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A Big “Strafe.”
The Bosches started a big “strafe” yesterday, and so kept us all busy on counter battery work; that is, spotting the flashes of the “hun-guns,” and wirelessing down their positions to the artillery, who either fire at them or note their positions for a future occasion. With all the German guns going, the woods behind the lines were a blaze of flashes, and we sent down as many in the afternoon as the battery had got in the previous six weeks. The artillery were naturally rather bucked. It was a wonderful sight seeing all the shells bursting along the miles of trenches, and the huge white spreading gas shells at intervals. One could hear the bang of our big guns when they fired salvos from under us, and at times we got bumps from the shells passing near us in the air. “Shell bumps” are fairly common, and I have had them before. I don’t know how near the shells pass, but moving at that speed they would affect the air for a long way round. I felt them at 5,000 feet once. They were not being shot at us, but shells which pass through to Hunland, so:
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We got a wireless report here of a naval battle and not a cheery one at that. We are all waiting to see what the papers will have to say about it to-morrow.... Later: The C.O. has just been on the ’phone about the naval battle, and we are relieved to hear that it was not so bad as we had heard at first, or rather that the German losses were not so few as we were told.
I must stop, as I have some letters to censor. “Hoping this finds you as it leaves me, in the pink.”
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We have had two or three days of rest, as the weather has been too bad for flying.... The naval battle was not a defeat after all, and it seems a case of “as you were” in France; so we just sit here and play ping-pong and wait for the Army to win the war.
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