The Real Shell and the Ghost Shell

I had in my hand the other day a heavy fragment of a German shell that had killed more than ten men on board one of H. M.’s large men-of-war. That inert fragment of iron had taken its toll of human life.
The British had captured a trench and were busy digging themselves in. A young officer passes up and down the line encouraging them. As he talks to them and cheers them with his words, from out the very sky it seems a shell comes — and bursts about him and tears his life away, and then buries itself in a huge hole in the ground.
These real shells have done their cruel and deadly work, where brave men meet their death, but the “ghost shell,” as a writer strikingly puts it, goes on upon its deadly way across the lands, over the wounded and the dead, across the seas to English homes. And there it bursts and shatters human hearts; it tears the happiness of lives and homes to pieces; it leaves a track of desolation as it goes; it is followed by the cries of breaking hearts and the sobs of orphaned children. Oh! the horror of it all. Only faith in God can mitigate the grief.