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Three shells in succession passed just over the roof of my cottage, one smashed the next house to pieces; the next fell into our little back garden, eight yards from the cottage; and the third struck the road on the other side. After that I got up and joined monsieur and madame for ten minutes in the cellar, until the shelling had ceased. Then back to bed.
Colonel Burland to the enfiladed crossroads to see what troops were there, and to learn if any word had come through from headquarters. I stopped at the field dressing station and ordered them to get the wounded away as quickly as possible as the enemy were shelling their quarters, evidently with the intention of destroying them.
A glance of the situation served to reassure him; the German fire was not directed against the city; the batteries at Frenois and la Marfee were shelling the Plateau de l'Algerie over the roofs of the houses, and now that his alarm had subsided he could even watch with a certain degree of admiration the flight of the projectiles as they sailed over Sedan in a wide, majestic curve, leaving behind them a faint trail of smoke upon the air, like gigantic birds, invisible to mortal eye and to be traced only by the gray plumage shed by their pinions.
I soon perceived that our enemies, the weeds, had millions in reserve, and on Monday the day after the rain with all the children helping, even Mousie part of the time, we went at the garden again. To Mousie, scarcely an invalid any longer, was given the pleasure of picking the first green peas and shelling them for dinner.
That they expected a shelling was evident, for the engineers were at work excavating pits and burrows, and the infantry were filling sacks with earth, while in the Château itself preparations were in progress for the fighting of fire. The white flag with the red-cross centre hung limp and drenched over the stables and barns. In the corn-field beyond, long trenches were being dug for the dead.
The enemy was shelling the road, dropping several heavies near me, so I hastily gathered into a shell-hole the remains of all the dead in the immediate vicinity and covered them up as best I could, then placed the cross firmly in the ground and turned to leave. I had not gone far when a "crump" struck so close as to stun and partly bury me. When I regained my senses I found that I could not see.
Well, Fritz knows how to make himself cosy." With that remark we parted, Tommy having a broad grin on his face. "You will see the place where you get out of this ditch, sir," he called out; "a shell has blown it in; strike off on your left straight ahead. You'll see them in front of you." The shelling was getting very unpleasant, and I had to keep low in the trench the whole of the time.
Nursing in the typhoids was relieved by turns up to the trenches behind Dixmude, which we looked forward to tremendously, but as they were practically with slight variations in the matter of shelling and bombardments a repetition of my first experience, there is no object in recounting them here.
"Quite well all there are of us, Joe," said Diana, shelling her peas as she looked up at him. "How's your mother?" "Well, she's pretty smart. Mother seems to be allays just about so. I never see the beat of her for keepin' along. You've had quite a spell o' nursin' folks, hain't you, down this way? Must ha' upset you quite considerable." "We didn't have the worst of the upsetting."
It swept away a number of Italian bridges, however, from Merna and Raccogliano further up stream, and we saw pieces of these rushing past in the swift current. On the 21st the Major and I motored to Palmanova and bought some winter clothing at the Ordnance. An Austrian twelve-inch howitzer, whom we had christened "Mr Pongo," was shelling all day at intervals, chiefly in the back areas.
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