WHEN THE BOCHE WAS CAGED.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXXIV, Issue LXXIV, 3 August 1917, Page 6

WHEN THE BOCHE WAS CAGED.

PRUSSIAN OFFICER SPITS ON HIS MEN. In a letter home a British sergeant describes a strange incident witnessed after a number of prisoners were taken, j "The Boches were being brought ? down in big batches," he writes, "and ' most of them seemed mighty glad to be where they were instead of in the "fighting. I saw one little batch of a sergeant and three men who were looking very sorry for themselves and trying to keen kind of separate from the others. 1 Just as they passed into the cage a German officer stepped out from the ' half-dozen other officers he'd been standing with and spat right in the face of the sergeant, and started cursing him. I "Taking their cue from the officer 'a . dozen men started hustling that sergeant and his three men. They were kicked and cuffed and spat at as though , they were dogs caught stealing. I had i to chip in and talk pretty sham to the ! crowd, or they'd all have been fighting. "I wondered what it was about, and when I got a chance I had a little talk with a Bavarian corporal I who'd once been a hair cutter in Kenj sington, and spoke English like a book. Ydu'di hardly credit what he told me, ' but I'm sure it was true, and the hair I cutter talked as though he saw nothi hijr out of the way in it, and nothing ; new, either. j "That Boche sergeant and his men { were of a field gun battery. The officer who spat at them dklii't know where I they'd been or anything about them, 1 only that they were gunners, and that was enough for him, andi for all the others too. They all reckoned their gunners had done 'em in badly, and given them no support against us at all. I know it's a fact they were too late with their barrage to be much, good, and after that the snooting they did was very wild; very poor shodting indeed it was; and all the Boche infantrymen were mad about it."