Tommy Atkins at War: As Told in His Own Letters

an officer who has seen too much of the grim and ugly side of the campaign to find any romance in it. Yet out of all the horror there emerge inc

calculation. The soldier does not

d hour of g

age withou

r day, it is just because the thing has to be done, and he is there to do it. Tommy Atkins doesn't stop to think whether he is doing a brave thing

ed him for more than a mile under a vicious German fire that was exterminating nearly everything. It was a fine act of heroism. "Yet if anybody we

h, thus describes what happened: "Pledge mounted a horse and dashed through the German lines. His horse was brought to the ground, and, as we afterwards discovered, he sustained severe injuries to his legs. Nothing daunted, he got his horse on its feet, and again set off at a great pace. To

position, and the gunners had been killed, whereupon the two drivers went to rescue the gun. "It was a good quarter of a mile away," says the witness, "yet they led their horses calmly through the hail of shell to where the gun stood. Then one man held the ho

e officers and men of one of the British batteries had been killed or wounded with the exception of one subaltern a

order was passed to abandon the guns temporarily. This is the time when our men don't obey orders, so they stuck to their guns. They ceased their fire for a time. The

ur Engineers. A party of them rushed towards the bridge, and, though dropping one by one, were able to lay the charge before all were sacrificed. For a moment we waited. Then others came. Down towards the bridge they crept, seeking what cover they could in their eagerness to get near enough to light the fuse. Ah! it was then we Frenchmen witnessed something

otect them. This was done by a sergeant of the Engineers, but immediately afterwards his own head was blown away by a German shell. "The brave fellow certai

ur rifles," writes Private Styles; "so simple!" Sir John French relates a similar exploit of an officer who, while proceeding along the road in charge of a number of led horses, received information that there were some of the enemy in the neighborhood. Upon seeing them he gave the order t

what you might call a dainty afternoon tea in the trenches under shell fire. The mugs were passed round with the biscuits and the 'bully' as best they could by the mess orderlies, but it was hard work messing through without getting more than we wanted. My next-door neighbor, so to speak, got a shrapnel bullet in his tin, and another two doors off had his biscuit shot out of his hand." Lieutenant A.C. Joh

nd the other entered his sleeve and passed through his trousers as far as the knee, without even scratching him. Drummer E. O'Brien, South Lancashires, had his bugle and piccolo smashed, his cap carried away by a bullet, and another bullet through his coat before he was finally struck by a piece of shrapnel which injured his ankle; and anot

p was shot off so neatly that the bullet left a groove in his hair just like a barbe

let out of a shell between the left eye and the temple. "It struck there," he relates

ddenly found the attentions of the Germans were directed to him. "You know what a fine mark he is with his red head," says the writer to his correspondent

ne deeds done in the quiet corners of hospitals and out of the glamour of battle that move the strongest to tears. Such is the incident related by a member of the Royal Army Medical Corps, and it is a fitting story with which