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Updated: May 28, 2025
Something else takes its place a philosophy of fatalism, sometimes an utter boredom with the way in which death plays the fool with men, threatening but failing to kill; in most cases a strange extinction of all emotions and sensations, so that men who have been long under shell-fire have a peculiar rigidity of the nervous system, as if something has been killed inside them, though outwardly they are still alive and untouched.
In a distant corner a Turco, wearing his red fez upon his head, sat with his chin on his knees amid an improvised bivouac of bed-clothes and looked on uncomprehendingly. The rest smoked cigarettes and toyed with the voluptuous pages of La Vie Parisienne. The sous-officier, being an artiste in his way, had been giving me a histrionic exhibition of shell-fire.
This war has been a revelation of womanhood. To see one of these cool, friendly creatures, American and English, shove her motor car into shell-fire, make her rescue of helpless crippled men, and steam back to safety, is to watch a resourceful and disciplined being. They may be, they are, "ministering angels," but there is nothing meek in their demeanor.
Obviously the wider your trench the greater your exposure to the effects of shell-fire, and if we go on introducing trench-mortars, and gas-pumps, and gas-extinguishers, to say nothing of a great store of bombs, as pleasing in variety and as startling in their effects as Christmas crackers, our trenches will soon be as full of furniture as a Welsh miner's parlour.
The German machine-gun fire was not quite so deadly now, but our men suffered badly from shell-fire. On several occasions I noticed men run and take temporary cover in the shell-holes, but their ranks were being terribly thinned. Still more went over, and still a stream of men were making for the mine crater; they then disappeared in the smoke. The noise was terrific.
Understand, my comrade, that shell-fire is not all very pleasant, and there are times when a man must sit in the fire-trench, crouching at the bottom, whilst they rain all round him, some bursting in the trench and shattering the traverses, some thumping pits behind or in front big enough for a platoon to camp in, and others blowing in the parapets, and smothering the fellows behind them.
With all our guns ranged about the point of the hill, we then proceeded to thrash and batter it with shell-fire. No gun-fire that we have had as yet has approached this for rapidity. The batteries roared ceaselessly from the plain; the big 4.7 lifting up its voice from a little in the rear high above the din. The day was cloudy, and rain fell at intervals, but towards the evening it cleared.
One's mind is absorbed in this pageant of shell-fire, and with a curious intentness, with that rigidity of nervous and muscular force which I have described, one watches the zone of fire sweeping nearer to oneself, bursting quite close, killing people not very far away.
A few men make a short rush, and gain the solid cover; but one throws up his hands when half way, gives a choking yell, springs in the air, and falls down limp. The same thing is going on over a mile of country, while the shell-fire is gradually gaining power and we may be sure that the enemy are suffering at the hands of our marksmen.
He rested until two o'clock, when he ate some food. Thereafter he repaired to the Tomb, and in that ruined shrine, amid the wreckage of the shell-fire, the defeated sovereign appealed to the spirit of Mohammed Ahmed to help him in his sore distress. It was the last prayer ever offered over the Mahdi's grave.
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