Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 29, 2025
The line-officer's humor becomes a trifle robust where the "gilded staff" is concerned, notwithstanding the fact that most staff-officers have seen active and distinguished service in the line. Our anti-aircraft guns "Archies" we called them were mounted on trucks, and on account of their weight had some difficulty getting up.
First, anti-aircraft guns -'Archies, we call them -have improved enormously. In the first of the show the airman merely had to keep five thousand feet up and no Archie could touch him. A French friend of mine told me the other day that one of their anti-aircraft guns hit a flier at a height of fifteen thousand feet. The gun was firing from an even greater distance than that across country, too.
They would have become perfectly respectable, utterly negligible modern citizens of the world, the infertile by-product of a rich civilization with its perfected machinery for the preservation of accumulated wealth. There are more Archies and Adelles about us than is commonly recognized: they are on all our calling-lists, in every European capital or congregation of expensive country homes.
Archies blazed and banged at him, leaving a trail of puff balls to mark his course; an enemy scout came out of the clouds to engage him and was avoided, for the corps made it a point of honor not to fight when engaged on such a mission as was Tam's.
After the North Sea Wind fog, a general calm had settled down upon that death-scarred region. Over the front and about No-Man's-Land an occasional flare or star-shell would go up. One of these came unusually close to the swiftly moving Fokker. Immediately after that came bombing from Archies stationed along the enemy front.
When I was sure he was down, sure enough, I had come a bit too low, and for a while I was pretty busy dodging the finest collection of Archies I have yet met with. I got two fair-sized pieces of shell right through both planes, but they didn't seem to matter a bit. I got up to a good height before I quit climbing.
Though the Archies were now roaring more than ever, Blaine and his observer, both machine guns pointed f or instant action, started straight at the pursuing planes. Buck was with him at a convenient distance. Instantly the rattle of their guns pattered out in the air as a fusillade of bullets was showered at the foe. The determined maneuvers of the new arrivals evidently daunted the Huns.
At the height at which our archies so the anti-aircraft guns are called by Tommy Atkins forced the Boche to fly there was little chance of his observers picking out this battery, at least, against the ground.
By the time he passed over the German line all the Archies in the world were blazing at him, but Tam was at an almost record height the height where men go dizzy and sick and suffer from internal bleeding. Over the German front-line trenches he dipped steeply down, but such had been his altitude that he was still ten thousand feet high when he leveled out above his aerodrome.
Yet he didn't hate Xavier Rodan any less. "The S.O.B. might just get sent to a mental hospital at the worst," Gimp growled loyally. "Well, come on, Frank let's forget it, ditch our Archies at the Hostel, get a culture steak, and look around to see what you've missed..."
Word Of The Day
Others Looking