A SAPPER HERO.

Taihape Daily Times, Issue 219, 10 November 1916, Page 6

A SAPPER HERO.

HOW A FRENCHMAN BLEW*UP A GERMAN OUTPOST. Details of a thrilling and heroic exploit performed by a French sapper near Peronne are available. Sapper Louis V— was charged with the mission of getting across the Somme marshes where the Germano had built out over the marsh itself a land of bridge platform bearing quickfirers and outpost guards. His job was to blow the whole affair up with ■dynamite. Neither the officer, in giving his instructions, nor V- himself spoke of his return. To get there would be wonderful, but to return after the alarm has been given, that ■was not to be thought of. So before leaving the trench V —embraced his ■comrades and divided his possessions among, them. Then he greased his body, donned a rubber suit, and crawled forward through the wire entanglements. After two hours of progress, infinitely slow and full of difficulties and dangers, luck favoured the brave sapper; he struck a deep winding ditch along which he was able to swim and stumble almost to his goal. I At last between him and the platform there was only a patch of scurncovered pool. Silently as a water-rat he dived, and, gauging the distance aright, he came to the surface exactly beneath the German outpost. He j released the bag of explosives, and pressed the knob of the bomb, whicn ■would explode the charge. in twenty seconds and blow the outposts to atoms. Once more the sapper, swam furiously under water to the ditch en- ! trance. As he gained it there was a thunderous roar, and after the few seconds of terrible silence that followed, a hail of fragments fell around the escaping Frenchman. The whole line was immediately in an uproar. There was a blaze of lights and a boom of guns. The sapper, abandoning caution, rushed headlong towards the French trenches. His only injury was a flesh wound in the left arm, "just enough for a month's holiday in Paris," as he expresses it.