Definition of "bludgeoning"

In the fell clutch of circumstance / I have not winced nor cried aloud. / Under the bludgeonings of chance / My head is bloody, but unbowed.

1888, William Ernest Henley, “Invictus”, in A Book of Verses

There was a motor car behind them now and it blasted into the truck noise and the dust with its klaxon again and again; then flashed on lights that showed the dust like a solid yellow cloud and surged past them in a whining rise of gears and a demanding, threatening, bludgeoning of klaxoning.

1940 October 21, Ernest Hemingway, chapter 42, in For Whom the Bell Tolls, New York, N.Y.: Charles Scribner's Sons; republished London: Jonathan Cape, Thirty Bedford Square, 1949 (13th printing), page 386