Thomas Witham ["Tales of the V.C."], item 2

• January 18, 2018 04:21:39 Thomas A. Lingner

  TALES OF THE V.C.

  Private Thomas WItham, 1st. Battalion Coldstream Guards.

  By, Lieut: J. P. Lloyd

  
  

   stamped 

  M.I.7 B (1)

  31 MAY 1918

  
  

    It was the morning of the 31st of July 1917, and the 1st battalion of

  the Coldstream Guards had taken two lines of German trenches on

  Pilckem Ridge. In each one of the chain of shell holes, that was

  all that remained of the German second line, crouched the men of the leading wave,

  waiting only for the order to go forward again.

  In one of these craters on the right of the line sat three men - a

  sergeant, a corporal, and a private. Up and down the dreary

  waste of gray mud in front of them the British shells were

  bursting in a leaping inferno of smoke and flame. They were

  bursting, too, in clouds of red dust upon a heap of bricks and rubble,

  which had once been a house, some 70 yards away to their right front.

    Suddenly, as they waited there, out of the ruins came a

  quick gust of bullets, that cracked like whips overhead, and, even

  above the thunder of the barrage, the three men could hear the

  familiar insistent chatter of a machine-gun. Lurking in some hidden

  corner, it had escaped the anger of our guns. In a few minutes the

  barrage would lift, and the machine-gun would work its will

  upon the khaki line that marched behind it up the base slope of

  the hill.

  Somehow, and at once, that machine gun must be silenced. But how?

  Between the three men and the emplacement fell what seemed to be

  an impenetrable curtain of fire, and if, by a miracle, a man

  should come safely through that, how could he reach the machine
  gun unseen by it's crew? Then, as if in answer to the question,

  a smoke shell burst close in front of them, and the emplacement

  was blotted out by an eddying cloud of smoke.

  Before his companions realised what was in his mind Witham, the 

  private had scrambled out of the shell-hole and was racing through

  the smoke towards the ruins.

  At the appointed time the barrage lifted, and the Coldstreamers rose

  and walked behind it up the bare slope of Pilkem Ridge. But

  
  

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