THE BROKEN BAYONET

Otago Daily Times, Issue 16537, 10 November 1915, Page 6

THE BROKEN BAYONET

ONE WHO DANCED. HERO OF LONESOME PINE. (From Captain C. E. W. Bean, Official Press Representative with the Australian forces at the Front.) (Copyright.—New Zealand rights secured by the Otago Daily Tunes.) GABA TEPE, September 6. It lay just outside the parapet. Two days alter we hod taken the Lonesome Pino trenches, when there cams one of tho breathing intervals in that six days' counterattack, someone noticed it and pulled it into the trench.

It was on the captured trenches, lying just as it had fallen in the red sunlight during the last hours of that fateful afternoon. Tho bayonet was broken off within an inch or two of tho hilt. The magazine was full, but the out-off was closed, and the safety, catch was pulled back, and the whole rifle from the broken bayonet very nearly to the butt was purple with blood. There was no trace of its owner —I do not know whore he fell. That broken riflo spoke more clearly of hie qualities than the most fulsome tombstone. The kmg-looked-for day had come, and they were going straight for the Turks with the bayonet; and he was not going to spoil it with any rifle firing. He had bolted and barred his magazine--for him it was bayonet or nothing. If anv man went into it with a whole heart that man must have done so. DANCED TO THE TRENCH.

I have often wondered whether he was one <sf four men who were watched by a friend of mine, a colonel of another battalion, during that charge' on Lonesome Pine. I could not see them myself, as they were on the extreme left, but my friend saw them, and so did some of the Fifth Battalion wh'o were watching with him. They said that the four men who went out on the extreme left of the Fourth Battalion in one of ite lines during the charge of Lonesome Pino, ran half the way across and then danced tho remainder right to the Turkish parapet. The fog of the battle would soon hide them, and if an average holds good three of the four must have been hit.

It is just fancy, but it was just where they reached the Turkish trenches that this relic was found. And I often wonder if one of those dare-devils was the owner of the broken bayonet. A FACE IN THE .DAWN.

They came down to fighting with even cruder weapons than broken. bayonets or jam-tin bombs in that Homeric struggle. It was in the grey iight of the third or fourth morning when men began to doubt whether the things they saw before them were the real things themselves, or the fancies of their own worn-out brains, that mine officer —he was a captain, but by this time ho was commanding hie regiment—thought he saw as he passed down one of the captured saps a face staring down at him from over the 'parapet, about? his head. He had passed the point, but the image had photographed itself on his mind, and as he turned quickly on his heel he .thought that he could sec the face still there. He stooped down and tossed a pebble up towards it, but - it did not move. Then he said quietly to man who was beside him: " I think there is a Turk watching us from over that parapet there. Do you see the place? Pick up a lump of earth and heave it at him, and see if he moves."

The man made no mistake about the lump of earth. He picked from the side of the trench a dry clod about six inches square and heaved in the direction of the object. It caught the object fair in the face. There was a splutter and a scatter and the sound of falling earth, and something- wallowed off between the maze of sandhills and mole burrows which was still neither ours nor theirs —at least certain Turks, brave men. ■used to wriggle up near comers of it "that we certainly by this time claimed as our exclusive property. It was a Turk this time true enough. If the officer had not turned at that moment the next would probably have been his last. THE SURPRISING AUSTRALIAN.

It is not surprising fhat our men should face death handsomely in a Homeric fight like that one, a fight after their own hearts. But I confess that the Australian is full of daily surprises for anyone that watches him face death in less romantic circumstances.

Some time since a man was preparing his company's dinner when an Bin shell buried itself within a few feet of him and then exploded. Out of the bilous green-brown dust cloud there slowly emerged a figure, scrambling on hands and foot. "Damn blankv snipers!" was all it said as it spat the dust out of ite mouth in front of an interested audience.

Along a certain bench there lives a sniper. He is intermittent m his practice, and he does not always shoot very straight. The other day a private soldier in one of the units living nearest to that beach strolled down to it to wash his clothes. "HOW FAR OFF?"

As he squatted there at the water's edge a bullet pinged on the beach beside him. "How far was that off me?" he asked a mate who was sitting , on the edge of the hill near by. "Al<?ut four yards," was the answer.

The man by the water's edge laughed. " Oh ! then, its good enough to let him go on trying," ho Raid, and turned to his work. The second bullet whacked into the beach. He turned his head to it for a moment. " You beggar!" he said, just as a man will snarl at some friend who tnases him by throwing stones at him. And he went on with hie washing until it was finished. Those are the things you see every day and every hour of it.