The shifting tide of battle had forced the advanced line of the Allies to contend with a strong forward movement of German troops. In the shelter of a wonderfully ingenious and deep-dug trench the boys looked out upon a bloody battlefield, one of the bloodiest in European history. French soldiers with rifles in their hands, standing or kneeling in the immediate vicinity, keenly peered over the flat land toward the positions known to be held by the Germans, concealed in the woods—forests believed to be bristling with machine guns, backed by infantry in rifle pits and covered trenches.
Time and again the French infantry had found[137] these positions impossible of taking owing to barbed wire entanglements strewn with brush and branches of trees.
A heavy siege gun supporting the Allies was in action at the time. A French artilleryman with the hand elevating gear rapidly cranked the big barrel down to a level position ready for loading. A second threw open the breech and extracted the brass cartridge case, carefully wiping it out before depositing it among the empties; four more seized the heavy shell and lifted it to a cradle opposite the breech; a seventh rammed it home; number eight gingerly inserted the brass cartridge, half filled with vaseline-like explosive; the breech was closed, and the gun pointer rapidly cranked the gun into position again. In less than thirty seconds the men sprang back from the gun, again loaded and aimed. The mortar sent its shell purring through the air against a German position on a far-off hill. There was an answering burst of flame from the enemy’s battery. Both shots were too high. With this incessant trying for range, the sharp whirring sounds in the air seemed almost continuous. And there were hits that pierced ramparts of flesh and blood!
Groups of wounded passed without ceasing, and yet the conflict was ever renewed with death-defying courage. The command to which the boys were attached had been driven from their entrenchment[138] by literal showers of shells, and fell back to the headquarters of yesterday.
They were threatened from all sides with annihilation, hemmed in by walls of steel and sheets of flame, on three sides by bayonets, and on the other by blazing batteries.
The left wing of the Allies was in desperate encounter also and unable to effect a junction with and relieve the tremendous pressure on the right.
Twenty-five miles away were stationed troops of cavalrymen standing at the heads of their chargers, ready to jump into the saddle at a moment’s call and stem any torrent of infantry that came their way. These cavalrymen had been so held in reserve by the Allies, because of the burrowing campaign that had been conducted in the immediate vicinity of the battlefield. But now that the fighting had burst the confines of the trenches they were sorely needed.
There was one way only to summon the reserves in time, so desperate was the situation. That was by a?roplane. But two machines of the French command had escaped destruction, and but one man of the aviation corps out of si............