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Updated: May 31, 2025
With that marvellous foresight which the Germans had shown in all their plans, these had been embedded in cement two weeks before in high emplacements, while their advanced columns were threatening down to Paris.
Then he would put down foundations for a new barn or farm building, or if near a town for a factory, and when these were complete, he would erect some lightly constructed building upon it. There was nothing to attract attention or suspicion about this, and numbers of these emplacements are said to have been made before war began.
What a wicked thing of the Englander to shell an "undefended" town! The search-lights and the huge gun positions and the maze of trenches, barbed wire and machine-gun emplacements hewn out of the living rock, of course, to the Teuton mind, do not constitute defence. But you must not think that we have had it all our own way in this sea-warfare here.
An artilleryman came along and dropped a bundle of picks and shovels which he was carrying to the gunners, who had begun the emplacements; the boyish Major dismounted, subduing his excitement with a dignified frown; and for a while he was very fussy and very busy, aiding the battery captain in placing the guns and verifying the depression.
The guns advanced at a gallop in the face of a terrific fire, were unlimbered, and were soon hurling common shell and shrapnel at the enemy at a lively rate, striking the emplacements, batteries, and entrenchments with the rhythmic regularity of a triphammer. The enemy soon abandoned one gun, but continued to serve the other at intervals for over an hour.
The guns were distributed along the line in favorable locations for either defense or offense but, as there were no prepared emplacements, the men had but little protection. Here our work, as at St. Eloi, was to support the advance; in fact, that is the normal function of machine guns in an attack, although the lighter automatic rifles of the Lewis type are usually with the assaulting troops.
"Even when from our boat we saw the fair face of that great rock Capri already scarred and gashed by the gun emplacements and hiding-places that were to make it a fastness we reckoned nothing of the imminent slaughter, though the fury of preparation hung about in puffs and clouds of dust at a hundred points amidst the grey; but, indeed, I made a text of that and talked.
We could not get enough men across to charge the emplacements.... We were mid-west of the west wing, it was said; and word came the third day that we were holding up the whole line; that the east was ready to drive through, in fact, was bending forward; that the west was marking time on our account and here we were keeping the whole Russian invasion from spending the holidays in Budapest.
It was not for our entertainment, but to make us forget our dead, to make us charge the valley again over our dead it being planned that a remnant might make the crossing and charge the emplacements.... He came a short barrel of a man and fat. They had kept him well at the Center. He was valuable in the hospitals, it was said.
Those officers who could get horses rode round to look at the country which for nine months we had been watching through telescopes, and the concrete emplacements of Monchy and Le Quesnoy Farm were all explored, while No Man's Land, the only place free from wire and shell holes, provided an excellent canter.
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