Silencer

“ Oakes Radell took the pistol from his pocket, but did not take his eyes from Harrison Hadler’s face. Hadler glanced down at the weapon, and his face went white. His lower jaw dropped, his eyes seemed to bulge.
“You—you mean to kill me!” he gasped.
“This automatic is equipped with a silencer, you’ll notice,” Radell spoke calmly. “A silencer is not so good on a pistol as on a rifle, but it helps some. Even if the shot is heard, I’ll be gone before anybody can decide where it was fired.” ”

“ He was just a month old when I painted a bull's eye upon the brick wall of our back garden and invited our friends to indulge their fad as our guests. The shooting awakened the baby so frequently that Karen—Mrs. Marshall—dug up the silencer, which I had shown her as a memento of my career on the bench. Thereafter we confined our practice almost exclusively to drawing from the hip and shooting without sighting. It is impossible to sight with a gun equipped with a silencer, you know, since the silencer covers the sighter on the barrel. ”

“ But at all hazards we must keep the secret of the silencer to ourselves,” said Pryor. “The silencer enables us to make night-flights in secret without the enemy being any the wiser,” he added.
Collins grinned. He knew, only too well, how “The Hornet” had, more than once, been over to Belgium and returned in safety without its presence being spotted by the enemy. He knew, too, that the bomb-rack had been full when Ronnie and Beryl Gaselee had ascended, and that it had been empty when they had returned. ”

“ One of my cylinders was out of action—a dirty plug, I should imagine, but still I was rising steadily with plenty of power. After a bit the trouble passed, whatever it was, and I heard the full, deep-throated purr—the ten singing as one. That’s where the beauty of our modern silencers comes in. We can at last control our engines by ear. How they squeal and squeak and sob when they are in trouble! All those cries for help were wasted in the old days, when every sound was swallowed up by the monstrous racket of the machine. ”

“ Any ordinary inventor who had discovered something of such importance would protect it at once. We can therefore make up our minds that in no regular motor-engineering works throughout this country has the complete silencer been evolved. It would be impossible for the most brilliant inventor to keep such a thing entirely to himself."
"Again the field shrinks?"
"Yes, Sir John. We now have a man of the character already indicated, who, as he has undoubtedly constructed silent engines, must have done so in secret. ”

“ An efficient silencer, with a long exhaust pipe carried right to the rear of the machine, considerably reduced engine noise and rendered the approach march a far less hazardous undertaking than was the case with the earlier models.
Sponsons were designed to collapse into the interior of the machine when necessary, and the cumbersome practice of detaching them from the hull came to an end. Short 6-pounder guns were introduced to render this change possible. ”

“ I knew that a union which held the exhaust pipe in place on the silencer had been working loose. I grabbed a spanner out of the tool-box, and elbowing my way along the side of the car again, with two turns of the spanner loosened the union, pushed forward the throttle-lever in the steering-post, and gave the motor all its gas.
The thing was done in a quarter the time it's taken me to write of it, and you can guess the effect. Bang! bang! came a succession of explosions quick and pitiless as a Maxim gun. Those peasants gave way like wheat before the scythe. ”

“ But the mobile armoured big gun and the Tank as a machine-gun silencer must enormously facilitate an advance against the blinded enemy. Neither of them can advance against properly aimed big gun fire. ”

“ And he had said further, in face of the disappearance of the gun and in explanation of the fact that all twelve of these people had immediately protested to Strawn that they had heard no shot:
"This was a premeditated murder, of course. The Maxim silencer—unless they are all lying about not hearing a shot—proves that. Silencers are damned hard to get hold of, but people with plenty of money can manage most things." ”

“ Special precautions must be taken against that vilest of all inventions of diabolical ingenuity—the Maxim "silencer." No argument is needed to prove that silent firearms could not suit crime better if they were made expressly for it. ”

“ For a final safeguard, Garson searched for and found the telephone bell-box on the surbase below the octagonal window. It was the work of only a few seconds to unscrew the bells, which he placed on the desk. So simply he made provision against any alarm from this source. He then took his pistol from his hip-pocket, examined it to make sure that the silencer was properly adjusted, and then thrust it into the right side-pocket of his coat, ready for instant use in desperate emergency. ”

