Through the hot clear hours of August 23 [1914] the summer sky was spattered with the greasy black puffs of bursting shells. The French had instantly dubbed them “marmites after the cast-iron soup pot that sits on every French stove. “Il plut des marmites” (It rained shells) was all that one tired soldier could remember of the day.
In some places the French were still attacking, trying to throw the Germans back across the Sambre; in others they were holding; in still others they were retreating in crippled, broken disorder. The roads were choked with long columns of Belgian refugees, coated with dust, weighted down with babies and bundles, pushing wheelbarrows, dully, tiredly, endlessly moving toward no goal or home or refuge but only away from the awful roar of guns to the north.
Source:
Tuchman, Barbara W. "Debacle: Lorraine, Ardennes, Charleroi, Mons." The Guns of August. New York: Macmillan, 1962. 275. Print.
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