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After entering Rheims the French, to protect the innocent citizens against bombs dropped by German air-ships, for two nights placed a search-light on the towers, but, fearing this might be considered a breach of agreement as to the mitrailleuses, the abbé Chinot ordered the search-light withdrawn.
He wanted, above all, to see the place where the first companies of the French infantry had suddenly come on a mixed crowd of Boxers, soldiers and townspeople fleeing in panic all mixed together, and had mown them down with mitrailleuses. There was a cul-de-sac, which was horrible, it was reported.
From every window of the three-storied chateau opposite us the lean muzzles of mitrailleuses poured out their hail of death. I have seen fighting on four continents, but I have never witnessed so deadly a fire as that which wiped out the head of the Belgian column as a sponge wipes out figures on a slate.
Their artillery was silent, however; and from this fact the German artillery officers grew jubilant, confidently asserting that their Krupp guns had dismounted the French batteries and knocked their mitrailleuses to pieces.
Peasants too old for war, their occupations gone, sat listlessly with hanging hands, their faces the faces of bewildered children; their clean floors were tracked by the muddy boots of soldiers; their orderly lives disturbed, uprooted; their once tidy farmyards were filled with transports; their barns with army horses; their windmills, instead of housing sacks of grain, were occupied by mitrailleuses.
The Insurgents in the Rue de Rivoli and the garden of the Tuileries were using mitrailleuses and rifles, and the troops along the Boulevard at the edge of the Place des Invalides, close to the river, were attacking them with four-pounder guns. Fort Vanves was firing on the Insurgent positions in the neighbourhood of Montrouge and the Faubourg St.
The wounded men with us were very quiet. I thought they were dead. There was only the incessant cannonade and the crashing of buildings. Mitrailleuses were at work now spitting out bullets. It was a worse sound than the shells. It seemed more deadly in its rattle. I stared back behind the car and saw the other ambulance in our wake. I did not see the motor-car.
The Buenos Ayres Standard, describing that day of fierce warfare, stated: "At dawn, the National troops, quartered in the Plaza Libertad, made another desperate attack on the Revolutionary positions in the Plaza Lavalle. The Krupp guns, mitrailleuses and gatlings went off at a terrible rate, and volleys succeeded each other, second for second, from five in the morning till half-past nine.
The cannon that he passed, with the exception of the Montigny mitrailleuses and the American gatlings, were all beautiful pieces, bronzed and engraved with crown and LN and eagle, but for all their beauty they were only muzzle-loaders. In a little while he came to the head of the column.
But courage, the right, hatred of the foreigner, the yearning for vengeance, were to take the place of more perfect engines, and to replace at least it was hoped so the modern mitrailleuses and breech-loaders. The troops were passed in review. Not a citizen failed at the roll-call.
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