“ He slipped from beside the fire and into the shadow of a steep rock, watching with eyes that almost pierced the dark on all sides.
And there he saw her creeping up on the outskirts of the firelight, prone on her hands and knees, dragging herself up like a young wildcat hunting prey; it was the glimmer of her eyes that he caught first through the gloom. A cold thought came to him that she had returned with her gun ready.
Inch by inch she came closer, and now he was aware of her restless glances probing on all sides of the camp-fire. Silence—only the crackling of a pitchy stick. ”

“ But here as soon as we have crossed the wall we shall be exposed to a deadly fire, not only of rifles, but of machine guns. Of these the enemy have two on motor tricycles, and it is understood that the call of their sirens is a signal that they are in action. ”

“ A wind may rise when you're dropping off to sleep on the stone flags of a cellar, and then you can hear the door of the house and of nearly every house in the place creaking on its hinges. The breeze catches the telephone wires which run from the artillery at rear to their observation stations, and the wires sing like light shells travelling through space.
At dawn you waken to the sound of anti-aircraft guns firing at aeroplanes which they never bring down. ”

“ In the fire-trenches there is no talking save in whispers, but every now and then the almost uncanny silence would be punctuated by the sharp crack of a rifle, the tut-tut-tut of a mitrailleuse, or, from somewhere in the distance, the angry bark of a field-gun. ”

“ The silence, I remember, was the only thing that troubled me, after those three days and nights of almost incessant shell-fire. But it was a joyous trouble—while it lasted. Hardly had I closed my eyes upon the moonlit muslin curtains, when I woke with a start to that unaltered scene. The only difference was the slightly irregular hum of an enemy aeroplane, and the noise of bombs bursting all too near our perfect billet. ”

“ Our experiments prove the sound of the gun to be dependent on its shape; but we do not know that we have employed the best shape. This suggests the desirability of constructing a gun with special reference to the production of sound. [4]
An absolutely uniform superiority on all days cannot be conceded to any one of the instruments subjected to examination; still, our observations have been so numerous and long-continued as to enable us to come to the sure conclusion that, on the whole, the steam-siren is the most powerful fog-signal which has hitherto been tried in England. ”

“ In windy weather the shortness of its sound is a serious drawback to the use of a gun as a signal. In the case of the horn and siren, time is given for the attention to be fixed upon the sound; and a single puff, while cutting out a portion of the blast, does not obliterate it wholly. Such a puff, however, may be fatal to the momentary gun-sound.
On the leeward side of the Foreland, on the 23d, the sounds were heard at least four times as far as on the windward side, while in both directions the siren possessed the greatest penetrative power. ”

“ It was as when a mighty momentary wind seizes upon a house in the dead of night, slams two doors, causes something to bark, and passes on its way. The two slammings and the bark of the revolver were almost simultaneous—and silence swallowed them together. ”

“ I press my head against the earth and listen to the muffled thunder, like the explosions of quarrying—and raise it again to listen for the sounds on top.
The machine-guns rattle. I know our barbed wire entanglements are strong and almost undamaged;—parts of them are charged with a powerful electric current. The rifle fire increases. They have not broken through; they have to retreat.
I sink down again, huddled, strained to the uttermost. The banging, the creeping, the clanging becomes audible. One single cry yelling amongst it all. They are raked with fire, the attack is repulsed. ”

“ In Sharp's bag was found a sack of small round objects that look like marbles. All the owner of the weapon needs to do to kill an enemy is to drop one of those bits of glass in the enemy's pocket. Then he can go off several miles and start the weapon. The force it generates is concentrated in the bit of glass, and the silence is instantly generated, the bit of glass being destroyed in the process. ”

“ But no snipers were in evidence and, strangely, they were not shot at even once; at that time this section could truthfully be called quiet. Not so?
Well, considering that one airplane engine makes as much noise and keeps it up longer than the shooting of a machine-gun, and that now no less than three airplanes made their appearance low down and came on at a tremendous rate, the quiet sector suddenly took on a different character. And then Susan Nipper commenced to talk out loud and to do things spitfire fashion. ”

