United States or Central African Republic ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
On the terrace the artillerymen were sponging the blood from the breech of their gatling where some wretch's brains had been spattered by a shell-fragment. They told him that a Sister of Mercy had passed into the house ten minutes before; that she walked as though very tired, but did not appear to have been hurt. "She is up-stairs," he thought. "She must not stay there alone with Sir Thorald."
I hunted it up on the map, and promised myself to have a look at it the next time we came out to rest. And then I forgot about it till I heard the name mentioned again. On 23rd October I had the bad luck, during a tour of my first-line trenches, to stop a small shell-fragment with my head. It was a close, misty day and I had taken off my tin hat to wipe my brow when the thing happened.
Not a shell-fragment was left, and we wondered how in the world the birds were able to carry off their thin-shelled eggs either in their bills or in their feet without breaking them, and how they could be kept warm while a new nest was being built. Well, I am still asking these questions.
The cap had fallen off, and the hair was breaking loose. The face was very white but there was no wound or bruise on it. 'She was killed at once, I heard him saying. 'Her back was broken by a shell-fragment. Dick, we must bury her here ... You see, she ... she liked me. I can make her no return but this.
And when a shell-fragment smashed the gun under his hands, he left it only to plunge hastily to the other gun abandoned by all but dead and dying; pulled off a dead man who sprawled across it and recommenced shooting.
Suddenly, there was a terrific crash and a shell burst, it must have been forty or fifty yards off. I thought, bitterly, that there'd be no Blighty for me no such luck. Then, high up in the air, I saw a big shell-fragment sailing along in a wide curve, spinning and turning.
As we passed through the village we noticed a new hole in the church tower, and three holes in the churchyard, which had scattered clods of earth about the pavement. A shopkeeper was engaged in repairing a window-frame that had been broken by a shell-fragment. There is no flustering the French population.
Shall I forget that little private, forty years old if he were a day, with a hole from shrapnel in his steel helmet and the bit of purple and white ribbon worn proudly on his breast, who, when I asked him how he felt after he received the clout from a shell-fragment, remarked blandly that it had knocked him down and made his head ache! "You have the military cross!" I said. "Yais, sir.
"If you think we're a couple of fools for not doing this more willingly," went on the Master with savage earnestness, "just stop to think what it means to a man to give up the dog he loves. Not to give him up to some one who will assure him a good home, but to send him over into that hell, where a German bullet or a shell-fragment or hunger or disease is certain to get him, soon or late.
One big block of granite had been overturned by a bursting shell and the inscription was so scarred as to be illegible. The stone Christ had been hit in many places. His left hand was gone, so that He hung aslant by the other. Both His legs had been blown off at the knees and His nose and mouth had been carried away by some flying shell-fragment or shrapnel-ball.
Word Of The Day