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Updated: May 28, 2025
There was a big battle on, that much was certain; but the uproar was so distributed that one could hardly tell whether it was in front or behind. However, the transport was steadily advancing horse-wagons, mule-wagons, motor-wagons, all plodding patiently, paying no heed to the shell-bursts. And then Jimmie took a look behind, and saw that infernal red-headed Orangeman!
So fast do the shells fly over and detonate on the enemy ground that it is almost impossible to distinguish the isolated shell-bursts; they are lost in one dense fog of smoke. Just now we ceased to be rational as we stood watching it. "That's the stuff to give 'em!" cried a Tommy in his excitement. "Pump it over! Pump it over!" and, as some German sand-bags flew into the air: "Gee! Look at that!
Every voice had one message, "This for the Ridge!" which was crowned by hell's tempest of shell-bursts to prepare the way for the rush by the infantry at "zero." The thing was majestic, diabolical, beautiful, absurd anything you wished to call it.
Only, instead of seeing Ypres from the shelter of the Scherpenberg Windmill, as a distant phantom in the horizon mists, beyond the shell-bursts in the battle-field below us, we were now to go through Ypres itself, then wholly forbidden ground, and out beyond it into some of the ever-famous battle-fields that lie north and south of the Ypres-Menin road.
All the while the French battery kept on firing slowly, then again rapidly, their cracks trilling off like the drum of knuckles on a table-top. Another effort to locate one of the guns before we started back to Paris failed. Speeding on, we had again a glimpse of the landscape toward Noyon, sprinkled with shell-bursts.
Battery after battery, we make their acquaintance along the entire sector, wherever we go. Many of them, of course, are mobile, so that we never lose the sport of searching for them. Only a few days ago we located one of this kind which came into action in the open by the side of a road. First we saw the flashes and then the shell-bursts in the same cadence.
I have been able to watch a German counter attack, after a successful English advance, and have seen the guns flashing from the English lines, and the shell-bursts on the German trenches along the Messines ridge; while in the far distance, a black and jagged ghost, the tower of the Cloth Hall of Ypres broke fitfully through the mists bearing mute witness before God and man.
All branches of the winning army making themselves at home in the conquered area among the dead and the litter behind the old German first line this was the fringe of the action. Beyond was the battle itself, with the firing-line still advancing under curtains of shell-bursts.
You will hear shell-bursts which appear quite close, when in reality they are quite a distance away. That, for instance!" as a shell exploded apparently just outside the window. "That little fellow is a couple of hundred yards away, in the corner of the wood. The Boche has been groping about there for a battery for the last two days." "Is the battery there?" inquired a voice.
Was this real, or was it extravaganza? Painted airships and a painted summer sky? The audacity of those British airmen! Two of them were spotting the work of British guns by their shell-bursts and watching for gun-flashes which would reveal concealed German battery-positions, and whispering results by wireless to their own batteries. It is a great game.
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