United States or New Caledonia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
I do not know why, but some curious sense made one keep low in ducking round to a bay of the front trench. The enemy's reply was not due for some minutes yet. There was a sudden lurid red glare with a heavy crash over the parapet to our right perhaps 150 yards away. "That's not one of their 5.9's, surely?" exclaims a friend. "One of our trench mortars, I think," says another.
The enemy could thus get quite close to our positions before we could deal with them, and their attacks were also favoured by an intense volume of artillery fire from 5.9's placed about the Jerusalem-Nablus road and, as some people in Jerusalem afterwards told me, from the Mount of Olives.
A strong point was therefore started at once in the heap of debris and scattered earth, known as Point 91, and a platoon of our old friends, 5th Royal Sussex, came up with the darkness and helped to dig a communication trench back to our old front line. No counter-attack developed, though shell-fire from the usual 5.9's was heavy for 12 hours, and the position was held securely until relief.
As it happened the house was out of No. 9 felt and let it go, as he only wanted one-third of a dozen. What did the fellow do but send back the card-board wads, saying he had ordered 9's, and giving us Hail Columbia for sending 12's instead, as well as a long epistle about knowing his own business, and not wanting our help in running it.
No. 9's a long way the handiest lot in the simitery, and the likeliest for situation. It lays right on top of a knoll in the dead center of the buryin' ground; and you can see Millport from there, and Tracy's, and Hopper Mount, and a raft o' farms, and so on. There ain't no better outlook from a buryin'-plot in the state. Si Higgins says so, and I reckon he ought to know. Well, and that ain't all.
Supposing, for example, that the regular number of the Lehigh Valley train was always numbered '9, then every man who purchased a ticket for a point on the Lehigh Valley would be given the ticket '9. Then, when the boat that was taking the passengers for Lehigh Valley points left Ellis Island, all the 9's would be gathered together and no one would be left behind."
Gas shell, musty with chloroform; sweet-scented tear shell that made your eyes run with water; high bursting shrapnel with black smoke and a vicious high explosive rattle behind its heavy pellets; ugly green bursts the colour of a fat silkworm; huge black clouds from the high explosive of his 5.9's.
On this salient and on its approaches, a total trench line of about 150 yards, the Bavarians threw during an hour about 400 5.9's, not to mention smaller shells, while two field guns galloped into Gommecourt Park and unlimbering in full view fired obliquely at the wire from point-blank range. They were harassed and eventually forced to retire by the action of Lieut.
Then sit down to the following, which I clip from the "second year's work" in a "course of study" that lies before me: "Learn to count to 100, forward and back, by 1's, 2's, 3's, 4's, 5's, 6's, 7's, 8's, and 9's, beginning to count from 0, and also from each digit, respectively, up to the one used continuously, in each case." Just buckle down to this for a while and see how it goes.
Had we not fired at this moment the whole ship's company would have been overpowered by a great despair, for everyone knew that a few minutes more of this would finish us. But so long as we fired things could not be so bad with us. The medium guns fired also, but only two of the six 5.9's on one side were still in action.