Chapter IX: Introduction: Bravery (3)

Then one night the boys of the 45th Company sat reasoning together and came to the flattering conclusion that “Doc” was still a trifling distance from them in the matter of regimental distinction, and needs must be brought into more intimate harmony with them. _The Marine’s Magazine_ tells us that they secretly removed his blouse and tunic and had the company tailor sew on Marine buttons and attach the Globe, Anchor and Eagle to his collar. When “Doc” appeared at chow with his new decorations the officers were aghast, but later General (then Colonel) Doyen authorized him to wear them and there they have remained.

“I am prouder to wear the Globe, Anchor and Eagle than I am to wear the Croix de Guerre which was given me after I had the opportunity of helping General Catlin when he was wounded,” said Dr. Clifford. “Any one of the boys would have done anything he could for the general in similar circumstances, but not everyone is awarded an emblem by the Marines themselves. A token of affection from such men as those is the greatest honor.”

IN THE THICK OF IT AT BELLEAU WOOD

He was with the 5th Regiment through that fame-winning Belleau Wood battle, and has endless stories to tell of experiences in that terrible fight, some of them amusing as an afterthought, though they were not so regarded at the time. For example, the experience when he and a stretcher bearer were crawling through the grass toward the trench where General Catlin lay seriously wounded. Shells were dropping and machine-gun bullets were slashing all about.

“Keep closer down, Doc,” was the constant admonition of the stretcher bearer, “closer down.”

“The lad didn’t realize, I guess,” Doc says, “that I was perfectly willing to get closer to the earth but my stomach prevented my doing so.”

He says of the awful days in Belleau Wood, where his life was repeatedly in danger:

“It was glorious to be with the boys there, as they saved Paris and made history. Out of the 1,600 men in the 3rd Battalion, there were only 200 left after ten days in Belleau Wood. Many a time the rosary I carried was covered with blood as one of those brave boys grasped it for the last time.” (Creed made no difference at a time like that.)

“I could relate instances of individual heroism for hours at a time. I lay by the side of Top Sergeant Grant of the 20th Company while he picked off nine Germans consecutively at 400 yards; that’s Marine Corps marksmanship for you.

“‘Anything I can do for you, boy?’ I asked him.

“‘No, Doc,’ he said, ‘but you might pray while I aim.’

“‘I’ve been doing that,’ I told him, ‘every time you squeeze the trigger.’ Later I saw him blown to pieces by a shell.

“Then there was the chap named Young who saw Major Berry wounded and threw himself in front of him as a shield from the bullets that were flying like hail. Later, when I spoke to him about his act, he merely said, ‘I’ve done nothing.’ A few days afterward when he had volunteered to perform a dangerous mission in the town of Lucy and was doing what he would probably have called ‘nothing,’ he, too, was killed by a bit of shell.

“One of the boys saved me when I was stunned by shrapnel and in my stupor started to walk toward the German line. He saw where I was headed and got Doc out of that pretty quick. Then I was paralyzed by another piece of shrapnel and was taken to a Paris hospital. But I was lucky. I was out again in five weeks and got back at the front just in time to be with my boys when the great drive opened on July 18 at Soissons.”

During that intense fighting he was again at the side of the men of the 5th to lend a hand whenever possible. One wounded Marine asked him for a smoke, which was forthcoming, but the lad was unable to take it, his hands were both shot.

“Light it for me, will you, Doc?” he said, and Doc did, although he hadn’t had any practice for more than thirty years.

Another story he tells is of a runner who, before one of the battles, asked him to lead a prayer meeting. Although somewhat astonished by the request, Doc complied and the meeting was duly held in a dugout. Later an officer was questioning the runner concerning his whereabouts.

“I was in the dugout at a prayer meeting,” said the boy.

“A prayer meeting?” demanded the officer.

“Yes, sir,” persisted the lad, “and it was a damned good prayer meeting.”

Besides the Croix de Guerre, Dr. Clifford proudly wears the blue Cross of Lorraine, given him by an officer in that province.

COULDN’T STOP THEM

Thro’ Turkish Shells and Barbed-Wired Sea They Landed at Gallipoli

Twenty transports of Australians under General Birdwood, arriving at Gallipoli. In any circumstances, landing through rough seas and narrow beaches, under defiant cliffs and then climbing those cliffs is not nerve soothing for either impatient commanders or restless soldiers. But in war time with cannon belching at you—well, it costs.

It was planned to surprise the Turks—those surprisingly straight-shooting Turks, with their infernal German guns and German officers. The men tried to hope, but it was really absurd to think the enemy would be surprised. In January the Allied troops had tried to force the Dardanelles. That had been sufficient warning. The enemy would not be caught napping only a few months later. Even the most hopeful of the men set about writing the letters which might contain their very last wishes, fears, bequests, expressions of love. Then the gloom passed and jokes and laughter came.

