[A TERRIBLE EXPERIENCE.]
A mile and a half crawl with five bullets in his body under artillery and rifle fire was the experience of Private Dan Hurst of the Coldstream Guards. Writing to his wife, Hurst says:
"Don't fret over me. I have five wounds, but I am a lucky chap to be here to tell the tale, for if the shell which hit me in the chest had exploded a bit lower I should have been killed outright. Our ambulance men tried to get us away, but the Germans fired upon them, so they had to leave us to take our chances. It rained in torrents all that night and the Germans put sentries with bayonets over us. They took all our food and water away, and on Tuesday afternoon some of them tried to make out that we had been firing upon them. We asked how that was possible when they had taken everything from us, but they were going to shoot us when an officer came up and stopped them.
"On Wednesday they removed us to the far side of a haystack out of their line of fire so we could not get hit, but one of the British shells exploded near us, and of course I got hit. We thought it best to make a dash for it. I could not walk and had to crawl on my hands and knees with my wounds bleeding, and while I was crawling away they started to fire on us. There were six of us who started but only two of us finished. Our trenches were only a mile and a half away, but it took us four hours and a half to crawl there."
[THE NEW WAR WEAPON.]
A French doctor, who has just returned from Flanders, describing the effect of the "Fleche d'aero," as the steel darts with which the French airmen are supplied are generally called, said:
"Among the 2,000 wounded whom we treated in forty-eight hours was a German who had been struck by an aeroplane dart. He was evidently bending over when hit, for the dart had entered the right thigh and traversed the whole leg, so that the point emerged just above the boot. The man was conscious when he was brought in, and said he felt no pain, only a heavy blow. He died soon afterward from shock and loss of blood."
The darts resemble steel pencils. They are about five inches long with the unpointed end half-fluted to insure their falling head first. It is calculated that they strike with a hundred pounds force if thrown from an elevation of 1,000 metres.