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Updated: May 8, 2025
In half an hour perhaps it will have picked up its full load, and be sliding back smoothly and gently down the cobbled road, swinging carefully now to this side to avoid some scattered bricks, now to that to dodge a shell-hole patched with gravel, driven down as tenderly and gently as it was driven up fiercely and recklessly.
At the intersection of two streets, in a shell hole, twenty bodies had been thrown for burial. But that was not novel or new. Shell-hole graves and destroyed houses were nothing. The thing I shall never forget is the cemetery round the great church. Continental cemeteries are always crowded. They are old, and graves almost touch one another.
He had been found! He had been buried in a shell-hole, half-dead, and when the Blue Bonnets swept back over the enemy's trenches he had been rescued. He had been badly wounded and had lain unconscious for a long time. But he was alive and was in a hospital in France!
Then they passed toward their own lines, and my friend in the shell-hole called to me and said, "Let's be going." It was time to go. When we reached the edge of the town our guns away back started shelling, and we knew the Germans would answer. So we sat in a field nearby to watch the bombardment.
"Oh, that's nothing," I said. I knew at once what it was. I remembered that, as I stumbled up the hill, I had tripped over a bit of barbed wire and scratched my leg. And so I explained. "And I fell into a shell-hole, too," I said. "A wee one, as they go around here." But I laughed. "Still, I'll be able to say I was wounded on Vimy Ridge."
His words and his driving did not harmonize; if he missed a single shell-hole in the wide stretch of France through which he drove, it was not his fault.
I have an indistinct recollection of what happened for the next few minutes. I know I ran from shell-hole to shell-hole, obsessed with the one great fear of being captured and at last reached the reserve trench, in front.
Down we went into a shell-hole. Another, and another came over. Murderous little brutes they were too. Seven of them. Then they ceased. We immediately jumped up again and reached our objective. Then getting under cover of some twisted ironwork, which once formed the roofing of the emplacement, I took breath. "Anyway," I thought, "here I am." In a few minutes I had a look round.
That was impossible, as I was observing for my brigade, so I lay on the parapet till the bullets began to fall too close for comfort, then I dodged out into a shell-hole with the German barrage bursting all around me, and had a most gorgeous view of a modern attack. That was some time ago, so you needn't be nervous. Have I mentioned rum to you?
There was no water, except at a well in Longueval, under the fire of German snipers, who picked off our men when they crawled down like wild dogs with their tongues lolling out. There was one German officer there in a shell-hole not far from the well, who sat with his revolver handy, and he was a dead shot. But he did not shoot the padre.
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