At about two o’clock in the morning they dropped anchor. Each man stood at parade on the decks, and each was ordered to look to his supplies—a rifle, a bayonet, 150 rounds of ammunition, three days’ rations, a first-aid kit. It was weird contemplating this stretch of the Ægean and that bit of coast so soon to be washed by blood.

Captain David Fanlon in his story of _The Big Fight_ says: “The long procession of transports and their grim battleship escorts had stolen up in the night, a widely spread yet organized, concrete group of slowly-moving, black, gloomy monsters. Every light aboard each ship had been ordered out. Not even the pin-head flame of a cigarette might show on any deck.

“The only light we had was the faint green gleam that filtered over the smooth waters from a moon that had begun to wane and had, indeed, at this hour of three in the morning, nearly fallen behind the ragged jaw of the black cliffs.”

That moon may have been very picturesque, but the men on those boats hated it, feared it, wished it in—any place but in the heaven above them. Its beam might act as a spotlight on the surprise attack. It looked like the evil _eye_ of the _enemy_.

“I wonder,” said some one, “what that old green eye of a moon is looking at back of those dark, old cliffs? I wonder if he sees the big guns drowsing and the garrisons asleep or——”

“What he’s seeing,” came a grumbling answer, “is the heathen blighters getting ready to bang hell out of us!”

THE GREAT ADVENTURE BEGINS

“And now the men had assembled on the decks as soft-footedly as they might. They had gathered in the darkness into orderly rows like big companies of phantoms. The ship’s crews worked as spectrally and nearly as silently as the lowering of ladders and the launching of the boats would permit. Small steamboats, each with a swerving tail made up of barges and small boats, panted alongside the transports and battleships. With wonderful precision and swiftness the great ships spawned hundreds on hundreds of smaller craft, thousands on thousands of men, crowding the waters with them for as far as you could make out whichever way you looked in the faint moonlight.”

_© New York Herald._

A Night Attack on the Dardanelles

British warships bombarding Turkish forts to protect the Allied landing parties. The fire that was returned was both accurate and deadly.]

Of a sudden, the moon dipped and blinked out behind the cliffs. There was a sigh of relief. “God bless that damned old moon.” A moment before there had been just enough light to see the battleships coming on slowly in the rear with the obvious purpose of covering the attack. “Then you couldn’t see a blessed thing. The green waters had turned to ink. You only knew your comrades were with you in the same boat by the press of their swaying bodies against your shoulders and your ribs.”

They were within two hundred yards of the shore.

“Shouldn’t wonder,” whispered some one, “if we’re to surprise them after all.”

“Then suddenly out of that weird darkness, that curious silence that had been disturbed only by the rapid, half-choked panting of the steam tugs, the surge of the water against the sides of the barges, the whispers, the occasional smothered laughs—all soft sounds—there came hell—veritable hell if ever hell comes to men on earth! And it came with a tremendous roar!”

Captain Dave Fanlon was not an observer at the time. He was a participant. He gives a most thrilling account of the ghastly landing:

“There was a swift, sharp lightening of the sky back of the gaunt, black cliffs, and our boats seemed thrown out of the water, thrown up into the air by the rocking thunder of the heavy guns of the Turkish batteries behind those cliffs. The water that had been so smooth an instant before, that was, in fact, so treacherously smooth, as had been the silence, was stabbed and chopped and sent into wild spume by a great rain of shells. Blinding blasts flared as suddenly, as here and there a boat with its living load was struck and shattered. Screams and hoarse, impulsive cries began to mingle with the explosions.”

The Turks had the range as surely as if they were only ten feet away from the Australians. The English battleships began an angry, heavy retort. Whether they found their mark among the Turks or not, it seemed to make no difference. The enemy fire became more and more intense. Boat after boat was being smashed. Scores and scores of men, unable to swim, or weak swimmers, died right there.

CAUGHT IN BARBED-WIRE NETS

Most of the men struggled. They tried to throw off their encumbrances. They helped one another to get rid of their knapsacks. They let go their ammunition belts—everything but their bayonets. They knew that even if they could make the shore there would be small hope for them without the bayonets. All the time came that devilish fire from the cliffs. The shore was not far off now. They swam. They were within fifty feet of it. Then they hit against a terrible snare.

“The enemy had constructed on stakes in eight feet of water a barbed-wire entanglement along more than two miles of the beach.” Men ran their faces full tilt against the barbed wire’s fangs. They cursed and moaned. They hung on to the wire, but ducked every instant, for a scream of bullets was all around. Hundreds drowned. Hundreds were held like netted fish in the entangling wires. Many were lost in trying to get through that wire. But the attack went on. There was some space between the wire and the sea bottom. They crawled through! The enemy’s own shells smashed some of the wire. Bombing parties in battleship launches tore more sections open.

