WWI Soldier Will R. Bird from Amherst, N.S, Canada, credited his dead brother with saving his life.
After a shift spent digging trenches and placing barbed wire near the front lines in Vimy, France, in 1917, he needed sleep. It was past midnight when he and two other soldiers called it a night in a bivouac dug into an embankment. A ground sheet was fastened in place to keep the soldiers warm. Hours later, the sheet broke free and touched his face, waking him.
A warm hand grabbed one of Bird’s hands, and then the other one.“I had a look at my visitor,” Bird wrote in his 1968 book Ghosts Have Warm Hands. “In an instant I was out of the bivvy, so surprised I could not speak. I was face to face with my brother, Steve, who had been killed in ‘1915!”
Steve told Will to gather his equipment and follow him. They walked through trenches and past makeshift shelters inhabited by men from Will’s platoon, but when the gear on his shoulder fell off, he became separated from his brother, who had entered a passageway.
By the time Will made it to the passageway, he had two options — going left or right. He went right and his brother was nowhere to be found. Will came back and went left, but was again unsuccessful. Tired, excited and sweating, Will dozed off as he leaned up against a wall that early morning.
Soon after, Will was awoken by a soldier shaking him. He asked him why he was there.“They’re digging around that bivvy you were in,” the soldier said. “All they’ve found is Jim’s helmet and one of Bob’s legs.” A German shell had landed a direct hit on where Will R. Bird was supposed to have spent the night. He told his miraculous tale of survival to the other members of the platoon.
About half of the guys seem to think, ‘Sure, this could happen. We’re living in a site of mass murder.’ The other soldiers think he’s pulling their leg or it’s nonsense and he writes quite revealingly after a few days and the continuous death and destruction, most people forgot about it, but he remembered, he remembered his brother Steve, he remembered the warm hand.
annaxmalina
kianamaiart
prguitarman
areudirty
baratheonpilled
tangentwithtanner
yousharknotpass
romaincrisis
pixelskylines
