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There was a postman from Bradford, who was forty-seven years old and had thirteen children. I remember his telling me of South African experiences. He fell. Most of our men were far younger. Many were mere boys, whose days in the Camel Corps at Khartum had been their first taste of manhood. Their Company Sergeant-Major, Leigh, was mortally wounded by shrapnel while running up the nullah.
There were many graves in the bosky arbors eighteen under one mound but some of those who had fallen six months before still lay where the gleaners could not reach them. I used to peer through the leaves of Plug Street Wood at No Man's Land between the lines, where every creature had been killed by the sweeping flail of machine-guns and shrapnel.
They pressed forward, these lackadaisical non-combatants, until the position was reached and communication established. Again and again the wire was cut by shrapnel, and again and again a Buzzer crawled out to find the broken ends and piece them together.
Shrapnel to Tuckham, and assuredly could not complain that the latter was unsympathetic in regard to the old man's health, though when he said, 'Poor old man! he fears he will die! Tuckham rejoined: 'He had better make his peace. 'He fears he will die, because of his leaving Miss Denham unprotected, said Beauchamp.
At the far end a fat and frightened woman was crooning to her child. Beside her sat a wrinkled, leathery old man with bandaged head. He had wandered into the street, and he had been cut about by shrapnel. The few wits he had ever possessed were gone, and he gave every few seconds little croaks of hate. Three telephone operators were working with strained faces at their highest speed.
One has seen dreary flat lands of mud and leafless trees become fair with the spring, the growing harvest reaped, and the leaves begin to fall. Always the factory of war was in the same place; the soldiers billeted in the same towns; the puffs of shrapnel smoke over the same belt of landscape; the ruins of the same villages being pounded by high explosives.
Having admitted that a wrong had been done, he was not the man to leave it unamended; only he would have chosen his time, and the manner. Since Nevil's illness, too, he had once or twice been clouded with a little bit of regret at the recollection of poor innocent old Shrapnel posted like a figure of total inebriation beside the doorway of the dreadful sickroom.
Then came that salvo again twelve reports in quick succession a sheaf of shells whining overhead like so many puppies burst after burst in the sky, some short, some far past him you would swear they must have gone through him one right over him. The hearts of our men were in their mouths as they watched. He sailed straight through the shrapnel puffs, turned sharply, and steered away.
Bursting star-shell and questioning searchlight fought with the darkness, betraying to the guns the sinister black hulls driving through clouds of silver spray, the loaded tubes and streaming decks, the oilskin-clad figures on each bridge forcing the attack home against the devastating blast of the shrapnel. Death was abroad, berserk and blindfold.
A piece of shrapnel had bent the whole five until they were welded together. The shrapnel fitted into the silver exactly, and actually it was silvered by the scrape it had made against the coin. I should like to have had it, but the man valued his souvenir, so one didn't like to offer him money for it. A young Canadian found a comrade of his nailed to a door, and stone dead, of course.
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