Left To Tell Their Story In Their Own Way, Those People
Told It Without Fire, Almost Without Interest.
A week of their wonderful life there would have made their tongues
eloquent for ever perhaps; but they had six weeks of it, and that wore
the novelty all out; they got used to being bomb-shelled out of home and
into the ground; the matter became commonplace.
After that, the
possibility of their ever being startlingly interesting in their talks
about it was gone. What the man said was to this effect: -
'It got to be Sunday all the time. Seven Sundays in the week - to us,
anyway. We hadn't anything to do, and time hung heavy. Seven Sundays,
and all of them broken up at one time or another, in the day or in the
night, by a few hours of the awful storm of fire and thunder and iron.
At first we used to shin for the holes a good deal faster than we did
afterwards. The first time, I forgot the children, and Maria fetched
them both along. When she was all safe in the cave she fainted. Two or
three weeks afterwards, when she was running for the holes, one morning,
through a shell-shower, a big shell burst near her, and covered her all
over with dirt, and a piece of the iron carried away her game-bag of
false hair from the back of her head. Well, she stopped to get that
game-bag before she shoved along again! Was getting used to things
already, you see. We all got so that we could tell a good deal about
shells; and after that we didn't always go under shelter if it was a
light shower. Us men would loaf around and talk; and a man would say,
'There she goes!' and name the kind of shell it was from the sound of
it, and go on talking - if there wasn't any danger from it. If a shell
was bursting close over us, we stopped talking and stood still; -
uncomfortable, yes, but it wasn't safe to move. When it let go, we went
on talking again, if nobody hurt - maybe saying, 'That was a ripper!' or
some such commonplace comment before we resumed; or, maybe, we would see
a shell poising itself away high in the air overhead. In that case,
every fellow just whipped out a sudden, 'See you again, gents!' and
shoved. Often and often I saw gangs of ladies promenading the streets,
looking as cheerful as you please, and keeping an eye canted up watching
the shells; and I've seen them stop still when they were uncertain about
what a shell was going to do, and wait and make certain; and after that
they sa'ntered along again, or lit out for shelter, according to the
verdict. Streets in some towns have a litter of pieces of paper, and
odds and ends of one sort or another lying around. Ours hadn't; they
had IRON litter.
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