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Updated: May 21, 2025
There may not have been more than fifteen shells in the minute, but it seemed, looking along that path, more like thirty. They were of all sorts mixed ugly, black, high-explosive shrapnel bursting with the crash of a big shell; little, spiteful whizzbang field gun tearing into the brown earth; 5.9 shells flinging up fountains of it.
But they do not use high-explosive here. Shrapnel merely and uselessly torments. When I first saw the Cathedral I was told that there had been calm for several days. I know that German agents in neutral countries constantly deny that the Cathedral is now shelled. When I saw the Cathedral again the next morning, five shells had just been aimed at it.
Lethal and non-lethal gas were intermingled both by the Germans and ourselves with high explosive shells; the effect of each assisted the effect of the other. If one began to sneeze from the effect of non-lethal gas, one could not wear a gas-helmet to resist the lethal; the high-explosive shells disguised both types.
Private Gerald Bunthrop's battalion had been hurried up to support the broken and breaking line, was thrust into a badly wrecked trench with crumbling sides and broken traverses, with many dead and wounded cumbering the feet of the few defenders, with a reek of high-explosive fumes catching their throats and nostrils.
They took refuge behind trees, just as if a little tree would stop a machine gun bullet. Of course we told them, but not till one or two of their number got hit did they realize their danger. The Germans were shelling the trenches that we were going into, and now and again they would send over some high-explosive shells and sweep our road with shrapnel, so we had a few more casualties.
In most villages, in many of his dugouts, and by contraptions with objects lying amid the litter, he had left "booby traps" to blow our men to bits if they knocked a wire, or stirred an old boot, or picked up a fountain-pen, or walked too often over a board where beneath acid was eating through a metal plate to a high-explosive charge.
Dunstan's student who had endured cold and wet and forced marches, who had felt the shock of high-explosive shells, the stinging threat of machine-gun and rifle bullets, who had taken part in wild charges over the top, but some other being.
So far as we have mastered the mysteries of the craft, there appear to be four types of bomb in store for us or rather, for Brother Bosche. They are: The hair-brush. The cricket-ball. The policeman's truncheon. The jam-tin. The hair-brush is very like the ordinary hair-brush, except that the bristles are replaced by a solid block of high-explosive.
One man actually stopped in the middle of "No Man's Land" to light up again. The Germans had by now realised that the great attack had come. Shrapnel poured into our trenches with the object of keeping our supports from coming up. They had even got their "crumps" and high-explosive shrapnel into the middle of our boys before they were half-way across "No Man's Land." But still they kept on.
A shrapnel helmet, with a hole clean through the top, evidently caused by a piece of high-explosive shell, rested upon the mound. The King stooped and picked up a piece of shell and put it in his pocket. It was now time for His Majesty's departure. Gathered near his car was a crowd of Tommies, ready to give their King a rousing cheer as he drove away.
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