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It was impossible to estimate their number, line followed line in such rapid sequence that the eye was bewildered. They were up against the 29th. The Division wiped out, not partially but completely, row after row. Rifles and machine-guns mingled in hasty chorus, incessant, rapid, accurate. Fritz fell back. The glasses swept over to the right: the heart gave one wild leap of anxiety.
Shouts and cheers from the Cuartel soon told us that our friends had got possession of it, and after the city was won I learned that when the two columns had started, leaving a third drawn up in the square before the Cuartel, those who were for us, remembering what I had said about the gold that I would give for the machine-guns and the ammunition, had broken their ranks and made a rush for the doors to secure the three guns which were in the courtyard, and so the fight had begun, they seeking to hold the Cuartel against the others until help came.
Single rifles now alone cracked off; all the other men must be listening too listening and wondering what this distant rumble meant. Far away the Chinese fire still continued to rage as fiercely but near us, by some strange chance, these distant echoes had claimed attention. Again the booming dully shook the air. Again the machine-guns beat their replying rataplan.
All the British soldiers whom I met in Germany were captured in the early part of the war when their shell-less Army had to face machine-guns and high explosives often with the shield of their own breasts and a rifle. Herded like cattle many of the wounded dying, they travelled eastwards to be subject to the insults and vilifications of the German population.
"I say, Gubbins," said Davis, "we fought fairly well to-day I reckon; but do you think we should have stood against such a fire as that?" "Well, I don't know," replied Gubbins. "If there had been any cover near I, for one, should have felt uncommon inclined to make for it. I can't abide them shells and machine-guns."
A mass of Indian infantry, with some machine-guns, had established themselves for hundreds of yards along this commanding height, among the old Chinese barricades, and were now firing as fast as they could down into the distant Palace enclosures. Overhead bullets were passing in continuous streams, and crouching low in an angle of the buttresses lay a number of wounded men.
At the machine-guns, the gunners settled themselves, waiting the Master's word of command to mow into the white foam of that insurging wave a wave of frantic riders and of lathering Nedj horses, the thunder of whose hoofs moment by moment welled up into a heart-breaking chorus of power. "Damn it all, sir!" the major exclaimed. "When are you going to rip into them?
That object was achieved, but at the cost of severe casualties to the divisions engaged, which were launched in daylight after artillery preparation, which results proved to have been inadequate, against a trench-system strongly manned and garrisoned by very numerous machine-guns.
The battalion of Londoners on our left north of Moislains had withdrawn, the village of Moislains itself was never mopped up, and the eight Bosche machine-guns holding Moislains seeing this moved quickly to the south of the village and opened on our backs.
The wretched Moussa Isa's carcase was now superfluous nay dangerous, and must be disposed of at once, for Europeans are most kittle cattle. They will exterminate your tribe with machine-guns, gin, small-pox, and still nastier things, but they are fearfully shocked at a bit of killing on the part of others. They call it murder.
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