Salt Lake Tribune | 1918-02-17 | Page 25 | Captive Portuguese Freed by Germans

CJPTIVE PORTUGUESE FREED BYGERMANS Sent Back to Their Own Lines Because of a Scarcity of Food. BATTLE IS DESCRIBED 1 Young Tennessee&n With British Army Tells of Fight in France. i ! By Q. WALES, ; International News Service Staff j .o Correspondent. j PARIS. Feb. 1th Portuguese troops. J c. putted in a trench raid on the Flanders fix"".!:, were sent buck to the allied tines by the Germans with placards on their backs saying: "We can't spare the food t o feed you" a r. d "Go b a c k to your Trenches, we don't want you.'' according to Frank H. Gai'.er. who has just arrived here from the Frittsh front. O a i I e r. who is a son of i 1 e bishop of Tennessee and comes fivm Nashville, is a subaltern in the British army. being attached to a battery of "heavies" in the Roy a L Ga it; so n art: lie r y . He has co m e to Paris to sign up in the United States army. "The battery I was with was posted vry near Passchendaele," said Sublieutenant Sub-lieutenant aGiler. "1 received owrd on the day before Christmas that my application appli-cation for permission to go to Paris and join up with the "Yanks' lutd been grunt- ed. and I was mighty glad. But while I was packing up tor my departure old Fri!3y started a bombardment that indicated indi-cated an attack was coming, sure. I received re-ceived orders to proceevi to an advanced post and do artillery observing. Heavy ' tack Comes. "I went cp for ward to an old, half-demolished half-demolished German pillbox that our boys were usir.g tor an observation post. It j was out m a little saiient. The Fnglish j troops were holding the line then, the Canadians having been sent south alter storming Passchendaete in November. "Fritzy turned on a:i awful heavy bombard nent. and t-'.en switched to a rolling barrage, and we knew the iuian-try iuian-try attack was coming. With my runner I fed back to another observation pos-t on j a ltt'.ie hill. Sure enough, the Huns at- j ticked in force, using three divisions on a two-kilometer front. I swarmed forward and reached ; si line of craters that the ting lis a 1--had been holding. They stopped there tor a few minutes to form up. Ti en they debouched for the second step, and i- I fe'.t back to another observation post. "j'MeanwhLle more and more of our guns taregistering great, big lone range babied and Fnglish reserv es were also coming up the communication trenches for the counter-attack. English in Action. j "Frill went forward again, lighting his way into our second line of deterge in seme places. But our guns slammed down a barrage over the German lines that prevented reinforcements from de-touching. de-touching. ! "Then the English troops went forward with a yell, and there was some pretty cugh hand-to-liand righting in the trenches, right under my eyes. They fnught with bayonets, knives, bludgeons j and hand grenades, and by the time the j excitement died away there weren't any i Huns left except a little handful of prisoners. pris-oners. It was ail such hot work that I J rever got away until the day after Christ- The Portuguese contingent of troops I has been holding a quiet sector in the neighborhood of the Ypres sector, ana j Sublieutenant Gai'.er veiled the troops there on several occasions. i "The Portuguese are good soldiers and j tight well, but they haven't had the experience ex-perience and can't class with the German veterans." said Gaiter. "The Huns put i over a big raid on the Portugese one ! night, and" under cover of a terrlric born- I liardment and a barrage their shock troops captured forty or fifty Portuguese and took them back to the German lines. Portu ese Sent Back. "But the next nisht the Portuguese outposts were astonished to see some of their own men creeuing and dodging across No Man's Land. They thought it was some trap, but their comrades called out -not to shoot. A few minutes later the prisoners jumped over the parapet into their own trenches once more. Each s nan, had a sisn of some sort pinned on his -oat bv the Germans. Most of those , pia.-arus were to the effect that Fntzy wouldnt bother with Portuguese prisoners prison-ers because he could n't spare the food fnr them. Other? said that Fritzy wasn't S. nfnaid of the Portuguese, and to prove "t was sending them back." utenant trailer is a graduate, of" s-wari'.e college and Columbia univer-sitv univer-sitv and was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford when tiie war broke out. lie came to France immediately and joined the old original American ambulance corps. Afterward he joined the American mission mis-sion in Belgium and was on Mr. Hoover's Ft aft'. When the United States declared war on Germany. Gaiter wf-nt to England En-gland and joined the Royal Gams. on artillery.