Winning a Cause: World War StoriesThompson, John G. (John Gilbert)
History
Winning a Cause: World War Stories
Thompson, John G. (John Gilbert)
Readers -- History; Readers -- World War, 1914-1918
A long wooden box five feet by three feet "in the cold, dark
underground." Here we move and sleep and have our being, under one of
the famous battlefields of Europe, a captured German dugout, with
German shells bumping on the roof from time to time. Had I but the
ability I could paint you a word-picture that might bring to you the
wonder of last night's events in their grandeur and their grimness. As
it is I must do what little I can.
A long straying column along a road as darkness fell; turning westward
one saw the splendor of a blood-red sunset where the crimson melted to
gold, the gold to green, so often called blue. Against this the
silhouetted outlines of slag-heaps and pits and houses, now ruined, now
whole. By the roadside little huts some three feet square built by
their owners, who gathered around little blazing fires now that their
day's work was done. The low drone of homing planes filled the air as
one by one they swooped down to earth, or rose on some perilous
mission, while bursting shrapnel added golden balls of fire to the
firmament of heaven, now a deep, deep blue. To north, to east, to
south, yellow-green flashes of guns stabbed the darkness, and the
redder glare of bursting shells came ever and anon. Across an open
heath, along a road pitted with shell-holes to the skeleton of a
shell-smashed town like some ghostly sentinel to the gates of war.
Here the sweet smell of a September evening was every now and then
rendered hideous by pungent odors through the dead town, where the
smell of gas still clung to houses and issued up from cellars. Now
trenches lay along the road, and the golden harvest moon turned to
silver and flooded the scene, casting long, strange shadows on the
ground. A deepening roar, followed by the whizzing scream of shells as
hidden batteries poured death into the German lines. A whistle, a
roar, a thud, a sudden check, and on as a couple of shells spattered
the road ahead. "Halt, off-load the limbers"--on to a crater where our
guides awaited us. Here the chalk molds and craters of the shattered
German lines along which we walked looked like miniature snow-clad
mountains in the moonlight. Destruction everywhere, but a destruction
that was grand while it was dreadful. And so to dug-outs, and the
night-time "hate" and gas--a doze, and the wonderful dawn of a perfect
daybreak. Exploration of trenches, broken by pauses to look at aerial
combats far up in the blue, where planes looked like bits of silver
dust whirled about by the breeze. Interest covered and crushed every
other emotion, and though many of the things that lie about seem
loathsome in cold-blooded language, I found nothing of loathing there.
Now a human skull with matted ginger hair, but with the top bashed in,
now a hand or arm sticking up from some badly-buried body or
shell-smashed grave, and everywhere the appalling waste of war--spades,
shovels, German clothes, armor, ammunition scattered in a chaos beyond
words.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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