“ You will advance up the hill to the storm of the battery—at the word ‘halt,’ you will deliver your fire at the port-lights of the artillerymen, and immediately carry the guns at the point of the bayonet.—Support arms—double quick—march!” Machinery could not have moved with more compactness than that gallant regiment followed the fearless stride of its leader. Supported by the Twenty-third, the dark mass moved up the hill like one body,—the lurid light glittering and flickering on their bayonets, as the combined fire of the enemy’s artillery and infantry opened murderously upon them. ”

“ I heard John Silence cry, and the Colonel followed him through the door, while I was just quick enough at their heels to hear him add, “the smoke’s the worst part of it. There’s no fire yet, I think.” ”

“ What you hear is not encouraging—the distant boom of a gun, a few seconds' silence, then a long quavering whistle in the air, like the cry of a banshee, growing every moment nearer and louder, and finally the deafening report somewhere near you. You never know where a shell is going to burst, although you hear it long before it arrives; you can only sit tight and hope that it will go where the other fellows are, or better still where no one is. ”

“ I was working at one of the for’ard guns, and as after she was loaded, the captain of the piece stood waiting with the trigger lanyard in his finger, ready to pull, one of the officers calls out, ‘I say, sir, why don’t you fire?’ ‘I want to make her tell, sir,’ says the gunner,—‘I am waiting for their flash,—there it is’—and as he pulled trigger, a cannon shot came through the port, and dashed him to pieces between us, covering me and the officer all over with his brains. ”

“ As a gun fired there flamed out in front of the battery a blinding sheet of light that threw up every detail of men and guns and patch of wet ground in glaring hot light or hard black silhouette. On the instant, the light vanished and darkness clapped down on the tired eyes, to lift and leap again on the following instant from the next gun’s spurt of vivid sheeting flame. ”

“ We know this bit of soldiers' slang, which means the lachrymatory shells. We quickly put on our masks. In perfect safety, crouched against the wall of the trench, in the company of a hundred unknown comrades, we wait until the poisonous gust of yellow smoke has blown away. Through the eye-pieces of our masks everything seems to be enveloped in some fabulous steam; the pale lightning of the guns, the ghastly [Pg 17] discs of the English rockets, the red stars of the German. But one sound: the clatter of the machine-guns near us, a muffled thunder as of a rising sea. ”

“ As a signal in rock-lighthouses, where neither siren, steam whistle, nor gun, could be mounted, and as a handy fleet-signal, dispensing with the lumber of special signal-guns, the gun-cotton will prove invaluable. ”

“ There was danger, too, of a false alarm started by a nervous sentry. It needs but a moment for such an alarm to become general, so great is the nervous tension at which men live on the firing-line. Terrific fusillades from both sides followed while the listening patrols flattened themselves out on the ground, and listened, in no pleasant frame of mind, to the bullets whistling over their heads. But at night, and under the stress of great excitement, men fire high. ”

“ Cherry murmured. Once more they were on the deserted streets.
Then, as if to crush her high hopes, all hell let loose. The roar of powerful motors, the scream of sirens, the boom and bang of anti-aircraft guns filled all the night with terror.
“I can’t let you in ’ere now,” said a burly guard at the entrance to the broadcasting station. “It is quite impossible. You shouldn’t be ’ere at all.”
“But this lady is to sing over the radio at nine!” Dave protested.
“Can’t be ’elped.” The guard was firm. “Orders is orders. No ladies hallowed in the station during an alarm. ”

“ By the continued glare of our discharges, we could see dense dark masses of men, moving in columns to three separate points of attack upon our works. Our artillery and musketry poured on them as they advanced a continual stream of fire, rolling and glancing from angles, bastions, and redoubts. Repulsed—they were re-formed by their officers, and brought again to the charge, to be again repulsed. At such times, hours fly like minutes. A life appears concentrated to a moment. ”