Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 28, 2025
On these were placed a large number of empty spirit and water casks set on end. Into these fifteen hundred barrels of powder were emptied; the space around them was filled in with timber and sand, so as to form a solid mass, and over the powder casks were laid several hundred shells and some three thousand hand-grenades. “The French deemed their position impregnable.
The latter is carefully distinguished from the former by a conspicuous red thread. Also, as you know, it is the habit of the enemy and ourselves when the trenches are near enough, to enliven each other by the casting of homely but effective hand-grenades made out of tins. When a grenade drops in a British trench somebody seizes it instantly and throws it back.
Out of an orchard into the stubble of a wheat-field broke a panicky mass; a score or more of men who had lost their officer and their heads presumably. They were the nail under the hammer, a brown blot, a target. "Ah!" a chorus of excited exclamations in greeting of the game flushed from cover ran along the line. Just the way you got our fellows with the hand-grenades, we will get you!
It was as well, perhaps, that they did not see me do it, for the comitadji chieftain had a long knife, two revolvers, and four hand-grenades in his belt and a rifle slung over his shoulder.
Yet here the blue sky could be seen through the black skeleton rafters of the once pleasant homes; and there were other significant skeletons in the absolute solitude, the great ribs of dead chargers, together with broken bits and bridles, and remnants of exploded hand-grenades, and a burst gun-barrel, all lying on the bank of a lovely mountain stream at the point where he crossed it, as it flowed, crystal clear, through this sequestered bosky nook.
The veneer had been warped and twisted and burned off down to the raw animal flesh. Their brains had the fever itch of callouses forming. Not a sign of brown there in the yard; not a sign of any tribute after all they had endured! They had not been able to lay hands on the murderous throwers of hand-grenades.
The company officers blew their whistles, and there was a sudden clatter from trench-spades slung to rifle-barrels, and from men girdled with hand-grenades, as the advancing companies deployed and made their first rush forward.
The living pictures and the moving statuary in the Grand Palais exhibited the fine arts of war as they are practised by civilized men using explosive shells, with bombs, shrapnel, hand-grenades, mitrailleuses, trench-mines, and other ingenious instruments by which the ordinary designs of God may be re-drawn and re-shaped to suit the modern tastes of men.
A bombing-party of North Staffordshire men cleared thirty yards of the trench by the rapidity with which they flung their hand-grenades at the German bombers who endeavored to keep them out, and again and again they kept at bay a tide of field-gray men, who swarmed up the communication trenches, by a series of explosions which blew many of them to bits as bomb after bomb was hurled into their mass.
The only visitors were a few military cars, and men of the salvage corps, directing German prisoners in the gathering up of live shells and hand-grenades, of tons of barbed wire and trip wire, and all the other débris of battle that still lie thick upon the ground.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking