Shell by the million
The French farmers call it the iron harvest. Every year they plough up more shells, which are dumped where farm tracks meet the road to be collected and blown up.
There are hand-grenades, often still primed; trench mortar bombs, both little flat-nosed ones and big bulbous projectiles which earned the nickname toffee apples; and there are shells, the most common from field guns like the 75mm and 18-pdr, on up to the extraordinarily rare 1,980 lb shell for the huge French 320mm railway gun.
'As World War One went on, guns grew in numbers and calibre ...'
Simply seeing just how many shells have survived into the 21st century emphasises why so many veterans saw the war as a conflict between man and gun. As World War One went on, guns grew in numbers and calibre, and were abetted by short-range trench mortars, all of which consumed ammunition on a vast scale.
In the two and a half years of the Boer War the British Army fired 273,000 shells, and in the first six months of World War One it fired a million. In the week’s bombardment before the battle of the Somme in 1916 it fired a million and a quarter. During the Third Battle of Ypres, a year later, there were times when daily expenditure exceeded two million shells.
'... some of the monster guns used by both sides blew defences and their occupants to tatters.'
This weight of fire did not simply create the ‘artillery landscape’, its villages and woods pulverised by shellfire so characteristic of parts of the Western Front, but it helped transform domestic industry. In the spring of 1916, 61 per cent of the male workforce was involved in war work, and women were drawn into it to an unprecedented extent: there were less than 100 women employed at Woolwich arsenal in November 1916, but 30,000 a year later.
This avalanche of shells did not simply change the landscape, but it transformed the experience of battle for most of its participants. They lived a troglodyte existence, in trenches and dugouts, but while these might kept out shells like those fired by the 18-pdr, some of the monster guns used by both sides blew defences and their occupants to tatters. By 1916, it was clear that heavy guns, like the 9.2 inch guns widely used by the British Army, had a key role to play. Shellfire had a horrifying effect on body and mind alike.
In 1914 Captain Arthur Osburn, a medical officer, ran into a farm courtyard just after a German heavy shell had hit it:
Fragments of stone, manure, pieces of clothing and hair came falling about me as I ran through an archway into the yard and beheld one of the most heart-rending sights I had ever seen, even in war. The detachment of 9th Lancers had almost completely disappeared. In the centre of the yard where I had seen them but a moment before there was now a mound four or five feet high of dead men and horses… Around this central heap of dead men the wounded lay on all sides. Some had been blown to the other end of the yard, their backs broken. One sat up dazed and whimpering, his back against a wall, holding part of his intestines in his hand.
Arthur Osburn, Unwilling Passenger
Published: 2005-03-01
