"Shrapnel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... number. These were for the guiding of the guns — because, for each tiny square on the German side of the lines, there was a battery or a couple of batteries behind the French front, whose business was solely to sweep that square with high explosive shells, gas shells and shrapnel, when ...
— The Boy Allies with Haig in Flanders • Clair W. Hayes
... excitement was roused to fever by the discovery that evening of an infernal machine in the City Hall. Leaning against one of the great marble pillars in the lobby of the building, a gleaming object (looking very much like a four-inch shrapnel shell) was found by a vigilant patrolman. To his horror he found it to be one of the much-dreaded thermos bottles. Experts from the Bureau of Rumbustibles were summoned, and the bomb was carefully analyzed. Much to the disappointment of the chief inspector, the devilish ingredients ...
— In the Sweet Dry and Dry • Christopher Morley
... in. There was plenty of work he could see; the machines came, sometimes whole truck-loads of them, damaged in every way he had ever seen before, and in new ways not dreamed of in Kumme's bicycle-shop—tyres torn to shreds by fragments of shrapnel, frames twisted out of shape by explosions, and nasty splotches of blood completing ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... demobbed just about a year ago. I saw him in Paris about a year before that. The old egg got a bit of shrapnel in his foot or something, didn't he? Anyhow, I ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... possible bombardment when over the Hun lines, this might be accomplished without danger. So far as was known, they had gauged the utmost capacity for reaching them possessed by the German anti-aircraft guns, and Jack promised himself to jeer at the futile efforts of these gunners to explode their shrapnel shells close to the ...
— Air Service Boys Over the Atlantic • Charles Amory Beach
... Spenski. They looked forward to the night, as men famished and athirst in a pit listen to the toil of rescuers. Almost the last thing that Peter remembered was that the moon came up before the sun had set. The rapid-fire battery was at work on a hot smoky hill, the shrapnel and larger pieces still higher, and the great masses of infantry moving below among the wind- driven hazes of the valley, their long necklaces, of white ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort
... chance to finger it. The young captain seemed quite proud of it and bore it off with him to the dining room. It was what remained of a bomb, and had been loaded with slugs of lead and those iron cherries that are called shrapnel. A French flyer had dropped it that afternoon with intent to destroy one of the German captive balloons and its operator. The young officer was the operator of the balloon in question. It was his daily duty to go aloft, at the end of a steel tether, and bob about for seven hours at ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... about the Hindenburg line. In fact, for the first half of the dinner he hardly spoke. I think he was worried about his left hand. There is a deep furrow across the back of it where a piece of shrapnel went through and there are two fingers that will hardly move at all. I could see that he was ashamed of its clumsiness and afraid that someone might notice it. So he kept silent. Professor Razzler did indeed ask him straight across the table what he thought about the final ...
— The Hohenzollerns in America - With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities • Stephen Leacock
... calmly examining the Southern position through his glasses, while he restrained his eager men. The volume of Southern fire was growing fast. Shells and shrapnel rained death over a wide area, and the air was filled with whistling bullets. It was certain destruction for any force to charge down the road in face of the Southern cannon, and the Northern army began to spread out, wheeling toward ...
— The Rock of Chickamauga • Joseph A. Altsheler
... in silence. In his man's mind one thought dominated—the immense pity of it all. And there was a dreadful fascination in looking at these girl soldiers, whose soft, warm flesh was so soon to be mangled by shrapnel ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... rendered nugatory by the bridge over the second canal being commanded from the heights, the guns on which opened upon our columns with shrapnel, while the gunners were completely protected by their epaulements. And a further attempt by Gibbon to cross the canal by the bridge near Falmouth, was anticipated by the enemy extending his line to ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... wounded, lay in a trench. The shells were bursting around him; the bullets and shrapnel were whistling through the air; the roar of the guns shook the ground. He was going down into the valley of the shadow of death. Knowing that he must pass over to the other side, he reached into his pocket with his ...
— Heart Talks • Charles Wesley Naylor
... from the once bullet-swept water's edge to the slight shelter of a sand-bank, and walk by the narrow sap into "Shrapnel Valley," still strewn with old water-bottles and broken rum-jars, by a trench then to "Monash Valley," and there probably you start coveys of partridge, which abound now in great numbers, or you start the silver fox or ever-present hare. Wild life has returned as ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... the horses are champing the bits, and are muddied from head to foot. Now, quick, quick; look, the Yankees have discovered the battery and are preparing to charge it. Unlimber, horses and caisson to the rear. No. 1 shrapnel, load, fire—boom, boom; load, ablouyat—boom, boom. I saw Sam Seay fall badly wounded and carried to the rear. I stopped firing to look at Sergeant Doyle how he handled his gun. At every discharge it would bounce, and turn its muzzle completely to the rear, when ...
— "Co. Aytch" - Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment - or, A Side Show of the Big Show • Sam R. Watkins
... the old battlefield, and I came across a great wilderness of white chalk—not a tuft of grass, not a flower, nothing but blazing chalk; apparently a hill of chalk dotted thickly all over with bits of shrapnel. I walked up it, and suddenly found myself on the lip of the crater. I felt myself in another world. This enormous hole, 320 yards round at the top, with sides so steep one could not climb down them, was the vast, terrific work of man. Imagine burrowing ...
