Somme, 1st Battle of the, France, 1916 -- Fiction; World War, 1914-1918 -- Fiction
They lay there laughing and joking and watching the uncouth antics of
the monster waddling across the shell-riddled, ground, cheering when
it appeared to trip and recover itself, cheering when it floundered
sideways into a hole and crawled out again, cheering most wildly of
all when it reached the barbed-wire entanglements, waddled through,
bursting them apart and trailing them in long tangles behind it, or
trampling them calmly under its churning caterpillar-wheel-bands. It
was little wonder they cheered and less wonder they laughed. The Here
We Are’s motions were so weirdly alive and life-like, so playfully
ponderous, so massively ridiculous, that it belonged by nature to
nothing outside a Drury Lane Panto. At one moment it looked exactly
like a squat tug-boat in a heavy cross sea or an ugly tide-rip,
lurching, dipping, rolling rail and rail, plunging wildly bows under,
tossing its nose up and squattering again stern-rail deep, pitching
and heaving and diving and staggering, but always pushing forward.
Next minute it was a monster out of Prehistoric Peeps, or a new patent
fire-breathing dragon from the pages of a very Grimm Fairy Tale, nosing
its way blindly over the Fairy Prince’s pitfalls; next it was a big
broad-buttocked sow nuzzling and rooting as it went; next it was a
drunk man reeling and staggering, rolling and falling, scrabbling and
crawling; next it was--was anything on or in, or underneath the earth,
anything at all except a deadly, grim, purposeful murdering product of
modern war.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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