“I thanked him and wished him the same. I never saw him again. He was
killed in action within two hours after our conversation. Both he and
my pal, Macfarlane, were shot down dead that morning.
“When they called for volunteers to go with me in discharge of Major
Lewis’s order the entire company responded. I picked out twenty-five
men, twelve bayonet men and thirteen bombers. They agreed to my plan,
which was to get within twenty-five yards of the gun emplacement
before attacking, to place no dependence on rifle fire, but to bomb
them out and take the position with the bayonet. We followed that
plan and took the emplacement quicker than we had expected to do, but
there were only two of us left when we got there—Private Godsall, No.
177,063, and myself. All the rest of the twenty-five were dead or down.
The emplacement had been held by eleven Germans. Two only were left
standing when we got in.
“When we saw that the gun had been silenced and the crew disabled,
Godsall and I worked round to the right about ten yards from the
shell-hole where we had sheltered ourselves while throwing bombs into
the emplacement and scaled the German parapet. Then we rushed the gun
position. The officer who had been in charge was standing with his
back to us, firing with his revolver down the trench at our men who
were coming over at another point. I reached him before Godsall and
bayoneted him. The other German who had survived our bombing threw
up his hands and mouthed the Teutonic slogan of surrender, ‘Mercy,
_Kamerad_,’ My bayonet had broken off in the encounter with the German
officer, and I remembered that I had been told always to pull the
trigger after making a bayonet thrust, as that would usually jar the
weapon loose. In this case I had forgotten instructions. I picked up a
German rifle with bayonet fixed, and Godsall and I worked on down the
trench.
“The German who had surrendered stood with his hands held high above
his head, waiting for us to tell him what to do. He never took his
eyes off us, even to look at his officer, lying at his feet. As we
moved down the trench he followed us, still holding his hands up and
repeating, ‘Mercy, _Kamerad_!’ At the next trench angle we took five
more prisoners, and as Godsall had been slightly wounded in the arm,
I turned the captives over to him and ordered him to take them to
the rear. Just then the men of our second wave came over the parapet
like a lot of hurdlers. In five minutes we had taken the rest of the
Germans in the trench section prisoners, had reversed the fire steps,
and had turned their own machine guns against those of their retreating
companies that we could catch sight of.”
* * * * *
Badly wounded in the knee a little later, the sergeant took refuge
in a shell-hole. Four German prisoners on their way to the rear were
requisitioned as stretcher-bearers and carried him in on an improvised
litter.