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For it was raining hard a dogged, dreary downpour drilling through a heavy atmosphere whose enervation was like the oppression of some malign and inexorable incubus; its incessant crepitation resembling the mutter of a weary, sullen drum, dwarfing to insignificance the stuttering of machine-guns remote in the northward, dominating even a dull thunder of cannonading somewhere down the far horizon; lowering a vast and shimmering curtain of slender lances, steel-bright, close-ranked, between the trenches and over all that weary land.
Bombs and machine-guns did the work, destroying fortifications and bringing about the surrender of all the Mullah's following, with the exception of about seventy who made their escape. Certain records both in construction and performance had characterised the post-war years, though as design advances and comes nearer to perfection, it is obvious that records must get fewer and farther between.
Every minute the murderous crack of rifles and the whir of machine-guns rang out. Death hovered all round. In front the German rifles, above the bursting shrapnel, each shell scattering its four hundred odd leaden bullets far and wide, killing or wounding any unfortunate man who happened to be in the way. The trenches looked as if a giant cataclysm of Nature had taken place.
The Germans knew better than ourselves how to sit still behind their machine-guns and avoid discovery. French civilians were moving about among the cottages at the time when our advance to occupy them was made and it seemed impossible that the enemy could be holding them even weakly. Civilians, too, were mingled in the fray as well on this as on later occasions.
It simply indicated that those manning the American and French anti-aircraft guns, and the aviators of those two armies, should get ready to repel an enemy air raid. But the queer thing occurred when every one of the pursuing planes opened up their machine-guns almost simultaneously upon the first.
He had 130,000 men near Le Mans, and proposed to take 120,000 with 350 field-pieces or machine-guns, and calculated that he might require a week, or to be precise eight days, to carry this force from Le Mans to Chartres, allowing for fighting on the way. Further, to assist his movements he wished Faidherbe, as well as Bourbaki, to assume the offensive vigorously as soon as he was ready.
Under ordinary conditions, when one can skim above the surface of the earth at a height of a few hundred feet, this is quite true, but it is quite a different matter when one is flying above hostile troops who are blazing away at him with rifles and machine-guns.
They then had a huge target at pointblank range on which to concentrate leaden hail from machine-guns and rifles aided by the shells from the Asiatic forts. Few lived in that eager first rush some jumped into the sea to wade or swim, but were shot in the water or drowned under weight of their equipment.
After the Battle of the Somme opened, the German newspapers used to print extracts from the London papers in which British correspondents vividly described how their own men were mown down by German machine-guns after they had passed them, so well was the enemy entrenched.
The German machine-guns were not out of commission, and for them it was like working a loom playing bullets back and forth across the zone of a hundred yards which the British had to traverse. The British had been told to charge and they charged. Theirs not to reason why; that was the glory of the thing.
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