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It is only when a great thought incarnates itself in action, desperately striving to find utterance even in sabre-clash and gun-fire, or when Truth and Freedom, in their mistaken zeal and distrustful of their own powers, put on battle-harness, that I can feel any sympathy with merely physical daring.
Through the window of the lower room, barricaded by the cautious old warrior until its aperture was not more than eight inches square, Alan thrust his rifle as the crash of gun-fire broke the gray and thickening mist of night.
The gun-fire broke out into a long irregular roar, a fury of noise which roused up the city behind me, as though all the citizens were slamming their doors to get away from it.
Indeed, before the end of that fateful five months of 1914, during which a sturdy British army of less than two hundred thousand men had, under the pressure of the German hosts, been fighting a retreat, yard by yard and mile by mile, in a way which will live forever in British military history, there had been forced upon Lloyd George as one of the principal members of the Cabinet that there were grave deficiencies at the front in equipment, that the British soldiers, unsurpassable for valor, for their individual skill, and their contempt of death, were being, not only overwhelmed by German numbers, but swept down by gun-fire which was in extent and in power tremendously superior to that of the British.
We start for him at full speed, opening up with all our guns in the hope of getting in a shot before he is able to submerge. But you may believe he doesn't take long to get below the surface. Anyway, the sub doesn't mind gun-fire much. They are afraid of depth charges bombs which are regulated so that they will explode at any depth we wish.
To move them in daylight to the trenches meant inevitable loss of life and almost certain demoralization under the enemy's gun-fire. "Between 11 A.M. and 12 noon the central brigade of these divisions filed past me at Bethune and Noeux-les-Mines, respectively," wrote Sir John French. It was not possible for them to reach our old trenches until 4 P.M. It was Gen.
Let either side start a bombardment and the other responds. There is a you-hit-me-and-I'll-hit-you character about siege warfare. Gun-fire provokes gun-fire. Neither adversary stays quiet under a blow. It was not long before we heard the whish of German shells passing some distance away. They say sport is out of war. Perhaps, but not its enthralling and horrible fascination.
Guns, as people say, have "a moral effect" that is sometimes out of proportion to the actual damage they inflict. Anyway, skirmishers seldom advance under gun-fire, and the Boers on this occasion were decisively checked by our battery. Even when the guns left, we were able from the vantage-ground of the hill to keep them at arm's length until the time came to catch up the column.
The spectator is under varying spells. To-day he seems in a fantastic world, whose horror makes it impossible of realization. To-morrow, as his car takes him along a pleasant by-road among wheat-fields where peasants are working and no soldier is in sight, it is a world of peace and one thinks that he has mistaken the roar of a train for the distant roar of gun-fire.
But the German retreat from the Somme to the shelter of their Hindenburg line gave some respite to our men, and theirs, from the long-drawn fury of attack and counter-attack, and from the intensity of gun-fire. There was at best the mirage of something like victory on our side, a faint flickering up of the old faith that the Germans had weakened and were nearly spent.
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