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Updated: May 29, 2025
The combination of smoke-shells and dummies was wonderfully effective, and the enemy reported that he had been attacked in great force and with tanks along a large part of this front. What really happened was this. They killed and captured a number of Germans without suffering many casualties themselves, and then returned at once to our own trenches.
Presently, when our artillery lifted, there were new clouds rising from the ground and spreading upward in a great dense curtain of a fleecy texture. They came from our smoke-shells, which were to mask our infantry attack. Through them and beyond them rolled another wave of cloud, a thinner, whiter vapor, which clung to the ground and then curled forward to the enemy's lines.
For this purpose a great many smoke-shells were fired to screen the operations from the enemy's observation. Also along the flanks of the actual raid a number of dummy figures were arranged to represent an attacking force and so to draw the enemy's fire away from the actual raiding parties.
Then he told the telephonist on duty to get him each battery in turn; and the Brigade was soon a stage nearer in its preparations for supporting the Infantry brigade selected to make the attack. Ten minutes later the brigade-major again rang up to say that the how. battery was required to fire smoke-shells on certain points. Before the fight began the colonel made a tour of the batteries.
If the ground they occupied were to be properly tunnelled and trenched, even that might not avail, and there would be nothing for it but to attack them by an advance under cover either of the night or of darkness caused by smoke-shells, or by the burning of cover about their position. Even then they might be deadly with magazine fire at close quarters.
"But we haven't metres on our range-drums," I said with an air of abandonment. "Yes, I know, but the French insisted on it, because of their infantry.... Oh! there's a para. there about smoke-shells that's important." "The para. about smoke-shells is deleted ... there will be no smoke-shells," put in the elderly colonel, looking up. "Oh, is it, sir?" said the staff lieutenant, turning round.
The only really effective and final defeat such an attenuated force of marksmen could sustain, would be from the slow and circumspect advance upon it of a similar force of superior marksmen, creeping forward under cover of night or of smoke-shells and fire, digging pits during the snatches of cessation obtained in this way, and so coming nearer and nearer and getting a completer and completer mastery of the defender's ground until the approach of the defender's reliefs, food, and fresh ammunition ceased to be possible.
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