United States or Iran ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The next day, at about the same hour, the dark cloud again rose from the ground and the double explosion followed. We again abandoned the yard and waited in the field. But this time there were several further shell-bursts. No dull boom in the distance followed by a long-drawn whine, but only the earth and smoke thrown darkly up and then the deafening double detonation.
He sent the sunlight streaming into your room in the morning, washed the air of particles enabling observers to see shell-bursts at long range, and favored successful charges under accurate curtains of fire the patron saint of all modern artillery work, who would be most at home in Arizona where you could carry on an offensive the year around.
The French say "Belle!" when they see such a barrage, and beautiful is the word for it to those men who were going across the field toward this shell-made nimbus looking too soft in the bright sunlight to have darts of death. All the shell-bursts seemed to be in a breadth of twenty or thirty yards. How could guns firing at a range of from two to five thousand yards attain such accuracy!
Several of their thunderbolts fell with a hiss into the water of the canal where some Belgian soldiers were building a bridge of boats. It was just an odd chance that our ambulance could get across without being touched, but we took the chance and dodged between two shell-bursts.
Near St Guillaume an anti-aircraft battery opened fire. The Hun pilot then thought it better to leave Archie to deal with us, and he annoyed us no more. Some of the shell-bursts were quite near, but we could not afford to lose height in distance-dodging, with our machine in a dubious condition twenty-five miles on the wrong side of the trenches.
As the only features in the landscape were a ragged tree stump, and what looked like the remains of a broken fish basket over the horizon, all very distant and a dozen shell-bursts and the bark of an unseen machine-gun, all very close the determination was apt to be a trifle erratic. Still, the points were marked down, where each handful believed and trusted itself to be.
An artilleryman, perspiring and mud-spattered from shell-bursts, who came across the fields, said: "They knocked off the corner of our gun-pit and got two men. That's all." His eyes were shining; he was in the elation of battle. Casualties were an incident in the preoccupation of his work and of the thought: "At last we have the shells! At last it is our turn!"
Our old friend Archie has been lying in wait with guns set for a certain height, to which his three decoy birds have led us. There crashes a discord of shell-bursts as we pull our machines out of the dive and swerve away. The last machine to leave the unhealthy patch of air is pursued for some seconds by flaming rockets. The patrol re-forms, and we climb to our original height.
The reports of the infantry out of its experience under shell-bursts, which should be the gospel, may vary; for the infantry think well of the guns when the charge goes home with casualties light and ill when the going is bad. Every day charts go up to the commanders showing the expenditure of ammunition and the stock of different calibers on hand; for the army is a most fastidious bookkeeper.
Our shell-bursts had gone much farther up the hill one realised that; and heavy black clouds were spurting into the air below Boiselle, just behind the hill's shoulder. The crash, crash, crash, crash of four heavy shells, one following another almost as quickly as you would read the words, focused all one's attention on that point. The fire on it was growing.
Word Of The Day