With a sickening crash a biplane came to earth, right in the path of the moving Tank. A glance at the twisted wreckage showed that the infamous Black Cross was painted on the planes. Ralph had a smart answer to his question. Our airmen had been busy up aloft.
Setley did not trouble to turn aside his command. Right over the debris of the German biplane she waddled, crushing metal and wood into an unrecognizable pulp, and then thrust her blunt nose into the outer line of barbed wire.
Like a rhinoceros tearing up jungle grass with its formidable horns the Tank set about to destroy the entanglements. Posts snapped off like carrots, coils of wire suddenly released from tension quivered in the air until borne down and buried deep in the earth by the broad traction bands of the landship. The while machine-gun bullets rattled harmlessly against her armoured hide, bombs exploded on, against, and underneath the terrible war-machine. The car of Juggernaut would cut a very poor show compared with this motor-propelled fortress.
Other Tanks were engaged in similar operations, keeping parallel to the line of direction of the hostile trenches and methodically uprooting the entanglements in as many minutes as it had taken the Germans days to set up in position. Having completed this part of the programme the Tanks made for the sand-bagged parapet at the raised end of the glacis, while simultaneously with this movement the whistles went, and the British infantry rushed forward with an irresistible élan.
Their attention divided between the terrifying landships, that were crunching over emplacements and trenches, and the glittering array of bayonets, the German machine-gunners, unfortunately for them, did not take into account a couple of British biplanes, Cleaving through the dense eddying clouds of smoke and recklessly disregarding the bursting shells the intrepid airmen descended to within a hundred feet of the Von der Golz Redoubt and the adjacent trenches. A hail of bullets from the airmen's Lewis guns—death-dealing hornets—caught the Huns unawares, creating havoc in the dense masses of grey-coated infantry.
Poison gas shells added to the horror of the desperate struggle. Aerial torpedoes, missiles from trench mortars, and the deadly shells from the Stokes' guns, rained upon the enemy position. It was a wonder that the Huns stood it as they did; yet, with their back to the wall and unable to retreat or even to take shelter in their deep dug-outs, they fought with a courage that could only be described as fanatical.
Ploughing her way through the mazes of barbed wire Setley's Tank came astride a deep trench that flanked one side of the redoubt to where the glacis terminated in what was a few hours before an elaborately constructed covered way bristling with loopholes, each one of which showed the muzzle of a machine-gun. Now there was little left but a crumbling mound of earth and disrupted sand-bags, in which half-buried Germans still maintained a furious but erratic rifle-fire.
Almost before he was aware of it Ralph found himself within the once considered impregnable redoubt. There was practically nothing to mark its position. It was only when he found himself confronted by a landship strongly resembling his own that he realized that he had gained his objective, for the oncoming Tank was not, as he at first imagined, one of German workmanship, but a British machine that had entered the redoubt on the opposite side.
Narrower and narrower grew the encircling ring of khaki. With bomb and bayonet the British infantry swept the flattened earthwork, until the surviving Huns, finding further resistance useless, threw down their arms and raised shouts of "Kamerad." Greatly to their surprise they found that, contrary to the statements of their officers, the British Tommy is a generous victor. As if by magic the heat of combat gave place to a light-hearted, almost considerate, treatment of the remnant of the garrison of the redoubt, and it was by no means an uncommon sight to see a British soldier bind up the wounds he had inflicted on a German only a few minutes previously.
The paucity of prisoners testified to the stubbornness of the enemy resistance. Quickly the captives were formed up and marched to the advance cages—a task not without great peril, since the German gunners, according to their customary indifference to their ill-fated comrades, were putting up a barrage behind the captured position.