World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives, English
Remaining in the hedge for a few hours, we dug holes for the guns,
covered them with tarpaulins and grass on top, giving them the usual
scenic shelter. We did this work in the open but only one man at a time
exposed; it was as much as life was worth for more than one to be seen
working. That evening, in the midst of our meal at cookhouse,--"Stand
to!" and we raced for our pets. When the concert was well under way,
Munsey noticed a light three or four hundred yards off that was acting
somewhat peculiarly; it would flare up and down oddly and seemed to be
in a farmhouse straight at our rear, but not much attention was paid to
it at the time. Next morning Munsey and I were in the cookhouse, trying
to moisten a couple of hardtack biscuits with what juice we could
extract from a piece of bacon rind, when an airplane hummed overhead and
the attention of one of our anti-aircraft guns was immediately diverted
to the bird. The cookhouse had formerly been a French dressing station,
dismantled by the fire of those devils that know no law of God or man,
composed of three huts in a row made of half-inch board. While eating,
one of our own shells, a shrapnel, that had been sent up at a German
stork and did not explode, dropped squarely into the middle of the
cookhouse, frightened the cook out of his wits and hit the dixies,
scattering them around our feet. "Stand to!" and we made our way
carefully, keeping out of sight as much as possible from the watching
bird overhead.
When I got to the gun the shell fire was commencing to get dangerously
close. "By God, there must be somebody giving our battery away," said
Munsey. A number of our men had been wounded at this time and the
airplane still buzzing above, made it impossible for us to fire, and we
got a "Stand down!"
"Come on over," Munsey proposed, "and we'll see what's in that building
where I saw the light." We found a family of civilians living there and
they were at once very solicitous about giving us coffee. "Never mind
the coffee," said Munsey; "we have come to examine the house." The old
man seemed quite willing to have us do so and pointed the way upstairs,
starting himself to go out the door. Munsey grabbed him by the
arm,--"Come along and show us the way." He indicated that we could find
the way ourselves, but my mate was insistent and he forced the old man
along and upstairs we went.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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