Men did get through. They lay gasping on the beach. But bullets came thicker. They rose. Officers tried to organize the torn forces. The bombardment from the forts was ceaseless. The English ships roared back with thundering fire. Machine gun fire and rifle fire from Turks, concealed in mounds of sand and the clefts of the cliffs, were tearing down the brave Australians—ever dauntless.

“The landing party was grotesque and wavering under the frightful storm. Shouts, yells, screams of pain, cries of alarm merged into a great clamor. The most heartening thing, somehow, in the darkness had become the Australian cry of ‘Coo-ee!’—sharp and musical, in which men had called themselves together into groups.

“There was no living on the beach. The only way out of that immediate hell was to charge across the sands and get into the shelter of the dunes, to fight our way to the base of the cliffs and get away from the shells of the cliffs, and to fight a way into the enemy trenches in the table-lands.”

Amidst the horror and confusion that reigned impossible deeds were performed. How it was ever done no one can tell. It was terrible. But it had to be done. Many of the English hadn’t a thing to fight with but the cold steel of their bayonets. The warships, of course, helped tremendously. The hills of sand and the stony cliffs were rent by merciless fire. You could see “the bodies of the enemies, clusters of them, spouting from the places of their concealment. Legs, arms, heads were flying wildly in the air.”

GOT THERE ANY OLD WAY

Captain Fanlon says:

“We got up those sand ridges any old way—by digging in our bayonets like Alpine staffs, clawing with our free hands, scrambling with toe-holds and fighting up on all fours.

“We had just gained a knoll of sand and bush and taken protection behind it for a minute’s breathing when one of my men, one of those sturdy cattlemen who had made their way out of the wilderness to get into the war for civilization, went down with a bullet in his leg.

“‘Nothing much,’ he said, as I bent over him to examine the wound, ‘and don’t stop for me. Go on and come back for me later or maybe the Red Cross lads will find me. A little thing like this isn’t going to—’

“He was smiling as he talked, but suddenly his head fell back, his smile widening into a horrible grin. A bullet had taken him in the neck. He was done for.

“Of course, and luckily, there were only a few of our thousands that had been blown out of their boats and most of the lusty fighters of the landing force had their ammunition in hand. They were going after the Turks with the rifle volleys of deadly accuracy.

“Having come alive through the terrible ordeal of that shell and bullet strand of open beach, the Australians and New Zealanders were fired to the highest fighting pitch. Companies of them sang as they climbed and pushed and struggled along—sang or rather yelled snatches of all manner of songs though they didn’t sound much like songs. More like strange, sustained savage war cries.

“There was no staying the impetuosity of some of them.”

SOME WOULDN’T “DIG IN”

At last the Turks began to give way. They were on the run. But their forts two and three miles away were still pouring their fire. The men were ordered to dig in. Despite orders, however, “hundreds of our warriors refused to stop. They charged right on through the pathways and tunnels in the cliffs. We never saw them again. Those that were not killed were captured by the Turks. We used to say in speaking of them afterward that they had ‘gone on to Constantinople.’”

The Australians had proved their mettle in this terrible adventure. Everlasting glory was theirs—soldiers so recently recruited. The soldiers, though, were not the only ones to be elevated to higher sacrifice in these soul-straining demands. “There was the work done by the Australian Army Service Corps—landing a steady procession of boats with medical and food supplies as well as ammunition, fleets on fleets of these boats from the transports and battleships moving to shore with the coolest regularity, with the waters around every one of them constantly thrashed by tons of falling shells. Scores of the boats were blown up. But the others never stopped.”

“The stretcher-bearers and the doctors we could also see working calmly among the sand dunes, ignoring snipers’ bullets as though they had been harmless flakes of snow. Slow and painful files of the wounded—those who could walk or stagger along were being guided to protected places until the coming of night might enable their removal to the hospital ships.

“As for the dead whose countless prone bodies were strewn upon the beach with curious pitiful inertness, so different from that of sleep that you know instinctively it means death—there was no use then risking live men to give the dead the attention, to award them such decencies of care and burial as were their due. This also would be the work of the night. Yes, and many a man as he worked over the graves of his fallen comrades pitched into that grave, himself become a dead man—betrayed to a sniper by the moonlight’s gleam.

“Twilight veiled the sun and then very suddenly black night came.”

© _New York Herald._

British Troops Meeting a Charge by the Turks

Their fighting equipment reduced to machine guns and rifles, a small British unit at Gallipoli met the onrushing Turks in the open and drove them back.]

The Australians had done the thing men in authority had thought it impossible to do. Lord Kitchener later declared this one of the most brilliant feats of bravery and soldiering of the war.

There were 20,000 men who landed at Gallipoli. Perhaps 1,000 of them are alive to-day.

