French Tank Cutting Wire.
Note the lower lines and greater speed of the French design compared with the British, more mobile but less powerful.
"They march past," said Henri Barbusse, describing them at the front, "with faces red brown, yellow or chestnut, their beards scanty and fine, or thick and frizzled, their greatcoats yellowish-green, and their muddy helmets displaying the crescent instead of our grenade. From flat or angular faces, burnished like new coins, one would say that their eyes shine like balls of ivory and onyx. Here and there in the file, towering above the rest, comes the impassive black face of a Senegalese sharpshooter. The red flag with a green hand in the center goes behind the company.
"These demon-men, who seem carved of yellow wood, of bronze or of ebony, are grave and taciturn; their faces are disquieting and secret, like the threat of a snare suddenly found at your feet. These men are drunk with eagerness for the bayonet and from their hands there is no quarter. The German cry of surrender, 'Kamerad!' they answer with a bayonet thrust, waist-high."
Their presence, also, told its story.
A counter-assault was planned.
Rarely do the Moroccans hold the trenches. It is not their kind of fighting, nor would their bodies, used to the sun of North Africa, endure the cold and wet of the muddy trench. They are the troops of the advance. There are no prisoners, no wounded, after they have leaped into a trench. Their trail is the trail of savage death.
All the next day the bombardment increased in violence, and Horace, at his military switchboard, plugged calls to distant quarters for reënforcements. Everywhere along the line, when the early dusk fell, men were standing to arms or marching to the threatened sector.
One section of trench was wiped out with the concentration of high explosive shells; wire, fire trench, communication trench and their living defenders being blown into an unrecognizable, pockmarked mass. Another trench was hastily dug behind and craftily wired. There the assault would come.
The noise was deafening, maddening. One felt the slow approach of insanity. Men sprang up here and there with frantic cries that the appalling nerve-racking din might cease, even for a second. A few went mad, and their hands were bound by their comrades until the crisis was past.