Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 17, 2025
And presently, beyond the great military camp of pre-war days, you begin to mount into a region of chalk hills, barren and lonely enough before the war, and now transformed by the war into a scene which almost rivals the Ypres salient and Verdun itself in tragic suggestiveness. Standing in the lonely graveyard of Mont Muret, one looks over a tortured wilderness of trenches and shell-holes.
I pictured the battlefield of the Somme as I had last seen it a sea of mud stretching for miles, furrowed by the troughs of battered trenches, pitted every yard with shell-holes and smeared over with the wreckage of what once were human bodies. I could not imagine what useful purpose women could serve amid such surroundings. It seemed to me indecent that they should be allowed to go there.
Then he got his pipe going, and we strode through desolated Nurlu and made across rolling prairie land, broken by earthworks and shell-holes. A couple of heavy hows. were dropping shells on the grassy ridge that rose on our left wasted shots, because no batteries were anywhere near.
Round Ypres, and up by Boesinghe and Hooge you remember Hooge? the 14th, 20th, and 6th Divisions took turns in wet ditches and in shell-holes, with heavy crumps falling fast and roaring before they burst like devils of hell.
I left the Cathedral and walked along the grass-covered streets, pock-marked by innumerable shell-holes, and every now and then I had to dive into some cellar for shelter from falling shells. At the Hôtel de Ville the same sight presented itself. The bombardment had reduced its walls to little more than a tottering shell, which fell to pieces at the merest touch.
The car rolled and pitched its way through, smashing into shell-holes, bounding over fallen masonry, scraping by within a hair's-breadth of a recently smashed lorry. On and on, like a drunken thing. Still the air was thick with the foul gas. My eyes were burning; at last it was quite impossible to keep them open.
Before night fell on the 31st the rain descended in torrents. For four days it continued, and even when it ceased it was followed by darkness worthier of November than of August. The field of battle was turned into a maze of lakes and bogs with endless shell-holes filled and hidden by the muddy water.
From top to bottom it is pockmarked by shells and scarred by trenches trenches every few feet, and between them tangled masses of barbed wire still clinging to the "knife rests" and corkscrew stanchions to which it had been strung. The huge shell-holes, revealing the chalk subsoil, were half-filled with water.
The New France has been born in the travail of the monstrous desolation of trench-land that stretches, scabby with shell-holes, leprous with gray wire, pitted with countless graves, scarred with crumbled villages for four hundred miles across the fair fields of la douce France.
"Enormous masses of ammunition, the like of which no mortal mind before the war had conceived, were hurled against human beings who lay, eking out but a bare existence, scattered in shell-holes that were deep in slime. The terror of it surpassed even that of the shell-pitted field before Verdun. This was not life; it was agony unspeakable.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking