Feature Letter of August 27th, 2025
Adkins, George Leslie
You will remember after the June 3rd scrap, I was corralled for the Orderly room because of Sergeant Sharpe (the Orderly Room Sergeant) having been wounded. Well, if I remember rightly, Mart was killed the next trip into that hell-hole, which would be about the 18th of June, 1916, at a point, judging from where his body was found some 500 feet east of Maple Copse. I remember when his personal effects were taken from his body, we found a note - a note which left so deep an impression on me that I have never forgotten it and never will, for I consider it one of the sublimest acts of heroism of which I have ever heard, of which one seldom hears except in the pages of romantic fiction. The words were, written after he was wounded and in the brief period before he died:
On the Battlefields of Flanders,
Good bye Mother, good bye all.
Mart.
George, I am deeply interested in knowing whether or not your mother ever received that note. I was handed in to the Orderly Room and carefully labelled with the rest of his effects, after having been drawn to the attention of Colonel Griesbach, because of the high beauty of his last thought and act. What an act of sublime courage! I often think of it; it is one of the things that stands out in my memory as the most heroic of all that which came to my notice in that frightful massacre.
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