222051 Pte. William Holmes British Army 4th Battalion Yorkshire Regiment from:John Street, Eldon Lane From a direct discussion with Wiiliam Holmes.
Billy was involved in the retreat through St Quentin in March 1918.
He was a pacifist and elected to be part of a two man Lewis gun team so that he could be responsible for transporting ammunition and thereby avoid pulling a trigger.
Billy and his mate were covering the retreat on one side of a street whilst troops retreated. They were separated from their group and eventually escaped through a network of trenches. Billy's mate stood on Billy's shoulders to get out of a trench (they were both about 5 foot 3 inches tall) he climbed out and told Billy to escape as their were enemy about and that was the last that Billy saw of his mate.
Billy was eventually hit by shrapnel from a shell and was picked up by the enemy. He as standing in a line with others and ordered to empty pockets and hand over any weapons, tools etc. He thought he was going to be shot as he could not hand over his issue pocket knife. He eventually convinced an officer that his belt clip was broken and the knife must have been lost. Billy stood in a queue to have his wounds attended to, he witnessed the patient in front having a large raggy piece of shrapnel removed from his thigh. The German surgeon decided that instead of pulling the shrapnel back through the entry wound that he would remove it on the other side of the leg, without anesthetic.
Billy was reported missing in action 23rd March 1918. He was marched to a camp in Germany where he was put to work in a coal mine surviving on a diet of 1 bowl of watery soup and a hunk of black bread per day. Whilst working at the mine, the above ground belts were worked by German peasant women picking stones from the coal. The women wrongly thought that the POW's received Red Cross parcels regularly and the POW's were often stripped naked by the women searching them for chocolate.
He was eventually repatriated and had one weeks leave before being sent to Dublin where he lived under canvas for a year during the troubles.
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