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All around there was the slamming of great guns, and I sat chewing a bit of straw by the side of a shell-hole, thinking in the same old way of the utter senselessness of all this noise and hate and sudden death which encircled me for miles. No amount of meditation would screw a new meaning out of it all. It was just the commonplace of life out here. The routine of it went on.
This, unfortunately, is not confined to Germans. One of our officers who had had a brother killed a few days before deliberately shot and killed several unarmed prisoners. He was, himself, killed the same day. On another occasion, a wounded German, lying in a shell-hole, stabbed and killed one of our wounded and attacked another only to be beaten at his own game and killed with his own knife.
Later they trained their machine guns on German working-parties and swept crossroads on which supplies came up, and the Canadian sniper, in one shell-hole or another, lay for hours in sulky patience, and at last got his man... They had to pay for all this, at Maple Copse, in June of '15, as I shall tell.
With great care Stanley was placed as comfortably as possible inside the biplane, which the two aviators trundled to the edge of the shell-hole. A moment later, with Bangs giving the plane a downward push, then leaping lightly up behind Blaine, they easily rose to a requisite height and glided over the shell-torn plain.
Best wishes to you, WILLIAM BARNARD, Scoutmaster 1st Dansburg Troop, B.S.A., Dansburg, Ohio. Tom could hardly believe his eyes as he read the letter. William Barnard! Would he ever forget the long night spent in that dank, dark shell-hole? Would he ever forget that chance companion in peril, who had nursed him and cheered him all through that endless night?
In an upper corner a gaping shell-hole had linen table-cloths five or six fold thick hung over to screen the light from showing through at night.
By this time I was feeling quite stiff, but he was quite satisfied that no live man could be there. Had I jumped into a shell-hole, as fear prompted me to do, he would have roused the whole line, and a bomb would likely have got me.
Exactly underneath the board, rubbing their noses appreciatively against the sign-post, stand two mules, attached to a limbered waggon, the property of the A.S.C. Their charioteers are sitting adjacent, in a convenient shell-hole, partaking of luncheon. "That was a rotten place we' ad to wait in yesterday, Sammy," observes Number One. "The draught was somethink cruel."
I had gone back for help he and ten or twelve others who had moved on too fast were waiting in a bit of shelter till I could get some more men from the Colonel. The Germans were coming on thick. And I went back. There was a barrage on and on the way I shirked my nerve went. I sat down for twenty minutes by my watch I hid in a shell-hole. Then I went to the Colonel, and he gave me the men.
Here, too, he saw for the first time a big and quite recent shell-hole, for the Russian guns were searching out the position. He was so interested in it all that he poked his nose where he shouldn't have been, and dropped plump into the pit behind a gun-emplacement. Gunners all the world over are the same shy people, who hide themselves in holes and hibernate and mortally dislike being detected.
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