like Recicourt. The name did not sound historic. But we had scarcely shaken hands around the group of American Ambulance men who gathered to greet us before we heard a B-A-N-G!--an awful sound! It was as if someone suddenly had picked up the whole Haynes Hardware store--at Emporia--tinware, farm implements, stoves, nails and shelf-goods, and had switched it with an awful whizz through the air and landed it upon the sheet-iron roof of Wichita's Civic Forum, which seats six thousand! We looked at each other in surprise, but each realized that he must be casual to support the other; so we said nothing to the Ambulance boys, and they, being used to such things, let it pass also. We went on talking; so did Major Murphy, being a soldier. So did Mr. Richard Norton, being head of the American Ambulance Service. In a minute there was a fearful whistle--long, piercing, and savage, and then they had taken the Peters Hardware stock in Emporia and dumped it on the Wichita Union Station. This time we saw a great cone-shaped cloud of dirt rise not 400 feet away--over by the wagon road, across the brook from us. Still no one mentioned the matter. It seemed to Henry and me to be anything but a secret, but if the others had that notion of it, far be it from us to blab! An ambulance driver came lazying around the corner and began to start his car. "Any one hurt, Singer?" asked a handsome youth named Hughes, of the Corps.