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Updated: June 28, 2025
As they approached and covered our mine, the train was fired, and up they went in the air, and down they fell buried in the ruins. Groans, screams, confusion, French yells, British hurras, rent the sky! The hills resounded with the shouts of victory? We sent them hand-grenades in abundance, and broke their shins in glorious style.
On that occasion they had been so pounded by the French artillery that they were little more than giant furrows in the chalky soil, and thickly strewn along those furrows was all the horrid garbage of a battlefield: twisted and tangled barbed wire, splintered planks, shattered rifles, broken machine-guns, unexploded hand-grenades, knapsacks, water-bottles, pieces of uniforms, bits of leather, and, most horrible of all, the remains of what had once been human beings.
We were hard at work, mounting guns, preparing shells to be used as hand-grenades, stopping up surplus embrasures, and removing the débris which encumbered the passages from one part of the work to another.
A little flickering life still lingered in a few; there were vague râles in the darkness. A rafale of shells fell on the slope; the violet glares outlined the mouth of the crater. The Frenchmen scrambled over the edge of the crater with their unconscious burden, and then, from a little distance, threw hand-grenades into the pit till all the moaning died away.
A French partisan, with five-and-thirty men from Gueldres, who lurked among the rushes in wait for prey, seized the rope by which the boat was drawn, hauled it ashore, discharged their small arms and hand-grenades, then rushing into it, secured the soldiers before they could put themselves in a posture of defence.
She passed by some horrors; on others she dwelt with fearless emphasis. "Then the hand-grenades were thrown!" She put her hands over her eyes. "As they fell" she put her hands over her ears "oh, the groans!" "It was the Browns who started it!" he interjected in defence. "I had hoped that we should escape that kind of warfare."
Twenty of them were to carry the port-fires, &c., &c. Those who had hand-grenades had short ladders to enable them to reach the port-holes, the exact height of which Colonel Burr had ascertained.
In those days every regiment had two special companies, the heavy-armed grenadiers, so called because they originally carried hand-grenades, and the light-infantry company. These were frequently detached for special duty, as the present, when the Light Infantry would be used for flanking purposes.
The powder-magazines were set on fire, and exploded with a tremendous crash, throwing down many houses in their vicinity, partly by pieces of the walls striking them, and partly by the concussion of the air; whilst quantities of shot, shell, and hand-grenades, which could not otherwise be rendered useless, were cast into the river.
From the heaps of earth which had once been trenches German soldiers rose and staggered in a dazed, drunken way, stupefied by the bombardment beneath which they had crouched. Our men spitted them on their bayonets or hurled hand-grenades, and swept the ground before them. Some Germans screeched like pigs in a slaughter-house. The men went on in short rushes.
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