"Modern fighting," said the veteran, as he cleaned his rifle, a daily task in that rust-devouring atmosphere, "is the result of modern weapons. Whereas a musket would take two minutes to load and had a range of only a couple of hundred yards, a modern rifle will fire thirty shots a minute and over, and has a good killing range at an almost flat trajectory of a thousand yards. Suppose it takes a charging force of infantry six minutes to run a thousand yards, where a musket would get in three shots a modern rifle would put in from 180 to 300 shots, and would be firing almost continuously."
"Men would have to be under cover to face that fire," agreed Horace.
"More murderous than the rifle," the veteran continued, "is the machine-gun, which fires 600 shots a minute and can be operated by two men. It is estimated as being equal to fifty men, but, in reality, its destructiveness in the hands of a good gunner is far higher. It's easy to handle, too, the Maxims weighing sixty pounds and our Hotchkiss fifty-three pounds, because the English weapon is water-cooled and ours is air-cooled."
"Which is best?"
"Ours," replied the veteran promptly, "because a Maxim, when it's firing steadily, gets so hot that it boils the water and the enemy can see the steam. Then he knows where you are and concentrates his fire and—you tuck in your toes and no one will ever wake you up."
"Invisibility counts," said the boy.
"It's the difference between life and death!" was the reply. "That's where the value of the trenches becomes evident. Since both rifles and machine-guns have a flat trajectory, when they do strike the ground, they do it at a very slight angle. If your head is ten inches below the level of the ground, a thousand men can fire at you with rifles and machine-guns a hundred yards away, and you can smoke a pipe comfortably and listen to the song of the bullets overhead.
"Shrapnel, especially when handled by the 'Soixante-Quinze,' which, in addition to being the best field-gun in the world, has the best shell with the best time-fuse, is more destructive against advancing troops than machine-gun and rifle-fire combined, when it is rightly timed. Of course, it is far harder to aim exactly and to time to the second. A shrapnel shell holds 300 bullets and a 'Soixante-Quinze' can fire fifteen shells a minute. That means that one gun can send 4500 bullets a minute into an advancing enemy, the bullets scattering in a fan shape from the burst of the shell. The Boches, by the way, waste a tremendous amount of ammunition in bursting their shrapnel too high. I got hit, myself, with three balls from a shell which had burst too far away and they didn't even make a hole in my trousers; bruised me a bit, that was all.
"But you can see, my boy, when you've got rifle fire, machine-gun fire and shrapnel all looking for a different place to put a hole through you, a trench is the loveliest thing in the world, no matter if it's wet and slimy, full of smells and black with dried blood. The worst pool of filth would be a haven of refuge if only you could drop your body in it a few inches below the zone of certain death. If one gets caught once in the open, one never grumbles again about the labor of digging a trench."
"But why are trenches so twisty?" asked Horace. "One misty day, when it was safe, an aviator took me up a little way, and I had a chance to look down on our trenches. I was only in the air a few minutes and we didn't go very high, but, although I know this section pretty well, I couldn't make head or tail out of our lines. They looked like a sort of scrawly writing, or a spider's web stretched out and tangled up."