GERMANS CAME CRYING.

Taranaki Daily News, 30 December 1916, Page 9

GERMANS CAME CRYING.

| SURRENDERED FOR FOOD. It is the spirit of the British soldier that makes him such a formidable enemy —nothing daunts him. He is always the same cheery optimist. This is vividly shown in the following letter from a gallant .lad who lias been through some of the worst fighting. "We went over in grand style," writes a sergeant recalling the assault on Montauban, "and found the place in an awful mess. Most of the houses had been knocked head over heels—the only ones I saw standing were a couple of cafes. A# we came on we saw lots of Germans running out of the back of the village, but there were plenty of them monkeying about the ruins. We divided the company up in groups of six, but as we neared the village we joined up again. My five pals and myself flaw some Huns in a ground floor room, so we dropped a Mills bomb through the window and didn't wait for an answer. "As we turned the corner we saw a German lying round the end of a wall. He'd got a machine-gun and had made a little emplacement with bricks. He turned the damned thing on me and got me in the foot. I didn't wait to see ) what happened, but simply went at him and bayoneted him. I couldn't go on much further, so I sat down to see what was the damage. "Mv foot was pretty bad. but when I looked at my left hand breast pocket I saw two holes in it. I opened my pocket and found that two bullets had gone through my metal shaving mirror, through my pocket case, and had nosed their way into a book I was carrying. Funnily enough earlier in the morning my officer gave me the book and said 3 could read it when I got into the German trenches, so I put it in my pocket, little thinking that I should be able to read a bit of it on a hospital srhip coming back. The two bullets, after piercing the mirror and case had met and fused into one lump of metal. "I saw three Germans come up ti» two of our fellows and throw down their rifles. So our boys chucked theirs down, too, and went out for them with their fists, and they didn't half give them a dusting. The Germans seemed to be all ages from 16 to 50, I should say. Some of them came up crying out that they had had no food for five days. One Of our boys did wonders with the bayonet—he was chasing three Germans —he caught them up and bayoneted two as he swung round, he hit the third man down with the butt of his rifle. The spirit of our boys were splendid—they simply loved the fun. One of them got blown up by a shell. He seemed pretty dazed, but lie picked himself up and came long. All he said was, "Oh, there must be a war on after all, I suppose."