Cards had, in his apparently casual contempt of that school world, a remarkably competent sense of the direction in which straws were blowing.
"Fortitude"
Hugh Walpole
Trenches had disappeared, concrete emplacements had been overturned, breastworks had been flung like straws to the wind.
"From Bapaume to Passchendaele, 1917"
Philip Gibbs
It fell and burst right inside the shell-crater where the stretcher-bearers were huddled with their wounded men, and they were blown out of it yards high, so that their bodies were tossed like straws in a fierce wind....
"From Bapaume to Passchendaele, 1917"
Philip Gibbs