You can never judge his ability as a fighter from a man's appearance. Private Davis was a runner, about 26 years of age, attached to my company headquarters. He was a small and unassuming man, very neat in his appearance and always spick and span, even in the trenches. His companions often wondered how he could manage to keep himself so clean and tidy.
One night Davis, being near company headquarters, overheard the officers discussing an intended raid on a German machine-gun emplacement, which we thought was a short distance in front of the German trenches. This machine gun had caused quite a number of casualties in our company, so this raid was made with the object of finding and destroying it. Davis begged very hard to be allowed to go with a patrol party that was being sent out, so the company commander gave his assent.
That night Davis was out in No Man's Land on patrol duty, the patrol consisting of four men under one N.C.O. Later on the patrol came back without having seen anything of the enemy in No Man's Land, but Private Davis was reported missing by the sergeant. About an hour after the return of the patrol, one of the officers who was on duty at the time was called by a sentry who had heard the whistle that had been pre-arranged for the patrol party's signal as they approached our barbed-wire entanglements.
There in front of our wire were several Germans, with their hands up. All the boys on the fire step had their rifles to their shoulders in an instant. Then we heard a shout, "I have got six Heinies, don't shoot."
It was Davis. I got out of the trench and showed the way through the barbed wire to the Huns, who looked scared to death. There was Davis behind the Boches, with a Mills bomb and pistol in his hands.
He told me that he had got lost. He had then prowled around and surprised this machine-gun squad, who were outside a concrete machine gun emplacement.
I asked Davis how he had managed to capture these men and he told me it was quite easy. "I just put the fear of God into them with my Mills bomb and made them walk in front of me." As he could speak a little German, he told them that at the least noise they made he would blow them to pieces. After that it was a cinch, as he expressed himself.