THE KIND OF MEN THEY WERE

And here is a tribute to the men who stormed the heights that may be found in the London _Times’_ account of the campaign:

“The most moving part in the Gallipoli story will ever be the splendid feelings it called forth in the breasts of young Australians. To them it was no ordinary adventure in warfare. These single-minded, loyal youths had different conceptions of God. But every conception fitted into the sublime conception that this work for their race and country was God’s work. Upon the tissue of their natures, the warm affections, the cleanliness and the liberty among which they had been brought up, this fighting call in Gallipoli precipitated something that seemed to them the highest thing possible. What they knew was that they wished to go to Anzac, that they were prepared to die there, that the Australian army had become for them a sacred institution. Their hearts were touched by the death of comrades, their eyes took fire at the sight of the distinctive Australian uniform. Gallipoli proved, if it did not in itself go far to produce, a warmth and generosity in the Australian character. The difficulty experienced by the commanders was not to get men to this shell-torn place of hardship, but to keep them from it. Half the members of the Light Horse Brigades and all the drivers of artillery and ambulances had been left behind in Cairo or Alexandria, to attend to the horses. But it was impossible to keep them there. They decided amongst themselves who could be spared. Everyone wished to go, those chosen were thought lucky. They boarded transports at Alexandria, stowed away until the ships were at sea, and then reported themselves to the officers commanding. One artillery brigade lost 39 of its men in this manner. General Hamilton could never find it in his heart to send back men who came with tears in their eyes and asked for nothing better than to be given privates’ work in Anzac. There were cases in which sergeants gladly forfeited stripes and pay for the chance. Men could not bear to go back to their homes and say they had not done their share at Anzac.”

UNORTHODOX BUT STANCH

“And of their discipline, which was attacked because it was sometimes unorthodox, what better can be said than what was told in the undying story of the _Southland_? The _Southland_ was torpedoed by a German submarine in the Ægean Sea, when conveying the 21st Australian Infantry Battalion and part of the 23rd, 1,500 strong, from Alexandria to Mudros. They were Victorian country boys, recruited for the most part from the farms and stations of the Wimmera and the Goulburn Valley. Panic ensued among the ill-assorted crew of this converted German liner. Three of the four holds filled with water, the hatches of the hold first damaged were blown out and in the water there the Australians could see the dead bodies floating of their comrades killed by the explosion. No one thought that the ship could keep for long above water. But the soldiers stood at their stations. They waited for their turn. One went to the piano, and played favorite airs. Others, when volunteers were asked for, jumped into the water to right overturned boats. When at last all the men were off the stricken vessel, standing on half-submerged rafts, clinging to the edges of boats, swimming alongside improvised supports, volunteers were called for to stoke the ship into port, all the men within hearing offered for the hazardous task. Six officers and seventeen men climbed the rope ladders again, and with her bows under water and her stern low down, the ship was brought into Mudros and beached. It was a triumphant vindication of the discipline of Dominion troops. ‘The discipline was perfect,’ wrote Captain C. E. W. Bean, official reporter at Anzac. ‘The men turned out immediately. There had been boat drill on the voyage and the men ran straight to their proper places and lined up.’”

This praise of discipline which, though “unorthodox,” meets and never fails to meet the required end, reads quite as if it had been written of the boys of the United States’ expeditionary force.

ONE OF OUR BOYS

A California Youth of Heroic Soul Who Gave His Life to England

We are constantly hearing of the hundreds of Americans who laid down their lives under the French colors. It was part of the debt we owed France. England, too, when she joined in the war for liberty, found many Americans hastening to her aid, and among the lives that were taken under her flag in the “great venture” was that of Harry Butters, a young Californian whose death in France called forth nation-wide eulogies in Great Britain.

Young Butters, after a preliminary education at San Francisco, went to England and entered Beaumont College at Windsor. There amid England’s rural charms and the spell of England’s old traditions, he learned to love the country which sheltered him.

At the outbreak of the war, Butters went back to America. He could not stay, however. There was a call to rise and to go. He went back to England and enlisted. It was as an officer of the British Army that he died.

The London _Observer_ voices England’s praise and love of the American:

“This American boy—and what a straight, upstanding pattern of youth and strength he was—owed us no duty and he gave us all. He gave it not impulsively nor in adventurous recklessness, but with a settled enthusiasm belonging to the ‘depth and not the tumult of the soul.’ How much he gave is worth considering. His personal endowments and opportunities were such that when he made up his mind to quit everything in his bright California and to come into the war, his choice was heroic in the fullest sense of that word.

“When he went back to America after leaving college, he was a young man of mark, framed to excel both in sport and affairs. He was very tall, supple, active, frank, and comely of face, as gay as he was good-looking. You saw by a glance at his hands that he had a born instinct for management and technique. He had been a good deal at sea. He knew all about horses and motor-cars. He was a crack shot and a fine polo-player. His business ability was shown as soon as he took over the management of his father’s estates. With this practical talent that could turn itself to anything he had other qualities. One remembers what a delightful, level, measuring glance he used to give suddenly from under his brows when he had finished rolling a cigarette and went on with his keen questioning about men and things. To talk with him was to receive a new and promising revelation of the mind of young America. Like so many of our own young soldiers in their attitude toward politics, he was not content with either of the old parties in the United States. He thought that his own generation, if it was earnest enough, might make a better hand both of social problems and world-relations. He hoped to play his part. Although he always thought of himself in a fine spirit as “an American citizen,” he wanted the United States to take a full share in the wider life of the world, and especially to work as far as possible for common ideals with the whole English-speaking race.

