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Soon, at a sign from the officer, the men spread mats on the muddy ground and lay down on them, and then appeared a train of horses, dragging a field-piece or quick-firing gun, which was halted behind the infantry and unlimbered.

For this she was grateful, for her thoughts were of a melancholy and tender nature and she had no wish for any companion save one. In consequence, when a steam-launch, approaching at full speed with the rattle of a quick-firing gun, broke upon her meditations, she was distinctly annoyed.

Sun Yat Sen had boomed the necessity for better communications during the short time he had ruled at a National Railway Bureau in Shanghai, an office from which he had been relieved in 1913 on it being discovered that he was secretly indenting for quick-firing guns.

They had four torpedo tubes for eight torpedoes, two 14-pdr. quick-firing guns, and two 1-pdr. high-angle anti-aircraft guns. Naturally they were also equipped with all the latest improvements, such as wireless apparatus, panoramic periscopes, armoured conning-towers, and decks.

Light, quick-firing guns, posted on the roofs of lofty buildings, rained death and mutilation upon them.

The Angamos then slowed down a little, and a few seconds later the Miraflores overtook her and discharged every available gun into the cruiser, killing several more men, and dismounting one 32-pounder and two 3-pounder quick-firing guns. But the cruiser's people had meanwhile again loaded their guns on the port broadside, and were not slow in avenging the death of their comrades.

Before the complete horror of the situation had mastered the audience, a strong pair of hands, far back in the church, came together with an explosive clap. Like the rat-rat-tat of a quick-firing gun was the appreciative volley of recognition from the solitary applauder. It went rolling and crackling through the church defiantly, derisively, appreciatively.

A furious bombardment from a score of quick-firing mortars hidden behind La Folie Hill battered the earth out of shape, and when the Germans occupied the terrain where the French trenches had been, the "seventy-fives" played such havoc among them that they were forced to relinquish their hold.

All the guns were mounted well above the water, enabling them to be used even in a heavy sea, which could not be done in the case of ships lying low in the water like the Devastation. A further impetus was given to the development of the secondary armament by the introduction of "smokeless" powder which, however, gives a very slight smoke, and the "quick-firing gun."

The sun, tearing open the curtain of blue mist, inundated with brightness one of the most beautiful landscapes it is possible to conceive. A handful of Dublin Fusiliers with quick-firing rifles concealed in the hollows of the heights might have stopped a whole army struggling up the hill-sides. But no one appeared to stop me, so I went on. Climbing was characteristic of the day.