WEIRD EXPERIENCE.

Feilding Star, Volume XII, Issue 2856, 29 January 1916, Page 4

WEIRD EXPERIENCE.

WHAT A SOLDIER WENT

THROUGH

Gunner H. Ward, of Wimbledon, Hawke's Bay, who was reported killed at the Dardanelles, and has returned to this dictrict in the flesh .to demonstrate like Mark Twain, that the report was "slightly exaggerated," tells a story that is even more weird than his own (says tho Dannevirke Evening News). Gunner Ward says that one day a courpany was hard at work in a trench when one of its former privates, who was reported to have been killed, calmly walked iv and took up his part of tbe job against the Turks. The members of tho company looked the newcomer over to make sure he was not somebody else, and then told him he had no earthly right to bo there. He was dead! The soldier said that he wast not dead, and to demonstrate that ho was very much alive, ho proceeded to carry out orders, but the members of the squad, to prove that they were right, and he was wrong, said they would show him his grave. At the end of the day tho little company went round a quiet corner, and there the man, newly hiick from hospital,' saw a little wooden cross with his nanio carved on it, and the date on which a shell was supposed to have made his body unrecognisable. The tragic part of the story is that two men were standing together when one was blown to pieces by a shell, and the other injured and sent to hospital. A mistake had been made in tho one that was taken and the other that was left, and the soldiers, while welcoming ono comrade, back to life, bad to mourn another dead.