Sometimes a single shell comes:
sometimes half a dozen. Sometimes whole batteries get to work. The
effect is terrible. You who live at home in ease have no conception of
what it is like to live in a town which is under intermittent shell
fire.
I say this advisedly. You have no conception whatsoever.
We get no rest. There is a distant boom, followed by a crash overhead.
Cries are heard--the cries of women and children. They are running
frantically--running to observe the explosion, and if possible pick
up a piece of the shell as a souvenir. Sometimes there are not enough
souvenirs to go round, and then the clamour increases.
We get no rest, I say--only frightfulness. British officers, walking
peaceably along the pavement, are frequently hustled and knocked aside
by these persons. Only the other day, a full colonel was compelled to
turn up a side-street, to avoid disturbing a ring of excited children
who were dancing round a beautiful new hole in the ground in the
middle of a narrow lane.
If you enter into a cafe or estaminet, a total stranger sidles to your
table, and, having sat down beside you, produces from the recesses
of his person a fragment of shrapnel. This he lays before you, and
explains that if he had been standing at the spot where the shell
burst, it would have killed him. You express polite regret, and pass
on elsewhere, seeking peace and finding none.
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