It was then that he received the message from Lieutenant Combe, asking for reinforcements and stating his position. Captain Stinson ordered Sergeant Boddington, of "A" Company, to send forward twenty men to help Combe. The Captain himself went forward in advance, with a runner. He found Combe in the act of winning his posthumous decoration.
Combe and his men had entered the German trench after a terrible struggle, aided by a few men of another company whom they had picked up. They bombed the Germans along the trench with German bombs, having exhausted their own long before. Eighty prisoners had been captured and were on their way back to our lines, and 250 yards of trench were in the hands of the invaders.
Again and again the gallant little band charged the enemy, Combe always at their head, leading them around traverses and into dug-outs. Along the whole of that 250 yards of trench lay dead and dying Germans.
Combe was killed by a rifle bullet as he was leading his gallant bombers up the trench in the climax of his triumph.
CAPTAIN WILLIAM AVERY BISHOP, R.F.C. (LATE CANADIAN CAVALRY).
"Give me the aeroplane I want," said Captain W. A. Bishop, "and I'll go over to Berlin any night--or day--and come back too, with any luck."
It was during a discussion in the mess on the question of air reprisals that Canada's champion airman slipped in the quiet remark; and when a man who has won the V.C., the Military Cross and the D.S.O. with a bar, says he could bomb the German capital it may be taken that he means what he says. He had then brought down nearly fifty German flyers, besides a few balloons.
Born at Owen Sound, Ontario, in 1894, a son of the registrar of Grey County, this stripling received a commission in the Canadian Cavalry in March, 1915, and went to France with a cavalry unit. He was in the trenches in the days when our Cavalry Brigade held a section of the line as infantry. Later, after only one experience of fighting Germans from horseback, he decided that he wanted more excitement and joined the increasing host of airmen.
His headquarters in France as a flying man were until recently in the cosiest of aerodromes, cuddled close up against a small bunch of cool trees, which looked innocent enough from the air. An ancient farm is in the vicinity and the title of the young airman's hut was "The Abode of Love." It is a fitting answer to the Hymn of Hate.