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Updated: June 20, 2025
I asked Rossiter. "Too far," he replied, mournfully, "only a dot at that distance." Now, all the parts had fitted into the pattern, the gay green grass growing out of the stacked barrels and carts, and the sullen, silent, waiting mitrailleuse which can spit death in a wide swathe as it revolves from side to side, like the full stroke of a scythe on nodding daisies.
With all this ammunition, what a very mitrailleuse of good society she becomes; what an accumulation of polite attentions she may discharge at any door! That one well-appointed woman, as she sits in her carriage, represents the total visiting power of self, husband, daughters, and possibly a son or two beside. She has all their counterfeit presentments in her hands.
It was more than flesh and blood could stand. A retreat was sounded, and the cavalry fell back upon its support. But, even as they drew off, there burst from the German front the sharp roar of the mitrailleuse. The German maxims had opened fire. The Belgians fell faster than before. And now the Germans were ordered to charge.
Sleep is a lost art with these men, as with all classes of people, during those nerve-destroying "white nights." When all the silvery satin of the birch logs has been removed from their capacious holds, these primitive barks will be unpegged, and the cheap "bark-wood," riddled with holes as by a mitrailleuse, will be used for poor structures on the outskirts of the town.
It will be a welcome relief if camouflage, as popular five years ago as fin-de-siècle twenty-five years ago, shall follow that now unfashionable vocable into what an American president once described as 'innocuous desuetude'. Perhaps we may liken mitrailleuse and franc-tireur, vrille and escadrille, brisance and rafale, to the foreign labourers who cross the frontier to aid in the harvest and who return to their own country when the demand for their service is over.
Or, if guns win battles, why did not Louis Napoleon beat the Prussians with his Mitrailleuse, or the Spaniards with their Mausers the Filipinos, whose arms were no better than the old-fashioned Remingtons? Needless to repeat what has grown a trite saying that it is the spirit that quickeneth, without which the best of implements profiteth but little.
They found that a small and badly placed charge of dynamite had merely knocked out a few stones between two of the buttresses, leaving the bridge intact enough for all the armies of Europe to pass over it; and the Turks did not even put a mitrailleuse behind sandbags in the streets or use field-guns from the adjacent hills to delay the Bulgars in their crossing.
Occasionally he makes the mistake of running across a mitrailleuse battery with its dog-teams needing reinforcements, or tries to billet himself on a military pigeon-loft and meets a violent death.
Among them was a young Belgian lieutenant who used to make a "bag" of the Germans he killed eaeh day with his mitrailleuse until the numbers bored him and he lost count. Near him were three or four nurses discussing wounds and dying wishes and the tiresome hours of a night when a thousand wounded streamed in suddenly, just as they were hoping for a quiet cup of coffee.
As we crawled along, still on high gear that tin car certainly pulled strongly a horseman emerged from a fold in the hills. He was riding a sweat-covered, mettlesome black with a rolling eye. His own eye was bitter, and likewise the other features of his face. After trying in vain to get the frantic animal within twenty feet of our mitrailleuse, he gave it up.
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