— An Onlooker in France 1917-1919 • William Orpen
... one who asked; the whos came like shrapnel; and when, not knowing what else to do, I smiled as one dying, there went up a wail of mirth that froze my blood and then heated it to a fever. The company howled. They rolled over one another, crying, "Charlie Toliver!—Charlie ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... columns deployed into thin lines, with short intervals between the men, as the shrapnel broke. From out the blur of the mingling of landscape and sky there came, simultaneously, a whir, a crash, and the quick dash of shrapnel balls over the ground, and of the brief flash which marked the shrapnel's burst there remained only a dimly-seen lingering cloud of dirty smoke and ...
— The Boy Allies with the Cossacks - Or, A Wild Dash over the Carpathians • Clair W. Hayes
... action. Every man there, gentlemen, swallowed as much smoke in five minutes as would smother you all in this room! I received, at the same moment, two musket balls in the thighs, a grape shot through the calf of my leg, a lance through my left shoulder, a piece of a shrapnel in the left deltoid, a bayonet through the cartilage of my right ribs, a cut-cut that carried away a pound of flesh from my chest, and the better part of a congreve rocket on my forehead. Pretty well, ha, ha! and all while you'd say bah! and in eight days and a half I was making ...
— The Room in the Dragon Volant • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... with a fearful expectation, broken by sudden and shattering voices that speak and then are still—voices that seem to come out of the bowels of the earth near at hand and are answered by voices more distant, the vicious hiss of the shrapnel, the crisp rattle of the machine-guns, the roar of "Mother," that sounds like an invisible express train thundering through the sky above you. The solitude and the silence assume an oppressive significance. They are only the garment of the mighty mystery that ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... on the rolling surface of the Cosmagnon Alps—closed in by the barrage fire on both sides under the dazzling sky, but with the world below completely shut off by Monte Pasubio's crown of clouds. Shrapnel and shell disappeared in the ocean ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... stickiness, slap into my face—a stray one spinning with a sloppy whit into Jacob Bumble's open mouth as he sang, like a musket—ball into a winter turnip; while a fine preserved pineapple flew bash on Isaac Shingle's sharp snout, like the bursting of a shrapnel shell. ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... like Ruskin and many other of the nineteenth-century philosophic artists, idealised warfare. His warriors are not clad in khaki; they do not crouch behind muddy earthworks. They are of the days before the shrapnel shell and Maxim gun; they wear bright steel armour, wield the sword and lance, and by preference they ride on horseback. Indeed, they are of no time or country, unless of the house of Arthur and ...
— Watts (1817-1904) • William Loftus Hare
... suddenly into life. Rushing black figures came and went in the gaps of the bushes. A howl that drowned the shouts of the officers, a long quavering yell, burst from the ambuscade. Two rolling volleys from the Royal Wessex, one crash from the screw-gun firing shrapnel, and then before a second cartridge could be rammed in, a living, glistening black wave, tipped with steel, had rolled over the gun, the Royal Wessex had been dashed back among the camels, and 1,000 fanatics were hewing and hacking in the heart of ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... And the mutton was wonderfully lean, and the fowls, but for difference in size, might have been ostriches, they were so wiry of muscle, especially as regarded the legs. A time was to come when Mrs. Filliter was to cook shrapnel-killed mule and exhausted cavalry charger for her gentlemen, and when they were to bear up better than most sufferers from this tough and lasting form of diet, because of not having previously been pampered, as Mrs. Filliter expressed it, with ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... the ground was slippery with the blood of countless thousands, where a fellow's chances of getting back alive were, so he pictured it, one in a million, brought a distinct feeling of panic. He could see the air literally filled with bursting shrapnel, while red-hot bullets from machine-guns swept the earth as clean as a scythe goes through the ripening wheat. Man simply could not endure in a hell like ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... lack us through and through; The chilled steel bolts are swift! We have emptied the bunkers in open sea, Their shrapnel bursts where our coal should be." And he ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various
... clap of thunder you ever heard close to your ears, then the smoke covered everything and you could hear the shot going through the air like a giant rocket— The shots they fired at us did not cut any ice except a shrapnel that broke just over the main mast and which reminded me of Greece— The other shots fell short— The best thing was to see the Captains of the Puritan and Cincinnati frantically signalling to be allowed to fire too— A little fort had opened on us from ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... trenches. The 2nd Lovat Scouts were completely washed out, and had to retire and dig in down near the beach. By this time the rain had stopped, and by next morning we saw the water subsiding gradually. Fortunately it was a misty morning, and we could wander about on top, though we did have one or two shrapnel bursts over us. We then discovered that our valises and stores were still floating in the water-cart emplacement—the Sikhs having turned tail when the storm broke. It was six weeks later when we ...
— The Fife and Forfar Yeomanry - and 14th (F. & F. Yeo.) Battn. R.H. 1914-1919 • D. D. Ogilvie
... slavers; the gate was tottering, but it still held by the upper hinges. A few more blows and it must surely fall. But those blows were never struck. Again Soa sprang backwards, and the roar of the gun was answered by the screams of the slavers as the shrapnel ploughed through them. ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... we were sent north to St. Eloi, after making a short advance in the vicinity of Messines. From St. Eloi we were ordered to Hill 60, taking part in the now historic battle there. After Hill 60, Ypres, where shrapnel and poison gas put an end to my soldiering ...
