EX-CONVICT WINS V.C.

Otago Witness, Issue 3275, 20 December 1916, Page 68

EX-CONVICT WINS V.C.

The ex-convict who won the Victoria Cross is dead. He was killed (says a London paper) in action daring the "great push." What he was before he joined the army in tho early days of the war is> known to but a few, for the name in which ho enlisted and under which the Victoria, Cross was awarded to him is not his own. He was a North Country man, and the people among whom he lived for the greater part of the 34 years of his life, knowing his whole record, did not hesitate to honour his life for his gallantry in the field. Now that he has given his life for his country they respect his memory tenfold. He was a typical little northerner. Short and sturdy, in his wild clays before the war he had little respect for law and order. He was a man with a man's passions, and indulged them as he willed. Six times he found himself in the hands of the police. They were trivial offences •at first, just drunkenness, but gradually his feet slipped on the path of crime. He was convicted of stealing, and then captured in a housebreaking enterprise. He was convicted and sentenced, coming out of gaol just before the outbreak of war. Ho was fast reverting to his old habits when the Kaiser plunged Europe into the maelstrom of death. Our ex-convict, probably like a good many more, thought that it was no concern of his. Then came.the stories of the German barbarities on the women and children of Belgium, and down in his soul the ex-convict heard the call to arms; whatever his record, he was a man. He sundered himself from his friends, and, coming south, joined a regiment which has made history on many a hard-fought field. ON THE BATTLEFIELD. Just as he discarded his own name when he entered the army, so he discarded his old character. He became a smart and efficient soldier, and presently found himself in Flanders in time to take part in some of the bloodiest battles of the war. For days his regiment held a hard-won trench, subjected tho whole time to a merciless lire from German machine guns safely ensconced,« as the Huns thought, behind impregnable defences of sandba.gs, trenches, and barbed wire. Tho British were sadly hindered in their operations, and yet could do nothing against the enemy's guns. There came a night when the roar of the artillery of man was as nothing compared with tho thunder of heaven. The skies were riven with lightning, and Thor and Odin played bowls with thunderbolts among the stars. And, with it all, the Germans sprayed the British trenches with machine gun bullets. Just when the storm was at its highest, and the German gunners had run for shelter from the elements, a solitary figure slipped over the British parapet and wormed its way across No Man's Land, through shell-holes and mud kneedeep. On through the German barbed wire the figure went, dragging with it a little load. Right up to the machine g-un emplacement it went, and there, taking the shape of a British soldier, it hurled bomb after bomb into the German trench.

Shrieks and groans followed the bursting of the bombs, and the sound of footsteps rushing helter-skelter down the trench cam© to the ears of the Englishman—the exconvict from a northern town, who, entirely of his own free will, had undertaken the perilous task of silencing the enemy guns. WAITING FOR THE HUNS.

He did not hurry away after the first attack, but waited out there within a few inches of death for a lull quarter of an hour. Then ho heard the Huns returning, thinking that the danger was passed. But he was waiting for them, and, although able to use only his left arm, hurled more bombs at them. This time the Huns did not run away, but, maiming the parapet, maintained a violent fire for upwards of an hour over the crouching body of the daring Englishman.

Gradually the fire lessened, and this little northerner,once more taking his life in his hands, squirmed his way across the bulletswept ground to the safety of the British trench. It was for this gallant deed, which saved many British lives, that the King awarded the ex convict the Victoria Cross. He came to England to receive it. Hia townsfolk made much of him, and in the very town in which he had been haled as a criminal to the dock, men stood and cheered him to the echo. And now he i 3 dead on the field of battle, and none do hia name more honour than those whose duty it was to hound him down in the days ha set tho law at defiance.