[Edward]

Originally Posted by Jim Oxley

The phrase comes from Hemingway’s 1944 Collier's magazine dispatch, "War in the Siegfried Line." Describing the brutal combat in the dense, dark fir forests of the German border, he wrote that artillery shell bursts tore through the trees, sending wooden splinters raining down "like javelins in the half-light of the forest".

The author is obviously a learned man.

Best post of the week!