Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 17, 2025
General Dubois told me that, only a few days before my visit to Verdun, one of his staff-officers, returning alone and afoot from an errand to Vaux, had fallen into a shell-crater and had drowned in the mud. Indeed, the whole terrain is pitted with shell-holes as is pitted the face of a man who has had the small-pox.
On our way back is a field pock-marked by a hundred ancient shell-holes around a few deserted earthworks. On some bygone afternoon it must have been wild, raging, reeking hell there for half an hour or so. Somebody in this landscape put a red tick once against that long-forgotten corner. France, April. There is a house at a certain corner I passed of late.
This is the wood, as far as I can make out, which R had on several occasions told me was a dreadful place, filled with unburied bodies, pitted with shell-holes and with half the trees broken by explosions and ready to fall. None of this, however, could be seen from a distance.
They fastened flash-lamps to their bayonets so that they might see their victims. They wore rubber gloves to save their hands from being torn on the barbs of the wire. Stealthily they crawled over No Man's Land, crouching in shell-holes every time a rocket rose and made a glimmer of light. They took their time at the wire, muffling the snap of it by bits of cloth.
You go out one week and look through your glasses at a green, smiling country-little churches, villages nestling among woods, white roads running across a green carpet; next week you see nothing but ruins and a country-side pitted with shell-holes. All night the machine guns tap like rivet-ting machines when a New York sky-scraper is in the building.
A handful of D Company, led by the company commander, by short rushes reached a ruined tank, close to the enemy, but the remainder disappeared into shell-holes, whence encouragement was powerless to move them. Only in A Company was any fire opened.
The wild flowers along the riverbank were already humming with bees, and the whole scene seemed so peaceful and quiet after all they had endured in Rheims, that even the shell-holes left in the fields which had been fought over in the autumn and the crosses marking the graves of fallen soldiers did not sadden them. Mother Meraut sat for a long time silent, then heaved a deep sigh of relief.
Suddenly the whole thing seemed impossible that the noise at the foot of the street was really guns; that I should be there; that these two young women should live there day and night in the midst of such horrors. For the whole town is a graveyard. Bodies in numbers have been buried in shell-holes and hastily covered, or float in the stagnant water of the canal.
To-day nature is busy trying to hide the evidence of the hate of man, and long grass and poppies cover the blackened soil and grow in the shell-holes, until only in the memory of the men who strove nakedly in its desolation and death will the knowledge of that area as it was for those eight long months remain.
In front, and to the right, billows of red shell-holes rose to the sharp-cut, white skyline a hundred yards away. You feel as a man must feel in a very small boat lost in a very wide ocean. In the trough of a shell-hole your horizon was the edges of the crater on a level with your head.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking