![]() ![]() ![]() They finish long before the lorries return. While the night is lit up by the bombardment, Paul's detail goes about its task, pushing in iron stakes and stringing barbed wire at regular intervals. Meanwhile, Paul is thinking about the awareness of the front known to all soldiers their senses are alert and they are changed from a relaxed state by "a tense waiting, a watching, a heightening alertness, a strange sharpening of the senses." As he ponders this, the lorries leave to collect them again at dawn. Kat can recognize the type and size of the shells by the sounds, and he teaches the young recruits these differences. The young recruits are agitated but the veterans like Paul and Kat are thick-skinned and use the moment to teach the novices. The fumes of powder can be tasted and the guns make the earth quake. As they near the front line they see the guns camouflaged and they smell the air, acrid with smoke. As they pass one particular house, Paul hears geese and glances significantly at Kat, who is already thinking about geese for dinner. Although they keep up a steady flow of repartee with a marching munitions column, Paul's group is disconcerted by a change in the usual pattern of British artillery, which begins firing before ten o'clock, an hour too soon. At nine o'clock in the evening, under cover of darkness, Paul's company, tense with the understood danger of their mission, boards trucks to travel down a bumpy road to lay wire near the front.
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