Floodgate

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The two oddly similar incidents, although both happening on the night of February 3rd, and both involving army ammunition storage installations, had no discernible connection.

The occurrence at De Dooms in Holland was mysterious, spectacular and tragic: the one at Metnitz in Germany was a good deal less mysterious, unspectacular and faintly comic.

Three soldiers were on guard at the Dutch ammunition dump, set in a concrete bunker one and a half kilometres north of the village of De Dooms, when, about one-thirty in the morning, the only two citizens who were awake in the village reported a staccato burst of machine-pistol fire — it was later established that the guards were carrying machine-pistols — followed immediately by the sound of a gigantic explosion, which was later found to have blasted in the earth a crater sixty metres wide by twelve deep. Houses in the village suffered moderately severe damage but there was no loss of life.

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