Daniel Desmond Sheehan

“ The heavens were alive with shells of every sort and kind. The earth beneath us shook and trembled and quivered as if in agony from the pounding and smashing and awful battering it was getting. There, across the way at the other end of No Man’s Land, what a catching of the breath, what a tightening grip of the heart, there must have been as the lurid flame of war burst upon them. ”

“ Our bombardment was not long in motion when the Germans got their big guns under way. The cross-play and the reverberations, the crash and clash of contending guns of every calibre was simply frightful. At this point language fails to give any accurate idea of what was happening. Bullets from machine guns began to whiz around us where we were looking over the parapet: Our sentries in the fire trench had a dangerous duty to perform, but it was a duty from which they never flinched. A sixty-pounder from a trench mortar came over and exploded on the parapet right behind us. ”

“ Trench expeditions are trying, but they never seem to mind them. They are the most cheerful and contented lot I have ever seen. They can joke at the best, or the worst that the Germans send across. I overheard the complaint of one of our men the other saying that the Boche was a very nasty kind of fellow, and no sportsman, since he could not understand the pleasantries of an Irish raid across “No Man’s Land“ which, of course, was all “for the fun of the thing“ and to relieve the dullness of trench life. ”