— A Soldier's Sketches Under Fire • Harold Harvey
... He wanted to know how many rifle cartridges I could make in a year, at a price, a very round price, how many in five years. He wanted to know if I could convert any of my plant into a manufactory for shrapnel, and so on. What interested me is that he should take all that trouble over a small concern like mine. It looks as if someone saw a time when there would be a great dearth of ammunition. Two days ago Schroeder had gone away. I was braced, while ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... in a vain attempt to prevent the German occupation, was mined, so that it could be instantly destroyed. I found my little garden rather neglected, for the man who looks after it had been "mobilized" and is now lying in a hospital at Bordeaux, getting over a shrapnel wound in the leg. The place nevertheless was full of pears, peaches, figs, green corn, American squashes, beans, tomatoes, and no end of roses, gladioli, tobacco plant, hollyhocks, heliotrope, dahlias, morning-glories, verbena, ...
— Paris War Days - Diary of an American • Charles Inman Barnard
... Penworthy's bit of shrapnel, which had broken a rib or two, had been acquired just north of Albert. When he left, he said, we were putting ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... not long before the end, when he was feeling the strain upon him to be heavier than he could bear; after a word or two about the war—he had volunteered to go to the front as a chaplain—he said, "So I am staying here as usual; but the incessant demands on my time try me as much as shrapnel and bullets." That sentence seems to me to confirm my view that he had not so much sacrificed as devoted himself. He never gained a serene patience; I have heard him over and over again speak with a sigh of his correspondence ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... kind of march—I suppose a battery of howitzers never before found itself mounted upon cars, ready to open fire at once and bang away into the offing with shrapnel or into the bushes with canister. Our line extended a half-mile along the track. It was beautiful to stand on the bank above a cutting and watch the files strike from the shadow of a wood into a broad flame of moonlight, every rifle sparkling up alert ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... sky split redly asunder. German guns began to feel a way to Paris. The earth rocked in a gentle rhythm under a rain of shells. Shrapnel and gas lent vivacity to the assault. Guns to their utmost reach swept the little valley like a Titan's sickle. Private Cowan nestled his cheek against the earthen side of his little slit trench and tried to remember what she had ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... German trenches, and the second had been pounded out of being by our guns. The barbed wire had been cut into fragments by our shrapnel. Here and there an arm or a leg protruded from the ground—here and there a head. For two hundred yards and perhaps more there was nothing to oppose us, except the enemy shells bursting so constantly that we seemed to breathe splintered metal. Yet very few were ...
— Hira Singh - When India came to fight in Flanders • Talbot Mundy
... trail, stopping again to gaze at the shadowed valley below while I mused on the centuries it had seen and the brief moment of a man's life. Standing thus, I was like to lose my own, for suddenly I heard a whirr like that of a shrapnel shell on its murderous errand, and at my ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... The mincemeat shrapnel had proved fairly destructive, but the turnip marmalade didn't seem to of developed much internal energy. All of them jars of marmalade proved to be what they call "duds." But you bet enough had gone up to make a good battle sketch. The ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... the afternoon a third of the enemy, with the exception of a force that lay hid in bushy hollows on the east bank between the two posts, were in full retreat, leaving many dead, a large proportion of whom had been killed by shrapnel. ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... of the Women's Reserve Ambulance Corps in England was spurned. Now—they wear shrapnel helmets while working ...
— Mobilizing Woman-Power • Harriot Stanton Blatch
... with fearful crash Shrapnel and ball commingling clash, And bursting shells, with lurid flash, Their dazzled sight confound: Trembles the earth beneath their feet, Along their front a rattling sheet Of leaden hail concentric meet, And ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... abated. They loaded and moved forward, column on column, like so many immortals that could not be vanquished. The scene from the balloon, as Lowe informed me, was awful beyond all comparison,—of puffing shells and shrieking shrapnel, with volleys that shattered the hills and filled the air with deathly whispers. Infantry, artillery, and horse turned the Federal right from time to time, and to preserve their order of battle the whole line fell back toward Grapevine ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... columns are profitably used where the ground is so difficult or cover so limited as to make it desirable to take advantage of the few favorable routes; no two platoons should march within the area of burst of a single shrapnel.[1] Squad columns are of value principally in facilitating the advance over rough or brush-grown ground; they afford no material ...
