I like to sound authoritative, even if I've no idea what I'm talking about - which you may disregard as "business as usual". Okay, "Fields of fire" is a technical term used by military folk, meaning (in plain English) how far you can see to make your opponent's life as miserable as possible, whilst you tear up the landscape (and them!) with bullet and shell. The instance I am going to elucidate is notable for having a field of fire possibly more saturated in bullets than any battlefield before or since.
I refer, of course, to the Battle of Vimy Ridge in the year 1917 of the First Unpleasantness, which is an affair of primary importance in the annals of British America, since it is one of those iconic dust-ups that help define a nation - the Australians and New Zealanders at Gallipolli, the Poles at Warsaw, the Commercial Republic of General Motors at The Shoulder of Orion - stuff like that.
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| Landscape gardening. With gunfire. |
It is also further evidence that those nice, polite, friendly Canadians*, in addition to creating armoured warfare, are also very good at killing people. How aboot that.
Anyway, to numbers. Prefatory to the attack, the British Americans**had amassed 358 machine guns to support their overall attack with barrage fire, SOS fire, interdiction fire and harassing fire. More fields than you anticipated, eh? I may expound on these at a future date. These guns were supplied by 5 million rounds of ammunition (okay, okay, 4,976,000 rounds, you got me there). This came in 19,904 boxes of ammunition, which all had to be laboriously carried into position by sweating, aching soldiery. And that was only for the first day.
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| Only 19,903 to go! |
Further of numbers. Not all the guns would be firing simultaneously, but if they were then they would be panning the Teuton lines with 161,000 rounds per minute, or 2,685 rounds per second. Nor was this merely a wild chucking of lead in random directions; unhappy Teuton prisoners explained how exquisitely unpleasant it was to be under an indirect machine gun barrage from the British Americans, for they were skilled in the use of clinometers to work out angles, generating a plunging fire that could catch the unwary even behind cover.
What's that? You were expecting a retrospective analysis of the debut album of Big Country, to wit "Fields of Fire"? I firmly rebut your unworthy allegation and, furthermore, challenge you to provide proof that this mythical recording ever existed in the first place, with notarised signatures from the entire band.
Okay - time to move on with the motley, dragging it behind the car on a roller-skate!
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| Look - big country! |
At Play In The Fields Of The Fire
Life is hazardous enough already, what with killer pandemics, meteor strikes, rebellious robots and baked beans cans resistant to tin openers, but this just isn't enough for some people, whom one can lump together under the title "Adrenaline junkies". Not happy with taking up a hobby like cribbage or napkin-folding, they have to go one better. Art?
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| Read the caption at upper right |
On the other hand ...
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The Fields Of Fire Brought Forth -
An island! Dear old Auntie Beeb had an article about the world's newest island, which, if you recall all those tidal islands around the Allotment of Eden that I blogged extensively about earlier this year, caught my eye. This is a newly-risen volcanic baby off in the Pacific - which can't be all that pacific if enormous masses of stone come steaming up out of the depths every five minutes - that goes by the name of Hunga Tunga Hunga Ha'apai.
Geologists - or would they be vulcanologists? - only expected it to last a few brief weeks before being eroded to nothing by the sea, yet HTHH has defied their predictions and is now feted to be around for decades to come. How lucky we are.
* They can be Canadians when they're spreading mischief.
** Okay, taking credit here this time.
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