The Nemesis of Flame
A Vision of Inferno From Which Even a Dante Would Have Shrunk — “What Hell Must Be Like”
As a rule the experience of one “caught in his own trap” is regarded with a good deal of satisfaction by human nature in general. The spectacle of anyone “hoist with his own petard” seems quite in the line of poetic justice, and there is not much sympathy with the victim. But there are instances when the merited recoil punishment is too ghastly, too appalling to permit of any other sensation than that of horror, and a French correspondent on the Somme has recorded such an instance. One detachment of the French line was under heavy and concentrated fire, and the commanding officer thought it advisable to withdraw the men to a better position, about fifty yards in the rear. The correspondent quotes the statement of the soldier left behind to watch and signal the movements of the enemy. He says:
“I fixed myself about fifteen feet up in the crotch of a big tree and seized a telephone which was connected with the nearest battery. From there I could see a German trench at the edge of a little wood, about eighty yards from the trench my comrades had vacated.
“For nearly an hour nothing happened. Occasionally I noticed heads peering from the Boche trench, trying to see into the empty trench which was hidden from them by a slight rise of the ground just before it. They would have been a splendid mark for a sniper, but I had other work this time. Suddenly a group of about forty Boches crept from the wood, rapidly followed by the best part of a company. I telephoned: ‘Enemy advancing led by a detachment of flamenwerfer,’ for I had recognized the devilish apparatus carried by the foremost group. When the latter were about eighty feet from the empty trench, they halted in a hollow just below the rise of ground, and then, with appalling suddenness, a dozen jets of white and yellow flames darted up to fall plumb into the trench. The dense smoke hid the Germans from me for a time, but, thanks to my mask, I was able to gasp information to the battery.
“A few moments later I had a glimpse of what hell must be like. Our gunners had the range to an inch, and a torrent of shells burst right among the flame-throwers, exploding the containers. Great sheets of flame shot up, one jet from a container just grazing me, burning my clothes so that my ribs were scorched rather badly. But it was impossible to escape. The ground was a sea of fire. In the midst of it the Germans, like living torches, were dying horribly. One man spun round like a top, not even trying to run away, until he fell in a pool of flame. Others rolled on the ground, but the blazing liquid ran over them everywhere, and I could smell the sickening odor of burning flesh.
“I don’t think any of the fire-throwers escaped. Their screams, heard despite the cannonade and rifle fire, seemed to continue terribly long. The company behind them was panic-stricken. As the smoke lifted, I saw them moving back to the wood, and our mitrailleuse did severe execution, spreading added slaughter over that scene of horror.
“I was nearly fainting with the fumes and the pain of my burns. The Captain sent a patrol, which found me hanging limply in the tree fork. They had trouble getting me, but luckily the Germans were too staggered to interfere.”