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There was enough high-explosive force littered along those roads above the Somme to blow cities off the map. "It does one good to see," said a cheery fellow. "The people at home have been putting their backs into it. Thousands of girls have been packing those things. Well done, Munitions!"
A trench; a high-explosive shell; the fate of young Etherington; and no possible little wooden cross to mark his grave. And Betty, on the floor by my side, gave way. The proud will bent. She surrendered herself to a paroxysm of sorrow. She was not in a fit state to return to the hospital, where, I learned, she shared a bedroom with Phyllis Gedge.
Archibald Pennybet, the boy who left school, determined to conquer the world, and coolly confident of his power to mould circumstances to his own ends, was crushed like an insect beneath the heavy foot of war. He was just put out by a high-explosive shell. It didn't kill him outright, but whipped forty jagged splinters into his body.
The artillery of both the British and French attempted to wreck the German trenches before their infantry should be sent against their foe. In this effort the British, using principally shrapnel, made little headway; but their ally, using high-explosive shells, such as they had been hurling at the Germans for weeks at the rate of a hundred thousand a day, was successful.
This time they caught the German reenforcements, with the result that many of them were slain before they could reach their own front. In this work the British shrapnel was more effective than the French high-explosive shells. The bombardment was continued vigorously for three-quarters of an hour.
Sure enough, their attention drawn to the distant growling, the dull booming of the detonations of the high-explosive shells could be distinctly heard. War was ahead, at last, and not so very far ahead at that. Not long after, the squadron passed through a shattered French village.
Heavy guns, under the recoil of whose fierce salvos, the frame of the giant globe trembled and shuddered, shot out their tons of high-explosive shell. But the pirate commander had known accurately the strength of the liner, and knew that her armament was impotent against the forces at his command.
Yards from the men it met a screen of impenetrable density. Instantly the gunners pressed their triggers and a stream of high-explosive shells issued from the roaring weapons. But shells, also, were futile. They struck the shield and vanished vanished without exploding and without leaving a trace to show that they had ever existed.
They made the approach, too, under a destructive fire with high-explosive shells screaming and crashing over, around, and amongst them, with bullets whistling and hissing about them and striking the ground with the sound of constantly exploding Chinese crackers. Bunthrop himself, to state the fact baldly, was in an agony of fear.
The Germans displayed their "thoroughness" as they retired by poisoning the wells with arsenic, and setting high-explosive traps into which they hoped the British advance guards would blunder. Bridges over all the waterways were burned and the crossroads carefully mined.
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