The army behind the armyPowell, E. Alexander (Edward Alexander)
History
The army behind the army
Powell, E. Alexander (Edward Alexander)
United States. Army; World War, 1914-1918 -- United States
everything—guns and howitzers, shrapnel and high explosive, carriages,
railway-mounts, tractors, trucks, limbers, caissons, even the harness on
the horses—is ordnance.
[Illustration: A 16-INCH HOWITZER.
Huge howitzers, streaked like zebras and spotted like giraffes, point
their ugly snouts toward the sky.]
[Illustration: A 16-INCH HOWITZER ON A RAILWAY MOUNT.
Camouflaged monsters on railway mounts which can drop a ton of explosives
on a given target twenty miles away.]
From out of the smoke, so close behind the rolling barrage that they seem
to be moving amid the bursting shell, a long line of tanks—elephantine
monsters of the Mark VIII type and little, agile, humpbacked
whippets—waddling forward across the welter of No Man’s Land, wading
through ooze and slime, clambering over heaps of débris, crushing wire
entanglements as easily as though they were made of string, rearing
themselves against the walls of concrete pill-boxes and then crashing
down upon them, straddling in their stride the yawning chasms of the
German trenches, but always pushing forward, like terrible and ruthless
prehistoric monsters, one-pounders and machine-guns spurting death from
the loopholes in their armored flanks. Tanks and tank-guns are ordnance,
of course.
The barrage abruptly lifts, and the eager infantry, pouring out of
the trenches, sweeps forward with a roar. Out in front, forming a
thin fringe to the leading wave of the assault, are the autoriflemen,
playing streams of lead on the enemy trenches from their Brownings and
Chauchats as a street-cleaner plays a stream of water upon the asphalt
from his hose. As the barrage lifts, the Germans, emerging from the
dugouts where they have taken shelter, man their parapets, but volleys
of hand-grenades drive them back again. Through the wire demolished
by the tanks and into the shell-shattered trenches swarm the cheering
Yanks. Parties of “moppers-up” hasten from dugout to dugout, calling
upon the occupants to come out and surrender, and when they do not
comply, tossing hand or gas grenades into the entrances or wrecking
the dugouts with mobile charges. The captured positions are quickly
organized. Machine-guns and trench-mortars are brought up and placed in
position. Carts and voiturettes, ammunition-laden, some drawn by mules,
others by hand, come forward at the double. An enemy machine-gun nest
is located and promptly demolished by a pair of Stokes mortars, which
send their bombs somersaulting through the air, as a juggler tosses
bottles, in an unending stream. Then the enemy launches a counter-attack,
the gray-clad hordes advancing doggedly while the rifle-fire crackles
along the trenches and the machine-guns go into action with a clatter
which sounds like a boy drawing a stick along the palings of a picket
fence. Rifle-grenades and shell from the little 37-mm. infantry cannon
burst amid the advancing Germans, gaps appearing here and there amid
their close-locked ranks as patches appear in a moth-eaten fur when
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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