This Month's Installment
As always, the italicized parts are what I'm unsure about.
Sometimes a thin, fluffy, white cloud comes up over them, remains hanging a short while, and yields like a vapor. There the fierce battle surges.The hours pass; morning---160---became afternoon; the dark lines move seemingly closer; one minute, they are visible in indistinct outlines; the next they disappear, as if the earth had swallowed them; then it is as if they climbed up small hills and fortifications.The thundering of the cannons sounds closer, louder. The rattling and clattering of the machine guns join it, beside the singing whirring and whistling of the shells. Tacktack - rrrrr - rrrr - si - tsiiissst - hui hui - baffbaff - bumm!... so it goes without stopping. The earth rumbles, sighs, screams. As if a thousand invisible wings were spinning in the air, as if the ground were spitting fire that fizzes up in flashing tongues; spread over the fields, mixed with iron and soul...The slowly moving dark lines rise at a steady rate; soon they slacken, open themselves up widely and swarm apart; soon they pull themselves together into close formations; then again they are pushed erratically forwards and just as quickly pulled back again. And now there is nothing to see. Until they suddenly emerge a new; here and there whole rows duck; the one rises up, charges forward; the others remain lying. And the bullets patter there like hailstones, and from all sides, it whistles bangs, whizzes.Calmly, the Reckensteiner stands at his post. Only one grief is in him: that he cannot be there below, fighting, attacking, dying! It is something different at the front from up here as train station commander. Yet he knows that he stands in a post full of responsibility. That gives him courage and patience.
