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Updated: May 13, 2025
Then there is the starlight on No Man's Land, for the starlight is a part of the lights o' war just as are the moonlight and the star-shells and the little flash-lights and the range-finders and the bursting shells and bombs. But there are other more significant lights o' war.
Occasionally there would be a dozen of these star-shells in the air at the same time: they reminded me of the Fourth of July fireworks at Manhattan Beach.
Bosche put a few shells over near by, but fortunately nobody was touched. He was evidently nervous about something, for on several occasions he sent up star-shells, in batches of six, which lighted up the whole ridge like day, and until they were down again I stood stock still. Day was breaking in the east. A low-lying mist hung over the village. I hoped it would not affect my taking.
I must have dozed off, for after a little while I awoke with a start and, looking towards the entrance, I noticed a blue-white glare of light. As my companions were getting out, I followed them, in time to see the Germans sending up star-shells, to guard against any attack on our part. The following day I filmed several scenes connected with the Belgian artillery and outposts.
It was a pitch-black night and the occasional star-shells only served to make the black more intense when they faded. As we crawled out one behind the other each had to keep a hand on the foot ahead so as not to get separated. We made several ineffectual attempts to find the opening in our barbed wire and then cut a new one. Was this like the darkness after Calvary?
All they remembered was that they were pushed, dragged and fairly punched along in the darkness that was, every now and then, lighted by gun flashes or the star-shells. The fighting was still going on, though it was growing less intense, and it seemed evident that the attacking party of raiding Germans had been beaten back.
Every now and then this belt of trees was being thrown into sharp relief by German star-shells, which rocketed into the sky one after the other like a display of fireworks, while at times a burst of hostile shrapnel would throw a weird, red light on the twinkling poplars which surrounded the cemetery.
Every scene is so different, and looking at everything from the pictorial point of view I wished with all my heart I could have filmed such a wonderful scene. But even had I been able to do so I could not have reproduced the atmosphere, the sound of the guns, the burst of the shells, the glare of the star-shells, the laughter of the men and some of them were swearing.
The British guns, I suppose, from fear of slaying us, and the German guns from fear of slaying Germans; but as to how, I know not. But the German star-shells continued bursting overhead, and by that weird light their oncoming infantry saw charging into them men they had never seen before out of a picture-book! God knows what tales they had been told about us Sikhs. I read their faces as I rode.
Now and then I would glance over my shoulder and, in the fleeting glare of the star-shells, would glimpse, above the porter's straining shoulders, the head of the dead soldier lolling inertly from side to side, as though very, very tired.... And I wondered if in some lonely cabin by the Volga a woman was praying for her boy.
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