WARM HEARTED AND FEARLESS

“So when the news of the war came to San Francisco, he put aside as fair a prospect of wealth, success, happiness, and long life as could well open before a young man, and determined to throw in his lot with the old country and the Allies in the fight for civilization against all the armed might of lawless iniquity which had flung itself on Belgium.

_Drawn by Joseph Cummings Chase._

Sergeant Harry J. Adams

_89th Division, 353rd Infantry, Company “K”_

Following a retreating German into a house in the town of Boullonville on September 12, 1918, he fired the remaining two shots in his pistol through the door and ordered the surrender of the occupants. By his bravery, coolness and confidence he captured, single-handed, 375 prisoners.]

“He was then twenty-two. He arrived in England in the early part of 1915 to join the British Army, and no military eye could doubt that the British Army had got a rare recruit. Harry Butters got his first commission in the 11th Royal Warwickshire Regiment. Afterward his technical faculty found more congenial scope when he transferred to the Royal Field Artillery. While training, he stayed a good deal at the rectory, Stow-on-the-Wold, Glos. The rector writes: ‘He was a warm-hearted, fearless young officer, as fine an American gentleman as ever crossed the Atlantic.’ It is much to say, but it is true.”

“His captain writes that, ‘He was with his guns, and no one could have died in a nobler way. He was one of the brightest, cheeriest boys I have ever known, and always the life and soul of the mess.... We all realized his nobility in coming to the help of another country entirely of his own free will, and understood what a big heart he had. He was loved by all.’

“He is in it to the finish, indeed, with comrades of his adoption, who have passed with him. He takes his last sleep out there with so many of the brave and true where none was braver and truer than he, and among the recollections of the great war, his name will not be forgotten. Beaumont will take care of that. In his old college we doubt not he will have his permanent memorial. In our thoughts the flags of Britain and America cover his heart with double honor. We shall never see them entwined again without thinking of him. No American can read these lines without being proud of him. No Briton can read them without feelings deeper, more moved than can be said in any words. We are grateful, as he would have liked, to his America that bred him.”

Mrs. Denis O’Sullivan, the widow of the famous Irish singer who was so eulogized by Mark Twain in his “Memoirs,” wrote to friends about the boy she affectionately called “stepson,” though there was no such tie between them:

“Do you remember in poor Synge’s ‘Riders to the Sea’—the old mother says that now her last son is drowned, she will be able to sleep o’ nights?

“The harrowing anxiety of every day in this time of war is over for me, too. On July 22, as you know, Gerard, my first stepson, was killed. And on August 31, at night, too, my last—Harry Butters—they were both as dear to me as my own—but Gerard had his own people here—he was not dependent on me, while in a way, Harry had only me—his sister was six thousand miles away. I haven’t been able to say much of him these last months as he had been getting the carbon copies of my letters to you. Yet it was so often on the tip of my fingers to enlarge upon the boy—his charm, his capabilities.

“More still upon the drama of his last experiences—from the moment when he burst into Aldwych his first day in uniform, so big, so startlingly handsome—above all, so gay—a shout of ‘stepmother!’ that raised the dust in that crowded, smoky refuge where the hundreds of tired Belgians looked around in astonishment that anyone left in the world could be so fresh, so dazzling—through those months of his watch beside his guns or directing fire from his exposed shell-swept hillside—that awful moment when the enemy found the range and poured death down upon the shelter that was no shelter—when all the other officers within call took refuge there, fourteen in all, Harry, the youngest, but the one who dashed out under fire to carry what was left of one of his telephonists to the first-aid station—a poor mangled mass of humanity, still breathing and crying out, a deed that in a smaller war would have meant the Victoria Cross, but in this, only one of a thousand such daily—after it his sudden collapse from the shock—(‘No one knew it, stepmother! I managed to bluff it through!’) But his colonel had been through the same experience and backed the doctor up in sending him to the base for a few days.

“Then his June leave, luckily due anyway, brought him over to No. 7 where he could be petted and taken care of—but it was a quiet Harry—no less clear-eyed and vigorous, but so, _so_ tired.

“Then Winston Churchill and Garvin trying to make him take three weeks’ extra leave, the boy’s refusal, his return to France, some weeks in the ammunition column, where, knowing him to be comparatively safe, I could carry an easier heart, then a hasty line: ‘Just going up to one of the batteries to replace a casualty. It’s too bad it comes while I’m in bad shape, but it can’t be helped, and it surely is what I’m here for, after all. Don’t worry any more than you can help.’

