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Updated: June 28, 2025


Night engagements are always dreadful, but this was the worst I ever knew. To see your danger is bad enough, but to hear shells whizzing and bursting over you, to hear shrapnell and iron fragments slapping the trees and cracking off limbs, and not know from whence death comes to you, is trying beyond all things.

"Yes, yes," said `old Hankey Pankey, as if thinking over the matter "yes. Got the rockets ready, Mr ahem Shrapnell?" "Aye, aye, sir," replied `Gunnery Jack, who had come up from his guns, on the halt being cried, to see whether the captain might not have any special orders for him. "They're close at hand, sir." "The signal rockets, I mean."

Two minutes after the bugle has sounded, some such order as this is given from the officers' bridge. "Enemy off the port bow! make ready with shrapnell shell. Distance three thousand yards. Elevation twenty degrees."

It's just like those gunnery fellows. They think nobody can be as sharp as themselves; but Mr Shrapnell will find himself too sharp for himself as well as for me some day, if he doesn't look out!"

A line of battle appearing in the timber preparing to charge, the skirmishers were called back, Bartlett swept the bushes with canister and shrapnell, Boyle's brigade charged into the brush, encountered the fire of the Confederate line at close quarters, replied, charged, and drove the enemy through the timber to an open field beyond.

The French were quickly disabled by the Germans, and even the head gunner was severely wounded. I took him on my shoulders, and got him out of the line of fire. The Bavarians sent another shrapnell shell after us, and, as the projectile burst over our heads, I felt a blow on the leather rim of my képi. "A shrapnel splinter!"

"That's right, Mr Shrapnell; tell Adams to get one of the signals ready for sending up at once, for I expect to see the admiral's every minute," said `old Hankey Pankey'; adding, as `Gunnery Jack' stepped back to prepare the signal rocket with Adams, "That chap thinks himself very smart with his rocket and tube, as if I didn't know the real difference between the two!

I found it in the book "Shot, Shell and Shrapnell or Sixty Years as a War Correspondent," recently written by Mr. Maxim Catling whose exploits are familiar to all readers. "I was standing," writes Mr. Suddenly we found ourselves the object of the most terrific hail of bullets. For a few moments the air was black with them.

All along our line an assault was made and the enemy was holding us off with terrible effect. From their blockhouse on the hill came a magazine of shot. Shrapnell shells fell in our ranks, doing great damage. Something had to be done or the day would have been lost. The Ninth and part of the Tenth Cavalry moved across into a thicket near by. The Spaniards rained shot upon them.

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