CAPTURED 22 GERMANS WITH EMPTY PISTOL.

Taihape Daily Times, Issue 219, 7 November 1916, Page 2

CAPTURED 22 GERMANS WITH EMPTY PISTOL.

Mary Boyle O’Reilly, an American lady who has been touring the European war zone, relates a tense incident of the war, in which a wounded Welsh officer who had just returned from Flanders brought a grim jest from Pozieres. . “Logically I ought to be dead; but you never can tell,” he said. “Our crowd took a trench north-west of Pozieres, and rushed on to the second line without orders. 1 tried to get after them, but it was an awkward place, and a one-armed man is handicapped for climbing —my right elbow was,broken. Presently I heard scuffling underground. The sound came from the other side of the transverse against which we leaned, so 1 took a look around the coiner, and there was a German officer —the first I’d seen this year—just feeling' Ins way out of the dug-out. Left-handed I hauled my revolver from the holster. ‘Don’t shoot,’ shouted the German in English. ‘Then don’t move,’ I admonished. ‘We are nor moving,’ ne returned. All of us sat still like so many Micawbers, waiting for something to turn up. My orderly gone, nothing seemed to happen. ‘Got anything to smoke?’ I asked the German. As he moved I saw a rifle behind him. ‘Hand that this way, please; gently, now, along the ground, careful!’ So i got a first rate weapon fully loaded. That’s why, logically, I ought to be dead. It’s a long, long way to our old lines, but my orderly finally returnee with four men. So I told the Germans to march out without their weapons. They did, twenty-two of them. Then I laid down my empty revolver.”