Did You See the Flash? It’s Too Late!

I was going up the trench, and I saw a shell burst, and I dropped in the mud. The sergeant come behind me, “What are you doing down there? ” I says, “I just saw this shell burst.” He said, “Did you see the flash? ” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “You’re too late. Get up. Away you go!” Another time, I’d been laying out there in the open, with a machine gun fire coming in, tat, tat, tat, tat, in front of you, you know, throwing dirt up in your face. Poor chap hit on this side and this side. This fellow gets up, runs over to a shell hole for shelter and a shell drops down over there. See, little things like that comes back to me, but it’s pretty hard for me to remember all these things. Laying out in the open, I’ve seen these observation planes. Those days just a single plane, and they fly very low. I’ve seen the odd dog fight, you know. The German come over and seen the two, seen two planes get at one another. All of a sudden, you see black smoke. One fella drops out of the plane, and things like that, things like that, that when I look back. Another place there, we’re laying out in the open and there was a sap. It’s like a trench, running straight up and down, like that. A lot of boys would run for that to get under cover, but he just dropped that shell into that shell hole. Some things that I don’t ... I mean, I’ve seen … Well, you’re going up the trenches, probably it’s not a very nice thing to say, but you’re wondering, you’re walking on something soft. You know you’re walking up there ... some poor chap is buried there, you know, things like that. Then there’s conditions, too. Poor chaps get out there, a lot of sickness, you know. A lot of death through sickness too, you know, trench feet and pneumonia. There was conditions that were so bad that, just as well, sometimes, that you don’t remember these things. I can remember a lot of things like that, where the people were badly wounded by the shells coming over. But you can’t do anything for them. You just got to go. I mean, the time I mentioned about staying with this friend of mine that got badly hit. I should have gone with my unit, but I couldn’t leave him. I thought, probably, I would be able to help him. But then, when I saw this stretcher bearer come along, he just stared. He just dropped and run. See, things like that, that you look back on, and you ... it’s sad in a way. Then, there was your pals that would go over there, and not come home. Yeah, war’s terrible. I mean, it’s sad in a way that, as I say, there should be some way of avoiding all this.