The British soldier

by E. J. Hardy

A sergeant sent back to a hospital in England said: "It was at Ypres I was shot. The bullet struck me in the elbow. I felt no pain there and no sensation of any kind, except in the tops of the fingers, which began to stiffen and freeze. But even then I didn't know I was shot. Five or ten minutes afterwards my coat began to stick to my arm, thick blood came down my sleeve, and I realised that I was wounded."

One man, shot through the arm, felt "only a bit of a sting, nothing particular. Just like a needle going into me. I thought it was nothing till my rifle dropped out of my hand and my arm fell." That is the feeling of a clean bullet wound. Shrapnel, however, "hurts pretty badly."

This is how another man in a letter described being hit: "I didn't know what had happened at the time, but afterwards I found out that a bullet had entered my shoulder, grazed my spine, and lodged pretty firmly in the back of my neck. 'Are you wounded, mate?' asked a corporal who came up to me. 'Looks like it,' I replied, pointing to my shoulder. With that he ripped up the sleeve of my tunic, and had just bound up my wound when a shell struck him full in the back, and he fell forward dead without a word."

A man when hit in the hand jumped out of the trench and shouted to the man who had shot him to come and fight him. "It was hailing lead, so he was pulled back into the trench and told that he was rather amusing, but silly."

Two men are resting in a trench but not lying low enough. One is munching a biscuit, and the other is flicking small pebbles at him. A particularly sharp stone, as the man with the biscuit fancies, strikes him on the neck. He leaps round and demands indignantly, "Say, Bill, did you chuck that stone at me?" Bill denies the charge, and, perceiving the occasion for it, rejoins, "Why, mate, you're wounded." He had got a bullet and not a harmless pebble.

Firing in battle is now carried on at such long distances that if one is in the neighbourhood at all he may not be able to keep out of it. This was once the case with me in China. A hail of bullets came round us and we did not know from whence it came. A man on the right of me fell and said, "I'm hit," and another on the left did the same. As no enemy was visible I thought that it was a grim joke until I saw blood spurting up.

Writing in a letter of a second occasion on which he was wounded, a soldier said: "This makes twice their shrapnel has pipped me. If they do it again I shall say, 'I ain't going to play any more! You are too rough!'"

Another man was hit in the right arm when drinking tea. He carefully transferred the pannikin to the left hand, and finished his tea!

When a bullet got him an Irishman, exclaiming "The brutes have hit me," fired his rifle and said, "That's one back ter them." Then he got hit again and observed, "Be jabers, if they haven't struck me the second toime." A third hit was too much and he expostulated, "That's number three. The blackguards might leave a party alone after they've hit him wance."