The Cornhill Magazine (vol. XLI, no. 244 new series, October 1916)Various
General
The Cornhill Magazine (vol. XLI, no. 244 new series, October 1916)
Various
England -- Periodicals; English literature -- Periodicals; Short stories, English -- Periodicals
Many and interesting are the various sound-phenomena of the battlefield.
Why is it, for instance, that once when a certain battery was firing over
my head from behind a crest the rush of the shell was heard going away
in an opposite direction, so that it seemed, at first, as if the breech
had blown out; and that when I approached the battery the shells sounded
as if they were going straight up in the air? Why is it that, from some
positions, the shells from our own batteries are heard to give forth a
crackling sound instead of the usual swirl when speeding over to the
enemy? This last effect may occasionally be due to a badly centred shell,
but, I think, not always. One is too busy in war-time to look into these
interesting details, and in peace-time one has not the opportunity!
I remember an occasion when the guns made a very effective accompaniment
to a song. I was lunching below ground in an observation-post dug-out,
and a very pleasant-voiced lady was singing to us from a gramophone. I
forget what the song was, but the regular bang and whirr of a battery
firing overhead certainly improved the effect. We shouted up to the
observer to know if the shells were ‘ours’ or ‘theirs,’ and elicited the
interesting information that it was the Germans who were supplying the
accompaniment!
The sound of the enemy shells is all too well known to most of us out
here, but there appear to be not many who have actually seen one in
the air. I have seen German shells coming towards me on two separate
occasions, but have, so far, never met anyone who has had the same
experience. This seems strange, for there is no reason why it should
not happen fairly frequently. It is quite an easy matter to see one of
our own shells leaving a howitzer, and sometimes a gun, if one stands
straight behind it, and it should only be a question of happening to look
in the right direction to see one coming the other way.
It was in the spring of last year near ‘Windy Corner’ that I first saw
a German shell on the wing. I had not been long at the front, and I
instinctively looked up when I heard it coming. What I saw was a minute
but very rapidly increasing speck in the sky, moving so fast that I was
somehow unable to judge where it was going to fall. I accordingly made
myself as small as possible, but it burst in a farm at the comparatively
safe distance of some 150 yards. It was from a 15-centimetre howitzer,
and was immediately followed by another, which I again saw by looking in
the same direction. As this was followed by a flight of ‘whizz bangs,’
and as I had no pressing business there at the moment, I hurried from
that well-known and unwholesome spot.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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