GUNNER JENKINS

Hokitika Guardian, 10 February 1928, Page 1

GUNNER JENKINS

man WHO fired FIRST SHOT IN' GREAT WAR. - 'Lyttelton Times, February 011 i.) Through a cloud of cigarette smoke, Gunner A. C. Jenkins, the man who fired the first shot for the British Army in the Great \\ ar, looked hack into the past yesterday, and thought of his two brave horses at Crieklewood, and said: Great pals.” lie is in Christchurch. He told yesterday morning how the first gun was fired. Major A. B. Foreman gave the orders. “ Centre Section ranging; N'o. 1 gnu, 4000 yards; N'o. 3 gun, 3800 yards—N'o. 4 gun fire!” And the thirteen-pounder boomed, recoiled, and became dug into the mud of France. It was war now. Dangerous certainly, but the crew of that N'o. ■I gun didn’t worry. Gunner Jenkins and his pals were not of that stufF. It would he over by Christmas anyway, l hey declared.

Rut the months dragged on, and the tears, and .-till the battle raged. There came an end one day—long after Gunner Jenkins bad given up hope of such

a fortunate turn of events—and the old gun. the gunner and the two horses were no longer the targets of living lead and steel.

Jenkins's gun is non in the British War Memorial Exhibition at South Kensington, battle-scarred and old ; bis horses, the pair that came with him unscathed through four years ul hell, are at the home of rest in Crieklowood ; and Gunner Jenkins has come to New Zealand, “ the best little country in the world,” he says. From August 22. 1914, until February 19, 1919, Gunner Jenkins, bis thirteen-pounder, and his two horses, remained together, associated in a terrible conflict, partners in campaign alter campaign. They were trying days. One by one the members of the original gun crew stopped the pieces of menacing shrapnel which showered upon them in an ever-recurring rain ; they were six on August 22, 191 I. when that first shot was fired ; but the day soon came when Gunner Jenkins alone was left. .Jenkins’s gun— he refers to it with the pride of ownership which comes of long association—was used to carry the remains of the Unknown Soldier at Hie burial in Westminster Abbey; at the unveiling of the Artillery War Memorial at Hyde Park Corner; and again to carry the remains of the late Karl Haig in the funeral through London.

Gunner Jenkins enlisted in the Bluish Army in May. 1911. and was sent to Ireland, where lie served with E Battery of the Royal Ilorse Artillery. Third Cavalry Brigade, under the command of General Cough. Then the Cleat War came. Ilis battery landed m Franco on August IH, 1914. They travelled by train to jiaubcugc, afterward'' inarching through Belgium to Binelie. Iliere at I 1.30 a.m. on August 22. the first shot in the greatest war in the history of the world was tiled.

Seated ill a chair at his hotel yesterday morning. Cuiuier Jenkins., the man who pulled the lever that awakened the echoes of war, pulled blue clouds of cigarette smoke into the air, and threw bis memory back to that fateful day.

lie told how a jolly, eare-lree battery was marching through Binelie that August morn when the cavalry patrols reported Cermnn Uhlans in the oiling: he called to mind the excitement ol the moments that followed, how the patrols had lieeii fired on by the Huns, and how the order came through lor his battery to get into t lie business. No. -I was used as the ranging gun.

For months Gunner Jenkins carried :tliont the cylinder of the first shell. " Just n hit of sentiment iikhlo me do it.” he siiid, “with the ghost of a Idush. “Silly ideii renlly.” It weighed ilhout n pound or so to sturt with. It seemed just ;i little hit heavier the following day. And one day when it seemed that the old brass thing in his haversack was becoming dangerously near the hundred-weight mark, (funner Jenkins decided that it must go.

Sentiment was nil right, hut there is not much room lor it on the battlefield. That is how it struck Jenkins. “ What’ve yer carried the dimmed thing about all these months lor, anyways?” a Tommy asked him roughly. And Jenkins told him how it was the first shot his battery had tired, and the Tommy told someone else, who passed it on, until General Gough heard all about it.

“ Yes,” Gunner Jenkins told the General. “ that was the first shot lired

by our battery.” “ First, fired hv your battery, he damned,” said the general, “that’s the cylinder of the first shell lired in the war.”

And that was that. Records proved that what the general said was true. There were proofs aplenty at the AN ur Office. General Gough took the shell, had the names of the original gun-crew engraved on it, and it is now a football trophy in the British Army. When the first eighteen pounder harked its hoarse defiant note, Jenkins’s battery didn’t know what the enemy had in store lor them, hut- they were not kept long in doubt Tor Fritz very sharply sent down a barrage that kept things moving amongst the llritish gunners. Six thousand yards was the range of the Mritsh eighteen-pound-ers: twelve thousand was that ol the Germans!

Gunner Jenkins can remember when iu was Tommy’s time to send across the surprise packet, can tell how at Fontonoy one warm day his battery fired on a regiment of Uhlans tit six hundred yards range, how indeed just .Yl very sick Germans remained ol the original o(if) men when the guns were silenced.

Sixteen rounds a minute those thirteen pounders lired. Every round held 2-10 shrapnel bullets. It was a terrible slaughter. Gunner Jenkins doesn't like those memories. War is hell, he says. He and his gun found themselves iu many nasty situations during those years in the mud and blood ol I* ranee, but they both (time through the great adventure, and with them. too. came the horses, which swung the thirteen pounder into line of that day in 1911 when the artillery began to sing its lethal chorus.