ty,
thirty or even forty feet deep. There may be more than one series of
entanglements and some may be screened in some fashion or other from
the effects of artillery fire. Aside from these, _trous de loup_,
pits with sharpened sticks to impale the invader, and all the other
devices of former times are used--in short, every obstacle from the
time of Moses to the modern machine gun. No invader can possibly
reach the enemy's trench to contest it with him until these
impedimenta are removed. Thousands of short-cut plans and inventions
have been offered for cleaning away the barbed wire before an
attack, but not one has succeeded because it requires that whoever
is to carry out the suggestion or remove the obstruction, must be
submitted to murderous grilling machine-gun and rifle fire. Shrapnel
shells with their sprays of bullets bursting at a height of a foot
above ground remain the approved method of cutting barbed wire. If
the barbed wire is not destroyed, the men in the charge are "hung
up" in it, as the saying is. Then if a machine gun is still in
position in the enemy's trench, they are riddled with bullets where
they lie. No form of death could be more pitiless or helpless for
the soldier than this. He becomes a target on a spit, as it were.

Granted that the barbed wire is swept away perfectly, no charge can
succeed if many machine guns or rifles from the trenches are playing
upon it. Then men simply rush into a spray of bullets. Therefore,
all the teeth must be drawn from the trench itself. This is done by
the concentration of high-explosive shells from guns of larger
caliber, mostly howitzers, which burst in the earth, tossing up
great fountains of dust, burying and smashing the machine guns and
driving all the operators into their dugouts, where they are
sometimes buried alive.

Back of the trench, the guns of smaller caliber which destroy the
barbed wire place a "curtain of fire," as it is called, which does
not permit the enemy to escape from a trench, or any reserves to
come to his assistance. This process is kept up for such a length of
time as is deemed sufficient. At a given moment, the invader
charges, often protected by a screen of smoke which is sent out from
his own trenches.

As the burrowers in the earth crawl from the parapets and take to
their legs, they know that their fate is almost altogether dependent
upon the preparation by the guns rather than any effort of their
own. Ahead of them is thi