ON BEING BLOWN UP.

Taihape Daily Times, Volume 7, Issue 348, 31 December 1915, Page 3

ON BEING BLOWN UP.

•A • SUFFERER’S DECCRIPTION OF HIS SENSATIOjNS. ((From the “Westminster Gazette”.) Having survived the interesting, though in these days unfortunately not unique, experience of being the centre of a bomb explosion, I find the general public seems as a rule intensely interested to knew what it feels Ike to be blown up. ‘My reply 'always is that it ig infinitely preferable to being up by the brigadier. There is something so satisfactory about being blown up by a bomb. Yon feel you have at last really accomplished something, and enter upon a whole new field of sensations and experiences.

’s what Happened in my case

One Sunday afternoon I was gently ’ placing in position for firing one of the rocket-like grenades that are shot from rifle-barrels, and explode on contact with the ground, when suddenly there wag a tremendous shattering roar, a blaze of blinding red light in the middie cf which I found myself realising that something had occurred, and wondering if I had been by chance hit, and then I pulled myself together seteral yards away from the place in which I had been standing. Dialogue somewhat as follows: —“Bring a stretcher there; hurry up!” It is peculiar how strange it sounds when ycur own stretcher is ordered. “I suppose I’m hit; where is it?” “That’s all right, sir; no, don’t look down.” “Oh, hand, is it? Blown to blazes, I suppose.” “Tos, sir.” Then comes the sensation cf apparently endless miles down communication trenches and down hard, jolty roads, which one has travelled so many times before on one’s own boctleather. Deng before the motor ambulance is reached the swinging jolt of the stretcher has become such an obsession of the nerves that one could cry aloud, not from the pain of it, but from its mere repetition. Then the sensation of real jolting over the French reads, and you curse, the cobbles ?-• vou never cursed them before, even when in fuT marching kit at the heat '■t day. And lastly, the sweet

sensation of utter rest, in a snowwhite hosnital ward, such rest as ,vou have not known for,months that have seemed veers, a dss.e of morphia, and the glorious knowledge that you have “done your hit,” and that your name will surely appear in the Roll of Honour next week.

So much for the excitements of being blown up. but I do not think they compare for a moment with the moral torments of the man who is nearly, but not quite, blown skywards. One nice dark night not so very long ago, an officer and sergeant set out from our trench with the object of reconnoitring the German lines, which at this point were some two hundred yards distant. The expedition was almost tco successful, for. without the i slightest warning, the couple found , themselves on the veyv brink of an advanced and excellently concealed German work, the existence of which had never even been suspected. In the words of the officer concerned, “We ; flopped.” But the flop was not quick: enough. Fritz had evidently been roused by their approach, for as they lay there, afraid to breathe, “with the coldest feet in the whole wide world,” a nasty heavy bomb landed smack; in the middle of the subaltern’s back and there it remained, without exploding, the victim too much terrified of the possible consequences to dare shake it off. Still they lay like mummies, “there being i nothing else to do.” Then came a second bomb, hit the sergeant on the hoot, relied some yards down a hea-ven-sent slope, and there blew up, numbing the legs of both men. By this time the owners of the trench had evidently satisfied themselves that they were a victim to "trench nerves,” a complaint common to all troops after continuous holding of trenches, when a man begins to “see things” at night, and no more bombs were thrown. For five more racking minutes the two lay still, “there being /nothing else To do.” and then, feeling they had enjoyed Sufficient advertisement for one evening, crept silently heme wards. Yet compared with some that experience is tamenes s itself.