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'Tom Herbert you are not a soldier, you are an impostor, I said; 'you are young, healthy, as good food for powder as anybody else, and yet here you are, safely laid away in a bomb-proof, while your friends are fighting. Wake, rouse yourself, my friend! The only way to regain the path of rectitude is to go back to the army!"
Across the way in, he had printed in big letters "NO THOROUGHFARE," and was unconsciously well pleased with himself because he had done this, thinking it a proof of mature wisdom, keen insight into his brother man especially perhaps his sister woman and a general tendency toward scientific, bomb-proof modernity, the triumph of intellect over emotion.
A fleet of gunboats joined the land batteries in bombarding the fort, and at last succeeded in making it no longer tenable. Guns had been dismounted, the bomb-proof had been destroyed, and the sides of the earth-work were full of breaches where the huge ten-inch balls had ploughed their way.
The warriors in the forest were once more compelled to shelter themselves behind the trees; but in the bomb-proof, where they were more secure, they were also more bold. From this a galling fire, mingled with the most hideous yells, was now kept up; and the detachment, in their slow retreat, suffered considerably.
They progressed perhaps half a mile, without coming upon any soldiers, when at the brow of a hill slightly higher than the rest, they became aware of unwonted activity. A trench had been dug along the ridge, with great pits here and there to serve as bomb-proof shelters. Every time a head projected above the ridge, a storm of bullets showed that the enemy was well within rifle range.
But, he says, the occupants were obliged to fetch fresh water from either bank. Had the cistern and the powder-magazine been bomb-proof, and drink as well as meat stored quant. suff., the fort would have been 'in a manner impregnable, if well defended by a suitable garrison. The latter in his day consisted of sixty to seventy whites, besides 'Gromettoes, free black sepoys.
I give this in detail because few outsiders, very few indeed save ambassadors and other jackanapes in uniform had, until the arrest of the Romanoffs, ever trod within the hallowed precincts of the palace-fortress, the bomb-proof home of the incompetent weakling who had been crowned Tsar of All the Russias.
During the three years that they occupied Madras, the French, fearing that they might be besieged in their turn, used the bomb-proof church as a storehouse for grain and as a reservoir for drinking-water. The church organ they sent off to Pondicherry as one of the spoils of war.
He gets up early in the morning and shaves himself with a safety razor, while the court chemist is analyzing his breakfast for traces of arsenic or prussic acid; then he dons his bullet-proof coat, descends a private stairway to a bomb-proof drawing-room and receives his meals on a dumb-waiter from the laboratory with the chemist's certificate that all injurious substances have been removed.
But when to this difficulty was added the further one that the hill had two summits, each crowned by very strong earthworks constructed of sand-bags, timber and steel rails, connected by tunnels with bomb-proof works on the rear slope, and that it was further protected by two lines of trenches, themselves protected by strong barbed wire entanglements, and that the works on the summit mounted several machine-guns and some heavier pieces of artillery, the reader may be able to form some slight idea of the obstacles which the Japanese undertook to surmount, as well as the indomitable courage which possessed them to make the attempt.
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