How Wide Is the Path of a Machine Gun? This Wide.

Machine guns (or guard dogs) would have been positioned at each of these little no-man’s-lands. If you somehow made it bloodied and battered through the first two rows of barbed wire (a feat that would border on the miraculous in and of itself), you would have to cross this five foot span before attempting to scale another 10 foot wall of barbed wire, then another 5 foot wall of barbed wire, a 20 yard span of guard-tower overlooked grass, and then a 12 foot concrete wall with 3 feet of barbed wire at the top. If you know anything about machine guns, however, it’s doubtful that you’d even get out of this trench alive. Crossing 5 feet when 2,000 rounds per minute are zinging in overlapping arcs around you and at you after being half-starved, continually beaten and worked to death, only to encounter another series of impossible barriers on the other side, might as well be 5,000 feet.