Significant, too, that evening, was the appearance of wagon-loads of wire. One of the men groaned aloud as he saw it,
"Zut! That means some dodging of bullets to-night!"
Never, till Time has ceased to be, will any man calculate the number of deaths which have been caused by that entrapment born in the brain of some fiend—wire entanglement.
Wire! The strangler!
Wire! The man-trap!
Wire! That grips a soldier with malicious glee and holds him fast to an immediate or a lingering death.
Wire! Which lies before every heroic effort, which throws its snaky coils around the feet and around the nerves of the bravest.
Embodiment of hate, of diabolic trickery, of malign expectancy, arch-creator of despair—Wire!
For every mile of fighting front, there are a thousand miles of wire, with a weight of 110 tons. For every mile of front, 12,000 standards and 12,000 pickets must be used. Withal, that thousand miles of wire has cost a thousand lives to put it up and keep it in repair, that, when the time may come, it may cost the lives of two thousand of the enemy.
Just as the character of the fighting shows the nature of troops, so does the wire that they use. The German wire is put up by machinery. It is a harder, tougher wire than is used by the Allies, with curved barbs, altogether a more efficient thing in itself. But, by reason of that very solidity, it affords greater resistance to shell-fire, and therefore, under heavy bombardment, funnels of passage can be driven through it, by which troops may assault the trenches it is designed to protect.