The first shell, which I had seen fall, struck a building in the Rue de la Bourse, barely two hundred yards in a straight line from my window.

A hole was not merely blown through the roof, as would have been the case with a shell from a field-gun, but the three upper stories simply crumbled, disintegrated, came crashing down in an avalanche of brick and stone and plaster, as though a Titan had hit it with a sledge-hammer.

A shell fell in a garden in the Rue von Bary, terribly wounding a man and his wife.

A little child was mangled by a shell which struck a house in the Rue de la Justice.

Another shell fell in the barracks in the Rue Falcon, killing one inmate and wounding two others.

A shell hit the windmill and tore it into splinters.

Just as we reached the square in front of the cathedral a German shell came shrieking over the house-tops and burst with a shattering crash in the upper story of a building a few yards away.

Occasionally, after the explosion of a particularly well-placed Belgian shell, Thompson and I, from our hole in the roof and with the aid of our high-power glasses, could catch fleeting glimpses of scurrying grey-clad figures, but that was all.

Though it was really probably only a matter of seconds before the engine started it seemed to us, standing in that shell-swept road, like hours.

The air was filled with shrieking shell and bursting shrapnel.

While we were watching the bombardment from a rise in the Waelhem road a shell burst in the hamlet of Waerloos, whose red- brick houses were clustered almost at our feet.

Their forts pounded to pieces by guns which they could not answer, their ranks thinned by a murderous rain of shot and shell, the men heavy-footed and heavy-eyed from lack of sleep, the horses staggering from exhaustion, the ambulance service broken down, the hospitals helpless before the flood of wounded, the trenches littered with the dead and dying, they still held back the German legions.

The first shell to fall within the city struck a house in the Berchem district, killing a fourteen-year-old boy and wounding his mother and little sister.

There would come the hungry whine of a shell passing low over the house-tops, followed, an instant later, by a shattering crash, and the whole facade of the building that had been struck would topple into the street in a cascade of brick and stone and plaster.

Compared with the "forty-twos" the shell and shrapnel fire of the first night's bombardment was insignificant and harmless.

The stoutest cellars were no protection if a shell struck above them.

Add to this the fact that every few seconds a shell would burst somewhere behind the row of buildings that screened the waterfront, and that occasionally one would clear the house-tops altogether and, moaning over our heads, would drop into the river and send up a great geyser, and you will understand that Antwerp was not exactly a cheerful place in which to land.

On the other hand, as I argued with myself there was really an exceedingly small chance of a shell exploding on the particular spot where I happened to be standing, and if it didwell, it seemed more dignified, somehow, to be killed in the open than to be crushed to death in a cellar like a cornered rat.

One shell and one carcass were fired, neither of which went halfway, by reason of the mortars being so faultily constructed that the chambers could not contain a sufficient charge of powder.

As the heavy shot and shell came pouring in from over one hundred and fifty guns at close range, the Gheriah defenders manfully strove to repay the same with interest.

After two hours' firing, a shell set the Restoration on fire; it spread to the grabs, and before long the Angrian fleet, that had been the terror of the coast for half a century, was in a blaze.

He brings in his canoe, and as he approaches the beach he's blowing his pu, the conch-shell, to let people know he has fish.

One night, when the moon was in the sky, he told her of his war record, of the shell-shock and the strange, criminal mania that followed it; and then of his swift recovery.

Any way she turned she found a barrier Ben kept them in his shell belt, and he wore the belt about his waist, waking or sleeping.

I took out the two great tortoise-shell pins that held it up, and let my hair tumble down around me.