United States or Albania ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It was one of those strange and contradictory scenes of war that bring home to the bewildered looker-on the utter impossibility of picturing how the thing really happens. While we stood watching we heard the sudden scream of a battery close above us. The crest of the hill we were climbing was alive with "Seventy-fives," and the piercing noise seemed to burst out at our very backs.
When next they stopped Chrisfield was on the crest of the hill beside a battery of French seventy-fives. He looked curiously at the Frenchmen, who sat about on logs in their pink and blue shirt- sleeves playing cards and smoking. Their gestures irritated him. "Say, tell 'em we're advancin'," he said to Andrews. "Are we?" said Andrews.
"I watched the assault of the Germans upon the village of Milancourt, near the Meuse," said a wounded Frenchman. "They came in solid ranks, without a word, loading and reloading their rifles without cessation. Our seventy-fives fell among them, and then the mitrailleuses entered into action. It was no longer a battalion.
One Turkish battalion coming up to reinforce, was spotted by an aeroplane, and was practically wiped out by the seventy-fives before they could scatter. "Type of fighting did not lend itself to taking prisoners, and only some 50, including one officer, are in our hands.
Whichever way you looked trenches flanked you. They were dug at every angle, and were not farther than fifty yards apart. On one side, a half mile distant, was a hill heavily wooded. At regular intervals the trees had been cut down and uprooted and, like a wood-road, a cleared space showed. These were the nests of the "seventy-fives."
This silence was broken only by the barking of the French seventy-fives, in parts of the city hidden to us, the boom of the German guns in answer, and from overhead by the aeroplanes. In the absolute stillness the whirl of their engines came to us with the steady vibrations of a loom. In the streets were shell holes that had been recently filled and covered over with bricks and fresh earth.
A furious bombardment from a score of quick-firing mortars hidden behind La Folie Hill battered the earth out of shape, and when the Germans occupied the terrain where the French trenches had been, the "seventy-fives" played such havoc among them that they were forced to relinquish their hold.
The first attack was launched on the hill forming the western finger of Massiges, whence the French fire broke their ranks and drove them back. Foiled in this direction, the next attack was delivered against the five-mile front. Some 40,000 men took part in the charge. But the powerful French "seventy-fives" tore ghastly lanes in their ranks, and few lived to reach the wire entanglements.
From somewhere in rear a battery of French "seventy-fives" opened up with their ear-splitting reports, and we could see the outlines of the ruined farm ahead of us silhouetted against the crimson flashes of their bursting shrapnel. But of the enemy there was no sign nothing but the arching trail of the flares that shot up and the steady plick-plock of the snipers. It was most trying.
Knotted metal heaped on the unyielding earth! The solitude of the communication-trenches was appalling, and the continuous roar of the French seventy-fives over our heads did not alleviate it. In the other trenches, however, was much humanity, some of it sleeping in deep, obscure retreats, but most of it acutely alive and interested in everything.
Word Of The Day