Storiettes.

Southern Cross, Volume 7, Issue 34, 18 November 1899, Page 10

Storiettes.

UNDER FIRE. One hears many accounts of the behaviour of men under fire, especially of men under fire for the first time. This was the case with the overwhelming majority of the American Army in the Cuban war, and here is Mr Richard Harding Davis’s picture of what happened. Bullets passed without giving a moment’s respite at several different heights, and while doing so made a most demoralising amount of noise. They struck the trees overhead, the ground under foot, and cut holes in the air on every side. Sometimes a shrapnel shell burst and tore the men it hit into ribbons of flesh. Dead horses and the bodies of the regulars lay along the trail, and no one who was not wounded or supporting wounded, passed down it from the front.

It was interesting to observe the pressure which men put upon their nerves, and to see them flying panicstricken for a tree, or dropping on their knees and sliding along the ground. It showed that a man when he is alone can only bear a certain amount of danger, as he can only stand a certain amount of physical fatigue. You would see a soldier walking along the trail quite boldly for a little way, and then a bullet would come too close to his head, or too many of them woald whistle by at the same moment, and as his nerves would refuse to support the strain any longer, he would jump for the bushes and would sit there breathing heavily until he mustered up sufficient will power to carry him farther on.