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Most of them were silent, staring ahead of them and licking their lips with swollen tongues. They were parched with thirst, some of them told me. Many stopped to drink the last drop out of their water-bottles. As one man drank he spun round and fell with a thud on his face. Machine-gun bullets were whipping up the earth. From Loos came a loud and constant rattle of machine-guns.
Then write a short history of the machine-gun from which they were lost, giving date and place of birth, together with, a statement of the exact number of rounds which it has fired a machine-gun fires about five hundred rounds a minute adding the name and military record of the pack-animal which usually carries it.
As the only features in the landscape were a ragged tree stump, and what looked like the remains of a broken fish basket over the horizon, all very distant and a dozen shell-bursts and the bark of an unseen machine-gun, all very close the determination was apt to be a trifle erratic. Still, the points were marked down, where each handful believed and trusted itself to be.
About five o'clock in the morning the Germans appeared on this lower road. Now, the sergeant in charge of that machine-gun, instead of taking cover behind this hedge with this brook in front of him, had concealed his gun in this clump of trees, which, as you see, are out in the middle of a field.
During the day few French soldiers are seen outside their dugouts, except parties cleaning the trenches. In the front line only a few sentries were kept on duty, and they were relieved every two hours. The French speak with great confidence of their field artillery, the terrible 75's. A battery of these guns handled by French gunners can fire almost like a machine-gun, and the noise is deafening.
Inherent stability was gradually improved, and, from 1916 onward, practically every pilot could carry on with his machine-gun or camera and trust to his machine to fly itself until he was free to attend to it. There was more than one story of a machine coming safely to earth and making good landing on its own account with the pilot dead in his cock-pit.
To gain the title of a "smart soldier," Tommy has to keep clear of the Crime Sheet, and you have to be darned smart to do it. I have been on it a few times, mostly for "Yankee impudence." During our stay of two weeks in rest billets our Captain put us through a course of machine-gun drills, trying out new stunts and theories.
They mined beneath this place and it blew up with a roaring blast which flung up tons of soil in a black mass. Then the Fusiliers dashed forward, flinging bombs through barbed wire and over sand-bags which had escaped the radius of the mine-burst in one jumbled mass of human bodies in a hurry to get on, to kill, and to come back. One German machine-gun got to work on them.
Some officers had lent us their horses, and Voukotitch had proudly produced his English saddle for Jo. On the road the spirit of mischief entered him. "You can ride all right," he said; "wouldn't you like to go to the nearest machine-gun to the Austrian lines?" "Rather," said Jo. "You'll have to do some stiff riding, though. I know the major, and he is bored to death. He'll let us."
Good!" said Henri. "We chose the same. Here we are, snug in this place, with plenty of ammunition, and ready and eager to continue fighting. If any of you men understand a machine-gun, get to the one we have, at once, and man it; the rest, who have no rifles, can assist in any way that appeals to them. Ah! Watch those fellows. They are streaming into the hall.
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