“That was August 22, only short notes after that, though he could find time to write, ‘I’m going to try to get over to Gerard’s grave. If I can find some flowers I’ll decorate it for you.’

“His friend, Captain Zamora, to whom he’d given my address, could not have been with him at the last, for he had also had shell-shock and was with the ammunition column, but he wrote on the 1st of September that Harry had been with his guns the night before, when the call came, had gone in apparently the best of spirits—and the same shell killed him and his battery commander.

“It has been so beautiful this week. I’ve never seen a harvest-moon more wonderful. One can only think what a world it is—and Harry and Gerard both out of it.”

GUTHRIE OF THE “KILTIES”

The First Canadian to Enlist Came Back with Scars of Twenty-two Wounds

Colonel Guthrie must have been born a fighter. Certainly ever since he was seventeen he showed the disposition of the warrior. His military career began with the outbreak of the South African War, when he proceeded to enlist in the Transvaal as a member of the famous Fourth Canadian Mounted Rifles. Guthrie made just one complaint about the campaign: “It ended too soon.” His adventurous spirit was not satisfied. He enlisted in the naval police. That, however, was not exactly what he wanted.

He returned to Canada in 1903. If civil pursuits were in order he would take them in the same spirit as an army campaign in the Transvaal. He studied law. When only twenty-seven he was elected a member of the legislature of New Brunswick. He was a success.

Perhaps he would have lived his life without further intensive physical experiences. The war saved him.

“It was August 4, 1914,” says the London _Telegraph_, “that fateful day upon which England declared war against Germany, closely following on the invasion of neutral Belgium. In a little theater up in the city of Fredericton, capital of the Province of New Brunswick, a large audience sat enjoying an interesting program. The second act had just ended. From the left wing of the stage walked the house-manager. A raised hand cut short the orchestra’s selection. Almost everybody knew what was coming. They had been expecting it for the last thirty hours. A silence fell over the entire house while nine words were pronounced by the house-manager:

“‘Our mother country has to-day declared war against Germany.’

“For a second—only a second—a lull fell over the audience. Then, as if prearranged, the orchestra struck up the strain of ‘God Save the King.’ From top to bottom the house was in uproar. Cheer after cheer rent the air. The audience as one stood singing the national anthem.

“Seated well up in front in the orchestra as the manager’s announcement was made was a man about forty-four years old. The audience, with the exception of this particular man, began to settle back in their chairs as the singing of ‘God Save the King’ was concluded. With a stride which was noticeably military he walked toward the rear of the theater and left the building. Less than two blocks away was a telegraph-office. The lone night operator, half dosing, jumped to his feet as the door opened, and the man who a few seconds ago had left the theater entered. He addressed a telegraph-blank to ‘Sir Sam Hughes, Canadian Minister of Militia,’ and then followed an offer to raise a company of soldiers for an overseas expedition.

HE RAISES A COMPANY

“‘Captain Percy Guthrie, Seventy-first York Infantry,’ the message which he handed the operator was signed. The first Canadian had volunteered his services to the King.

© _New York Herald._

The Charge of the London Scottish

Subjected to a withering fire, the Scots were driven back from Messines three times. They finally rallied and took the position with the bayonet.]

“Captain Guthrie returned at once to the theater, joined his wife, and witnessed the rest of the performance. The curtain came down, and with his wife, Captain Guthrie again headed to the telegraph-office. This time the operator was not thinking about sleep. He had just received a reply to Captain Guthrie’s telegram and was anxiously awaiting his return. The answer read: ‘Offer accepted. Proceed to recruit volunteers forthwith.’”

Guthrie raised his company and went to the front. He soon rose in rank, and at last was given command of a regiment of Scots.

Guthrie is said to possess almost a boyish exuberance of spirit, but of some things he will not jest. He will not even talk about them. Evidently the horror he has met with at the front has left a permanent impression. The following incident is told by a close friend of the Colonel’s, Charles K. Howard, representative of the Canadian Government Railway:

“On a night in the battle of Festubert the Tenth Canadians went over the trenches. The flares from the machine guns made the line as light as day. A piece of the German trenches was taken. The only injury that the Colonel at this portion of the scrap received were some tears in the legs from barbed wire entanglements, although he lost in three-quarters of an hour two-thirds of his battalion. The piece that was taken must be held until reinforcements came. These were a little slow in arriving. A captain held one end of the line while the Colonel, leading his men down the trenches, with his bombers cleared out another section. The German line began to give slowly. Step by step, they slid back around the traverses toward Givenchy. The Canadians gathered their strength and started to press forward. A brave Westphalian officer tried to hold his men and stem the tide. He stood up to his knees in mud, fighting until his last bomb was gone. The Colonel, at the head of his men, rushed upon the officer, who, weighing perhaps forty pounds less than the Colonel, was not daunted. He grasped the Colonel by both arms, holding him for a moment, and then, with the strength borne of despair, lifted him bodily into the air, holding him rigid so that he could not move.”

