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Updated: May 12, 2025
The squad of men to which Dorn belonged had to be on the lookout continually for an attack that was inevitable. The Germans were feeling out the line, probably to verify spy news of the United States troops taking over a sector. They had not, however, made sure of this fact. The gas-shells came over regularly, making life for the men a kind of suffocation most of the time.
That moment came at Hill 60 and sixteen other places below the Wytschaete and Messines Ridge at three-thirty on the morning of June 7th, after a quiet night of war, when a few of our batteries had fired in a desultory way and the enemy had sent over some flocks of gas-shells, and before the dawn I heard the cocks crow on Kemmel Hill.
His torch glanced over the numerous trophies adorning the walls, lances, swords, daggers, steel head-pieces, bascinets, peaked morions relics of a departed age of chivalry, when knights quarrelled prettily for ladies, and fighting was fair and open, before civilization had enriched warfare with the Christian attributes of gas-shells, liquid fire, and high explosives.
We reached Liverpool Trench, the assembly trench from which we were to go over the top on the morrow, about 11 p.m.... D and B Companies were in Liverpool Trench, and C and A Companies in Congreve Walk the other side of Garden Street. It was a dull, cloudy night. The guns were continually booming. Our howitzers were flinging gas-shells on to every known German battery throughout the night.
Then a man came running into our traverse: "Shure, sor," he said, "and it's gas-shells the dirty swine are sending over. My eyes seem to be burning out." His eyes were undoubtedly bad. Tears were pouring down his cheeks, and he was trying to ease the pain by binding his handkerchief over them.
It was a grand and awful sight a firework display better than any at Belle Vue, and free of charge! The sky was perforated with brilliant yellow light, and the shells were whizzing and crashing all round. The air was thick with sulphur. So much so that we did not smell something much more serious than sulphur. Amidst all the turmoil little gas-shells were exploding all over.
Its effectiveness was not, however, great, partly owing to the extreme difficulty of searching all the crannies of the mountain country, partly because the level of Austrian efficiency was low. Their gas-shells, in particular, seem to have been almost innocuous. The shelling began about 3 a.m., and lasted for three hours, when the infantry left the trenches.
I never spoke to him again. He was a dead man within nine hours. I suppose I had been asleep again about twenty minutes when a rolling boom, the scream of approaching shells, and regular cracking bursts to right and left woke me up. Now and again one heard the swish and the "plop" of gas-shells. A hostile bombardment, without a doubt. I looked at my watch 4.33 A.M.
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