SHELL FIRE.

Pukekohe & Waiuku Times, Volume 4, Issue 8, 29 January 1915, Page 1 (Supplement)

SHELL FIRE.

A TERRIFYING TUMULT. It is impossible to exaggerate the monstrous horror of the shell tire, writes Mr. Philip Gibßs in the "Daily Chronicle."

It is only a few days ago since I stood in the midst of it, watching its effect upon tile men around me, and analysing my own psychological sensation s with <* morbid interest. I was very much afraid—day after day I faced that music and hated it —but there were all sorts of other sensations besides fear which worked a ohango in me. I was conscious of great physical discomfort wh'ch reacted upon my brain. The noise.s were even more, distressing to mo than the risk of death. It was terrifying in its tumult. The German batteries were hard at work round Nieuport. Dixmude, Purvyso. and other towns and villages, forming a crescent, with its left curve sweeping away from tho coast.

On e could see the stabbing flashes from scnie of the enemy's guns, and a loud and unceasing roar came from them, with regular rolls of thunderous noise, interrupted by sudden and terrific shocks, which shattered into one's brain and shook one's body with a kind of disintegrating tumult. High above this deep-toned concussion came the cry of the shells—thav, long carrying buzz —like a monstrous, angry bee rushing away from a burning hive—which rises into a shrill singing note before ending and bursting into tho final boom which scatters death. AWFUL NOISE OF THE NAVAL GUNS.

But more awful was the noise of our own guns. At Nieuport I stood only a few hundred yards away from the warships lying off the coast. Each shell which they sent across the dunes was like one of Jove's thunderbolts, and madd one's body and soul quake with the agony of its noise. The vibration was so great that it made my skull ache as though it had been hammered. Long afterwards I found myself trembling with those waves of vibrating sound. Some people get accustomed to the nois?. but others never. Every time a battery fired simultaneously one of the men who were with me, a hard, tough type of mechanic, shrunk and ducked his head with an expression of agonised horror. Ho confessed to me that it "knocked his nerves to pieces." Three such men out of six or seven had to be invalided home in one week. One of them had a crise de nerfs, which nearly killed him. Yet it was not fear which was the matter with them. Intellectually they were brave men, and coerced themselves into joining many perilous adventures. It was the intolerable strain upon the nervous system that made wrecks of them.

A KIND OF MADNESS. Some men are attacked with a kintf of madness in the presence of shells. In the hottest quarter of an hour in Dixmude one of my friends paced about aimlessly with a dreamy- look in lis eyas. I am sura he had not the slightest idea where he was or what he was do'ng. I believe he was "outside himself*' to use a good old-fashioned phrase. And at Antwerp, when a convoy of British ambulances escaped with their wounded through a storm of shells, one man who had shown a strange hankering for the heart of the inferno, stepped off his car and said. "I must go back. I must go back. Those shells call to me." He wont back and has never been heard of again. Greater than one's fear, more overmastering is one's interest in this shellfire. It is frightfully interesting to watch the shrapnel bursting near bodies of troops, to see the shells kicking up the earth, now in this direction and now in that; to study a great building gradually losing its ehane and {ailing into ruins; to see how death take.s its toll in an indiscriminate way.

COURAGE STRONGER THAN FEAR. Men who have been in the trenches under heavy shell-fire, sometimes for as long as three days, come out of their torment, like men who have been buried alive. They have the brownish, ashen colour of death. They tremble as though aguish. They are dazed and stupid for a time.

But thev go back. That is tbe marvel of it. 'They eo back day after day, as the Belg'ane'are going back day after day. There is no fun in it. no sport, none of that heroic adventure which used perhaps—God knows—to belong to warfare when men were matched against men and not acamm, unapproachable artillery. This is their cour. a.jv etronge:' than all their tan. There is something in us. even divine pride of manhood, a dogged disregard of death, even though it comes from an unseen enemy out of a smoke-wracked riky liko the thunder-bolts of the gods, which makes us go back, though one knows the terror of it. For honour's sake men face again the music of that infernal orchestra, and listen with a. deadly sickness in their hearts to the song of the shell screaming the French word fcr kill, which is " tuel tuc! "