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Updated: June 7, 2025
One night a destructive little instrument, called a hand-grenade, was thrown into Cotton Mather's window, and rolled under Grandfather's chair. It was supposed to be filled with gunpowder, the explosion of which would have blown the poor minister to atoms.
I would look at him with a smile, and he would repeat: "As for me, I'm off," carefully rolling a bandage the while, which he did with great dexterity. His mixture of terror and swagger was a perpetual entertainment to us. One night, a hand-grenade fell out of the pocket of one of the wounded.
There ever closer and closer the blue boys dug and crept while they and the gray tossed back and forth the hellish hand-grenade, the heavenly hard-tack and tobacco, gay jokes and lighted bombs. There, mining and countermining, they blew one another to atoms, or under shrieking shells that tore limbs from the trees and made missiles of them hurled themselves to the assault and were hurled back.
The guests stepped gratefully outside; Selwyn, using a light fowling-piece, made pattern after pattern for them; and then they all trooped solemnly indoors again; and Selwyn froze Chaosite and boiled it and baked it and melted it and took all sorts of hair-raising liberties with it; and after that he ground it to powder, placed a few generous pinches in a small hand-grenade, and affixed a primer, the secret composition of which he alone knew.
Had a hand-grenade with the fuse alight been dropped upon the table, the consternation could scarce have been greater. To a man the tableful was up and thronging round me; but above all the hubbub I heard a little cry of misery from the table-foot where my lady sat. "How is this, sir? explain yourself!" thundered my Lord, forgetting for once his mild suavity.
It was just at the moment when Sergeant Huefer, undisturbed by the task allotted to him, in fact, eager to finish off the prisoner and get back to his meal, gave a short, sharp order and set his firing-squad in motion, that Henri's outstretched fingers came into contact with another object a round, cylindrical object attached to a short stick, a hand-grenade, one of those bombs which had helped to blow in the barricade which he and his gallant poilus had erected at the top of the stairway.
After this period I never carried out any further instruction in the hand-grenade. The drafts later on came out more fully trained and the Battalion Bombing Officers carried on any further instruction that was required. During and in preparation for the operations on the Somme 16 officers and 2106 men went through the course; and at least 5000 live grenades were thrown.
On the 18th British and French airplanes again bombarded Ostend, dropping 180 bombs, and once more raided Zeebrugge. In an ensuing battle six German planes were brought down. Infantry fighting in the Dixmude sector between Belgian and German troops occurred on four consecutive days, from November 17 to 20, with hand-grenade battles but no definite result.
They thought that they knew the full gamut of horrors; but nothing that they had yet gone through was any criterion for what they now had to endure. All understood the nature of a hand-grenade, which bursts like a Nihilist's bomb. It was as easy, they knew, to toss hand-grenades over the sand-bags into human flesh as apples into a basket.
Stransky picked up one of several cylindrical objects that were lying at his feet. "He wouldn't use this he was too soft-hearted but I will!" he cried, and flung a hand-grenade, and then a second, over the breastwork. The explosions were followed by agonized groans from the Grays hugging the lower side of the terrace.
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