Thomas Witham ["Tales of the V.C."], item 4

• January 18, 2018 04:12:21 Thomas A. Lingner

  TALES OF THE V.C.
  

  Private Thomas WItham, 1st. Battalion Coldstream Guards.

  By, Lieut: J. P. Lloyd

  
  

    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,

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