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For the post on Waschout Hill, the scheme was that the trenches should be concealed much in the same way as described in the last dream, but great care should be taken that no one in the post should be exposed to rifle-fire from our main position in the river. I did not wish the fire of the main body to be in any degree hampered by a fear of hitting the men on Waschout Hill, especially at night.
Now she understood why there had as yet been no rifle-fire. The day, coming on slowly, still offered more gloom than radiance, but she could pick out two figures clearly. One was that of Steve. He had ridden on ahead of his men, perhaps a hundred feet ahead, and was upon a bit of higher ground. The other form, bulking big in the thin light, was indisputably that of old man Packard.
He would cut down a mail-runner from pure wantonness, or bombard a mud-fort with rifle-fire when he knew that our men needed to sleep. In his leisure moments he would go on circuit among his neighbours, and try to incite other tribes to devilry. Also, he kept a kind of hotel for fellow-outlaws in his own village, which lay in a valley called Bersund.
There was a smoldering passion in him which glowed in his dark eyes. He was against bayonet-training, which took the field against rifle-fire for a time. "No man in this war," he said, with a sweeping assertion, "has ever been killed by the bayonet unless he had his hands up first."
The rifle-fire dropped. The devil had driven home all his tin-tacks, and for the rest of the day we had calm. Nov. 11. Ugh! What a day! Dull, cold, dank, and misty the spit of an 11th of November at home. Not even a shell from Long Tom to liven it. The High Street looks doubly dead; only a sodden orderly plashes up its spreading emptiness on a sodden horse.
Then, and then only, will they retreat into the next line behind them, the fortified Hotel de Pekin, which has already four hundred shell holes in it. Yesterday's losses at the French lines were five men wounded, four blown up by a mine, of whom two never have been seen again, and two men killed outright by rifle-fire.
Truth to say, the carcass of this bear scarcely lasted for the rest of the voyage, for black bear is a regular article of diet for these people, although they will not often eat the grizzly. These operations were scarcely well advanced before once more the whistle began to roar, and once more the rifle-fire began from Showan's place up in the pilot-house.
Then it took him half an hour to get back to safety by creeping from one hole in the ground to another and avoiding the rifle-fire.... Self-preservation makes it necessary to rush out thus single handed and ease your front. Every man killed is a discouragement, which holds the enemy back a bit.
A fairly heavy rifle-fire was coming from the flanks, but to a certain extent that was kept down by some of our batteries spreading their fire over those portions of the German trench which were not being attacked, and by a heavy rifle- and machine-gun fire which was pelted across from the opposite parts of the British line.
An officer of this guard came down the road and told us all his men had turned out without exception, including an old fellow of seventy, and stone-deaf, who had been roused by the rifle-fire, and one minus several fingers recently blown off by a shell.
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