The shells with black smoke, which the old-timers called "Americans" or "coal boxes", ripped with incredible violence. [...] The odd thing was that the little birds in the forest seemed quite untroubled by the myriad noise; they sat peaceably over the smoke in their battered boughs. In the short intervals of firing, we could hear them singing happily or ardently to one another, if anything even inspired or encouraged by the dreadful noise on all sides.
(Ernst Junger: Storm of Steel. Translated by Michael Hofmann)
At the corner of a stricken wood [...] at a moment when lyddite and shrapnel and machine-gun fire swept and raked and bespattered that devoted spot as though the artillery of an entire Division had suddenly concentrated on it, a wee hen-chaffinch flitted wistfully to and fro, amid splintered and falling branches that had never a green bough left on them. [...] There was a battered orchard alongside the stricken wood, and the probable explanation of the bird's presence was that it had a nest of young ones whom it was too scared to fed, too loyal to desert.
(Hector Hugh Munro "Saki": Birds on the Western Front)
Saki did not survive the war.
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