SHELL FIRE.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 11482, 2 September 1915, Page 7

SHELL FIRE.

' ANNIHILATES COURAGE. HO ORDIKA. J TEiT. There are, it appears, very few men who are not afraid of shell-fire. There are fewer who pretend that they are not afraid. Philip Gibbs, 111 "The Soul of War," desenbes the effect upon tho faces of men who have experienced it. Their faces were dead. It seemed as if their vital spark had been already put out by tho storm of battle. " Fear exists with the highest valor." Shed-lire is not an ordinary test of ' courage. .Courage is annihilated in the face of it. Something else takes its , place—a philosophy of fatalism, eome- , times an utter boredom. . . In most , cases a strange extinction of all emotions and (sensations, so that mon who 1 havo been long under shell-fire have a peculiar rigidity of the nervous system, as if something had been killed inside i them. . . I was conscious (under 1 shell-fire) of great physical discomfort - which reacted upon my brain. The noises were even more distressing to me than the risk of. death. . . Shocks : which shattered into one's brain and - shook one's body with a kind of disintegrating tumult. More awful was the noise of our own guns. Every shell which they sent . ... made one'f , body and soul quake «with the agony oi - its noise. Tho vibration was so great j, that it made my skull ache as though % it had been hammered. Long after- , wards I found myself trembling with those waves of vibrating sounds. Worse 5 still, because sharper and more piercing 9 staccato, w«.s my experience close , a battery of French cent-vingt, Eacl: 3 I shell was fired with a hard, metallic 2; J crack, which seemed to knock a, holt 1 | into my ear-drums. . . Three mer r* 1 out of six or seven, a tough, hare ci | typo of mechanic, had to be invalided - j home in one week. One of them had 2 | crise de nerfs which nearly killed hira It was the intolerable strain upon tin j nervous, system that made wrecks o' | the trenches under heavy shell-fire \ | sometimes for as long as three days ; come out of their torment like met I who have been buried alive. The? have the brownish, ashen colour o: 'death. They tremble as through an ; i guish- Thev are dazed and stum'd foi . tho marvel of .it. They go back da-J : after day, as the Belgians went da 3 after day. . . No one with an imagi p | nation out to come out to this war. "