LONE BRITISH OFFICER.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LII, Issue 16032, 25 September 1915, Page 2 (Supplement)

LONE BRITISH OFFICER.

SHELLED BY A TAUBE. Can a German aeroplane drop enough bombs to hurt a man sitting on a fence? This query was posed to himself by a British officer, Lieutenant Walter Winterbon, as lie rested on a harrier "some, where in France" and contemplated the scenery. Lieutenant Winterbon, as he sat on the fence smoking his pipe, was conscious of a dull whirring above him, and looking up perhaps half a mile in the blue he made- out the shape of a German Taube wheeling around and evidently looking for a chance to drop a few bombs. That such Was the intention became evident in a moment, when there fell one of these messengers from the sky and exploded within a few yards of the officer, throwing up a cloud of earth and grass. Mr. Winterbon smoked his pipe and .considered. There was no earthly use in his moving now, for lightning and bombs are not supposed to strike twice in the same place. So he at tight. Presently down came another bomb within a few feet of him. It did not explode And then others fell, until altogether there were eleven bombs in his immediate neighbourhood. Only. two were '"live*' enough to go off.

The officer was not hurt, and the longer he sat there on the fence and reflected the more satisfied he became of the futility and the costliness of trying to hurt anyone by dropping bombs on them from ft German machine.