Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 28, 2025
The war became a hopeless, dreary thing, without a thrill to it, except when men wading in water were smashed by shell-fire and floated about in a bloody mess which ran red through all a trench. That was a thrill of beastliness, but gave no fire to men's hearts. Passion, if it had ever burnt in these British soldiers' hearts, had smouldered out into the white ash of patient misery.
He could count five objects, and pronounce them by name and number, but he was incapable of reasoning that he would remain in Somo if Nalasu lived, depart from Somo if Nalasu died. He merely departed from Somo because Nalasu was dead, and the terrible shell-fire passed quickly into the past of his consciousness, while the present became vivid after the way of the present.
The stories told by those who, on the German side, lay in trenches under shell-fire before Verdun for days at a time and week after week, freezing, thirsting, in mud and water, between the dead and the dying, thrilled the hearer with their pathos and devotion.
It took him more courage than he had needed under shell-fire to ring the bell and ask to see "the lady of the house." He thanked God every time the maid handed back his card and said, "Not at home." On the first week's work he was four pounds out of pocket... Here and there an elderly officer blew out his brains.
This was especially noticeable in the case of small parties, which, when once established with machine-guns in the corner of a wood or a group of houses, were very difficult to drive out." The German losses were piling up. The agony of the German troops under our shell-fire was reaching unnatural limits of torture.
It is like the sardonic grin I have seen on the face of an intelligent soldier as he strode over filth and corpses towards shell-fire. Soldiers, when they are home again, delight in watching the faces and the ways of children. They want to play with the youngsters, eat buns in the street, and join the haymakers. They do not want the truth.
You can become accustomed, if not reconciled, to shell-fire; but I personally never heard the drone of an enemy plane overhead without a prickly sensation down the spine and an urgent desire for a large dug-out forty feet below ground; and there were very few of these in Palestine.
We despatch riders when first we met the Indians wondered how they would fight, how they would stand shell-fire and the climate but chiefly we were filled with a sort of mental helplessness, riding among people when we could not even vaguely guess at what they were thinking. We could get no deeper than their appearance, dignified and clean and well-behaved.
Koolau glanced up apprehensively, as if expecting to see the thing. Then high up on the cliff overhead the shell burst in a fountain of black smoke. The rock was shattered, the fragments falling to the foot of the cliff. Koolau passed his hand across his sweaty brow. He was terribly shaken. He had had no experience with shell-fire, and this was more dreadful than anything he had imagined.
We had been under shell-fire, taken prisoner, had lived on board a German raider and in her evil company many months, had been in lifeboats once in the open sea, were about to go in once more, in a rough sea, to be rescued from captivity, had seen our ship sunk and another one captured and scuttled, had been through terrific wintry weather in the North Atlantic, among icebergs, in the submarine zone, and on the very borders of an enemy minefield! experiences that perhaps no other landsmen have passed through!
Word Of The Day
Others Looking