In the first rush toward the pile an explosion snuffed out the lives of
thirty or forty of the men, knocking the rest of us off our feet like so
many nine-pins, besides killing several of the horses on the road, and
to add to the already indescribable chaos, several of the horses
stampeded, racing blindly into barbed-wire entanglements and adding to
the general destruction.
What with Fritz dropping bombs from his airplanes, our horses stampeding
and screaming like wild things, and our own explosives bursting in every
conceivable direction with a thousand different roars, the scene can be
better imagined than described. We saved about 10,000 rounds out of that
entire dump. For a distance of twenty miles the reflection of the fire
extended, the rockets themselves being visible for a space of ten miles.
I don't suppose since the world began was there ever a scene of such
awful beauty; it was a bursting Vesuvius with the co-mingled radiant
beauties of a thousand rainbows.
When there was nothing further that we could do, we regained our
frightened mounts and resumed our journey.
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