The demolished tunnel was at Herbesthal, twenty miles from the fortress. The saboteurs had achieved a stunning success. Repairs were impossible, and at midnight offloading began, starting with the yard-long shells. This was worse than Essen, because the engineers lacked heavy moving equipment. Trucks broke down. Uhlan steeds were pressed into service; their harnesses snapped. Since the guns had a range of nine miles, they needed to be advanced only eleven, and the roads were good. Nevertheless the backbreaking struggle continued all night and through the next day with a combination of motor vehicles, horses, and detachments of soldiers inching the gun carriages of the Kruppstahl giantesses forward. Late in the afternoon of August 12 one of them was assembled and in position, the brutal black mouth gaping skyward. Its two hundred attendants swarmed over it and then, wearing special padded equipment which protected their vital organs, they huddled on the ground three hundred yards away. At 6:30 P.M. came the command: “Feuer!” An electric switch was turned. The Belgian defenders felt a jarring in the earth so alarming that some wondered whether hell had risen. A Busy Bertha emerged from the bore’s dark mouth, sailed up a mile and, after remaining airborne a full minute struck its target, Fort Pontisse, dead center. Moments later a spiraling cloud of concrete, steel, and human flesh and bone was boiling a thousand feet overhead. Ludendorff had watched this appalling horror, and he entered the choking debris of another strongpoint, Fort Loncin, minutes after it, too, had been hit. Miraculously there were a few survivors. In his memoirs he recalled that…It had been hit by a shell from one of our 42-cm [420-mm] howitzers. The magazine had been blown up and the whole work collapsed. A number of dazed and blackened Belgian soldiers crawled out of the ruins, accompanied by some Germans who had been taken prisoner on the night of August 5-6. All bleeding, they came toward us with their hands up, stammering, “Don’t kill, don’t kill” [Blutend, mit hocherhobenen Handen, kamen sie uns engegen. “Ne pas tuer, ne pas tuer” brachten sie stammelnd hervor]….”Wir waren keine Hunnen,” the general added wryly; “We were no Huns.” He was right, of course; Attila had never dreamed of anything so ghastly. In those days men had still been awed by Plutarch’s description of Archimedes’ huge catapult, which drove the Romans away from Syracuse by throwing 1,800 –pound stones at them; the Roman commander, confounded, had said, “Archimedes really outdoes the hundred-handed giants of mythology.” But that had been a slingshot. Krupp’s new siege gun was a weapon of mass murder. The Belgians waiting in their reinforced concrete bunkers, which they had been told would resist any direct hit from any projectile, would hear the shriek of a Busy Bertha homing on them. Then the shell would penetrate the steel-buttressed cement and the delayed action fuse would set off the ton of explosive. Hour after hour this nightmare went on, until the maze of subterranean corridors linking the thirty mile redoubts became choked with gas, fire, and men who, one witness later recalled, had become “hysterical, even mad, in awful apprehension of the next shot.”