Best o' luck: How a fighting Kentuckian won the thanks of Britain's KingMcClintock, Alexander
History
Best o' luck: How a fighting Kentuckian won the thanks of Britain's King
McClintock, Alexander
World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives, American
When we saw 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 of 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.
As we could do nothing more here, I gave orders to advance and
re-enforce the front line. Our way led across a field furrowed with
shell-holes and spotted with bursting shells. Not a man hesitated.
We were winning. That was all we knew or cared to know. We wanted to
make it a certainty for our fellows who had gone ahead. As we were
proceeding toward the German reserve trench, I saw four of our men,
apparently unwounded, lying in a shell-hole. I stopped to ask them what
they were doing there. As I spoke, I held my German rifle and bayonet
at the position of “guard,” the tip of the bayonet advanced, about
shoulder high. I didn’t get their answer, for, before they could reply,
I felt a sensation as if some one had thrown a lump of hard clay and
struck me on the hip, and forthwith I tumbled in on top of the four,
almost plunging my bayonet into one of them, a private named Williams.
“Well, now you know what’s the matter with us,” said Williams. “We
didn’t fall in, but we crawled in.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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