Stirring as were these reflections, thrown with lightning-like rapidity across the mind of Tom Walton and perhaps scores of others who were fighting side by side with him, they were but passing thoughts which speedily gave way to the stern and hazardous realities of the moment as a hail of machine bullets from a dozen hidden nests again challenged, and for a time halted, their further advance.
It was another of those long, narrow, intermittent stretches of wooded land that they were approaching, and somehow, by the exertion of almost superhuman efforts, the Germans had thrown a hasty but temporarily effective barbed wire entanglement in front of it. It was another of those obstacles which cost lives to overcome, but which had to be thrown aside with the least delay in order that the enemy might not have time to marshal a recouped strength against the oncoming line.
But of the great fleet of aeroplanes that kept dashing back and forth above, one which had been especially assigned to watch and report their progress, hovering over them like a powerful winged guardian, had seen their predicament and even as the cloud of machine gun bullets mowed the first unfortunate ones down the message had been flashed to brigade headquarters, and almost in the same instant an order to action had been flashed to the commander of a nearby squadron of heavy tanks that just had performed a like service a short distance up the line.
Prostrate upon the ground, but with no other protection than an occasional shell hole afforded the luckiest of them, the men saw the tanks swerve in their course and come in their direction. Crawling, rolling, both right and left, they opened an avenue through which they might pass.
With a loud and joyous shout that rose high above the dismal song of death of the bullets, the harried soldiers greeted the lumbering, jolting approaching of the “Treat ’em Rough” branch of the American service.
Dipping into ditches and shell holes, but just as majestically taking the sharp and rugged rises in the ground, bobbing, gliding, sliding like antediluvian many-legged serpent-beasts, they came on at a jogging, uneven pace, much as might a great herd of giant, iron-hided elephants, puffing and snorting and spouting forth fire.
To avoid casualties they slowed up and proceeded cautiously through the little lane created for them, flanked on either side by indomitable doughboys, only awaiting their passage through to be up and at the enemy again, and who now, prostrate upon the ground, were taking pot shots at the sheltered Germans operating the machine guns.
But once past that point where they might hit or run down their own men, the tanks proceeded with all the power and speed they possessed straight for the sapling wood and the wire entanglements in front of it. Machine gun bullets pelted against their tops and sides as harmlessly as drops of rain upon a roof. Invincible to everything but the larger guns, which had not yet made their range, so viciously did the Americans in the skies fight off the enemy observers, they plodded on, barbed wire twisting and snapping, trees cracking off and falling before their terrible assault.
Some of the men already were up and running in the path of the iron monsters when the shrill whistle of their captain brought them to the ground. The tanks were coming backward. To the uninitiated it seemed that they were in full and precipitate retreat. For a distance of perhaps forty feet they backed, while many wide-eyed Americans looked on in wonder; then they as suddenly halted, and a second later again went forward.
They had returned for a renewed momentum with which to mow down the heavier trees which had obstructed their course already slowed down by contact with the outer fringe of the wood.