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Updated: May 28, 2025
He handed it to me, and I gave it to the men, who passed it from one to the other and then back to the owner. "Your men are extraordinary," he said. "They are wonderful." One of the most interesting prisoners I met on the field of battle was a tall, black-bearded man whom I saw walking away from La Boisselle when that place was smoking with shell-bursts.
Canadians, dust-covered from shell-bursts, eyes flashing, laughing, rushing about on the job in the midst of shouts of congratulation and directions to prisoners among the ruins, and the German commander so angered by the loss of the village that he began pouring in shells on Germans and Canadians at the same time! Two colonels were among the captured, a regimental and a battalion commander.
"Allons!" said our statesman, and we went to the town square, where German guns had carpeted the ground with branches of shade trees and torn off the fronts of houses, revealing sections of looted interior which had been further messed by shell-bursts. Some women and children and a crippled man came out of doors at sight of us. M. Doumer introduced himself and shook hands all around.
There was no more sign of an earthly storm brewing as one looked at the field than of a thunderstorm as one looked at the sky. Perfect soporific tranquillity possessed the surroundings except for shell-bursts, and their meagerness intensified the aspect, strangely enough, on that battlefield where I had never seen a quieter afternoon since the Somme offensive had begun.
Faint, gray-colored squads of soldiers passed in sight with helmets flashing in the sun; guns were being hauled forward; mounted horsemen dashed here and there, vanishing and reappearing; and all through that wide area of color and action shot up live black spouts of earth crowned in white smoke that hung in the air after the earth fell back. They were beautiful, these shell-bursts.
An outburst of screaming shells overhead that became a continuous, roaring sweep like that of a number of endless railroad trains in the air signified that the guns which had been idle were all speaking. Every one by scattered practice shots had registered on the German first-line trench at the point where its shell-bursts would form its link in the chain of bursts.
We hurried to the place and there it is on record, in the photograph for every man to see some day just as we saw it, the little party coming down the open with the angry shells behind them. I asked those stretcher-bearers as I looked up at the shell-bursts how the Germans treated them. "They don't snipe us so long as we have this flag," one of them said.
"Bang in the dug-out!" one exclaimed, from army habit. "Precisely! No harm done next door." Trench traverses and "funk-pit shelters" for localizing the effects of shell-bursts are the terrestrial expression of marine construction. No one shell happened to get many men either on the Lion or the Tiger.
The remainder of the thousand men was practically all casualties from shell-bursts, which, granting some exaggeration in a prisoner's tale, illustrates what killing the guns may wreak if the target is under their projectiles.
When we realised that even if the engine lost all life we could reach safety, nothing else seemed to matter, not even the storm of shell-bursts. Suddenly the machine quivered, swung to the left, and nearly put itself in a flat spin. A large splinter of H.E. had sliced away part of the rudder.
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