— Infantry Drill Regulations, United States Army, 1911 - Corrected to April 15, 1917 (Changes Nos. 1 to 19) • United States War Department
... Correspondents. But there is a mistake somewhere; either there are not enough Germans to go round, or else they—Headquarters, you know—simply hate the idea of throwing the flower of the British Army into the full glare of the shrapnel. Anyhow, we haven't actually been engaged yet, though our Private Smithson has collected three bits of shrapnel and a German rifle; and we have all heard artillery fire (off). Which makes us think that these rumours of war aren't just a scare ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 9, 1914 • Various
... the U-38, which sank the Armenian, carrying one or more outside guns, capable of discharging various kinds of shell, from blank shots to shrapnel, represents an important evolution in the development of marine warfare. Such a craft has the equipment to enable her to visit and search a passing merchantman, and to provide for the safe removal of officers, crew or passengers from a challenged steamer, before the destruction of the vessel. ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... strong," Major Hunt said—"we have a good few casualties, of course, but we haven't lost many officers—most of them have come back. I think all your immediate chums are still in France. But I've been out of it myself for two months—stopped a bit shrapnel with my hand, and it won't get better." He indicated a bandaged left hand as he spoke, and they realized that his face was worn, and deeply lined with pain. "It's stupid," he said, and laughed. "But when are you coming back? We've plenty of ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... must. I have been thinking a great deal lately that some kind of shrapnel shell or explosive bomb would be a most splendid innovation in their warfare. Then there are breech-loading rifles and those with magazines that I must hasten to study out and learn to reproduce as soon as we ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... on continually, and I lift my eyes from the sheet at each report, to see the puffs of smoke two or three miles off. The Germans have been firing salvoes of four shots over a little village where the French batteries are stationed, shrapnel that burst in little puffs of white smoke; the French reply with explosive shells that raise columns of dust over the German lines. Half of our regiment have left already for the trenches. We may go tonight. We have made ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... private had been lying with his battalion in a trench when a German aeroplane was sighted. It had hardly passed by when showers of shrapnel descended, and the Germans, in that grey- green so hard to see, were coming on as thick as locusts. Then the orders came to fall back, and he was hit as his battalion made another stand. He had crawled a mile across the fields in the night with a bullet in his arm. A medical corps officer told him ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... an officer gave directions, then a roll of smoke, a flash, a cracking bang, a gun runs back, and intently-watching eyes presently see a small cloud of smoke over the top of a distant kopje, and a faint, far-away crack announces that the well-timed shrapnel is searching the rocky ridges; then bang, bang! bang, bang! and the rest quickly follow, firing in turn and now and again in twos or threes. Then it's "limber up" and forward, and their attention is paid to another little range further on. Soon, having ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... as lovely as the country is now, it is like one great garden; how I wish you could be here. I have had a busy day, as one of my patients had to be operated on. Doctor R—— took a piece of shrapnel out of his arm, and two others have been pretty ill; four leave to-morrow, so the general clearing up ...
— 'My Beloved Poilus' • Anonymous
... wound through his lung. The Black Watch and Camerons were almost unrecognisable in their rags. The staple dressing is tincture of iodine; you don't attempt anything but swabbing with lysol, and then gauze dipped in iodine. They were nearly all shrapnel shell wounds—more ghastly than anything I have ever seen or smelt; the Mauser wounds of the Boer War were pin-pricks compared with them. There was also a huge train of French wounded being dressed on the other side of the station, including lots ...
— Diary of a Nursing Sister on the Western Front, 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... paces in diameter. Every man of the group had fallen forward with his bayonet pointing straight out in front of him. Some had been running with such elan that in falling their shoulders had fairly plowed into the soft ground. They had nearly all been killed by shrapnel fire, which in most cases had killed cleanly. We found one, however, who had been badly mashed by a shell which had burst in the ground at his feet, making a deep, oblong hole six feet long into which ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... posted in many an odd corner, laid upon the enemy from many a crevice in the ground and many a convenient hollow. Indeed, already the sharp snap of those soixante-quinze had begun to punctuate the air, and shrapnel-bursts could be seen above the evergreen tree-tops upon the snow-clad slopes, and over hollows where the enemy were massing. But now, as the enemy cannonade died down a little, and that torrent of shells which had been hurtling upon the French trenches ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton
... which the attachments were made. The units of the Battalion not doing attachment duty were used for working parties in the trenches and suffered several casualties. No. 2 platoon, right flank company, specially suffered, being caught by shrapnel fire on the Bethune-La Basse road, ten ...
— The 23rd (Service) Battalion Royal Fusiliers (First Sportsman's) - A Record of its Services in the Great War, 1914-1919 • Fred W. Ward
... stooping at the lordly stag—but this crashing avalanche of shale with the king of the forest atop was too much for them, and they went down the "hill" into the nothing and the far distance that lay, so to speak, almost at one's feet, like a spatter of shrapnel. ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... behind walls or flickered across the open in shouting masses, and were pot-valiant in artillery. It was expedient to hold a large reserve and wait for the psychological moment that was being prepared by the shrieking shrapnel. Therefore the Mavericks lay down in open order on the brow of a hill to watch the play till their call should come. Father Dennis, whose duty was in the rear, to smooth the trouble of the wounded, had naturally ...
