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Except for horses ripped by shellfire in battle, Drew had never seen any wounds such as these. He was deadly afraid that those two bullets had not really saved the stud. "Let’s have a look, Chino, bring my saddlebags!" Hunt Rennie was beside Drew. "Can you lead him back to the water hole?" he asked. "See if he’ll walk." Somehow they did it—Drew and Anse, Rennie and Teodoro.
We passed through Courcelette Valley and came to a small bridge crossing a trench; this particular bridge was the subject of hot shellfire, as it was the only point where traffic could cross for about a mile to the right or left, and Fritz was well aware of the fact. When half-way across, a shell exploded, killing my horse, and the animal rolled over with me on its back, twisting my leg.
At any rate we eventually found ourselves in a road that wound between high grassy banks along a great natural terrace just below the level of the plateau in front of Laon. We saw a few farmhouses, all desolated by shellfire and all deserted, and a succession of empty fields and patches of woodland. None of the natives were in sight.
Mihiel sector; it was one of the three that occupied a sector at Verdun when a penetration there would have been disastrous to the Allied cause; and it went direct from the training camp to the firing-line. This organization was under shellfire for 191 days, and it held one trench for 91 days without relief.
From where we stood we could see a wide panorama of the German positions, and beyond, now and then, when the smoke of shellfire drifted, I caught glimpses of green fields and flower patches beyond the trench lines, and church spires beyond the range of guns rising above clumps of trees in summer foliage.
And here, also, commanding the road, stood a ruined fortress of an obsolete last-century pattern. Shellfire had battered it into a gruel of shattered red masonry; but German officers were camped within its more habitable parts, and light guns were mounted in the moat.
This gun crew put up a fight on the deck of that sinking vessel which was so gallant as to elicit words of praise from the commander of the attacking submarine. Copassaki, when the ship was in flames, from shellfire, rushed through the fire to the forward gun and continued to serve it against the submarine until the gun was put completely out of commission.
Time after time officers seeing their lines cut to pieces, seeing their men so dog-tired that they even fell asleep under shellfire, hearing their wounded calling for the water they were unable to supply, seeing men fight on after they had been wounded and until they dropped unconscious; time after time officers seeing these things, believing that the very limit of human endurance had been reached, would send back messages to their post command that their men were exhausted.
All about us were the marks of what the shellfire had done, some fresh and still smoking, some old and dry- charred, but no shells dropped near us as we circled in a long swing up to within half a mile of the first line of German trenches and perhaps a mile to the left of them.
Those which had been wrecked by shellfire were like mouthfuls of broken teeth chimneys and fragments of walls still standing. Those which had been vengefully burned by the retreating Germans were mere heaps of ashes. Most of our time was spent around the Marais de St. Gond, where the French General Foch held the Thermopylae of Europe.
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