The Eve of Cold Harbor That evening, in a tapering drizzle, Grant’s aide Horace Porter picked his way through the troops of a front-line brigade to deliver final orders for the morning assault. He noticed that many soldiers, who usually wore their coats day and night, in sun and rain, now had them off, and seemed to be making repairs to them. “This exhibition of tailoring seemed rather peculiar at such a moment,” he thought. Then he could see that they were not sewing up rips. They were being calmly realistic, writing their names and addresses on slips of paper and pinning them to the backs of their coats, “so that their dead bodies might be recognized upon the field, and their fate made known to their families.” “Such courage is more than heroic,” wrote Porter, “it is sublime.” Ernest B. Furguson, Not War, But Murder German Paratroops We felt quite a professional affection for these paratroops. They were infantry trained, like us, to use their own initiative. They had the same system of “trench-mates.” They fought cleanly and treated prisoners, wounded and dead, with the same respect they expected from us. If our uniforms had been the same, we would have welcomed them as kindred spirits. On one occasion, the paratroops acquitted themselves as the honourable gentlemen we later knew them to be. It was the first time many of us had ever seen them. We never forgot them. We had attacked a wood and been thrown out. The platoon was being “stonked” in a ditch. Two of our stretcher-bearers went out to collect a casualty hit in the leg by a splinter. As soon as the Medics appeared, small-arms fire stopped as if turned off at the main. Unfortunately the German mortars could not see the target and sent over one more bomb before the “cease-fire” reached them. That bomb hit one of the stretcher-bearers in the leg. One stretcher-bearer was left in No Man’s Land with two casualties and one stretcher. Immediately two German paras burst out of the woods, holding up their hand to show that they were not armed. They ran to the troops in the field. They loaded the two casualties on to the stretcher in sitting positions, and, under the direction of the surviving Medic, they carried the men to safety in our lines. Waving farewell, they doubled back to the wood. We cheered them all the way back. A twelve-hour truce followed. No one had the heart to spoil this gesture by firing. So, temporarily, the war stopped. Next morning they were gone. - R.M. Wingfield, (original sources were not cited). Thoughts of an Early Wargamer The other three troops of the squadron were re-forming close by. Suddenly in the midst of the troop up sprung a Dervish. How he got there I do not know. He must have leaped out of some scrub or hole. All the troopers turned upon him thrusting with their lances: but he darted to and fro causing for the moment a terrible commotion. Wounded several times, he staggered toward me raising his spear. I shot him at less than a yard. He fell on the sand, and lay there dead. How easy to kill a man! But I did not worry about it. I found I had fired the whole magazine of my Mauser pistol, so I put in a new clip of ten cartridges before thinking of anything else. I was still prepossessed with the idea that we had inflicted great slaughter on the enemy and had scarcely suffered at all ourselves. Three or four men were missing from my troop. Six men and nine or ten horses were bleeding from spear thrusts or sword cuts. We all expected to be ordered immediately to charge back again. The men were ready, though they all looked serious. Several asked to be allowed to throw away their lances and draw their swords. I asked my second sergeant if he had enjoyed himself. His answer was, “Well, I don’t exactly say I enjoyed it, Sir; but I think I’ll get more used to it next time.” -- Winston Churchill, My Early Life 1941. Famed Wargamer Peter Young Mentioned in Dispatches? I found this one while reading an account of a Commando raid on an occupied Norwegian town early in the war - B.. M. “As I tried to catch up with Peter Young I saw him and George Herbert throwing grenades through windows and doors. They appeared to be enjoying themselves.” Back to Table of Contents -- Courier #82 To Courier List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2001 by The Courier Publishing Company. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com