CLOWN’S LEAP OF DEATH.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXVII, Issue 1377, 23 March 1915, Page 4

CLOWN’S LEAP OF DEATH.

A remarkable feat by a French soldier, who has some celebrity in the French circuses as an “English clown,” and calls himself professionally “Williams,” b :s been told by one of his compa’e ■l i t'va A French trench was enfiladeu by ;. Gorman machine-gnu and the losses in co..sentience became so serious that the lieutenant in charge remarked aloud, “If we. only had somebody up tl; re. wo might ho able to deal with them,” pointing to the tottering remnant of a chimney stack, the jagged top ot which was thirty feet above the ground. He knew nothing of the peculiar abilities of Williams, and when the latter saluted and said, “I think I can get up there,” he merely shrugged and nodded. Throwing off his heavy overcoat, the clown-soldier rushed to the chimney stack, and climbed up it like a monkey, resting momentarily on projections which crumbled beneath his touch, till, from the summit, he was able to shout the exact position and distance ot the deadly Germain gun. Then he coolly began firing himself. The trembling brick-work seemed to sway_ with every movement he made, and it was too much for his comrades’ nerves to watch him. They begged him to come down, and finally, an officer peremptorily ordered him to descend. In a few minutes ho- was on the ground. First ho dropped his rifle, and then, bringing the hearts of all who witnessed the feat into their mouths, he literally took a header at « low tiled roof twenty iect below, and lebounded from it like a ball of india-rubber, lauding feut, and playfully striking a clownish attitude, with his fingers hehinds his ears, saying with a grin, in the peculiar Anglo-French lie affects; “My new turn —the “leap of death.” He is to have the cross of the. Legion of Honour for his “leap of death.”