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Updated: June 16, 2025
Accuse me, if you choose, of ill-will towards the most precious invention of our century, nothing shall prevent me from saying that the principal result of railways, after the subjection of petty industry, will be the creation of a population of degraded laborers, signalmen, sweepers, loaders, lumpers, draymen, watchmen, porters, weighers, greasers, cleaners, stokers, firemen, etc.
Nearer than this they could not come, for the ground was open and, in the face of the force in shelter, armed with breech loaders, it would have been madness to have attempted a rush. For some time, the combatants remained in the same position; merely exchanging an occasional shot, when a head or a hat was exposed.
With the rapid-firing arms of infantry to-day, the advantage belongs to the defense which is completed by offensive movements carried out at opportune times. Fire to-day is four or five times more rapid even if quite as haphazard as in the days of muzzle loaders.
Dredgers of mud, navvies employed on suburban canals, excavators, loaders and unloaders of cargo, cattle drivers, whose driving, however, was done mostly on board ship, such and such like were the men who were the fathers of the families of St. Diddulph's-in-the-East.
So little advancing was there that the mules, so far as this Battalion was concerned, were never used, and the loaders and leaders, thanks to their function proving illusory, escaped all share in the fighting. If Poperinghe and Ypres had quite borne out their reputations I should not here remark on either of them.
At times our firing was so rapid that the gun barrels became heated to the point that they could not be grasped and the men held their guns by the sling strap. I had some personal experiences in this battle that were unique in my service. Our muskets were the Enfield rifle, an English gun, much like the Springfield. They were, of course, muzzle loaders, breech loaders then were the exception.
"That depends entirely upon how strong a garrison you can muster, my dear friend," answered I. "So far as the house itself is concerned I believe that, given, say, a couple of hours for preparation, it might be put into a very excellent state of defence; but that would be no good at all unless you could raise a garrison of, let us say, thirty fighting men, and at least as many non-combatants to act as loaders, ambulance party, and so on."
They had already carried the village nearest to them. This the French had set fire to, before retreating, to prevent its serving as a shelter for the enemy. The Mobiles stood their ground, for the most part well, under the heavy fire of shot and shell; but their muzzle loaders were no match for the Germans' needle guns, and the enemy were pressing steadily forward.
Between the killing work, the heat of the tubes, and occasional doses of radiation, their lives weren't worth the metal value of their tickets. He began pulling himself clumsily along a shaft, dodging freight the loaders were tossing from hand to hand. A bag hit his head, drawing blood, and another caught him in the groin. "Watch it, bo," a loader yelled at him.
For weeks the mountaineers had been advancing stealthily through the wilderness, pushing on by night, hiding in the hills and forests by day; and they had come the last fifty miles on foot, leaving their horses back in the hills. They were armed with Winchester rifles, with old-time squirrel rifles, with muzzle loaders having long octagonal barrels and fired by cups.
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