WAR WITH BIG GUNS.

Waikato Times, Volume 2611, Issue 2611, 6 April 1889, Page 2 (Supplement)

WAR WITH BIG GUNS.

THJ<: TfIRILLINI! SCENE OF A BATTERY IN HOT ACTION. Du> you ever ace a battery take position? it hasn't the thrill of a calvary charge nor the grimncss of a line of bayonets moving slowly and determinedly oil, hut tlieir is a peculiar cxcitemcnt about it that makes old veterans rise in their saddles and cheer.

Wc have been fighting at the edge of the woods. Every cartridge-box lias been emptied once or more, and one fourth of the brigade has melted away in cleid and wounded and missing. Not a cheer is heard in the whole brigade. We know that we are being driven foot by foot, and that when we break once more the line will go to pieces and the enemy will pour through the gap. Here comes help !

Down the crowdcd highway gallops a battery withdrawn from some other position to save ours. Tlic field fcnce is scattered while yon could count thirty, and the guns rush for the hills behind us. Over dry ditches where a farmer would not drive a waggon, through clumps of bushes, over logs a foot thick, e>'ery horse on the gallop, every rider lashing his team and yelling the sight behind us making us forget the foe in front, The guns jump two feet high as the heavy wheels strike arock orlog, but nota horse slackens his pace, not a cannoneer loses his seat. Six guns, six caissons, sixty horses, eighty men race for the brow of the hill as if he who would reach it first would be knighted.

A moment ago the battery was a confuacd mob. We look again, and the six guns are in position, r.he detached horses hurrying away, the ammunition chestopen, and along our line ru.is the command :

" Give them one more volley and fall back to support the guns." We have scarcely obeyed when boom ! boom ! opens the battery, and jets of fire jump down and scorch the green trees under which we fought and despaired. The shattered old brigade had a chanoo to breathe for the first time in three hour as we form a lino and lie down. What grim cool fellows those cannoneers are. Every man is a perfect machine. Bullets splash dust in their faces, but they do not wince. Bullets sing over and round, they do not dodge. There goes one to the earth, shot through the head as he sponged his gun. The machinery loses just one beat, misses just one cog in the wheels and then works away again as before.

Every gun is using short-fuse shell. The ground shakes and trembles, the roar shuts out all sounds from a line three miles long, and the shells go shrieking into the swamp to cut trees short off, to mow great gaps in the bushes, hunt out and shatter and mangle men until their corpses cannot be recognised as human. You would think a tornado was howling through the forest, followed by billows of fire, and yet men live through it—aye, press forward to capturc tho battery. We can hear their shouts as they form the. rush.

Now the shells aro changed for grape and canister, and guns are lircd so fast all reports blends into one mighty roar. The shriek of a shell ia the wickcdcst sound in war, but nothing makes the flesh crawl like the demonical singing, purring whistling grape-shot and the serpent-like hiss of canister.

Men's logs and heads are torn from bodies, cut in two. A round shot 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.

Through the smoke we see a swarm of men. It is not a battle line, but a mob of men desperate enough to bathe their bayonets in the flame of the guns. The guns leap from the ground, almost, as they are depressed on the foe, and shrieks and screams and shouts blend into one awful and steady cry. Twenty men of the battery are down, and the firing is interrupted. The foe accept it as a kind of wavering, and come rushing on. They are not ten feet away wheu the guns give them the last shot, That discharge picks living men off their feet, and throw them into the swamp a blackened, bloody mass. Up, now, as the enemy are amony the guns. There is a silence of ten seconds, and then the flash and the roar of more than :;,000 muskets and a rush forward v.ith bayonets. For what ? Neither on the right nor left nor in front of us is a living foe ! There are corpses around us which have been struck by three, four, and even six bullets, and nowhere 011 this acre of ground is a wounded man. Ths wheels of the guns cannot move until the blockade of dead is removed. Men cannot pass from caisson to gun without climb nig over windows of dead, livery gun and wheel is smeared with blood ; every foot of grass has its horrid stain. Historians write of the glory of war. Burial parties saw murder where historians saw glory.