TAKES A MUD BATH

“The Canadians, dashing on behind, overbalanced the struggling pair, so that the Westphalian officer fell backward into the mud, with the Colonel on top. In the dark the Canadian soldiers did not know whether their leader had been killed or not. They did not take time to investigate. They rushed over the two struggling men, trampling them deeper and deeper into the mire of the trench. The Colonel found the throat of the German officer. The struggle was soon over, so that he could catch up to his men.”

During the attack on Ypres Guthrie resigned his position and asked to be sent to the Tenth. Of that engagement, Mr. Howard says:

“The Tenth had been badly battered in taking back from the woods four British guns that had been captured. The gallant Colonel Boyle, with seven machine-gun bullets in his body, had for two hours in the darkness of the night lain in a shell-hole surrounded by his men and in true Western style, with a revolver in each hand, had repelled repeated attacks. Then he was carried away to die, and Major MacLarinthe, second in command, leading the charge, was shot through the knee. After crawling forward with his men to a little clump of woods which he helped to capture he was shot through the head and killed. Major Ormand, too, fell wounded. Four officers of the thirty-one were left when it fell to the lot of Junior Lieutenant Guthrie, as he had become in order to go to the Tenth, to lead the battalion.

“During the succeeding days the fighting surged back and forth over Ypres’s hillsides, during which time the battalion suffered greatly from the gas-clouds that were let loose now and then.

“One time, when leading his men, the Colonel fell with a bayonet wound in the chin. On another occasion his nose was broken, but this did not put him out of action. He suffered from the concussion of a shell on another occasion and was knocked out for five hours. On another day he was put out of business by a gas-shell which exploded near him and he was dragged out of a ditch full of water by a British general, who forced him to emit the gas by thrusting his fingers down his throat. A scar on the knee shows where the Colonel was punctured with a bayonet-point. His hand has been ripped open by a bayonet which he held while grappling with an assailant. The outcome of it was that the Canadians held the line at Ypres until reinforcements came.”

NOT SO UNSPEAKABLE

A Turk Whose Sense of Humor Made the Tommies His Friends at Gallipoli

War has its humor. Even though it appear arms locked with death, there is a laugh on the side. It is probably true, as an old soldier once said, that if there were not a funny side to war an army could never get through its hell. The British troops on the Gallipoli Peninsula did not find the situation teeming with the hilarious, but there were moments of relief from the grim monster of trench fighting. Oddly enough one of the provoking causes of much mirth, seasoned with a due amount of vexation, was a rotund Turk in whom a sense of humor and an impudent daring mingled in a way to win the regard of the Tommies fighting in the trench opposite him. He alternated between tossing a bunch of dates and hurling a bomb into the trench of the Tommies with whom he exchanged laughter daily. Some of the Australians detected in him reminders of an eccentric “publican” who dispensed beer at home. So the Turk was dubbed “Fatty” Burns, the sobriquet of the keeper of the “pub.”

A correspondent of the New York _Globe_ tells the story as he got it from Trooper Clancy, one of the men in the trench opposite the merry Turk, at Russell’s Top, on Gallipoli, the two trenches being separated by less than twenty-five yards.

“One old topper in the trench opposite me was a fair treat,” said Clancy. “He was so. My word! Used to pop up his head above the trenches and laugh at us. Then he’d pop down again. All along our side the boys would be taking shots at him, and they never hit. Then we could hear him laugh. We got so we liked him.

“‘Don’t shoot at the old orphan,’ the boys would say. ‘He looks like “Fatty” Burns.’”

One morning the Light Horse had made a demonstration in order to keep the Turks from thinking of what was going on somewhere else. They were chased back to the trenches when they had done their part, but they left two men behind them. The sun was cruel hot, Clancy says. His rifle-barrel fair blistered his fingers. These poor chaps were lying there with their faces in the grizzling sand. The Australians could not reach them. It would have been suicide to try.

“Here comes ‘Fatty’ Burns,” said some one.

The Australians in stupefaction watched the old Turk. He had thrown aside his rifle and stood up at full length on the parapet of the trench. Anyone could have potted him at that range. Clancy doesn’t understand yet why no one did, except that they were all fond of the old blighter. “Fatty” Burns crawled into the open in a lazy sort of way and walked over to the two wounded men.

“Gave them a drink of water, he did,” said Clancy, “and wiped their lips and then lugged them over to a bit of cover so we could go out and get them after night came. We gave a cheer for old ‘Fatty’ and he laughed at us before he went back into his hole. My word! How his white teeth did shine.”

The Australians had more bully-beef than they needed. The cans got to be a nuisance. They were not permitted to refuse the stated allowance of bull each day. Until lately a British ration has been a fixed and immutable thing. One day it occurred to some one that “Fatty” Burns might like some meat. So they tossed three cans into his trench.

