Attack
Edward G. D. (Edward George Downing) Liveing
9 chapters
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9 chapters
INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
The attack on the fortified village of Gommecourt, which Mr. Liveing describes in these pages with such power and colour, was a part of the first great allied attack on July 1, 1916, which began the battle of the Somme. That battle, so far as it concerns our own troops, may be divided into two sectors: one, to the south of the Ancre River, a sector of advance, the other, to the north of the Ancre River, a containing sector, in which no advance was possible. Gommecourt itself, which made a slight
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CHAPTER IToC
CHAPTER IToC
The roads were packed with traffic. Column after column of lorries came pounding along, bearing their freight of shells, trench-mortar bombs, wire, stakes, sandbags, pipes, and a thousand other articles essential for the offensive, so that great dumps of explosives and other material arose in the green wayside places. Staff cars and signallers on motor-bikes went busily on their way. Ambulances hurried backwards and forwards between the line and the Casualty Clearing Station, for the days of Jun
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CHAPTER IIToC
CHAPTER IIToC
Boom! Absolute silence for a minute. Boom! followed quickly by a more distant report from a fellow-gun. At each bellowing roar from the 9.2 near by, bits of the ceiling clattered on to the floor of the billet and the wall-plaster trickled down on to one's valise, making a sound like soot coming down a chimney. It was about three o'clock in the morning. I did not look at my watch, as its luminous facings had faded away months before and I did not wish to disturb my companions by lighting a match.
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CHAPTER IIIToC
CHAPTER IIIToC
Dawn was breaking. The morning was cool after a chill night—a night of waiting in blown-down trenches with not an inch to move to right or left, of listening to the enemy's shells as they left the guns and came tearing and shrieking towards you, knowing all the time that they were aimed for your particular bit of trench and would land in it or by it, of awaiting that sudden, ominous silence, and then the crash—perhaps death. I, for my part, had spent most of the night sitting on a petrol tin, we
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CHAPTER IVToC
CHAPTER IVToC
We climbed the little white road which led through the battery positions now almost silent, topped the crest, and dipped into Sailly-au-Bois. The village had been very little shelled since the night before, and appeared the same as ever, except that the intense traffic, which had flowed into it for the past month, had ceased. Limbers and lorries had done their work, and the only objects which filled the shell-scarred streets were slow-moving ambulances, little blood-stained groups of "walking wo
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Ambulance 464: Encore des Blesses
Ambulance 464: Encore des Blesses
Illustrated. Cloth, 12mo. Here we have the story of the experiences of a Princeton Junior—a boy of seventeen, who went to the war and drove an ambulance car in the Verdun and Champagne sectors. He tells exactly what he saw and heard in the American Ambulance Corps, bringing his story down to August, 1917. His accounts are modest, interesting, sometimes amusing—always vivid. War books by soldiers are very popular these days. The author-fighter has contributed some of the most informing volumes th
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The Old Front Line
The Old Front Line
Illustrated. Cloth, 12mo. $1.00 What Mr. Masefield did for the Gallipoli Campaign, he now does for the Campaign in France. His subject is the old front line as it was when the battle of the Somme began. His account is vivid and gripping—a huge conflict seen through the eyes of a great poet, this is the book. Of the importance of the battle, Mr. Masefield writes: "The old front line was the base from which the battle proceeded. It was the starting place. The thing began there. It was the biggest
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A War Nurse's Diary
A War Nurse's Diary
Illustrated, Cloth, $1.25 High courage, deep sympathy without sentimentality, and an all-saving sense of humor amid dreadful and depressing conditions are the salient features of this little book. The author, who preserves her anonymity, has been "over the top" in the fullest sense. She has faced bombardments and aerial raids, she has calmly removed her charges under fire, she has tended the wounded and dying amid scenes of carnage and confusion, and she has created order and comfort where but a
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Victor Chapman's Letters from France
Victor Chapman's Letters from France
Illustrated, $2.00 Victor Chapman was studying architecture in Paris when the war broke out and at once he joined the French Foreign Legion. A year later he was transferred to the Aviation Corps and went to the front as pilot in the American Escadrille. This volume comprises his letters written to his family, covering the full period of his service from September, 1914, to a few days before his death. "They are," says the New York Times in commenting on them, "graphic letters that show imaginati
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