BRITISHERS’ GRIM ADVENTURE

Taihape Daily Times, 30 November 1917, Page 6

BRITISHERS’ GRIM ADVENTURE

WEIED TALES EEOM THE TRENCHES. “Some fellowsT talk* about using the bayonet as if they enjoyed it! ” said the quiet looking Tommy, fhe youngest probably of the little group o± wounded who had consented to chat about their campaign adventures when visited in the great hospital ward. t‘An ’ you talk that way about the bayonet 'cause maybe you’d never nothing to thank it for!” countered a small, wiry fellow with a real fighting face. “Whore was you wounded, anyway?” he added

“On the. Somme,” replied the first speaker. “But I wasn’t wounded really, though I went through most of the fighting there.” And he looked down at his feet, both of them encased in soft slashed carpet-slippers. “Trench feet,” he explained, “an’ I don’t want anything worse! Stood to my waist in water for thirteen days and nights without once taking my boots off. Only natural the feet should rebel, I suppose! ”

“Oh, the British are not the only ones who have had to fight in water,” he added in response to a remark I made, “The Huns had to do it, too, in the damp and marshy place we were in. All the same, the trenches we took on the Somme were marvels. You aea, ‘Fritz had jfor ,a thirty years’ war —he had mistaken the ‘duration’ thirty instead of three —and everything was as nice as nice. AT WORK WITH THE COLD STEEL “We on the other hand, looked on our burrows as temporary. We wanted to be moving—and we did move, too, much to Fritz’s surprise and annoyance. As I say, he had taken up a permanent abode, and that’s the whole secret of the difference between our trenches and his. We could have been as elaborate in our abodes if we’d eared, but they were only a haltingplace on the road to the Rhine. See?” “If you’d been with us,” chimed in a Yorkshire giant, whose left hand was as stiff as a mummy’s with 'splints and bandages, you’d have been jolly glad to have had the cold steel to use. I was out in the first Battle of Ypres. right at the beginning of things. The Huns had been having it nearly all their own way before that ,and this was practically the first time they’d had a set-back. It took all the steel we had to it, too. If you’re up against it—right bang up against the knowledge that if you don’t kill, you’ll be hilled —you don’t stop to think out whether a thing’s messy or not. ... You go straight ahead with the business! “My life! but that was a time! The wonder to me is that we ever came through it. Excitement? The exciting thing come on top of another so fast that you can’t recollect them all. Think I’ll make a collection of ‘the most exciting thing I ever saw ’ stories. Would make some reading, eh. Jock? What would your contribution be?”

“Jock” was a young, fresh-coloured Scotsman with eyes as blue as the sea. A crutch lay beside him as he sat on the edge of the bed, but his cheery face did not betray any brooding sorrow over the loss of the limb given

in the great cause. “The most exciting thing I ever saw?” he said, almost blushing through the veteran tan as he found himself the centre of interest. ‘‘Well I didn’t see it. I experienced it. “It was one night just about the time of Loos. The worst job we lads used to have then was not fighting the Huns, but burying the dead ones. They lay out in front until they became —well, sort of troublesome. Then we had to take them from where they lay, wrap them in canvas, and carry them down the trenches to a certain place and give them decent burial. “Well, this night my pal and I were deputed to take a dead German to the place of internment. It had been raining all the night before, and the dead had lain out all day, so the job was at its very worst. The wind was howling like a soul of agony, the trench was as slippery as soft soap, and the Hun was very heavy. “We struggled on, however, not exactly blessing Fritz for his great girth, and openly strafing his live compatriots whenever they sent up a star shell and laid the wild expanse of No Man’s Land as clear as .daylight A ghoulish lot we must have looked and no mistake, but we plodded on, and on, and on, until — “‘Here!” said my pal, ‘l’m done. Let’s have a rest a bit.’ ‘Eight/ said I, and we laid Fritz down, then stretched ourselves. Creepy? It was. That horrible wind, too, made it creeper still.

“My chum and I were whispering quietly in the darkness, when all of a sudden, a sound rose that made our hair stand on end. It came from the fdead’ German. —a great, big groan. , . . . ! Just like this . , oh! The pair of us stood up with a jerk, then froze with fear But only for a moment Though I say it myself, we were old campaigners. Simultaneously we stooped down and beheld old Fritz sort of blinking at us. He was alive! “Things hurried after that. We

! r ot along somehow, and after he d been in the trench some time he pulled round. Oh! it’s not all so incredible as it sounds He had been badly wounded, and had lain out all day The jolting had revived him a bit, and —there you are!

The Ypres hero began again. “That reminds me,” he said, “of a Northampton, a little itllow five feoc six, who put up as jolly a fight as ever you saw against two Prussian Guardsman It was during a trench row one of these baymnet rackets that made madmen of you. I witnessed the thing myself, but the little fellow told me alter about it. “MY CLOSEST CALL,

“ ‘ Two of ’em,’ ho said, an’ they came racing at me like bulls, bayanets down like horns, and makiig the earth shake. My number’s up says T, for it wasn’t “fight” that was in their faces, but murder. You know the Prussian beasts. I do, anyway, and by heavens, I was determined to give as good as I got —for that’s the whole thing about bayonet fighting. “ ‘One of the beasts get ahead of the other, to have the glory of wiping the earth with me, I suppose. . . . He struck —and missed, as the Irishman said I struck and —well, I didn’t miss. I turned to the other brute, but just as he was down on me, he —how queer it looked! —he simply ’ collapsed. Fear of the steel? Not a bit. Some chum behind me had got him with a bullet. “But that wasn’t the finish. The bruite was only wounded. He ups~and at me again, as strong as ever. It was a better match then, wounded though he was, and I won. That’s all. It was my closest call, though.” The story-telling w:as finished. “And none of y-ou boy r s will bo anxious to repeat your experiences” I said. “Well, said the man from Ypres, “I’d like to see it finished, I would, for if ever any men on earth have earned punishment those Germans have Cruel, treacherous, unchivalrous brutes they are. However, I’m thinking I’ll have no more excitement with them. My next exciting moment will be the moment I get into my civvies again. Wish it were here.”