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203 METRE HILL 257
of unspeakable horror, and altogether the sight
was gruesome and ghastly beyond description.
Many dead bodies lay about singly on the hill-
side, and odd limbs were strewn about everywhere.
A peculiar and most uncanny thing was that the
effective zone of the explosives was so sharply
defined. I saw men with the head or an arm or
leg wrenched off, while the rest of the body was
perfectly intact. The head of one soldier had
been cut in two from the crown to the chin as
with a saw, leaving the right half absolutely un-
touched, while the left had completely dis-
appeared.
This was the work of a high explosive shell.
These very often burst into thin knife-shaped
fragments which come whizzing through the air
with enormous force, and such a fragment must
have caused this poor fellow’s death. I saw
another man, who must have been struck full by
a shell, cut in two at the waist ; the upper part of
his body was lying there perfectly unmarked ;
of
the lower part nothing remained, not a vestige.
The trenches, as I mentioned, were completely
razed to the ground ;
only a series of mounds of
softer earth, intermixed with scarred bits of timber
and shreds of burnt sandbags gave any indication
of the site of these defence works. Out of the
debris, parts of bodies and limbs protruded every-
where, proving how tenaciously the defenders had
stuck to their positions and how undauntedly the
Japanese had attacked. Many hundreds of brave
men were buried in these shallow graves, which
the Russians had dug, and the Japanese shells
had filled in again over the dead bodies.
The sights which met me everywhere on the
battlefield had been gruesome enough ;
but what
I saw in the hospitals was ten times worse and
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