How would you interpret ‘a combination shrapnel and high explosive shell’ in the context?
How would you interpret ‘a combination shrapnel and high explosive shell’ in the last clause of the first sentence?
Does it mean the shell is filled with shrapnel shots and high explosive?
Or does it mean it’s the kind of shell that is a combination of a shrapnel shell and a high explosive shell?
And how would you interpret the phrase ‘went on’ in the last sentence ‘…which went on after the burst and…’? Does it mean the nose-cap is till at work?
Thanks. It’s from A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway (Chapter 17).
the context:
There were three other patients in the hospital now, a thin boy in the Red Cross from Georgia with malaria, a nice boy, also thin, from New York, with malaria and jaundice, and a fine boy who had tried to unscrew the fuse-cap from a combination shrapnel and high explosive shell for a souvenir. This was a shrapnel shell used by the Austrians in the mountains with a nose-cap which went on after the burst and exploded on contact.