"Supporting the Guns"

Te Aroha News, Volume V, Issue 249, 24 March 1888, Page 6

"Supporting the Guns"

[By an* Old Soldikh.]

Did you over see a batteiy take position? It hadn't* the tin ill of a cavalry chargo nor the grimness of a line of bayonets, men ing slowly and determinedly on ; but theie is a peculiar excitement about it that makes old veterans- ri«e in their saddles and cheer. We have been fighting at the edge of the wood?. Every cartridge box has been emptied once and mo: c, and one-fourth of the brigade has melted a\va> in dead and wounded and missing. Not a cheer is heard in the whole brigade. We know that Tve are being driven font by foot, and that when we break once more the line will go to pieces and that the enemy will pour through the gap. Here comes help ! Down the crowded highway gallops a withdrawn from some other position to save ours. The iiekl fence is scattered while you count thirty, and the guns rush for the hill behind us. Six horses to a piece — three riders to each gun. Over <iry ditches where alfavmer would not drive a waggon, through clumps of bushes, over logs a foot thick, every horse on the gallop, every rider la«hing histteam and yelling — the sight behind us makes us forget the foe in front. The guns jump two feet high as the heavy wheels strike jock or log ; but not a horse slackens his pace, not a cannoneer loses his seat. Six guns, cix ■caissons, pixtv horses, eighty men race for the brow of the hid as if he who reached it iitt-fc would be knighted. A moment «go the battery was a confused mob. We look again and the six £un« are in position, detached horses hurrying away, the ammunition cheet open, and along our line runs a command: "Give them one more volley, and fall back to support the guns." We have scarcely obeyed when boom ! boom ! opens the battery, and iel-e of fire jump down and scorch the green trees tinder which we fought and deapaired. The shattered old brigade has n chance to breathe for the first time in three hours as we form a line and lie down. "What grim fellows those cannoneers are ? Every man is a perfect machine. Bullets splash dust into their faces, but they do not wince Bullets sing over and around : they do not dodge. There goes one to the earth, shot through the head as he sponged his gun. That machinery loses just one beat, misses just one cog in the wheel, and then works airay again as before. Every gun is using short fuse shall. The trround shakes and trembles, the roar shuts out all sounds from a battle-line three miles long, and the shells go shrieking into the swamp to cut treeß short off, to mow great gaps in the bushes, to bunt out and shatter and mangle men until their corpses cannot be recognised as human. You would think a tornado was howling through the fore>st, followed by billows of fire, and yet men livo through it — ay, press forward to capture the battery. We can hear their shout as they form for the rush. Now the shells are changed for grape and i<sanister, and the guns are fired so fast that nil reports blend together in one mighty roar. The shriek of a shell is the wickedest sound in war, but nothing: makes the llesh crawl like the demoniac singing, purring, whistling grape fibofc, and the serpent-like hiss of canister. Hen's legs and heads are torn from bodies, atjd bodies cut in two. A round ehofc or shell takes two men out of the rank as it crashes through. Grape and canister mow a swath and pile the dead on top of each other J ,