— This is "Part II" of Soldiers Three, we don't have "Part I" • Rudyard Kipling
... work of the Bulgarians was very good indeed; they had an excellent field-piece, practically the same field-piece as the French army. Their work was very fine with regard to aim and to the bursting of shrapnel, and their firing from concealed positions was also good. But I never saw enterprising work on their part; I never saw them go into the open, except during a brief time at Chatalja. They seemed to dig themselves in behind the crest ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox
... of artillery arose immediately to the west, shells began to rain in the river woods, then shrapnel, then, in long clattering cadence, volley succeeded volley, faster, faster, till the outcrash became ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... shapeless ruin. Here and there a house had escaped. It stood trim and neat amid the wreckage. A cafe restaurant still displayed its placards advertising Dubonnet and other aperitifs, peppered by shrapnel bullets, but otherwise intact. Here and there whole streets stood spared, without a trace of conflict, and in a street away the cottages had fallen down like card-houses toppled over by the hand of a ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... gaze roaming in space, watch two enemy aeroplanes and the intricate skeins they are spinning. Around the stiff mechanical birds up there that appear now black like crows and now white like gulls, according to the play of the light, clouds of bursting shrapnel stipple the azure, and seem like a long flight ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... hot fire now opens on the extreme left, and in a few minutes the artillery are ordered forward, and the six guns pass us at a gallop. They are soon lined up and firing shrapnel at some Boers, who scurry away over the brow of a kopje. The guns limber up and jump the railway line—a pretty stiff little obstacle—the narrow gauge metals being on top of a narrow embankment. Then across a level field of veldt, and they commence to ascend a slight depression, ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch
... with fevered lips, to roar forth shrapnel in Trafalgar Square; why not Gatling guns? The artillery did not come for very shame, but the Guards did, and there were regiments of infantry in the rear, with glittering bayonets to prod folk into moving on. All about these little ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... The shrapnel shot from Stephenson's batteries fell with too deadly an aim among the Beloochee footmen for them to hold their position on the hills. They fled towards the walls of their fortress, and the British infantry pushed hotly after them; but, in spite of all their ...
— Our Soldiers - Gallant Deeds of the British Army during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... than once, as shrapnel and pieces of shell flew by. Now and then he covered his eyes with one hand to shut out the horror of dead and torn men lying on either side of his path, but in spite of the shells, in spite of the deadly nausea that assailed him at times, he went on. The rush of air from a shell threw ...
— The Forest of Swords - A Story of Paris and the Marne • Joseph A. Altsheler
... dining-room suddenly began to reverberate to the bang-bang-bang of guns. Going to the door, we saw, high overhead, a great white bird, which turned to silver when touched by the rays of the morning sun. Though shrapnel bursts were all about it—I counted thirty of the fleecy puffs at one time—it sailed serenely on, a thing of delicate beauty against the cloudless blue. Though few airplanes are brought down by artillery fire, the improvement in anti-aircraft guns has forced the aviators to keep at ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... took place across open ground swept by both shrapnel and machine-guns, and the men just seemed to ...
— From the St. Lawrence to the Yser with the 1st Canadian brigade • Frederic C. Curry
... of the 1st our cavalry were busy with their horses, while the artillery devoted themselves chiefly to their guns. All that day our infantry stood in the trenches, and the smoke from the enemy's shrapnel made fantastic shapes against the leaden grey of the Northern sky. While I sat writing a young officer rushed in. He had kindly returned from the firing line especially to tell me of a little incident he had witnessed there. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 14, 1914 • Various
... waiting and smoking idly, each armed with his "Movement Order." The dull boom of guns not excessive, though there's a frequent "plom! plom! plom!" of the Archies, and the sky is dotted with clusters of pretty little shrapnel clouds. Sometimes the crack! crack! crack! crack! of machine guns high up in the blue. It makes you feel slightly homesick. I don't quite know why. That sort of thing isn't done ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... told Lieut. Danley could not be a Bolo armored train but was a sawmill smoke stack. Suddenly it flashed. Then came the distant boom. Came then the whining, twist-whistling shell that passed over us and showered shrapnel near the trenches where lay our reserves. He shortened his range but we hurried on and closed with his infantry with the decision in the American doughboy's favor in his first fight. He had learned that it takes many shrapnel shells and bullets to hit one man, ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... Swordfish, Commander Nettlebones, senior officer of the eastern division after my papa, although a very young man still, carries a swivel-gun and two bow-chasers. His Majesty's cutter Kestrel, commanded by Lieutenant Bowler, is armed with three long-John's, or strap-guns, capable of carrying a pound of shrapnel. His Majesty's cutter Albatross, Lieutenant Corkoran ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... Dustbin—attached for rations and discipline—accompany us on our sanitary rounds; set us a fine example of indifference to shell fire, even to the extent of attempting to catch spent shrapnel as it fell; and proved the wettest of wet blankets to the "socials" of the local rats. Then, as happens with sanitary inspectors in France, there arrived late one afternoon a despatch requesting the pleasure of my society—in five hours' time—at a village some twenty kilos distant as the shell ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, August 1, 1917. • Various
... them, for the snap and snarl of the Mauser rifles came readily to our ears, and the booming of their guns answered ours, as hound answers hound when the scent grows hottest. We pounded them with shrapnel and pelted them with common shell until the air around them rained iron. Our guns were six to one, yet those brave veldtsmen held their own with a stubborn courage worthy of the noblest traditions in all the red pages of war. They gave ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... one was looking not only at the scene of recent battle, but at the scene of a battle proceeding at that very moment. The Germans were engaged in a fierce counter-stroke on the North-Eastern front of the Ypres salient. The only indication was the bursting of a good deal of shrapnel at this point. It was here that I first saw shrapnel shells and noticed the little white puffs of smoke, which for all the world looked like the steam let off by an ordinary locomotive. Behind us, or rather, on the right ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... of Mons developed, the British line of the Conde Canal was swept with German shrapnel. German shells, also, began bursting in the suburbs of Mons and in the near-by villages. Sir Douglas Haig's right thus came under strong fire. German aeroplanes assisted by dropping smoke bombs over the British positions ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... quarter of their number on the field—the faith of the survivors was unshaken. Only those who had doubted had perished, said the Mullah, and displayed a bruise which was, he informed them, the sole effect of a twelve-pound shrapnel shell ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... this morning if anything connected with war can be so called,—a little company of mitrailleuses-a-chien, that is, small, shrapnel gun carriages drawn by the famous Belgian dogs. It sort of made my heart crinkle up to see those magnificent animals, detailed for fatal duty without doubt, pushing on so joyously. Straining in the traces and really smiling with their great tongues hanging out, they were ...
