WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO BE DEAD.

Taihape Daily Times, 8 June 1918, Page 3

WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO BE DEAD.

I Isaac F. Marcosson, a well-known American war correspondent, knows just how it feels to imagine yourself dead. He had a very narrow escape in Gorizia and tells about it in the Ked Cross Magazine for May. He"says: "It happened one day last September when I was in Gorizia, then temporarily among the redeemed —once the high hope "of Italian valour and now one of its graveyards. I had crossed the historic Isonzo River under a rain of shells and had made my way into the central section of the town. My Companion, a famous English war correspondent, got the inspiration to take a snapshot of me under fire. I stood up against the wreck of a huge public fountain over which still brooded the somewhat battered figure o? a German sculptor's idea of Venus. She looked more like a battered Brunhilda, however. I was trying to look as pleasant as possible in the circumstances. No sooner had my friend snapped the shutter than I heard a terrific din. Ithought the world had suddenly come to an end. The stucco building behind me was blown to fragments; the air became a mass of plaster; my spectacles were smashed and I stood there choked and shocked. For a moment I thought I was dead. Then I heard the cries of the wounded and the groans of the dying and I knew that I was still alive."