When I know there's one of them about, I
want to go round the corner. I remember one time--"
"That's all nothing, my lads," said the new sergeant, stopping on
his way past, "you ought to see what they chucked us at Verdun,
where I've come from. Nothing but whoppers, 380's and 420's and
244's. When you've been shelled down there you know all about
it--the woods are sliced down like cornfields, the dug-outs marked
and burst in even when they've three thicknesses of beams, all the
road-crossings sprinkled, the roads blown into the air and changed
into long heaps of smashed convoys and wrecked guns, corpses twisted
together as though shoveled up. You could see thirty chaps laid out
by one shot at the cross-roads; you could see fellows whirling
around as they went up, always about fifteen yards, and bits of
trousers caught and stuck on the tops of the trees that were left.
You could see one of these 380's go into a house at Verdun by the
roof, bore through two or three floors, and burst at the bottom, and
all the damn lot's got to go aloft; and in the fields whole
battalions would scatter and lie flat under the shower like poor
little defenseless rabbits. At every step on the ground in the
fields you'd got lumps as thick as your arm and as wide as that, and
it'd take four poilus to lift the lump of iron. The fields looked as
if they were full of rocks. And that went on without a halt for
months on end, months on end!" the sergeant repeated as he passed
on, no doubt to tell again the story of his souvenirs somewhere
else.
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