— Lige on the Line of March - An American Girl's Experiences When the Germans Came Through Belgium • Glenna Lindsley Bigelow
... Dick answered placidly. "That's Paula's luck. She's tough to kill. Why, I've had her under shell-fire where she was actually disappointed because she didn't get hit, or killed, or near- killed. Four batteries opened on us, shrapnel, at mile-range, and we had to cover half a mile of smooth hill-brow for shelter. I really felt I was justified in charging her with holding back. She did admit a 'trifle.' We've been married ten or a dozen years now, and, ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... hara-kiri, he slashed his hand across his stomach, and then drew it up from his waist to his chin. "I'm scraped with shrapnel from there to there," said Mr. Hamlin. "And another time I got a ball in the shoulder. That would have been a 'blighty' for a fighting man—they're always giving them leave— but all I got was six weeks at Havre ...
— The Deserter • Richard Harding Davis
... awful end. His eyes are dark with doom; He hears the shrapnel shrieking overhead; He sees the ravaged ranks, the flame-stabbed gloom. Oh, to have fallen! — the battle-field his bed, With Wauchope and his glorious brother-dead. Why was he saved for this, for this? And now He raises the revolver to ...
— The Spell of the Yukon • Robert Service
... Talana ridge. The light was bad and the guns re-opened upon the crest line in the belief that the whole of it was still occupied by the enemy. The practice was excellent, and in a brief space both sides were driven off the hill by the shrapnel. A subsequent attempt to take it was successful. The result of the battle, which lasted from sunrise until 2 p.m., might have been reversed but for the inaction of the main Boer force posted on Lennox Hill under L. Meyer, and of another force on Impati under Erasmus, ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... of the troops were loaded with shrapnel shells, which at the first discharge mowed long lanes in the advancing masses, while musketry was discharged with deadly effect. But Kafirs are stern and brave warriors. On they came with wild cries, sending a shower of short spears, (assagais), before ...
— Six Months at the Cape • R.M. Ballantyne
... his wound, and began feeling his hair. "It's not there," he said. "Guess I got it all over my hands. They got me this time. Shrapnel, in the body. Don't waste time on me. Some other fellow may ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... was more thrilling. It was a race between a French aeroplane and German shrapnel. To us the bursting shells looked like five little cotton balls. Since this war began shrapnel, when it bursts, has invariably been compared to balls of cotton, and as that is exactly what it looks like, it is again so ...
— With the French in France and Salonika • Richard Harding Davis
... Horace Smith-Dorrien in a telegram dated the 27th of September 1914, 'my great admiration for the splendid work the Royal Flying Corps is doing for my Corps from day to day. Nothing prevents them from obtaining the required information, and they frequently return with rifle or shrapnel bullets through their aeroplane or even their clothing, without considering such, to them, ordinary incidents as worth mentioning. To-day I watched for a long time an aeroplane observing for the six-inch howitzers for the Third ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... foreign trade arrested, numerous German factories underwent a quick transformation. Silk-works began to turn out bandages and lint; velvet works produced materials for tents; umbrella makers took to manufacturing rain-proof cloth; the output of sewing-machine factories was changed to shrapnel; piano manufacturers became makers of cartridges. Paper producers supplied the War Office with paper-made blankets. For copper, when the supply began to grow short, nickelled iron was quickly substituted. Sugar was employed to obtain ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... quietly preparing to get a move on. Some R.G.A. men have arrived with four pretty toys from Vickers's, and one fine morning they are going to disturb those sand-bags opposite them with a battery of trench mortars; our field guns will draw a curtain of shrapnel in front of the German support trenches, and then they will satisfy their curiosity as to what is behind ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... was no road to the one on my right.[6] I came across a lot of disheartened stragglers retreating up the hill. I went a little farther and saw our own firing line a quarter of a mile ahead. There was a bit of shrapnel flying about, but not much. I struck back up the hill and came upon a crowd of fugitive infantry men, all belonging to the 13th Brigade. At last I found General Cuthbert, the Brigadier of the 13th, sitting calmly on his horse watching the men pass. I asked him where the 15th was. He ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... distant hills were furry with chaparral. Once they saw a coyote slide into the brush, and once Billy wished for a gun when a large wildcat stared at them malignantly and declined to run until routed by a clod of earth that burst about its ears like shrapnel. ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... prepared for. Really, if you're planted out in the open, the peculiar awfulness of big shell-fire—what is it more than the peculiar awfulness of being run over by express trains let loose about the sky? Tell Don that when shrapnel empties itself over your head like an old tin pail, you might feel injured, but the big shell has a most disarming air of not being able to help itself, of not looking for anybody in particular. It's so innocent of personal malice ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... of the men the flame was extinguished in a few minutes and the ship got afloat, never ceasing its fire upon the enemy. At times the gunboats passed so near the forts as to be able to throw their broadsides of shrapnel, grape, and canister with most destructive force into their interior; and the forts, in the endeavor to depress their guns sufficiently to strike the vessels, lost their shot, which rolled into the ditches. They were nearly ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... plain, these little columns of Englishmen, Highlanders, Indians, and Gurkhas. The brigade pushed forward for a mile or two without opposition, then little puffs of white smoke bursting in the air showed that the Turk had opened the battle with salvoes of shrapnel; the little columns quickly spread out into thin lines, and our batteries trotted forward and were soon themselves engaged in action. So far the scene had been clear in every detail, but now as the day advanced, the ...
