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The use of cavalry by the French and British seemed to have taken the Germans by surprise and interfered with their plans. In one village they were forced to hurriedly depart without touching the supper which was laid out on the table. In other places the Allies found newly opened boxes of explosives with which the Germans had planned to destroy the villages before leaving.
This consisted in the capture, off Round Island, of a great fleet of Chinese junks, bound from Wei-hai-wei to Port Arthur, conveying to the beleaguered city vast quantities of food, clothing, ammunition, explosives, and supplies of every imaginable description. The junks were taken into Dalny, where their cargoes were declared to be contraband of war, and confiscated by the Japanese.
The louder reverberations as the day advanced and night came on showed that a fresh supply had been obtained, and that a new and determined campaign against the conflagration had been entered upon. Hitherto much of the work had been ignorantly and carelessly done, and by the hasty and premature use of explosives more harm than good had been occasioned.
It seemed but a part of the process that every year the instruments of war were vaster and more powerful, and that armies and explosives outgrew all other growing things.... Three hundred years of diastole, and then came the swift and unexpected systole, like the closing of a fist. They could not understand it was systole.
This programme represented a determined effort to speed up munitions production in the autumn of 1916. It included not only gas but explosives, both of which could be supplied by the I.G. Explosives demanded oleum, nitric acid, and nitrating plants, which already existed, standardised, in the factories of the dye combine.
She needs nitrates for her explosives, oil for her motors, bread for her sixty-five millions of inhabitants. For all this she has made provision, but the day will come when her granaries will be empty and her reservoirs dry. How will she fill them?
It must be remembered that, after the first Battle of the Marne, the German Government turned to the I.G. for a large part of its explosives and practically all its poison gas, and, as has been stated on many occasions, and with reason, Germany would not have been able to continue the war after the summer of 1915 but for the commercial development of the Haber process by the I.G. The story is too well known to repeat at length.
Jimmie had to grope this way and that, and he ran a piece of broken branch into his cheek, and by that time was almost ready to cry with fright. He knew that his home was two miles from the explosives plant, and he could not conceive how an explosion could have done such damage at such a distance.
A few months only would then be the life of this prodigious aeronef, of whose superiority in aerial locomotion they had such convincing proofs! The idea took such hold of them that they thought of nothing else but how to put it into execution. And how? By seizing on some of the explosives on board and simply blowing her up. But could they get at the magazines?
From the fields came the cry of, "Leave that to me!" as a fly rose from the bat, or, "Out on first!" as men took a rest from shell-curves and high explosives with baseball curves and hot liners between the bases, which was very homelike there in Flanders.
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