1939-10-08 — Page 5

TOBER 8, 1939.

Story

y; Hid him at the

ife; Found him

trangest way. And

happy ever after.'

This is the picture showing the arrival by air at Paris of the London Rugby team. "In the group which Berthe cut from that day's newspaper," says the author of this story, "was a figure which she thought looked like me. It was me."

Series, a To-day, those who came together in so strange a fashion aordinary

hrilling as is a great

1 the love

us. We heard intered and had behind the door.

bowl of water. this man step-

s way to a cup-

of field boots. beating as he swent over us. I saw us. He

passed out of the

as stealing food rations in the ne morning, an trapped me in

tting with pain. much whether I wn or not. I sat milk and wait-

Man

airs.

ear the kitchen, as if a regiment ver the house. and staff officers ds. When I crept to the roof, an at has caused me Us of detective

met an orderly Hold messages.

live in London, the father and mother of a happy family.

turn a gold replica on a chain to wear round my neck. This was engraved: E 2nd-Lieut. O. O. Blank, R.F.A. C. of

As the story is so intimate and personal, the writer must For nine months

My wound was not an easy one.

remain anonymous,

I went

near

night one of them told me she had been expecting me to pass out all the evening. She thought I was sick through being injured in the game that afternoon.

from A Striking

Grosvenor-

square ten days before the Armistice

But this much can be said. hospital to hospital. I was in a con- His name is familiar, and he so far recovered from valescent home his war wounds as to become one of the most famous wing three-quarters Oxford University ever put into the field against Cambridge.

After the war the author re visited the scene of his adventure. Back in his roof refuge he waves his hand through the ventilator just at the moment that the picture is taken.

We passed in the semi-dark,

shoulder to shoulder, one figure in German field uniform, the other in the uniform of a Bri- tish artillery subaltern.

A kind of scared fatalism carried me through, and I expect the Ger- man orderly happened to be think- ing of something else.

to make the Germans underneath

urse the rats overhead.

It sounds Incredible

now, but strange things begin to happen to your when you spend two weeks boxed in between inner and outer roofs.

was signed, when a parcel arrived for

Resemblance

me. It came from France and pre- looked like Berthe. There was no sented a wonderful appearance.

That parcel had been every. where, including Mesopotamla and Egypt. It was covered with Army franking stamps and directions,

and standing out from it all was the original address now preserved be. hind a panel of celluloid. It read: 2nd-Lieut. O. O. Blank, R.F.A., C. of E. That was all.

One morning Berthe shouted with ex- citement. She could see British troops

When I opened it I found eighty- prodding round the buildings with four letters from Berthe. They had bayonets. It was the 31st Division been collecting as "dead" letters un- catching up with its artillery, but it til some one in the field postal sy- didn't know it then. These were the stem had made them up into a parcel K.O.S.B. - and no man could want and got rid of them, sending them finer infantry than these gallant to the War Office. Scots proved themselves to be.

I read them all. The Armistice had The senior infantry officer, to come and gone before I had finished. whom

I reported, is a prominent

Find The Giri

member of Parliament to-day, and Promised To he still rags me about that farm. When the subject of war service crops up he tells people, when I am there to blush, that I saw service with

a young lady at a farmhouse watch- ing the fighting from the roof. He adds that I got a medal for it.

I saw a good deal of the girl who

mistaking the resemblance. She be- came moderately well known in Lon- don at a West End theatre. However, we drifted apart.

It was not until four years later that I learned that this girl was actually Borthe's sister. Looking back, I cannot think flow I man- aged to know her all that time without the fact ever coming to light.

The night I waited for this girl on the corner of the Rue Bleue, next to the stage door of the Folies Ber- gee, is important, though.

In the autumn of 1925 a friend of my young sister wrote to me from Paris that she had seen a woman in a shop (she was there with her mother) wearing a medal round her neck, and that the medal was en- graved with my name.

I left London for Paris that even-

I

The doctor in charge of the hos- ing and obtained details from the pital got into touch with my father. girl. This mannequin was slipping on in Paris and told him what he had

a gown to show to the mother when heard of the story from the V.A.D,S the end of its chain. It was gold, and my sister's friend saw the medal at I went back to my proper divi- for after that parcel's arrival I was she clearly read my name on it. sion, the 35th, and nine days later, as much an object of general inter- asked the girl to see this mannequin still bandaged, I was shot through

est as any five-legged calf would and ask her about the medal. the back of the head by a machine- have been. Monsieur Albert Thomas, gun bullet. I was then

the French Minister, promised my seventeen years and two months of age. From father to find the girl. St. Quentin I was carried back to Rouen, from Rouen eventually London. I spent the rest of the war in hospital.

to

Before I left that farm at Rosieres

But they never found Berthe. The father mother and the

was killed at Verdun. The two girls had dis- appeared.

I went to Oxford. My head wounds

I said goodbye to Berthe. I was too had healed and I was almost fit again.

1 Meet

Berthe At Last

The girl was Berthe. She told my sister's friend that a British officer who was killed in the war gave it oft, and that she was never going to. to her, and she had never taken it My sister went round to warn her.

We lived from day to day, expect young to understand much then, but At seventeen you are tough and take And then, at last, I met her myself.

ing to be detected and dragged out at any moment, but nothing happen- ed. After the ninth day the German Staff moved out. I found out later they were in retreat again. Only a few engineers occupied the house.

But the position was dangerous enough still. It seemed incredible that no one had suspected we were living within a few feet of their heads.

She

We

I thought she was looking at me in a a lot of crushing. funny sort of way.

have been married twelve I played Rugby football for the years now, and we have a boy not so When I gave her my identity disc University, and there was one match much younger than I was when, with she began to cry like a little girl that took me to Paris. London played a lot of other schoolboys, I was out with a broken doll. I told her to Paris at the Stade Pershing, cheer up and said I would come after

and there fighting the Germans. But the the back after the war and see how several of my fellow Englishmen to in that attic is this:-

match I accompanied weird part of this story that began she was getting on. She had told the Folies Bergere to see the show.

me a lot about her alater and her family. She did not know it then, but her father was dead at the time.

We lived for sixteen days in thal roof. I got to know this daughter of a French peasant fairly well.

That disc is an important part of was a fine-looking girl, but in those this story. The usual disc issued to circumstances anything would have troops was made of papier mache. looked romantic to a boy of seven- teen.

Ran Away

Made A

Noise Like Rats

Towards the end we were getting so careless that to amuse Berthe

used to scratch on the planks and poke bits of straw through the cracks

From School

It was three

years since I had soon Berthe, but one of the girls in the show looked so much like her I was sure it was she.

The night I was waiting for the girl who, unknown to me,

Was- Berthe's sister, outside that thea- tre, Borthe horself was inside.'

She was in the chorus of the show, This quietened me down, but I but I had not noticed her. And pro- kept reminding myself that I was bably at that moment she was stick- continually imagining I saw girls who ing up on the wall of her dressing- looked like Berthe. I arranged to room a photograph cut from meet this girl, and with two friends of day's newspaper. It showed the ar- mine from Oxford we made a party rival by alr of the London team. In after the show.

the group was a figure that Berthe thought looked like me.

that

That man who looked like me,

I ran away from school at sixteen to join the Army and my mother was It was not Berthe, of course, Two very upset, since my father was al- English girls from the Tiller Troupe ready serving on the French General made up the party, and when we not only was me, but was waiting not Staff. She begged me to give her my took these two girls home to their fifty yards away, for some one who official Identity disc, giving me in re- hostel up on the Rue Duperre that looked like her!