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. 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. As they pass one particular house, Paul hears geese and glances significantly at Kat, who is already thinking about geese for dinner. As they near the front line they see the guns camouflaged and they smell the air, acrid with smoke. The fumes of powder can be tasted and the guns make the earth quake.
The young recruits are agitated but the veterans like Paul and Kat are thick-skinned and use the moment to teach the novices. Kat can recognize the type and size of the shells by the sounds, and he teaches the young recruits these differences. 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.
