THEN AND NOW

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 3, Issue 282, 12 March 1941, Page 8

THEN AND NOW

1914 SAW HAND TO-HAND FIGHTING BETWEEN HUNS AND BRITISH If your children ask what war was like in 1914-18 and what you in particular did, don't be so modest and say, "Just a bit of fighting." Take a leaf out of the book of Private Eyre; this is from his Somme Harvest: "We are chucking bombs frantically. Men are going down. Huns appear, scrambling over the obstacles and jumping among us. Now it becomes a hand-to-.hand melee.

Faces and huge grey uniforms appear before me through the eddies of smoke. I strike out and lunge. Off goes my steel helmet, I reel, I stumble and fall among a heap of writhing figures. For an awful instant that seems a life-time, I look up with wide, terrified eyes at a gigantic, steel helmete'd, red-faced Hun lunging al me with a bayonet: The thought flashes through my numbed brain: This is the end,' and I await the stroke that will send me to oblivion with terrorstricken soul, when there is a flurry, a figure hurls itself like a battering-ram at the Hun. A terrible yell goes up and my assailant disappears in a shower of blood and crashes down amongst the sand bags, tearing at his stomach, with heels drumming and kicking at me. There's a Avild scramble all round. T jump up, grab my rifle and lay about me blindly, madly . . . Men fall, rise, come at me, melt away 79 And one man again is a match for a whole army of Fritzes. At least so they say in books.