U. S. OFFICIAL
Toulgas Outpost.
U. S. OFFICIAL
One of a Bolo Patrol.
U. S. OFFICIAL
Patrolling.
Those long weeks of patrol and sentry duty were wearing on the men. Sentinels were continually seeing things at night that were not. Once we were hurried out into the cold darkness by the report of a great multitude of muttering voices approaching from the forest, but not a shot answered our challenge and the next morning there in the snow were the fresh tracks of timber wolves—a pack had come to the end of the woods—no wonder the Detroit fruit salesman on guard thought the Bolos were upon us.
But not long afterwards the Bolos did come and more cunningly and stealthily than the wolf pack, for in the black night they crept up and were engaged in the act of cutting the barbed wire between the blockhouses, when a sentinel felt—there was no sound—something suspicious, and sped a series of machine gun bullets in the direction he suspected. There was a fight lasting for hours, and in the morning many dead Bolos were lying in the deep snow beyond the wire defenses. They wore white smocks which, at any distance, in the dim daylight, blended distinctly with the snow and at night were perfectly invisible. We were grateful to the sentinel with the intuitive sense of impending danger. Some soldiers have this intuition. It is beyond explanation but it exists. You have only to ask a soldier who has been in battle combat to verify the truth of this assertion.
Still we decided not to rely entirely upon this remarkable faculty of intuition, some man might be on watch not so gifted; and so we tramped down a path inside the wire encompassing the center village. During the long periods between the light we kept up an ever vigilant patrol.