SILENCED A MACHINE-GUN.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LII, Issue 16098, 11 December 1915, Page 2 (Supplement)

SILENCED A MACHINE-GUN.

DEATH IN SMOKE STACK.

SOLDIER CLOWN'S LEAP,

Williams was in a trend* somewhere in the long French line, helping to keep the Germans back from some mounds of broken brick that had once been a village. Before, he became a soldier he had been a famous clown and gymnast in a French circus. A German quick-firer, says T.P. s Journal of Great Deeds of the Great War, had worked round to the French flank, and was filling the trench with wounded men by its enfilading fire. The little whirring machine of death was hidden very cunningly. It was a grave situation. The fire of the gun was accurate and ceaseless. The French were unable to locate the mitrailleuse. In despair, the officer in charge €aid aloud, "If we only had somebody up there we might be "able to deal with them." He pointed to the top of a shattered chimney stack that bung groggily over the debris of the village. Its summit was 30ft from the ground, but to get to the top meant the probability of a violent and painful death. The Germans would shoot at the climber, and the smokestack looked as if it would come, down at the slightest extra weight and vibration. Although there was a double chance of death in the 6inoke stack, Williams took the risk. His officer shrugged his shoulders without refusing, when the clown asked if he might try. Williams stripped off his heavy coat, slung his ritle across his shoulder, and went up the chimney like a cat. He clutched at the meanest projections, jumping upward even as those frail footholds ami handholds crumbled under his weight. Tiny, ominous cascades of rubble and mortar fell down as his nimble feet passed scrambling up the shaft. The men in the trenches gasped ; every moment they expected to hear the heavy fail of the brave man's body on the earth. But he did not fall.

A Wind of Bullets. * He came to the summit, and all the country lay under his eyes, flat, and marked out in line* like a map. He hung there, looking about steadily, carefully : and the Germans, seeing him. loosed a whistling wind of bullets at him. But he paid not the slightest attention. He found the machine-gun, and shouted down the precise position and the approximate distance of the piece. Coolly he unslung his Lebel, pressed the clip of cartridges into the magazine, began sighting steadily, firing nonchalantly. Each time his rifle jerked and spat, the frail ruin that made his pedestal quivered. Williams, as steady as a rock, went on firing. The voice of the mitrailleuse became jerky and unsteady. Williams was as calm as possible, and continued to fire until the officer ordered him to descend. By his descent he startled his comrades, more even than by his ascent.

It was an old circus trick, but there were no net* ready for % slip and no attendants standing by to catch him. A slip meant death, and an ugly death; but Williams risked it with a laughing imperturbability. He dropped his rifle to the ground, then, while his fellows gasped, dived straight at a low, tiled roof 20ft feet below. The fall did not kill him. He came off the roof like a creature of indiarnbber, turned in the air and dropped swiftly and neatly to his feet "My new turn—the leap of death '" he cried, striking the grotesque attitude 'of the sawdust ring. Then he slipped into his coat and went back to his place in the trench.