TASTE OF BAYONET.

Taihape Daily Times, Issue 219, 16 January 1917, Page 3

TASTE OF BAYONET.

FIERCE STRUGGLE IN HAND-TO-HAND FIGHT. “ BOLTED INTO SMOKE. ’ ?

“1 was like a lunatic." These startling’ words occur in a letter home from at Tommy who saw some of the worst lighting. The amazing sensations experienced during a hand-to-hand melee arc of nature that cannot be adequately described in words. “Bayonet work, ” as these desperate encounters are laconically called, sets up all the primitive instincts of men. —for the time being all that is thought of is the slaying of the enemy. ‘‘There was no time to think,” says the writer of this letter. “The gassy smoke was very dense. Just around the next tuaverse was the little bay from which the other machine gun had been firing, it wasn’t firing now. Two men were lying dead close beside it, and another badly wounded; and half across the parapet was -Sergeant T ; who had been in charge of the gun, being hauled out by his arms by two Busches, while two other Bosches stood by, one holding his rifle, with bayonet ( fixed, in the thrust position, as if in- | dined to run T— — through. The other Bosches wore shouting something in German. They wanted to make T prisoner. There was blood on the side of his head. The insolence of the thing made mo quite mad for the minute, and I screamed at those Bosches like a maniac. “It seems rum, but they turned and bolted into tiie smoke; 1 after them as hard as 1 could go. i shot one in the 'back with my revolver. He fell, and as I came up with him I snatched his rifle from the ground beside him. Then, just ns suddenly, 1 came to my senses. The other Bosches were out of sight in the smoke. 1 jumped back into the trench and put a corporal on to the machine-gun, telling him to keep traversing that front. I ran farther down the trench to find out what had happened. The fire-trench dips just there into a wooded hollow. The pounding if had had there had levelled the whole place till you could hardly make out the trench line. “Here I found the bulk of my own platoon scrapping furiously with thirty or forty Bosches oven the parapet. It was splendid. I can’t describe the feeling as one rushed into it. But it was absolutely glorious. But # it gave me my first taste of bayonet work in earnest, with a Bosche bayonet in ray hand, mark you. Xo. 1 platoon had never let the beggars as far as our trench,, but met ’em outside. To give them their due, (hose Bosches never tried any of their ‘ Kamarade ’ business. They did fight—until they saw ha-*: their number ,stuck and down; and then they turned and bolted for it into the dense smoke over- Xo Man’s Baud. They were most of them bayonetted in the back before I could get my fellows to turn. 1 did not want them to go far in that dense fog of gassy smoke. And tlierc was hardly any daylight left. I didn’t want them tumbling into my ambush. “All hands arc at work now repairing the trench and the wire; v-ith a whole company of K.E. to help. Our casualties were eighteen wounded and seven killed. Wo buried '■> 1 dend Bosekes, and they took away a good many dead. W 7 o got eleven wounded and nine unwounded Bosche prisoners. Of course they took a lot of their wounded away. They took no prisoners from us.”