HORRORS OF SHELL FIRE.

Auckland Star, Volume XLVI, Issue 63, 15 March 1915, Page 9

HORRORS OF SHELL FIRE.

FRENCH COLONEL'S VIVID I NARRATIVE. A French colonel gives the following livid description of artillery fire in the vax . "We had just done some good work, and demolished with our battery j several of the enemy's gun opposite, I Mowing up their ammunition carts in a | fireworks display. Captain X's gaiety j was suddenly cut short by an unexpected reply of telling precision. A shower of l shells flying over my head had fallen right at" his feet; a huge fragment "had j etruck him to the h#art. He cried, 'Ah! mon Dieu!' The adjutant said, 'I am done for.' One of the gunners breathed out his soul in a long sigh, which I can jtill hear in mv ears. All this in much le=s than a second and in a blinding Hash of I turned round, convinced that I it was our own shells that had burst inside the guns. The three men lay side ! hy side with their hands by their hips as [ if on parade, but they were stretched I full length on their backs with an air of I calm and rest on their faces, in which • the eyes were still shining, that I shall always see in memory. Other men leaning against the wheels or fallen on their knees held their hands pressed upon the scarlet patches, which an instant before had been their faces, with difficulty -olding eyes, nose, or teeth in sobs of awful suffering. BATTLE'S ACTUALITY. "Pictures like this are terrible and grandoise. like all the holocausts freely offered to the idea of one's country, which only take visible shape at such instants of tragic beauty. As for mc, "I had not a scratch; my turn was to come only a little later. The first bat- • talion of my battery went on past the dismantled one and flung themselves into a charge under a veritable overhead 'vault of shrapnel and shell which the enemy's batteries in front and on the flank built for them. I had no time to think on the little incident which had just saddened this corner of the battlefield and fetched two tears from mv : eyes- In battle the 'immediate' is what is happening, and no longer that which las just happened; but still to-day—"a long month afterwards—every line of the '_ picture of R_. battery at the moment it was hit stands faithfully in its place before my remembering glance. Again I hear a voice (my own), 'Well, captain?" I was watching through my glasses a .pot that I was ordering him to bombard, and surprised at not having yet heard his guns behind mc, and another voice (his) a few seconds afterwards, 'Ah! mon Dieu!' He was no longer alive. Between the two exclamations death had passed, instantaneous and blessed, since he had not felt it, but quickly as his soul had been taken from 'him the last great cry of the poor -trieken captain shows that he still had the time to give it up to the Master of All Things. This little scene on one tiny point of the immense field lasted as long as a flash only, but other like flashes h?#d preceded and were to follow. Imagine it repeated a hundred times over •without much variation along the whole tone where the armies are grappling, and you will have an approximate vision of the picture of the battle painted by modern warfare. •*•_■> c " ? TSfVraißLE' SOLDIERS. "Do not imagine that the eye sees motley mass« of soldiers advancing in serried ranks against each other until the bayonets cross, according to the traditional idea—of civilians. Your imagination would be -ompletely in the "wrong. It requres a very practised eye to see the men during a fight. When finally you have seen a few suddenly itarting up like jacks-in-the-box it is never more than for a few 6econds, and the vision slips into the ground again as suddenly as it appeared. But if at this moment, instead of keeping the eye fixed on the point where the vision vanished, waiting for it to reappear, you turn it to the right or the left, you will see the game apparition being produced in the same instantaneous conditions. You would almost think that the ground had been sown beforehand with 'eclipse' apparatus, representing a file of (human silhouettes at intervals, able ' riowiy to advance either above or underneath the ground.

"After a long moment of this obserTation, and when the eye, growing accustomed, begins to perceive details, it remarks here and there on all sides, more or less, little light or dark heaps in relief to the green of the plain or the yellow of the fields. Those remain always visible, and, what is more, motionless and in the same position. They are the broken silhouettes; they are the "fad; that is all."