The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #162232 Message #3864563
Posted By: Teribus
06-Jul-17 - 05:28 AM
Thread Name: BS: Time to choose on June 8th-UK Elections
Subject: RE: BS: Time to choose on June 8th-UK Elections
Yes Raggy that's the chap. The chap who also said this:
Shooting to kill
I never knew Bob [Harry's friend and gunner] [Note that Raggy - this interview was recorded 81 years after the events in question - Harry REMEMBERS the names of those he served with who were killed - yet Stan Hollis didn't - "A lad from Cannock"] to use that [Lewis] gun to kill. If he used that gun at all, it was about two feet off the ground and he would wound them in the legs. He wouldn't kill them if he could help it.
[A German soldier] came to me with a rifle and a fixed bayonet. He had no ammunition, otherwise he could have shot us. He came towards us. I had to bring him down. First of all, I shot him in the right shoulder. He dropped the rifle and the bayonet. He came on. His idea, I suppose, was to kick the gun if he could into the mud, so making it useless. But anyway, he came on and for our own safety, I had to bring him down. I couldn't kill him. He was a man I didn't know. I didn't know his language. I couldn't talk to him. I shot him above the ankle, above the knee. He said something to me in German. God knows what it was. But for him the war was over.
He would be picked up by a stretcher bearer. He would have his wounds treated. He would be put into a prisoner-of-war camp. At the end of the war, he would go back to his family. Now, six weeks after that, a fellow countryman of his pulled the lever of the gun that fired the rocket that killed my three mates, and wounded me. If I had met that German soldier after my three mates had been killed, I'd have no trouble at all in killing him. [Which German Soldier do You think Harry Patch was talking about Raggy? - It wasn't the one who fired the rocket - Harry Patch was talking about the man he deliberately wounded.]
Oh and Raggy here is something else Harry Patch said in that interview:
Losing friends [Like Sydney Holis's best friend "The lad from Cannock"]
The night we caught it, we were in the front line and we were going back. We had taken the German front line, the German support line and we were coming back from the German support through the German old front line. We had to cross what was the old No Man's Land. It was crossing there that a rocket burst amongst us. It killed my three mates, it wounded me. We were on open ground.
September 22nd, half-past ten at night. That's when I lost them. That's my Remembrance Day. Armistice Day, you remember the thousands of others who died.
You see Raggy, 81 years after, having never told any of this to a living soul. Harry Patch vividly remembers names, dates, times and location as clear as a bell - do you know why Raggy? Because he is recalling something that he actually experienced, something that actually happened to him and when he brings it to mind I bet just for an instant as the thought comes to him he experiences and feels the pain all over again.
I think Nigel Parsons has it spot on.