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Updated: May 16, 2025
And when it seemed so wonderful to me after just a mild sort of experience down a shell-swept road, through the damp and cold of a French winter day, what must it be to those boys after trench raids or red-hot scraps down rain-soaked trenches under the wet mists of No Man's Land?... Listen to some of the stories the boys told me: 'You see, Judge, the good old Salvation Army is the real thing.
The Red Cross flag did not spell protection by any means. As we came within sight of the car a shell burst within thirty feet of it, a fragment of the projectile burying itself in the door. I never knew of a car taking so long to crank. Though it was really probably only a matter of seconds before the engine started it seemed to us, standing in that shell-swept road, like hours.
Indeed, it was grilling weather, and there in the battery, in a hollow, close down beside a little run or stream, it was even hotter than on the shell-swept bare top of the ridge. So the Canadian gunners had stripped down for comfort. Not a man had more than his under-shirt on above his trousers, and many of them were naked to the waist, with their hide tanned to the color of old saddles.
Some of them had gone to death under the shell-swept pines in the mountains of Tennessee, yet in the good man's speech they were scarcely known. He did refer to them, but only incidentally. The hero of the hour was this boy. Did the nation owe him anything? No, nothing then and nothing now. Why was he the hero?
In the great world-battles of yesterday, or the day before, the commanding general rode, with a few chosen officers of his staff, to some near-by hill-top, shell-swept and perilous, and with the help of a pair of field-glasses and a corps of hard-riding aides kept in touch as he could with the shifting fortunes of his divisions and brigades.
He was a private of the Cockney regiment whom we were relieving; and after the manner of his kind, would infinitely have preferred to conduct us down half a mile of a shell-swept road, leading straight to the heart of things, than waste time upon an uninteresting but safe détour.
We should naturally have protested against the chauffeur adventuring upon the shell-swept road for our convenience; but he was diplomatic enough to postpone the journey. After a time the shelling ceased, and he passed in safety. He told us when we met him later for the drive home that there were five large holes in the road.
It was probably a belated party of these new-comers that our men noticed wandering through the village in daytime. During the afternoon of Saturday our bombardment of Pozières became heavier. Most of these ruined villages are marked on this shell-swept country by the trees around them.
And to-morrow? In the hearts of all the people of this beautiful city there is a single and a simple faith. Nancy turns her face toward the ancient frontier, she looks hopefully out upon the shell-swept Grand Couronné and beyond to the Promised Land.
Very quietly, with that sang-froid which the French possess, perhaps, above all others, with determination written on every face, both young and old, and with heroism shining from their features, those gallant poilus, all along the line sweeping across the crest of the hills facing the Germans a stretch of ground ploughed deep now into a hundred furrows, shattered and shell-swept, and blasted in a thousand places into deep pits and craters watched first as those small advance-parties, sent by the enemy to reconnoitre the situation, were shot down or driven back to shelter; and watched now with straining eyes and with many an exclamation as a horde of grey-coated infantry debouched from the evergreen woods encircling the eastern and northern slopes of the approaches to their position, and, forming up there, advanced steadily to attack them.
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