Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 163, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 July 1919 — FIGHTER LIVES 35 DAYS IN HOLE [ARTICLE]

FIGHTER LIVES 35 DAYS IN HOLE

British Private’s Experience Considered Most Remarkable of War. AIDS HIS HELPLESS COMRADE Lives on Food Taken From Dead Bodies —Wanders Too Far Afield and Is Taken Prisoner by Germans. London. — Private Peters of the British army lived five weeks with a helpless comrade in a hole within thirty yards of the German trenches. Their experience is considered the most remarkable of the war. It was in 1917, at Crojselles that the fifty men then remaining of Private Peters’ company were ordered to dig in. , The spot was a sunken road. The men had passed the., objective and run into their own barrage fire. They fell like ninepins. When Private Peters looked up from his digging only his captain, himself and a comrade named M'cGuiness remained. Then the captain was shot dead and the comrade fatally wounded. Private Peters went out for a look around and found a stretcher bearer with a shattered thigh. He hauled him into the dugout. The stretcher bearer had iodine and his wound was kept free of infection. “That night two German officers came along, but we shammed dead

and they passed on briskly, for the British stuff was coming over,” says Peters, telling his story. “Shrapnel lodged on top of our dugout; bits found their way inside. The German officers stood over us the next night. But they never searched our hiding place. “There were sixty dead men lying about outside. Each night I went out and took away their iron rations and biscuits. The first few days we were short of water; then it rained every day for a while and I caught water in mackintosh sheets. “I made a stove of a bully-beef tin, broken candles and a flahnel rag, caught the rays of the sun wifti a per* iscope glass when it shone, and so lighted our stove. “We had hot coffee, >x»coa and beef cubes this way. But we soon were reduced to rifle oil and wood for fuel. Food of Dead Gives Out. “The night came when the food of the dead soldiers outside had all been taken, and I went further afield, with a compass. I got lost and fell over a German telephone tvire. I was captured and sent to Germany, where I was held until armistice day.” Taylor, after Peters’ capture, was examined by the Germans, who lifted his sound leg. but he shammed dead and they passed on. Then he crawled through the German trenches, which -were by that time thinly held, over the barbed wire, across No Man’s Land and to the British lines. But his leg was so long unset that he will never walk right again.