The Explosion : A Memory of 1915
By DENIS IRELAND.
ON a sunny morning in June, 1915, during a tour of duty as trench-mortar officer in the trenches opposite Armentieres, I was standing half in and half out of a dug-out doorway in the act of pulling the lanyard which fired my mortar when I was suddenly aware of a whistling sound and a dark shadow overhead. I looked up, and for a moment the dark shape seemed to hover motionless ; then it mate- rialized, swooped, grazed the sandbags beside my head . . touched me on the shoulder in passing . . . rolled down the steps leading to the interior of the dug-out with a stride like an eager, bloodthirsty gnome . . . and exploded.
Writing a long time afterwards it seems to me that something like this must have been the actual sequence of events. But the word exploded pales before the actuality as too coldly scientific and objective. So far as my con- sciousness was concerned, what actually happened was that at the light, glancing touch I turned with the firing cord still in my hand and watched that obscene, slithering descent of the dug-out steps very much as if Death himself had touched me on the shoulder in passing, muttering : "Excuse me, but I have business with these gentlemen below," had pushed me unceremoniously aside, and left me standing there, powerless to help. The actual space of time between the darkening of the air overhead and the contact with the dug-out steps which detonated the charge must, of course, have been a matter of a second, or a fraction of a second, but from the first swooping rush I was conscious of what was about to happen . . . and there was nothing left but to watch the thing slither downwards into the darkness like a guest sure of its welcome . . . I had not long to wait. After a pause which may have been the thirty-second part of a second I experienced a sensation as if I had been kicked in the stomach by an invisible elephant ; the wall of my belly was driven in until for a sickening instant it almost touched my spine ; I was vaguely conscious of the dug- out doorway collapsing, of beams and sand-bags pinning and overpowering me . . . of stifled shouting and shriek- ing from below ; then blackness intervened, and a merciful oblivion.
When I came to myself I was wandering like a drunken man in a communication trench about fifty yards to the rear of the scene of the explosion. My trench cap was gone, blood was streaming from the side of my neck, and I was blackened from head to foot. The bombardment was still going on ; in the clear sunlight I could see the " sausages " streaming over from the German lines, hovering, and descending with a succession of sickening crashes ; and now the explosions which formerly had excited in me only a detached curiosity filled me with absolute terror. I wanted to run, to keep on running, down communication trenches, along pave roads, past railway junctions, away from men and all their devilish works, and finally to go to sleep face downwards in a green field. Only one thing kept me from running. I resented the loss of my cap. God's curse on the man who had taken my cap ! For what seemed like an eternity I wandered about in a kind of drunken haze, searching for my cap, cursing everyone who spoke to me.
Afterwards I discovered that almost an hour had elapsed before the rescue party had succeeded in releasing me from under the beams, and that once released I had prowled about for another hour looking for my cap, apparently unhurt, but completely wandering in the mind. All this time I would let no one approach inc, or do anything for me ; and the regimental M.O. had re- commended leaving me alone. . . . Eventually I was persuaded to let him wash out the slight flesh wounds in my neck and to give me an anti-tetanus injection. By this time I was re-discovering the use of my wrist-watch, which, protected by a little metal grille, was still going. To my intense surprise it was already late afternoon.
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