Item 01: G. O. Hawkins articles and notes ca. 1916-1919 - Page 110
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[Page 110]
8.
the killing could be done with greater ease and with infinitely less expense.
This war proves that bombardment by modern artillery is so terrifically murderous and over whelming that nothing living can face it and exist, nor yet the builded works of men withstand the onslaught of its devastating forces and remain intact.
Whole villages of brick and stone buildings are shattered and wrecked and smashed till they lay flattened to heaps of spalls and splinters and dust. The trees of shady forest, of copse, of village street and of country highway are stripped and riven and broken into matchwood. The gardens and fields, in areas of hundreds of acres, are torn and ploughed and pitted till every vestige of cultivation is obliterated in a vast gun-wrought desolation.
Acres and acres of the soil that had yielded its wealth and beauty to the toiling Peasant is so belabored by bombardment that the craters formed by shell explosions intersect