On each of those two nights it had rained, and rained hard.
Just as we started on our way the big guns began booming somewhere ahead of us toward the southwest; so we turned in that direction.
We had heard the guns distinctly in the early forenoon, and again, less distinctly, about noontime.

Thereafter, for a while, there had been a lull in the firing; but now it was constant--a steady, sustained boom- boom-boom, so far away that it fell on the eardrums as a gentle concussion; as a throb of air, rather than as a real sound.

For three days now we had been following that distant voice of the cannon, trying to catch up with it as it advanced, always southward, toward the French frontier.

Therefore we flogged the belly of our tired horse with the lash of a long whip, and hurried along.

There were five of us, all Americans.