Salim mutlu collection

discharge of the guns and the bursting of the shells being ear-splitting, with a reverberating echo that lasts twenty or thirty seconds. … We are all of us certain that we shall no longer be able to sleep amid perfect quiet, and the only way to induce sleep will be to get someone to rattle an empty tin outside one’s bedroom door.

Monash quoted in “Gallipoli”, Robert Rhodes James, p. 177

The bullet which passes close by (say within ten or twenty feet) has a gentle purring hum, like a low caressing whistle, long drawn out. The bullet whish passes well over-head, especially if fired from a long range, has a sharp sudden crack like a whip, and really feels as if it is very close. Our own rifle-fire, listened to, of course, from behind the firing-line or in it, sounds like a low rumble or growl. Our machine-guns are exactly like the rattle of a kettledrum. The enemy’s rifle and machine-gun fire, on the other hand, sounds as if it were directly overhead, in a medley of sharp cracks, like the explosions of packets of crackers just overhead, even though the fire is actually coming from the front, a half-mile away. The enemy’s shrapnel sounds like a gust of wind in a wintry gale, swishing through the air and ending in a loud bang and a cloud of smoke, when the shell bursts. Unless one gets in the way of the actual fragments of the shell itself, the Turkish shrapnel does very little harm. Our own artillery is the noisiest of all, both the