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The hail of bullets is continuous. SCENE. The same, but the wall of sand-bags bags is broken in many places. The dead lie half-buried beneath them. CECIL lies, badly wounded, against a gap in the wall, his rifle by his side. HONOUR and DUTY kneel beside him tenderly. The last rays of the sun light up his painful smile.
But with his back to the sand-bags stayed a German Unter-offizier, enormous, sweating, apoplectic with rage, who fired two revolver shots in our direction. The man who had first organized the defence of the trench the hero of that "Arise, ye dead!" received a shot full in the throat and fell.
At the period of which I speak General Scott supposed a portion of the mill to be used as a foundry for the casting of guns. This, however, proved to be a mistake. It was valuable to the Mexicans because of the quantity of grain it contained. The building is flat roofed, and a line of sand-bags over the outer walls rendered the top quite a formidable defence for infantry.
The loss of its walls was but the beginning, not the end, of its defence. Each convent, each house, formed a separate fortress. The walls were loop-holed for musketry, ramparts were constructed of sand-bags, and beams were raised endwise against the houses to afford shelter from shells.
Most arms feel stiff all the way along, when the owners raise them. Your arm must be raised until high overhead, the hand hanging from the wrist and dropped into your lap or down at the side, letting the elbow "give," so that the upper arm drops first, and then the fore arm and hand, like three heavy sand-bags sewed together.
No more than ten yards away, when I stood peering through a hole in the wall of the Maison Rouge in the suburb of Blangy it was a red-brick villa, torn by shells, with a piano in the parlor which no man dared to play, behind a shelter of sand-bags and no more than two hundred yards away from the enemy's lines when I paced up and down the great railway station of Arras, where no trains ever traveled.
"An' them blasted Doppers are uncommon fond o' music, d'ye see, Sir," explained the wounded trooper. "They can't keep their ugly 'eads down behind the sand-bags when they hears it. Up they pops 'em over the edge and then you take care they don't pop down no more."
It is all going on very well, only as I said it will take time By the way, tell Joseph to get me one of your smokingcaps; once in dressing-gown and slippers a smokingcap is not out of the way, and I am getting bald, my dear Captain. How infernally cold it is here! These windows face the north, and there are no sand-bags. Mademoiselle de V.," he added, turning to my aunt, "you will catch cold."
Carefully laid sand-bags added to the height of the rampart, and left narrow spaces for embrasures; narrow, but sufficient there, where the channel of the river, straight and narrow, required the fleet to advance in a straight line and with a narrow front. Such a work, at an elevation of thirty feet above the water, was almost unassailable.
A hapless air-navigator, plunging, amid torn parachutes, sand-bags, and confused wreck, fast enough into the jaws of the Devil! Suffice it to know that Teufelsdrockh rose into the highest regions of the Empyrean, by a natural parabolic track, and returned thence in a quick perpendicular one.
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