Ge Lin rushed to the front line with several of his generals, Ge Lin held a telescope to observe, frowned and said, "The 391 Heights are the highest points within a radius of more than ten miles, as long as this commanding height is taken, the nearby French strongholds will be self-defeating, so we must do our best to take the 391 Heights." ”

"However, the French army built a large number of fortifications on the 391 heights, and the French design was very rigorous, and the various bunkers cooperated with each other to form crossfire, blocking all the passages of our army's attack. Moreover, these bunkers are very hidden, and most of them are in the blind spots of our artillery, so that our artillery cannot effectively destroy these forts. Moreover, the terrain of Heights 391 is steep, and our tanks cannot go up at all, nor can they provide effective support to our infantry, so it is very difficult to capture Heights 391. The brigade chief of staff next to him patiently explained.

"I don't want to listen to these excuses, I just need one result now, and that is to take the 391 heights as much as possible! Ordered the troops, ready to launch a new round of attack, Lao Tzu personally led the charge, Lao Tzu still didn't believe it, such a small hill can stop us! Ge Lin said loudly with some impatience.

"Brigade commander, you sit here with peace of mind, I will personally lead people to charge and guarantee to take the 391 heights in one fell swoop!" A regiment commander next to him immediately jumped out and said loudly.

"Yes! Brigade commander think twice, you are now the brigade commander, and thousands of soldiers in the entire brigade still need your command, so you must not be angry! The chief of staff also hurriedly persuaded.

"That's it! You don't need to be persuaded! Ge Lin said indifferently, "I have already decided, immediately prepare to launch a new round of attack, and carry out the order!" ”

"Yes!" Seeing that Ge Lin was determined, everyone couldn't persuade him anymore, so they could only bow down and accept the order.

Ge Lin put on a steel helmet, casually took the rifle of a guard next to him, strode out of the observation post, and came directly to the forefront position. The trenches were full of soldiers on standby, all with rifles in their hands, staring at the French positions on the opposite side like hungry wolves, ready to rush forward and annihilate the French.

"Boom! Rumble! After learning that the attack on the 391 Heights was blocked, the commander of the 45th Army, Zhou Tiedan, ordered to concentrate all the artillery fire on the 391 Heights.

"Tick tock~!" After more than half an hour of artillery preparation, the loud horn of the charge finally kicked off the attack.

Ge Lin roared, grabbed the rifle in his hand, and rushed out of the trench with his men. Pounced on the enemy's position.

"Da Da Da Da~!" Tongues of blazing fire erupted from the French army's dark fort, blocking the offensive of the Chinese army.

A rain of bullets swept by, and the two Huaxia soldiers who rushed in front fell to the ground instantly. Ge Lin hurriedly threw himself to the ground, spit out the weeds that had been snatched into his mouth, and said loudly at the top of his throat, "Flamethrower, burn these shitty Frenchmen!" ”

As soon as Ge Lin gave the order, two soldiers with flamethrowers on their backs rushed forward, under the cover of machine guns. The two soldiers cautiously approached the bunker, aimed at the bullet hole that was spraying backwards, and pulled the trigger! The two fire dragons rushed into the dark castle along the shooting hole, and a burst of frightened screams suddenly sounded in the dark castle. The several Frenchmen hiding in the bunker all turned into burning men, and the gunfire naturally stopped.

The flamethrower had already been invented in that era, and the inventor of the flamethrower in the modern sense was recognized as the German Richard Federer. In 1901, he created a sample flamethrower for the German army to evaluate. Federer's device already had essentially the hallmarks of a modern flamethrower, which was carried by a human hand and equipped with a 1.2-meter circumference cylinder. The inside of the container is horizontally divided into two parts, the lower half is a compressed air cylinder and the upper half is an incendiary bottle. When the shooter depresses the throttle handle on the fuel cartridge, compressed air ejects the liquid incendiary through a rubber tube through the steel firing nozzle, which has a simple ignition device, and when the liquid incendiary is ignited, it forms a mushroom-shaped fireball and sprays it towards the target. The device has a range of 18 meters and is capable of firing for two minutes, but the ignition tube is a one-time use and must be replaced with a new one for each launch. It was not adopted by the German army until 1911, when it formed a special regiment of 12 companies, armed with the first flamethrower in modern history. However, it took 4 years for the flamethrower to show its formidable power on the battlefield.

In February 1915, the French were the first to taste the German flames at Verdun, and two months later, on July 30, 1915, the British also tasted this infernal fire mixed with gasoline, rubber and sulphur in the trenches of Hooge in Flanders, and the British lost 31 officers and 751 soldiers in two days of fighting. After the Battle of Hogg, for the first time, the flamethrower's massive close-range lethality was included in the combat report.

The British and French, who had suffered a lot, also began to develop their own flamethrowers, and the French were more realistic, and their designs were basically copied from the Germans, which were put into use in 1917. The British, on the other hand, were too whimsical, and they built flamethrowers that weighed 2 tons. In the Somme region, the British deployed the four-gate monster, which was permanently installed in the fortifications 55 meters from the German front, in front of which was a no-man's land of confrontation between the two sides. These four large flamethrowers were designed for the Battle of the Somme and had a range of 80 meters and were used to clear the first line of German defense before the infantry charged. On July 1, 1917, as soon as the Battle of the Somme began, German counter-fire destroyed two of the four flamethrowers, and the other two were rendered useless after taking the first line of German defense.

After the success of Hogg, the Germans paid more attention to the role of flamethrowers. They organized the flamethrower corps into six-man teams of three flamethrowers, scattered throughout the front line, with the main task of clearing the forward lines of the Allied forces when the Germans launched an offensive. In 1917, the Germans improved the flamethrower equipped with a lighter weight and used a signal tube that could be fired multiple times, which greatly increased the mobility and frequency of the flamethrower.

It is true that the flamethrowers inflicted far fewer casualties on both sides in this war than machine guns and heavy artillery, but in the near-hand-to-hand trench warfare, the German flamethrowers undoubtedly brought a huge psychological shock to the Allied soldiers who were shivering in the muddy water. (To be continued......)