"By the red and flickering light of the sheelbursts men could be seen running and staggering, bent low. They dropped into what had been a trench, into shellholes, enduring, enduring with tautened faces, lying close to the ground, crouching as they burrowed for dear life with their entrenching tools, while the storm of steel wreaked its fury on tortured earth and tortured flesh. There were on all sides the groans and the waling of mangled men. A seargent ran around his platoon. He saw by the flashes bodies twisted and doubled and still, and dying men with eyeballs protruding and slightly wavering, blowing bubbles of blood from their lips as they breathed. Then the top of his skull was lifted from his forehead by a bullet, as on a hinge, and his body fell on two crouching men, washing them with his blood and brains. We were in the front line, but did not immediately know it. The din was frightful. A man with a blackened face and shattered arm ran bleeding towards the rear. A officer was seen in flashlights yelling in a corporal's ear. The answer was unheard. The corporal moved hither and thither, found what men he could, and motioned them forward. We stumbled from shellhole to shellhole by ones and twos with panting breath and shiny faces. One fell writhing. They disappeared in the flickering luminous smoke. The smell of burnt explosive was thick and pungent. Bodies, living and dead, were buried, tossed up and the torn fragments buried again."
To the Last Ridge, W.H Downing. p 76-77. Duffy and Snellgrove, Sydney (1998).
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