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The Companies were linking up the North with the West, and strings of trolleys, coupled together like railway-trucks, and laden with yellow clay or great balks of timber, or giant scales of bored armour-plating, or moleskin-clad, brawny navvies, progressed incessantly and at all hours through the thoroughfares of the metropolis behind huge, giraffe-necked, splay-wheeled, smoke-vomiting traction-engines.
Well, which did Moses and his little gang come across first in the Desert, the Pillar of Cloud, or the Pillar of Fire, or a couple of railway-trucks containin' the raw material for a sky-journey, only waitin' till Brer' Boer plugs a bullet in among the dynamite? It makes me feel good all over, as the American women say, when I think of it."
Undismayed, however, the French set energetically to work to make up their deficiencies. As it takes time to manufacture guns, large numbers of naval pieces were pressed into service, most of them being mounted on railway-trucks, thus insuring extreme mobility.
They stand on the mud of pavements, these degraded sea-dogs, with long lines of railway-trucks clanking their couplings behind their backs, and run malevolent glances over your ship from headgear to taffrail, only wishing to tyrannize over the poor creature under the hypocritical cloak of benevolence and care.
We overtook a string of camels as we neared the sok, strolling along and regarding the skies, R. and myself with an exaggerated superciliousness. They were laden with dates, carpets, and slippers from Fez, and, together with mules and donkeys, constitute the vans and railway-trucks of Morocco, substituting over the face of the land a dilatory calm in the place of speed and bustle.
Some idea may be had of the variety of artillery in use on the French front when I mention that there are at least eleven calibers of guns, howitzers, and mortars, ranging in size from 9 inches to 20.8 inches, in action between Switzerland and the Somme. All of these, with a very few exceptions, are mounted on railway-trucks.
Even to the inexperience of W. K. the sand-bagged earthworks built about Gueldersdorp, the barricades of trek-waggons and railway-trucks blocking up the roads debouching on the veld, the extending lines of trenches, the watchdog forts, the sentinelled pickets, the noiseless, continually moving patrols, all the various parts of the marvellous machinery of defence, controlled by one master-hand upon the levers, would count for nothing against that overwhelming onrush of armed thousands, that flood of men dammed up above the town, and waiting the signal to roll down and overwhelm her, and Cripps! what a chance to make a glorious, heroic splash in Greta's sight!
It was not the monster guns on railway-trucks, or even the great numbers of quick-firing, hard-hitting 75's, but the magnificent courage and tenacity of the tired men in the mud-splashed uniforms, which held Verdun for France.
Still other batteries are engaged in keeping down the fire of the hostile artillery while the big guns, mounted on railway-trucks, shell the enemy's headquarters, his supports, and his lines of communication.
It was mud and cinders underfoot, and it was walled off with corrugated-iron sheeting and barbed wire from the attentions of some hundreds of Belgian refugees who lived along the canal and parallel roads in every conceivable kind of resting-place, from ancient bathing-vans to broken-down railway-trucks.
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