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In fact, you can't even tell whether there was a target there to hit." "Never mind; we'll chance it," replied Ainslie. "And if the Bosche artillery suddenly wakes up and begins retaliating on the wrong spot with whizz-bangs well, we shall know we've tickled up somebody, anyhow! Nine o'clock, you say?" Here, again, is a bombing party, prepared to steal out under cover of night.
The left half Battalion remained along the road bank and in a dry ditch 50 yards W. of it, near to the junction with the Regnicourt Road up which they were to advance. There was one solitary house, protected by the hillside, which provided Company Headquarters with a certain amount of cover. The night was dark and the enemy, except for the whizz-bangs on "A" Company, very quiet.
So, going up to an R.A.M.C. officer, who was standing outside his dug-out, I asked him if there was any news in fact I enquired whether there was a war on up there, everything seemed to be so absolutely quiet. "Well," he said, "there was up to about three hours ago; Bosche has fairly plastered us with 5.9 and whizz-bangs.
It was only during the following summer that the English caught up with the Germans in artillery. This, naturally, did not tend to cheer up the men. It was aggravating, to say the least, to have the other fellow sending over "crumps" without limit, and be able to send back nothing but six or eight "whizz-bangs."
"Yesterday," he told Major Mallaby-Kelby, "he took a sniping gun on to the crest, and kept it in action for four hours, firing 150 rounds. At one time he was within three hundred yards of the enemy. He wiped out at least two infantry teams and waggons although the Boche tried hard to knock his gun out with 5·9's and whizz-bangs.
We soon decided that our best plan was to get out of the house, and stay in the ditch twenty yards away until it was over. A house is an unwholesome spot to be in when there's shelling about. Our funk hole was all right for whizz-bangs and other fireworks of that sort, but no use against these portmanteaux they were now sending along.
It's true that he does jolly good work when the Huns 'strafe' his wire and he has to go out and mend it, but he doesn't go forward in an attack; he sits in his dug-out and telephones like blazes for reinforcements while the Germans pepper his roof for him with 'whizz-bangs.
At midday I was awakened hearing great excitement occasioned by an air scrap overhead. Four were brought down. I felt too cosy to trouble to get up and look! Up at 12.45. One or two whizz-bangs landed uncomfortably near while I was shaving. At 2 p.m. there was another air scrap overhead. We watched it through our glasses.
While the shelling was as nothing compared to bombardments we went through later, still it gave us an opportunity to make the acquaintance of the various kinds of shells from "whizz-bangs" up to something of about eight-inch caliber. The first casualty in the battalion was a scout named Boyer who was killed on his initial trip into No Man's Land the first night in the trenches.
They started off with three 'whizz-bangs'" a whizz-bang is a particularly offensive form of shell which bursts two or three times over, like a Chinese cracker "so we all took cover and lay low. The consequence was that Minnie was able to send her little contribution along unobserved. The filthy thing fell short of the trench, and exploded just as we were all getting up again.
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