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We had four guns when we pulled into this position, but were latterly reinforced by two more from another battery, their sisters having been smashed and the crews bayoneted, including their commanding officers, and like friendless children they came to us looking for a home and were gladly taken in, thus increasing our battery to six guns.
My own agents had discovered the place where the prisoners were detained, also that they were to be quietly bayoneted in the night, as shooting would attract attention. I was also certain that Koltchak knew nothing about this.
The Chilians, who were now well up, bayoneted them by dozens as they attempted to gain the forts; and when the forts were opened to receive them the patriots entered at the same time, and thus drove them from fort to fort into the Castle of Corral, together with two hundred more who had abandoned some guns advantageously placed on a height at Fort Chorocomayo.
We were receiving rifle fire from four directions and bayonet thrusts from the Germans on the parapet. Mowed down like sheep. And as they came on they trampled our dead and bayoneted our wounded. The machine-gun crew had gone under to a man, doing their best to the last.
They looked monstrous, lying there crumpled up, amid a foul litter of clothes, stickbombs, old boots, and bottles. Groups of dead lay in ditches which had once been trenches, flung into chaos by that bombardment I had seen. They had been bayoneted. I remember one man, an elderly fellow sitting up with his back to a bit of earth with his hands half raised.
But the guns were being steadily served with terrible effect; the few poor wretches who reached the deck were bayoneted, and in how long or how short a time I cannot tell, for everything seemed to be swept away in the excitement; we steamed away out of the smoke into the ruddy sunset, and there I saw in one place a mass of tangled bamboo and matting, with men clustering upon it, and crowding one over the other like bees in a swarm.
At any rate they did not do so, whether from choice or necessity, and it was a part of our scheme to push them back into their entrenchments. This work was delegated to the cavalry entirely, but, as I have said before, mounted carbineers, are no match for stubborn, bayoneted infantry. So when the horsemen were close up to the Rebels, they were dismounted, and acted as infantry to all intents.
But Mistress Thankful had overlooked one difference between her own farm and a military encampment. She had not proceeded a dozen yards before a figure apparently started out of the ground beneath her, and, levelling a bayoneted musket across her path, called, "Halt!"
She was eager, voluble, curious, and most disconcertingly oblivious of a possible sensitiveness in Lane. "Dare, you look like a dead one," she said. "Did you get shot, bayoneted, gassed, shell-shocked and all the rest? Did you go over the top? Did you kill any Germans? Gee! did you get to ride in a war-plane? Come across, now, and tell me."
German machine-gunners were bayoneted as their thumbs were still pressed to their triggers.
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