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Updated: May 28, 2025
At all hazards that intrepid aviator was going to identify the shell-bursts of the batteries which he represented. The enemy might have him in rifle range, but they were too busy trying to hold up the British infantry to fire at him.
The British got through to the east side of the woods, and in reply the Germans sent in a wave forcing the British back to the west, but no farther. Then the British, reinforced again, reached the east side. Showers of leaves and splinters descended from shell-bursts and machine guns were always rattling.
And, though we watched them for an hour, they were still there motionless at the end of it. For thirty minutes batches continued to come up. We could see them building up a line a little farther up the hill, where another bank gave cover. Then movement stopped and our heavy shell-bursts in La Boiselle began again. The whole affair was being repeated a step farther forward.
"You see, we started it by not firing on theirs when they came out to their wounded. Of course, we can't help the artillery," he added, looking over his shoulder at the place from which he had come, where a line of black shell-bursts was fringing the hill. "That's not meant for us."
Archie now seemed to treat the deliberation of the solitary machine's movements as a challenge to his ability, and he determined to make us pay for our seeming contempt. An ugly barrage of A.-A. shell-bursts separated us from friendly air, the discs of black smoke expanding as they hung in little clusters. Into this barrier of hate we went unwillingly, like children sent to church as a duty.
As soon as the bus appears it is bracketed in front, behind, and on both sides by black shell-bursts. We swerve aside, but more shells quickly follow. The shooting is particularly good, for the Archie people have the exact range of the low clouds slightly above us. Three times we hear the hiss of flying fragments of high explosive, and the lower left plane is unevenly punctured.
Orderly!" He shouted for his man and ordered a further supply of German soda-water. Other officers crowded into the dugout. One of them said: "You must come round to mine. It's a blasted palace," and I went round later and he told me on the way that he had escaped so often from shell-bursts that he thought the average of luck was up and he was bound to get "done in" before long.
He picked it up and said, "Queer!" and then smelled it, and said "Queer!" again. It was not an ordinary bomb. It had held some poisonous liquid from a German chemist's shop. Other bombs were dropping round as the two hostile airmen circled overhead, untouched still by the following shell-bursts.
The Ridge seeped in one's very existence. You could see it as clearly in imagination as in reality, with its horizon under shell-bursts and the slope with its maze of burrows and its battered trenches.
They passed by us in the gathering gloom, and there seemed to be no end to these straggling multitudes of ruined, homeless people who were wandering westwards to escape the disaster that threatened to engulf us all. The eastern sky flickered with vivid gun-flashes and scintillated with brilliant shell-bursts.
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