The sound of the enemy shells is all too well known to most of us out here, but there appear to be not many who have actually seen one in the air. I have seen German shells coming towards me on two separate occasions, but have, so far, never met anyone who has had the same experience. This seems strange, for there is no reason why it should not happen fairly frequently. It is quite an easy matter to see one of our own shells leaving a howitzer, and sometimes a gun, if one stands straight behind it, and it should only be a question of happening to look in the right direction to see one coming the other way.
It was in the spring of last year near ‘Windy Corner’ that I first saw a German shell on the wing. I had not been long at the front, and I instinctively looked up when I heard it coming. What I saw was a minute but very rapidly increasing speck in the sky, moving so fast that I was somehow unable to judge where it was going to fall. I accordingly made myself as small as possible, but it burst in a farm at the comparatively safe distance of some 150 yards. It was from a 15-centimetre howitzer, and was immediately followed by another, which I again saw by looking in the same direction. As this was followed by a flight of ‘whizz bangs,’ and as I had no pressing business there at the moment, I hurried from that well-known and unwholesome spot.
It was many months before I again had a similar experience, and this time it was rather more thrilling. I was walking over some open country towards the trenches in company with my sergeant-major, and the Germans had started shelling a battery behind us. They were firing with the ordinary 77-millimetre field-gun, and the first few rounds were short and unpleasantly close to us. The Hun battery must have been some way back, as we heard the report and the warning whistle of the shell some two or three seconds before it arrived. At the next report I looked up instinctively to gauge the direction in which the shell was going. The range had been increased, and I caught a fleeting glimpse of a tiny speck in the sky which grew larger and disappeared close over my head in a small fraction of a second. It did not appear to come straight, but described a ‘googly’ curve. How much of this was due to its actual path, and how much the mere effect produced on the eye by its extreme speed, I cannot say, but I know that shells do not travel straight but affect a kind of ‘slice.’
On such occasions those who duck or take cover are usually too late. The rush of its near approach reached my sergeant-major after I had seen it go over, and though he has a delightful contempt for Germany’s efforts to destroy him, which I am not always able to share, on this occasion it was I who stood up apparently unconcerned while he crouched on the ground waiting for a shell which had already burst in the battery some 200 yards behind us!
When a shell passes very near to one its whistle increases to the roar of an express train, and when there is anything like a heavy bombardment on it is only those shells which pass dangerously close that one can hear above the general din.
More disconcerting than the actual burst of the shell is the ‘whirr’ of the splinters or, in the case of shrapnel, the loud ‘miaow’ of the flying bullets. I suppose our gallant airmen have more shrapnel fired at them than anyone else, and the loud ‘clump, clump, clump’ of the bursting ‘Archies,’ followed by the whine of three hundred bullets flying from each shell, is an almost continuous tune down the line even on the quietest of days.
Happily, man can accustom himself to most things, and to the seasoned soldier these sounds arouse little more interest than the rumble of London traffic to the Cockney—unless, of course, he is actually being fired at himself!
But to-day (July 1) the distant sound of the guns is once more stirring me as it did on my first morning in Flanders over a year ago. The rumble is more persistent and continuous than it has ever been. Yesterday my work took me down to the line, and I witnessed some pretty ‘strafing,’ but it is only back here at head-quarters that the true meaning of things is borne in upon me. Whichever side of the hill I stand, and according as the breeze varies, the thud and roar is continuous—it comes from three points of the compass. It is useless to speculate, but, whatever may happen in the future, this, at least, is a black day for Germany—the voices of the mighty guns of Britain and of France are raised in such a chorus as was never heard before.