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Updated: May 21, 2025
I can be of use to the Becketts, it's true, when we travel without a military escort, or with one young officer who knows more about seventy-fives than about the romance of history. I can tell them what I've read and what I've seen. But at Verdun you'll be in the society of generals; and at Rheims of as many dignitaries as haven't been bombarded out of town. The Becketts don't need me.
They knew also that the reverberations from the direction of Meaux, that each moment grew more loud and savage, were the French "seventy-fives" whipping the gray column forward. Of what they felt the Germans did not speak. In silence they looked at each other, and in the eyes of Marie was bitterness and resolve.
Volunteers remained behind to signal information to the French batteries, and an eyewitness of the attack described what followed thus: "The French seventy-fives immediately concentrated on the hostile trench line.
Someone is playing the tattoo softly and very quickly. If it is nearer, and especially if it is German, it sounds as if he played it on an iron ship's tank instead. That is Trommelfeuer what we call intense bombardment. When it is very rapid like the swift roll of a kettledrum you take it that it must be the French seventy-fives down South preparing the way for a French assault.
It must be remembered that the corner was screened from the Germans, who fired casually in the hope of hitting something and annoying the French. The cannons shelling the corner were usually "seventy-sevens," the German quick-firing pieces that correspond to the French "seventy-fives."
Through an enormous hole they could see the stars and feel the chill of the night. The owner stated that this destruction was not the work of the Germans, but was caused by a projectile from one of the seventy-fives when repelling the invaders from the village. And he beamed on the ruin with patriotic pride, repeating: "There's a sample of French marksmanship for you!
"Can't you hear 'em?" he asked tiptoeing rapidly up to Virginia. "It's them big guns, over in Europe. It's them forty-two centimeter howitzers and the French seventy-fives in the trenches along the Somme." "Do you think so?" murmured Virginia, smoothing down her cat's back, "it sounds like blasting to me."
In a hollow, they came upon several groups of the famed seventy-fives spread about through the woods, hidden by piles of underbrush, like snapping dogs, howling and sticking up their gray muzzles. The great cannon were roaring only at intervals, while the steel pack of hounds were yelping incessantly without the slightest break in their noisy wrath like the endless tearing of a piece of cloth.
They at least were real. Once thousands of men had come up out of the little woods a quarter of a mile below; they had come on in that famous massed attack, they had come on in the face of machine gun and "seventy-fives." They had just reached the wires, which marked high water. In the woods below, the Bois de Facq, in the fields by the river 4,000 Germans had been buried.
"We had to hold the crest of Douaumont under a terrible fire, and clear the craters on the slope when the Germans tried to fortify them. Our 'seventy-fives' dropped shells into the big craters as I would drop stones into a pond. Pauvres gens!"
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