SHOT TWO HUNS

Evening Star, Issue 16987, 8 March 1919, Page 9

SHOT TWO HUNS

GAME QUEBEC WOMAN

REFUSED TO DESERT HOSPITAL,

TEN SONS KILLED LN WAR

Ten sons she has given to her country, and every one has been killed. _ Three hundred men she has recruited for the Canadian overseas service, and two Huns she has slain with her own bands. She has served tho British and Canadian forces as an ambulance worker and driver, and has been honorably discharged from service. And, regardless of all personal danger, she acted as cook on board the _tug Warrior, out of Seattle, that she might thus release another man for service. What woman has done more for her country than Mrs Emma Wilkins, of Qnebec, Canada, who has done all these things? WENT TO WAR AT 51. Six of the sons that Mrs Wilkins lost in the service were hA own flesh and blood. The other four were sons of her husband by a former mar: but she had mothered them and cared for them with a love equal to that which she gave \ her own. Her husband himself was ! killed in the South African War, and. bcI cause of the shock of his death the baby : she" had died soon after. Her hrother-in- ': law was killed fighting in this war, and his wife, Mrs Wilkins's sister, went insane when she heard of the death. HUNS RAID HOSPITAL. Husbandless, childless, relationless, Mrs Wilkins, 51 vears old. determined to be of service so long as the war raged. Her creed was the gospel of war as she had learned it, and her one prayer was that the Huns might be beaten back and back until, fightirur upon their own ground, they were crushed, by the righteous wrath of the peoples they sought to destroy. The 500 men she recruited in Winnipeg, Canada, joined the service when simply, sincerely, she related the stories of her own adventures on the battlefields of France. When she told how one by one her boys died fighting for their country, she did not break down. She did not- even weep. Her eyes were dull with pain as she spoke, and there was only the faintest hint of a falter in her voice. Of her own adventures in sending two Germans to the place where all Germans go. Mrs Wilkins did not care to speak in detail. She shot them when they attempted to enter a hospital where she was an ambulance worker. It was in 1916. The Huns had Taided an English base supply, and had broken through the lines and were swarming down upon the hospital and the buildings surrounding it. Mrs Wilkins seiz-ed a dead soldier's rifle and refused to flee, as some of the other nurses and ambulance workers did. She waited in tho doorway of the shack that had been converted into a temporary hospital, and let the first Hun that came ! within range have it in the stomach. He staggered and crumpled. Another Hnr. appeared. A bullet from the woman's rifle spun him like the flick of a whip lash will spin a top. He fell, but scrambled to his feet, and began to run. Another bullet broke his backbone. Then the English reserves came up, and the Germans were driven from the field. "It was us or the Germans, so I shot and they fell," said Mrs Wilkins. " When I was on the way to England with three of my sons," said Mrs Wilkins when in Detroit a short time ago to boom recruiting and Liberty Loan bond selling, " we passed the spot where the Lusitania went down, and my boys said to me then ' Mother, if we die and the United States ever comes into the war, the first thing you do when you get back to Canada is to cross the border and kiss the first American flag you see." "THEY DIED FIGHTING—HARD." " I did that in Seattle," continued Mrs Wilkins. "There was a big American flag drooping almost into the street from the upper windows of a building. I knelt down and cried into the folds of that banner the story my boys wanted it to know, that they had died for what it represented, and that- they had died fighting —hard." When th-3 war came Emma Wilkins and her six sons were living in Quebec and were "getting along fine," as she phrase* it "Wo had a boarding-house there, and I was proud of my six stalwart, handsome boys," she said. "'They bought mo a little chicken farm among the Laurentian Hills, and I was happy—very happy. My husband had been killed in the South African war, and my little baby had died soon after it was born, but time had erased some of that bitterness, and in the love of my six sons I was surely rich in those things more precious than silver or gold. Life was peaceful, and the remainder of my days seemed to stretch ahead in quiet and content. Then war burst. England needed her sons, and none of my boy.s would refuse to answer that call. They all knew how their father had fallen, and duty to the TJnion Jack had become a religion in the family. BOYS IN ENGLAND. " When they grew old enough I let three of my big ooys go into the naval school at Liverpool, for wo had flown to England. I had them home on thenholidays, and we were still a happy family. One of the lads was a fitter, one a joiner in the dry docks, and one a cook in a restaurant, one was in a sugar refinery, and the baby of them all, Albert James, was a clerk in a store. " The bigger boys, as I called them, had all been in the Territorial regiments, too. They had enlisted tho first thing, and had gone over with the second Canadian contingent. When they said good-bye to me at "Montreal it was the last thing I saw of them on earth, but I was proud of them, and proud they were under the same old flag their father died for. They soon went into their old regiments, the Lancashires and the Scottish Fusiliers. William and John, 30 and 25 years old, fell in the retreat from Mons, and Joshua, 22, was killed at Tyro three j months afterward. I did not know any of ! this until after I had reached England. I When the other boys heard of their brothers' deaths they were wild to sro f o France and take vengeance on the Huns. Just about this time, too, I learned of the death of my brother-in-law, Lieutenant Albert King," and then news came that my sister, his wife, had gone insane from shock. "My three youngest sons s James, Al- ! Fred, and Albert James, all went into the navy and were killed that year. They were on board the Defence in the Battle of Jutland. As to my stepsons in the East Lancashires, I don't know how they died, but I am sure they fell fighting valiantly, like the rest of the Wilkins family, '