Immediately afterwards other sounds chimed in—the whirring rattle of quick-firers, the volleys of those in the trenches, and the stentorious shouts of the excited men from the other side of the world who were filled with the enthusiasm of battle.
The advancing Turks also made themselves heard, for they shouted at the top of their voices, even as red Indians had been wont to whoop when attacking some log cabin in an Ohio clearing, or a wagon-train on its way across the plains.
The clamor grew in volume. The Turks were firing as they came on, though those they sought to slay were doubly screened both by darkness and the barricades behind which they stood or crouched, each man acting mostly on his own initiative. The searchlights were destined to turn the scales of battle against the charging Turks, Jack imagined. Those powerful streams of light playing along the enemy’s lines betrayed their every move, and afforded the Allies a splendid opportunity to spray their columns with the fluid of death that leaped from the muzzles of those quick-firers.
Nor was this all.
In the midst of the terrible noise there came a dull boom from out on the water. Some battleship must be there in the darkness, possibly the same one that had so lately destroyed the hidden battery on the shore below. The men aboard knew to a fraction just what the distance was, and that brilliant light showed them where to land a shell.
Jack heard a peculiar sound that may have been caused by the passage of the monster shell overhead. Then came one of those terrible shocks, and they could see the flash as the explosion took place.
It struck him as nothing short of miraculous how those experts aboard the battleship could drop their shells exactly where they chose, with darkness around them; but that was just what happened, for the monster exploded in the very midst of the charging Turks, and must have created a panic among those who survived.
Having seen some of the craters dug by the shells hurled from the famous forty-two-centimetre guns of the Germans along the fighting line in Belgium and France, Jack could easily imagine what a pit had followed the crash, swallowing scores of the Turks. But the dismay among the attacking troops was but momentary. They had been primed for a victory, and were not to be cheated so easily. Once more they were coming on, a surging mob, with the rain from the pulsating quick-firers cutting swathes through their ranks.
If you have ever watched a farmer swinging his scythe, or the mowing machine pushing through the wheat or oats, you can have a pretty good idea of how men fall in windrows when a bevy of those modern guns are in action. Those who manipulate them constantly change the position of the weapons so that the discharge might be compared to the result when anyone handles a hose to sprinkle the lawn or the family garden. Some have even likened it to the machine for whitewashing or painting great buildings like those erected for Expositions; only instead of the pure white the result of this spraying is red.
Both Amos and Jack stood there watching most anxiously. Those shouts were so insistent, and the clamor so dreadful that they could be easily pardoned for feeling more or less nervousness. If, after all, the Turks swept irresistibly forward and carried the trenches of the Territorials, what the result might be no one could more than guess.