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Then came a great rush from the left: Cavalry, Indian scouts, regular cavalry, cavalry militia, volunteer regiments, and behind them all the machine-guns and the field-artillery a perfect avalanche of human beings and horses wrapped in thick clouds of smoke from which showers of sparks descended. That was our salvation.
Selim and Mahmoud indeed had made effectual reforms in the corps of gunners, as we have said, and had raised it to the amount of sixty thousand men; so that at present they have respectable field-artillery, whereas previously they had only heavy battering-trains.
Two long trains, loaded with ammunition and a section of field-artillery, had right of way; and then another train filled with jeering, blue-clad infantry blocked them. The soldiers, bare headed and in their undershirts, lolled and yelled and hung from the car windows, chewing tobacco, smoking, or gazing, jaws a-gape, at the crowds in the station.
Some one found me a restless field-artillery horse which was giving the gunners a lot of trouble, and I rode back to Oadpur alone not having any business at the front. As I approached the old Gate House, the flutter of a white dress caught my eye. It was almost dawn, and a pink haze hung over the paddy-fields.
The recruits were also being trained in sentry-duty; though this was not made very much of. The field-artillery would never be put on sentry-duty in time of war; gunners only equipped with swords and revolvers would not be sufficiently armed for that work; for it the infantry, or in case of necessity the cavalry, must be responsible.
Rutowski numbers 35,000, now on this ground, with immensity of cannon; 32,000 we, with only the usual field-artillery, and such a Tschonengrund, with its half-frozen quagmires ahead. A ticklish case for the old man, as he grimly reconnoitres it, in the winter morning.
The arsenals and ammunition-depots in the Pacific States were in the hands of the enemy, the cannon of our far western field-artillery depots had aided in forming Japanese batteries, and the Japanese flag was waving above our heavy coast guns.
And similarly on the other side, of the very large number of guns employed at the fight on the Modder, at Magersfontein, and in the siege of Kimberley the whole were, with the exception of a few pieces captured when Cronje was surrounded, withdrawn in spite of the hurried evacuation of their position, a feat almost unparalleled even in an army accompanied only by field-artillery, and extraordinary indeed in the case of works mounting heavy siege-guns.
Strong Belgian forces operating from the westward were driving the enemy towards the advancing British, while across the Rovuma Portuguese troops, well supplied with light field-artillery, were considered a bar to any attempted "break-through" on the southern frontier.
Marouin turned his horse and went back to his country house to give the necessary orders for the reception of a stranger whose name he did not mention. At ten o'clock at night, as had been agreed, Marouin was on the Champs de Mars, then covered with Marshal Brune's field-artillery. No one had arrived yet.
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