But there was no succession of crashes. The sound was more
like the roaring of a distant storm.
They advanced another mile, two hundred thousand men, afire with zeal, a
whole vast army moved forward as the other French armies were by the
hidden hand which they could not see, of which they knew nothing, but
the touch of which they could feel.
John heard a whizzing sound, he caught a glimpse of a dark object,
rushing forward at frightful velocity, and then he and his wheel reeled
beneath the force of a tremendous explosion. The shell coming from an
invisible point, miles away, had burst some distance on his right,
scattering death and wounds over a wide radius. But Vaugirard's brigades
did not stop for one instant. They cheered loudly, closed up the gap in
their line, and went on steadily as before. Some one began to sing the
Marseillaise, and in an instant the song, like fire in dry grass, spread
along a vast front. John had often wished that he could have heard the
armies of the French Revolution singing their tremendous battle hymn as
they marched to victory, and now he heard it on a scale far more
gigantic than in the days of the First French Republic.
The vast chorus rolled for miles and for all he knew other armies, far
to right and left, might be singing it, too. The immense volume of the
song drowned out everything, even that tremor in the air, caused by the
big guns. John's heart beat so hard that it caused actual physical pain
in his side, and presently, although he was unconscious of it, he was
thundering out the verses with the others.
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