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At the first battle before Ladysmith it was one of the Irish brigades that kept the Boer guns in action, bringing up ammunition under a rain of shellfire. During the Boer retreat and Roberts's advance on Pretoria, Blake's engineers were always with the Boer rearguard and successfully destroyed every mile of the railway as they went back.
At the same time the commander of the artillery of the 1st Corps, General Pernetti, with thirty cannon of Campan's division and all the howitzers of Dessaix's and Friant's divisions, will move forward, open fire, and overwhelm with shellfire the enemy's battery, against which will operate: 24 guns of the artillery of the Guards 30 guns of Campan's division
They were soon outside the confines of the camp, and marching along what had once been a perfect road, but was now badly broken up by the combined effects of shellfire and heavy trucking.
Though I have, in the abstract, no desire for shellfire, even when very mild, I could not, in a sense, help being glad that I was obliged to get so excellent a view of what a shell bursting in the air looks like at fairly close quarters. To be truthful, it looks almost exactly like what I used to call an absurdly exaggerated picture in the illustrated newspapers!
A wounded soldier, on being brought back to the hospital at Paris, after only one week in the valley of the Aisne, said in a dazed sort of way: "Each day was like the others. It began at 6 o'clock in the, morning with heavy shellfire. There was a short interval at which it stopped, about 5:30 every day. Then in the night came the charges, and one night I couldn't count them.
These men had already seen what shellfire could do to knock the beauty out of old houses and quiet streets. They had gone tramping through one or two villages to which the enemy's guns had turned their attention, and had received that unforgetable sensation of one's first sight of roofless cottages, and great gaps in garden walls, and tall houses which have tumbled inside themselves.
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