He sustained 21 wounds: gunshot wounds and shrapnel wounds to his head, hands, and body. His left foot was shattered. He was unconscious when found and carried to a field hospital.
The Germans retreated before French reinforcements arrived.
Roberts, despite his wounds, had not been carried off.
The fight at Outpost 20 on the night of May 15, 1918, became known in accounts of the period as “the Battle of Henry Johnson.”
## The Quote
Henry Johnson, asked years later about what he had done that night, reportedly said: “Just fought for my life. A rabbit would have done that.”
The quote appears in the Smithsonian account and in multiple historical accounts of his life. It is attributed to Johnson himself, reportedly given in one of the interviews he gave after his return home when he was for a time a celebrated figure. The specific source document for the quote — which interview, in which publication, on which date — is not fully elaborated in the accounts consulted for this article, and it should be read as an attributed quotation with that caveat.
The substance of the statement is consistent with the character that emerges from the documented record: a person who understood what he had done in terms of survival rather than heroism, who was alive when he might easily have been dead, and who did not explain the survival in terms of special qualities.
## The French Croix de Guerre
France awarded Henry Johnson the Croix de Guerre avec Palme within weeks of the action. Needham Roberts received the Croix de Guerre as well.