"BABS."

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLI, Issue 10526, 2 December 1916, Page 11

"BABS."

BOY'S GREAT DEED. LED PLATOON~TO VICTORY. Ha came to us with a. draft, from inland just six weeks before the Bi E Push began. He was barely 19—a fairhaired, blue-eyed, rosy-cheeked boy, obviously only recently released from the fostering care of his public school U. 1.0. rulers. Wo of the rank and file, who had becomeone with dirt and mire and grime, found him at once a joy, a ray of sun' Shin© in the murk of our trenches for lie was so clean and bright and polished and groomed all over chat it seemed

hardly fair to soil him. Uv was such a hoy! He came to my platoon, in command, m place of "Old Bludgeon,'' the exRegular ranker who had bem, killed at J&i? ldse ' l [l \ d <,: l fcbe firs t morning when he paraded us he took us straight mto hj» confidence and talked to us as il tie had brought .us up from the bottle. At ftrst we did not quite know what to audi"*r\ - Wa ™ C men, £?t»« e &» l Wiint to P lfl y at kinder' gaiten Still, ,t amused us intensely to foiiowi- « m - v me ? . and " m y &<** tellows. He wasn't m the least Datronising, and he seemed to be ™

much in earnest. ' "My men," he said, -'we have got to go through this thing together, and we might as well begm by knowing one another. J am not going to stand any onsenee and by the same token I • W fc ; va "V YOU % either - We *™ soldiers together. You are going to obev my orders without question, and on impart I am going to do the best I can wTN f 1 knoww H tlhav «B<*ted«. WW i■ U exp leCt 1 eCt the samc > from vou. \\ hat I want above all things hj cleanliness, cheerfulnpas „r,A .„? „.„..'•

~™, uwriuuiw, and no grousing, family!" *"* "'" wil] be fl b )W Vrn" he T tUrned " s over to our ' N ' UUI » a,ul marched off, blowing his Kl-f T Jr l f ly "' ith a wonderful sidle uandKer chief. that! ejaculated the platoon with one voice. ■There's Methusaleh for you! -Uttle Baby masquerading as an' old ened .him Bate, and rather liked him

tor has confidence in his young self V\e j found, too, in a day or two, that he did know Ins business; that he would not stand nonsense; that punishment came quickly as well as praise; that, he never funked taking a. hand at work with the rest, and that his one obsession was dirt. He was a perfect fiend for cleanliness. ''.'My-men,"'he said (and we always smiled inwardly at "My men") "no soldier can be a good soldier unless he trise to be clean. All this talk about curty boots and unshaven faces being inseparable from warfare is mere pose. K Ann I ' J

iveep clean! ' So we came to the dav before the Bi" J ush, when we were ordered out for a raid. Babb lined us up again after our company commander had given Us a talk and had one of his "confidentials." lie lingered the beginnings of a big of moustache and walked up and down the hue for all the world as if ho was our father. He told us that we were the rait of the earth, and that on our platoon rested the glory of the regiment. If any man disgraced himself In the raid, he said—and here he. lifted a warning finger—he himself would do himself the honour of shooting: him

~.„..-.. mu ,„ uich. >iuuiti ue no necessity for anything so dramatic and he relied on us to follow him. "Personally/' he said, "you must know that I hate the sight of blood as much as the sight of dirt, but if T. can lace it there's, no reason why v, e shouldn't all do it." The whistle blew. The. moment Lad come. Babs, who had jusc handed a letter addressed to his mother to an A.S.C. corporal, stood on the ladder. revolver in hand. "Now. men," he shouted; through the din, "we are going over, and I'll race you to see who gets in first!"

Up he went. He stood for a moment on the !parapet just to show how easy it was, I and then jumped off into "No Man's Land," with a torrent of ma-chine-gun bullets whizzing- by. The platoon followed. It was just like going into any other field, except that here and. there you felt something flipping by your ears as if bats were flying past you. Here and there somebody went down ; here and there somebody cried out, cursing the Germans for devils, for swine, for murderers, for anything- that is terrible.

i don't know how long we went on like this. To me it seemed a minute. Slatter, my mate, said afterwards it was a year and a half, or perhaps more. We were running fast, but you cannot go like a racehorse if you are loaded down with rifle and accoutrements, and so Babs, who had only his revolver, was still leading in the race that he had proposed. He looked round now and then in the dim light, shouting something that we could not hear. Once or twice he pulled out his silk handkerchief and waved it to us in encouragement .

When it- was all:over vmJ had 28 Bodies in tow. Their trenches had been fairly veil blown in, and Babs had gone down alone with only hie revolver and his silk handkerchief to fetch them out of their snug dugout. He was a humane boy, who played the game, and as ho stood at the dug-out door he veiled in what 1 took to be a sort of German:— "Take your choice —surrender or have a bomb. Say it quick-, too." They surrendered. We got our prisoners back, under fire, of course, but just before we reached our safety nook Babs, avlio was now in the rear' fell into a shell hole. Tie was not hit. Simply slipped on the slopp'. ground into the mud. 1 think

every one's heart stood still when he went down. We thought he had been hit. When he got up our Babs was as dirty as any mudlark, and he was very angry.' For the first time since he bad come To us he betrayed himself in a temper. Ho had faced death like the hero he is without wincing, but this whs too much. •'To hell with the Germans, he cried, "look at my tunic!" There's a mother's hoy for you—and God bless him! says a member of the Daily Express staff.