— With a Highland Regiment in Mesopotamia - 1916—1917 • Anonymous
... again stood immovably covering Dominique, as he deliberately and rapidly reloaded, and once more while the crowd still pressed on a torrent of shrapnel poured into them, sickening all finally of ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... his vessel about, but while she was still rolling in the trough of the sea with her sails flapping, an 8-inch shrapnel shell came hurtling through the air from the water-battery, a mile and a ...
— The Boys of '98 • James Otis
... the valley we uncovered our pursuers to the fire of the battery at the village, which opened with shrapnel shells, firing over our heads. General Stanley, who was in the battery, reported that not less than eight guns opened fire. As soon as Cleburne encountered that fire he hastily drew back over the ridge, out of sight. All pursuit with its accompanying direct and ...
— The Battle of Spring Hill, Tennessee - read after the stated meeting held February 2d, 1907 • John K. Shellenberger
... the wounded man on the table, and again were off. The guns roared. Shrapnel dropped and exploded, or exploded in air. Overhead Zaidos was conscious that the duel in the clouds still went warily on, but he could not give it a glance. He lost all track of time. He saw others with the Red Cross badge, working, working with ...
— Shelled by an Unseen Foe • James Fiske
... him plainly who he was, explicitly what "Standard Oil" was, and exactly who and what I was. I opine that about either assault there was nothing dignified, generous, or refined, but in stock-exchange battles one has not time to scent shrapnel. The immediate result of this interchange of deckle-edged[7] insults was to daze the public. "Standard Oil" attacked and actually replying; Rogers assaulting Lawson and Lawson sending back worse than he got—almost ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... the 'bull ring' again this morning. The weather is as hot as ever. While we were down there a German aeroplane flew right over from one end to the other—north to south. The anti-aircraft guns were firing at it the whole time, but failed to hit it. It was flying at a great height, and the shrapnel appeared to be bursting all round it. At one time it flew directly over our heads; but it did not drop any bombs! A few minutes after it had passed, bits of shrapnel fell quite near us—within four or five yards—proving how much overhead it had been. It was quite exciting, but not quite ...
— At Ypres with Best-Dunkley • Thomas Hope Floyd
... the forward line.... We were entertained by a certain amount of shell fire during the rest of the night. Next night we were due to leave for the forward trenches at dusk to carry on, having had our usual entertainment in the afternoon from the Germans, when suddenly they began throwing shrapnel at our trench. For about half an hour it was all over us, and I'm blest if I know why nobody was hit. It was the overhead cover, I fancy, that saved us this time. We came out like a lot of rabbits when it was over and proceeded ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... troops, a third kind of projectile is employed. It is called shrapnel, and it consists of a thin shell, holding a little powder and a large quantity of bullets. The powder is ignited by a fuse, which is set to act during flight, or on graze, when the shell is nearing the object. The explosion ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 324, March 18, 1882 • Various
... outline of the situation when the 7th Manchesters along with the remainder of the 127th Brigade were suddenly ordered to concentrate at Pelusium. The morning of August 4th opened quietly for us, although gunfire could be heard, and bursting shrapnel could be seen in the direction of Duedar. We had settled down to ordinary routine, one company setting out for a short march, and others preparing for kit inspections and other camp duties, when ...
— The Seventh Manchesters - July 1916 to March 1919 • S. J. Wilson
... be calamitous confusion. Swarming on the extremity of the branches among which the formicary is constructed, the defenders, projecting their terminal segments as far into space as possible, eject formic acid in the direction of the enemy. Like shrapnel from machine guns, the liquid missile sweeps a considerable area. Against the sunlight it appears as a continuous spray, and should one infinitesimal drop descend into the eye the stoutest mortal will blink. Attacks are made singly and in ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... on the mountings, sniffin' the mornin' cool, I climbs in my old brown gaiters along o' my old brown mule. The monkey can say what our road was— the wild-goat 'e knows where we passed. Stand easy, you long-eared old darlin's! Out drag-ropes! With shrapnel! Hold fast—'Tss! 'Tss! For you all love the screw-guns—the screw-guns they all love you! So when we take tea with a few guns, o' course you will know what to do—hoo! hoo! Jest send in your Chief an' surrender— it's worse if you fights or you runs: You may hide in the caves, they'll be ...
