That was the beginning. Gun after gun, battery
after battery, picked up the range and poured shells over and into the
wood, went searching every hollow and hole, rending and destroying
trench and dug-out, parapet and parados. The trenches, clean white
streaks and zig-zags of chalk on a green slope, made perfect targets on
which the guns made perfect shooting; the wood was a mark that no gun
could miss, and surely no gun missed. What the scene in that wood must
have been is beyond imagining and beyond telling. It was quickly
shrouded in a pall of drifting smoke, and dimly through this the
observing officers directing the fire of their guns could see clouds of
leaves and twigs whirling and leaping under the lashing shrapnel, could
see branches and smashed tree-trunks and great clods of earth and stone
flying upward and outward from the blast of the lyddite shells. The
wood was slashed to ribbons, rent and riddled to tatters, deluged from
above with tearing blizzards of shrapnel bullets, scorched and riven
with high-explosive shells. In the trenches our men cowered at first,
listening in awe to the rushing whirlwinds of the shells' passage over
their heads, the roar of the cannonade behind them, the crash and boom
of the bursting shells in front, the shriek and whirr of flying
splinters, the splintering crash of the shattering trees.
Pages:
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242