Hi everyone. to continue.
I started mine sweeping and found one immediately, (the mine detector, as you may know changes it sound as it sweeps over a mine). One has to stand up doing this job, no matter what! Ignore everything that is going on around you! It was now up to the Londoner to make it safe.

To get down out of trouble while he was doing his bit, I knelt down on my right knee, when the other Sapper bent over it to make it safe, it fired, came up and hit him in the chest, and exploded, the next moment I found myself laying on my back staring up at a beautiful blue summer sky wondering, "What the hell happened there" I got up, and my partner had flopped forward on his face with lots of holes in the back of his neck. I remember asking him “are you all right”? A stupid thing to ask anyone who had just set off, and been blown up with an S mine under his body. They took him away on the top of a Jeep.

While kneeling down behind him, one of the steel balls that had passed through his body had embedded itself in my skull, on the right hand side near my eye, had it not been slowed by its passage through my partner, I most certainly would have been killed, To this day, it is still there embedded in my skull! Another ball had penetrated my left leg cutting a furrow in some “very important personal equipment on the way”, it went right through my left thigh, but never had the strength to penetrate my uniform on the other side, I pulled it out an kept it. But, by now I was bleeding profusely. To such an extent that my boots squelched with the blood that had run down my legs.

Wass Thomas had a steel ball in his right elbow, and was sent off for treatment, I was taken to, and treated at a field dressing station, a hole in my head, two holes in my left thigh and a furrow elsewhere in my private equipment! Plus, the effect of being in close proximity to a violent explosion, blood seeping out of my nose, ears and eyes, coughing up blood where the explosion had caused some internal damage.

The medical orderlies put patches and bandages on my wounds and I had to make my own way back to my unit. On the way back, coughing up blood, and the bleeding from my eyes and ears, the gore had badly stained me. My boots soaked in blood where the wounds had bled unchecked earlier, all made much worse where I had been coughing up blood and wiping it on my uniform.

I must have looked a pretty ghastly sight, absolutely dreadful. As I made my way back, an American stopped me "Gee feller! You've had your fair share" we talked for a while then he gave me his "Bowie Knife" as a keepsake. Now! How about that for kindness? I kept that knife as a reminder of a complete strangers concern for others. Later that day, I was back on top of the hill, mine clearing, feeling like death itself and my parents had been notified that I had been wounded. For many years I have been trying to locate this hill, without success, I never knew its name, all I know is that it was somewhere in the vicinity of, and ran East of Vire.

The Bowie Knife? Well I kept it with me all the time, it was my treasured possession, and served to constantly reminded me of another mans kindness. The humane feelings for others that surfaced, even under the trauma and troubled times of war, only to lose it when I was wounded the second time. When my personal belongings caught up with me in Hospital, the Bowie Knife had been stolen.

If the American that gave me that knife is still alive, and reads this. THANK YOU FRIEND! You will never know what a kind thought, and how helpful that was in the midst of a pretty savage war that was in progress at that time.

I still have this lump of metal in my head, plus a few others that I collected later. A few years ago, I talked a miserable looking lady radiologist into taking a X ray of my head, and then found that it is half a steel ball, with the rounded bit facing outwards

Now! what I would like to know is; How do you all look back upon your experiences as observers in this episode?
Sapper Brian.