In spite of the lifting of the fog, the approach of the tank was still unperceived by the enemy. It is a constant source of wonder to tank crews that this happens so often. Locked up in their steel chamber and with a hammering gun they feel their roaring progress must herald them afar. Yet it often happens that they creep upon the enemy as though their beast had been shod with velvet.
Hal saw the flare of the “77” and headed toward it. Bowers turned a stream of fire on it and the gun went out of action.
The tank lurched on toward a long windrow of rusted wire. The wire shone red in the sun that had come out to dispel the fog. In successive alterations of the defense, it had been made into a pile fifty feet long, by twenty broad, and four feet high.
“Looks like a machine-gun nest to me!” called Bowers.
But Hal still guided the machine toward the spot.
Suddenly a veritable hail of bullets poured upon the tank and rattled harmlessly off the steel sides.
Hal stopped the tank.
“You’re right,” he called to Bowers. “It’s a nest, all right.”
For the next ten minutes, as Hal expressed it later, “we just sat there and took it.”
An anti-tank rifle was brought into play by the Germans. This weapon was a monster indeed, fully seven feet long and forty pounds in weight—not, perhaps, a monster as compared with heavy siege guns and heavy artillery, but a mammoth for an anti-tank gun. But the anti-tank’s rifle bullets likewise failed to pierce the living-room of the tank, although they did cut through the running gear in one or two spots that were not vital.