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Updated: April 30, 2025
Hines was hurried after him. The doctor came back in another hurry. He reported that the wagon train was on its way to the timber, without the captain; and that the captain had disappeared, over the ridge! Many Indians were in sight, and the doctor had been obliged to stop short. Now, on a sudden, there was a burst of distant gun-fire.
Jellicoe, with his superior speed, could have closed had he deemed it wise. But he thought of what hung on the fate of the fleet he commanded, and shrank from exposing his battleships to the risk of torpedo destruction. His dilemma was acute: gun-fire was very effective at 18,000 yards, the torpedo began to be so at 10,000.
Well, then, since you have been very attentive to your duty, and have not asked to go on shore, I will give you leave to go to-morrow morning and stay till gun-fire." I was very much pleased at this, as the officers had a general invitation to dine with the mess, and all who could obtain leave being requested to come, I was enabled to join the party.
During the retreat from Mona, Sir John French had a touch of that personal power his presence meant something to the men because of his reputation in South Africa; but afterward, when trench warfare began, and the daily routine of slaughter under German gun-fire, when our artillery was weak, and when our infantry was ordered to attack fixed positions of terrible strength without adequate support, and not a dog's chance of luck against such odds, the prestige of the Commander-in-Chief faded from men's minds and he lost place in their admiration.
The crash of the heavy gun-fire, and the sharper crackle of the quick-firers, raised such a terrific din that it quickly became impossible to make one's voice heard; but my crew had already received their orders, and the moment that we got within range they opened a steady fire with our two old Hotchkisses upon the gunboats at the harbour's mouth, while our destroyers, pushing boldly in after us, opened fire upon the searchlights, hoping to destroy them, and endeavouring by every possible device to distract the attention of the gunners and to draw their fire from us.
They turned slightly to their right, and crept through the mass of trees not yet levelled by the gun-fire of either of the combatants different, indeed, from the Bois des Caures and the Herbebois, where gigantic German shells had sent trees and earth hurtling skywards, had severed trunks in all directions, and had left but a tangled mass of fallen tree-tops and shattered stumps, smouldering here and there, and masking the trenches and dug-outs and redoubts obliterated during the earlier fighting, masking, too, the bodies of those gallant Frenchmen who had given their lives for the cause, and of the Germans, who had fought to achieve the ambitions of their Kaiser.
Excited shouts came pealing across the water to us from the decks of the various ships, boatswains' whistles shrilled, order after order was hoarsely bellowed, and with a rattling crash of gun-fire a perfect tempest of projectiles was sent hurtling out to sea from the now thoroughly awakened and panic-stricken Russians, not a solitary shot of which came anywhere near us; for the enemy seemed to have not the slightest idea of our actual whereabouts.
Four months of fighting, indeed, found General Joffre and his brave troops still holding the line, still selling inches of the hills when the pressure became too great or the enemy gun-fire too fierce to be withstood selling those inches at a price which can only be termed grisly and exorbitant and now and again counter-attacking, when pressure from the enemy had forced them to yield ground of vital value.
"One hears the zip-zip of the bullets, the boom of the great guns, the tang of our sharp French artillery, and in all this infernal experience of noise and stench, the screams of dying horses and men joined with the fury of the gun-fire, and rose shrill above it. No man may boast of his courage. Dear God, there were moments when I was a coward with all of them!"
Larches lay like spellicans one on another. Some leant against those that were yet standing, and in the tops of these last there was a roaring like an incoming tide on rocks. Crackings and groanings, sudden crashes, loud reports like gun-fire, were all about her as she climbed a tiny figure in chaos. When she came to the graveyard, havoc was there also.
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