Energy books

They were carrying cylinders with nozles like hose-
pipes. Suddenly there was a rushing noise like an escape of air from
some blast-furnace. Long tongues of flame licked across to the broken
ground where the King's Royal Rifles lay.
Some of them were set on fire, their clothes burning on them, making
them living torches, and in a second or two cinders.
It was a new horror of war--the Flammenwerfer.
Some of the men leaped to their feet, cursing, and fired repeatedly at
the Germans carrying the flaming jets. Here and there the shots were
true. A man hunched under a cylinder exploded like a fat moth caught
in a candle-flame. But that advancing line of fire after the long
bombardment was too much for the rank and file, whose clothes were
smoking and whose bodies were scorched. In something like a panic they
fell back, abandoning the cratered ground in which their dead lay.
The news of this disaster and of the new horror reached the troops in
reserve, who had been resting in the rear after a long spell.


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