A Weird Story.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLIX, Issue 17, 23 April 1913, Page 58

A Weird Story.

A weird story is told of Kop for the first time by an ex-soldier of the Scottish Rifles, w’ho was wounded and disabled on the slope. A sergeant of the regiment lay at full length shot through the brain, yet even in death the man looked like a fighting machine suddenly gone out of order. His rifle was pressed against his shoulder, his left had grasped the barrel on the under side, the forefinger of the right hand pressed the trigger lightly, the barrel jested out upon a rock, and his deathdulled eye still glared along the sights, for dissolution had come to him with awful suddenness, just as he had bent his head to fire at those who shot him, and now his hands had stiffened in the nn bendable stiffness of eternal sleep. A •Boer combatant saw the sergeant as he lay, and he grasped the rifle by the barrel and tried to jerk it from the dead man’s grip, but as he pulled he brought the rifle in a line with his own breast, and the unyielding finger on the trigger did the rest— ; the rifle spoke from the dead soldi, r’s hand, and the bullet passed through the Boer’s heart stretching him dead Inside the Briton. The soldier who relates the story was lying a few yards distant from his noncommissioned officer wounded in the knee-joint, and was an eye-witness of the tragic occurrence.