— Barrack-Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... when a black cat with a long red dress comes out and murders the same pieces the prima donnas have sung. We have seen a colored girl attempt a selection from some organ-grinder opera, and she would howl and screech, and catch her breath and come again, and wheel and fire vocal shrapnel, limber up her battery and take a new position, and unlimber and send volleys of soprano grape and cannister into the audience, and then she would catch on to the highest note she could reach and hang to it like a dog to a root, till you would think they would have to throw a pail of water on her ...
— Peck's Compendium of Fun • George W. Peck
... the cot on which the speaker writhed in his death agony lay another man apparently in a profound stupor. He wore the uniform of a private soldier and his eyes were bandaged. His face had been torn to pieces by shrapnel, fragments of which had blinded him. At that instant he came out of that stupor. Perhaps the familiar words recalled him to himself. He moved his hand slightly. The sister saw his ...
— And Thus He Came • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... risk that a balloon would run of being riddled by bullets, shrapnel, or pom-poms has not been taken into account, and as to the estimate of this risk there is some difference of opinion. The balloon corps and the artillery apparently approach the question with different bias. On the one hand, it is stated with perfect ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... They will read of Cats' Homes, and Anti-Vivisection Societies, and Homes of Rest for Horses, and a hundred such institutions, and they will find contributors to these institutions stirring not one finger when hundreds of thousands of men writhe under hails of shrapnel, and crowds of homeless women and children fly in terror before the unavoidable calamities or the superfluous brutalities of war. They will see a generation shaken and shuddering as the ghastly picture is daily unfolded before it, and they will see that same generation in a ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... Perhaps I said more than I meant to, Bert. I've got to turn out these machines in order that our soldiers may have shrapnel to fight with, and what with enlistments and the determination of unscrupulous workmen to take advantage of the situation, I'm pretty hard pressed. I can't very well spare steady young men like you, who have too much sense and too much patriotism to mix yourselves up with trouble makers. But I, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... kit was produced and the wound hurriedly dressed. It seemed to be but a slight flesh wound. In the midst of the dressing a great shrapnel shell burst just on the other side of the canal and threw some of its fragments into the water just beyond the U-boat. At the same moment was heard the whirr of an airplane motor overhead and very ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Submarine Fleet • James R. Driscoll
... ashore, per trip, at a speed of 2-1/2 miles per hour, in open cutters. Were a Commander to repeat that landing now, he would be able to run 5,000 men ashore, per trip, at a speed of five miles per hour with no trouble about oars, tows, etc., and with protection against shrapnel and rifle bullets. As to the actual landing on the beach, that could be done—we had proved it—in less than one quarter of the time. Each beetle had a "brow" fixed on to her bows; a thing to be let down like a drawbridge ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... dull concussions arrived from heaven, and right overhead I made out two German 'planes. A shell-case banged the pave and went on to make a white scar on a wall. Some invisible things were whizzing about. One's own shrapnel can ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... at a trail, and the stars and stripes floating proudly above their heads. The shot and shell plunging through their ranks from the hills above, the two siege guns on Lee's Hill now in beautiful play, the brass pieces of the Washington Artillery firing with grape and shrapnel—but all this made no break nor halt in that long line of blue. The double column behind the stone wall and the Third South Carolina on the crest of the Hill met them in front with a cool and steady fire, while ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... the day of the attack was unfavourable, and the straw at least did not end in smoke. The demonstration provided some amusement to our Grenadiers, who, with the assistance of a "Gamage" catapult, and two West Spring Throwers succeeded, to their immense delight in bursting the old Bethune bomb as shrapnel over the German trenches. It was only when the last bomb was thrown that Sergt. G. F. Foster, the stoutest Bomber that ever lived and fell, ended a demonstration which can hardly have caused a flutter in the dove-cotes of the German ...
— The Sherwood Foresters in the Great War 1914 - 1919 - History of the 1/8th Battalion • W.C.C. Weetman
... sometimes we could only locate them by the glint of the bayonets in the sunshine. Everywhere they were pushing on in extended order, but many falling. The Turks appeared to have the range pretty accurately. About mid-day our men seemed to be held up, the Turkish shrapnel appearing to be too much for them. It was now that there occurred what I think one of the finest incidents of the campaign. This was the landing of the Australian Artillery. They got two of their guns ashore, and over very rough country dragged them ...
— Five Months at Anzac • Joseph Lievesley Beeston
... dozen willing arms raise the body, bearing it to one side, for the major, mindful of the precious moments, yells to "swing the guns and pass the caissons." In a minute, the heavy Parrotts of De Gress are pouring their shrapnel into the faces of the Union troops, who are, three hundred yards away, forming for a rush ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... but sufficient to stop him riding for a week or two. "I should never have thought anything more of it—I mean, connecting the dream with the ill-luck—but in the South African campaign there were quite remarkable instances. You see, at such times when you are playing hide-and-seek with shrapnel, officers and men get very chummy when we do get a spell for a talk. The Tommies give us their confidences, and ask us all kinds of strange questions ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... On the beaches, certainly, there were tents and stores and men moving. But the rolling countryside beyond seemed bleak and deserted. Only occasionally a high-explosive shell threw up a spout of brown earth, or a burst of shrapnel sent a puff of white smoke to float like a Cupid's cloud along the sky. And yet two armies were hidden here, with their rifles, machine-guns, and artillery ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond |
