SHOT BY SENTRIES

Evening Post, Volume LXXXVIII, Issue 138, 8 December 1914, Page 8

SHOT BY SENTRIES

(rROU OUR OWN CORRESPONDENT.) SYDNEY, 4th December. We have had reported three recent cases in which soldiers on sentry duty have, in compliance with orders, fired on persons who have not heeded challenges given on their approach to guarded areae. In a Victorian case a man in a sailing boat was challenged when he sailed up to a military depot at dusk. The man kept his boat straight ahead until the sentry fired, and one of the bullets struck the man in the arm. The injured person explained afterwards that he had not understood^, himself to be challenged. Last week two men on a motor-car, travelling through a patrolled tract near Sydney, were challenged. No notice was taken, and the motor-car sped on. The soldier fired several shots. One of the men in the cay was wounded in the shoulder and the other was hit in the arm. They stopped them Happily the wounds were not very serious. The two men say they did not hear the sentry shout. The latest case of this kind is just reported from Fremantle, Western Australia, where an Italian fisherman has been killed by a shot fired^ by a sentry on Rottnest Island. According to the meagre particulars to hand, the fisherman took his boat within a • prohibited area, and was duly challenged. He did not stop, however, and the sentry fired a shot over the boat. This was without effect, and the sentry fired again, with fatal re- ' suits. Soldiers who have been on sentry duty say that an astonishingly large number of people take no account of the precautions which the exigencies of war make necessary as regards the approaches to forts and other military areas, and that a sentry's challenge is, often received with contemptuous disregard. Sometimes, however, it is a case of false alarm. For instance, a sentry on duty at Sydney Heads saw/ at night a figure apparently that of a creeping man, alongside the fence around a fort. A peremptory challenge only caused tho figure to move a little faster. The sentry fired, and with effect. In the m6ming the lighthouse-keeper found that his pet goat had been shot.