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Updated: May 28, 2025
They have a rest hut for soldiers. They employ whatever civilian labour they can hire for the roofing of some of the least damaged cottages; for this temporary reconstruction they provide the materials. When I was there, the place was well within range of enemy shell-fire. The approach had to be made by way of camouflaged roads.
It does not follow because you are an officer that you know what may and what may not be of service to the enemy. A former British officer who had become a well-known military critic, in an account of a visit to the front mentioned having seen a battle from a certain church tower. Publication of the account was followed by a tornado of shell-fire that killed and wounded many British soldiers.
It effectually prevented French reinforcements from coming up to the first line. His automatic pistol ready, Dick Prescott found elbow-room on the fire step. Cautiously he looked over the parapet. For a moment he could see nothing, save that German shell-fire had blown the barbed wire defenses to pieces, clearing the way for the German invaders to reach them.
"Death is nothing," said one young officer just down from the Somme fields for a week's rest-cure for jangled nerves. "I don't care a damn for death; but it's the waiting for it, the devilishness of its uncertainty, the sight of one's pals blown to bits about one, and the animal fear under shell-fire, that break one's pluck... My nerves are like fiddle-strings."
There were other men who could not stand shell-fire. It filled them with an animal terror and took all will-power out of them. One young officer was like that man who "did not mind rifle-fire." He, by some strange freak of psychology, was brave under machine-gun fire. He had done several gallant things, and was bright and cheerful in the trenches until the enemy barraged them with high explosive.
Still, it was an experience hard to beat to be left in a house practically levelled to the ground by shell-fire, and as I got eighteen hours off duty granted me, during which time I slept solidly without waking once, the whole affair remains most firmly impressed on the tablets of my memory. It is only when you have been through it that you understand what you can endure.
I daresay you'll wonder how it feels to be under shell-fire. This is how it feels you don't realise your danger until you come to think about it afterwards at the time it's like playing coconut shies at a coon's head only you're the coon's head. You take too much interest in the sport of dodging to be afraid. You'll hear the Tommies saying if one bursts nearly on them, "Line, you blighter, line.
For months Togo had kept his gunners in training and their shell-fire was accurate and deadly, hundreds of their projectiles hitting the mark and working dire havoc to the Russian ships and crews; while to judge from the little damage done, the return fire would seem to have been wild and at random.
In villages where there had been street fighting, like those of Barcy, and Poincy, Neufmoutiers and Montlyon, Douy-la-Ramee and Chevreville, the whitewashed cottages and old farmsteads which were used as cover by the German soldiers before they were driven out by shell-fire or bayonet charges, were shattered into shapeless ruin. Here and there a house had escaped.
A guide would accompany each party and an officer of the Divisional Staff would be with the first party. We must move in absolute silence; no lights or smoking. We would be exposed to shell-fire whenever we passed the crest of the rise from the beach, where we ought to adopt an extended formation.
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