Energy books

Casualty clearing-stations were ordered to make ready for big numbers
of wounded. That was always one of the first signs of approaching
massacre. Vast quantities of shells were being brought up to the rail-
heads and stacked in the "dumps." They were the first-fruit of the
speeding up of munition-factories at home after the public outcry
against shell shortage and the lack of high explosives. Well, at last
the guns would not be starved. There was enough high-explosive force
available to blast the German trenches off the map. So it seemed to
our innocence--though years afterward we knew that no bombardment
would destroy all earthworks such as Germans made, and that always
machine-guns would slash our infantry advancing over the chaos of
mangled ground.
Behind our lines in France, in scores of villages where our men were
quartered, there was a sense of impending fate. Soldiers of the New
Army knew that in a little while the lessons they had learned in the
School of Courage would be put to a more frightful test than that of
holding trenches in stationary warfare.


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