WAR NOTES

Taihape Daily Times, Issue 220, 17 September 1917, Page 2

WAR NOTES

STORIES OF AUSTRALIANS. SAPPER WHO CHOSE DEATH. The latest Australian fighting news is the capture of a machine gun from a German raiding party ? which retired, leaving 15 dead and three prisoners. It reads small, but countless brave deeds pass similarly unnoticed in times of great offensives. Nurse Rachael Pratt, of Melbourne, first Australian siister wounded, remained on duty attending to the wounded after she had been hit in the shoulder and chest by shrapnel, until she fainted. Field-Marshal Haig immediately sent her the Military Medal. Other sisters in another Australian casualty clearing station, which was badly shelled and bombed by the Huns ? similarly worked with coolness and quiet efficiency whilst the patients were being hit even in bed. KEEN CHASE. A captain from Melbourne who is now famous in Egypt and on this front as an aviator, attacked three Germans, bringing down one, and compelling the others to retreat. He followed one almost into the Huns’ aerodrome. A lieutenant in the Australian Flying Corps flew the exceptional period of 127 hours in four weeks. He brought down two Germans the other day, and found himself surrounded by a swarm of Huns. His machine was nearly shot to pieces. The propeller had been knocked off, the straining wires were cut and the under-car-riage was smashed. He fell 6000 ft., and awoke to the fact that he was going to death. He managed to control the machine, and planed down just inside the Britsh lines crashing into a shell-hole. He was slightly but had a remarkable escape from death. Sapper Earl, of New South Wales, who was buried for thirty hours after the explosion of a German coun-ter-mine, could hear the Germans working within a few feet of him un-der-ground, but gallantly decided to die rather than attract their notice. Rescue, he recognised meant giving away the secret of the Australian mining work. When Earl was dug out it was found that he had kept cruet records of everything he had heard during his long and hopeless vigil. He had tested all the leads. He died shortly afterwards in hospital. CORPSE FACTORY METHODS. A gruesome “find” on a bit of ground out of which the British had driven their foes appears to shed further light on the corpse factory “industry” which the Germans are believed to have established in latter day s to replenish their sources of munitions. It is contained in a letter received in England. The writer says: “We made one or two interesting discoveries on the captured ground; one of which lends considerable credit to the revelations of a German corpse factory, as in a wood were found two bundles of dead German soldiers. They had apparently been killed before the advance started, and had been bundled up ready for removal. They were bundled systematically in fives, one corpse in the entre and the.* other four round about, stomachs inwards, and the whole lot bound with wire.”