“There was a terrible hullaballo, when they landed,” said Clancy. “I suppose they thought it was some new-fangled kind of bomb. But an hour or so later some Turk threw us a lot of fine, fresh dates. We always reckoned it was ‘Fatty’ Burns.”

Three or four days afterward “Fatty” Burns thrust head and shoulders above the trench-top again and laughed like sin. Then he threw something into Clancy’s trench.

“I just had time to get my overcoat down on it before it went off,” said he. “‘Fatty’ had scooped out the meat from one of our tins and filled it up with melinite and pieces of scrap-iron. It fair murdered my coat. I held it up above the parapet and shook it at ‘Fatty.’ He laughed until he choked.”

“A bully old sport was ‘Fatty’ Burns.”

THE MEDICAL CORPS

Though the Reports Are all Too Few Every Doctor Was a Hero

_Courtesy of Telephone Review._

Decorating American Soldiers with the Legion of Honor

Colonel Carty of the U. S. Signal Corp receiving the insignia from General Berdoullat.]

“If there be degrees of chivalry the highest award should be accorded to the medical profession,” was said in the London _Times_ in 1916. People didn’t know whether that was meant quite seriously. Soon they found out. Medical men were figuring heavily in the casualty lists, and more and more stories were coming over of exceptional courage and devotion to duty among the doctors, nurses, and ambulance drivers. Usually, also, no one but the wounded on the fields of battle knew how to appreciate the deeds of the non-combatants. There was in general no thrill attached to the records. They were simply records of steady self-sacrifice in the face of the greatest danger.

The Times instanced a number of heroic doctors. Captain Chavasse was one of them. Utterly regardless of heavy firing he would time and again rush across the open to dress the wounded. He kept this up all through the engagement and then he himself was wounded in the side by a shell splinter. This injury he sustained while carrying an urgent case into safety, the journey being over 500 yards of shell-swept ground. Afterwards at night he took up a party of twenty volunteers, rescued three wounded men from a shell hole only twenty-five yards from the enemy trench, buried the bodies of two officers, and collected many identity discs—and these things he did although he was fired on by machine guns and bombs.

By J. F. Bouchor

The Sister of Mercy]

The Captain finally met his death while at such work. The official record gives only brief details: “Though severely wounded early in action, while carrying a wounded soldier to the dressing station, Chavasse refused to leave his post, and for two days he not only continued to perform his duties but also went out repeatedly under heavy fire to search for and attend the wounded who were lying out. During these searches Chavasse was practically without food, he was worn with fatigue and faint with his wound, yet he helped to carry in a number of badly wounded men, over heavy and difficult ground. It was due to his extraordinary energy and inspiring example that many wounded were rescued who would otherwise undoubtedly have succumbed to the bad weather conditions.”

“There had been many displays,” adds the London _Times_, “of almost superhuman courage and endurance in the war, displays which had been recognized by the bestowal of the greatest of all naval and military distinctions; but standing out prominently even amongst these proofs of highest bravery and duty was the heroism of Chavasse.”

It seemed almost as if such action became a tradition with the profession, for another hero was soon announced—Lieutenant George Allan Maling. During the heavy fighting near Fauquissart, Maling worked hard and incessantly under the unceasing shell fire. “He began his task at 6:15 in the morning, collecting and treating more than 300 men in the open and exposed to merciless fire. Throughout the whole of that day, during the evening, all through the night, without a break till eight o’clock next morning—twenty-six unbroken hours—he worked, reckless of shell and bullet. It seemed impossible that human strength could endure more. Eleven o’clock came, then a large high explosive shell burst and did dreadful havoc. It killed several of his patients, it wounded his only assistant, and it flung Maling down and temporarily stunned him. Yet no sooner did he regain consciousness than he pulled himself together and resumed his work. A second shell exploded, covering both Maling and his instruments with débris; yet even so, he had not finished—he extricated himself and continued his work single-handed.”

SOME RED CROSS WEAKLINGS

Captain Bobo and His Buddies Weren’t Good Enough for the Doctors

There is a reminder of the stone which the builders rejected in the story breezily told by Frank Ward O’Malley in the _Red Cross Magazine_ for July, 1919. It records the heroism of Bobo—Captain Stephen N. Bobo, whose ancestors long ago undoubtedly spelled their name Beaubeaux. Steve was born in Memphis, Tennessee, and began early to react against southern ease. Anyway, as soon as he was graduated from college he made straight for Honduras. “Thence,” says O’Malley, “Steve went to Chile, where he started for Sidney on a trading schooner, but liked the little ship so well that he bought a controlling interest in her en route. At the Christmas Islands, Skipper Steve Bobo converted his schooner into a trader instanter—and made a little money on her. He was wrecked off Easter Island and, with five companions, had to swim seven miles to land. Skipper Bobo and four of his friends were compelled during that swim to help keep afloat betimes a sixth, whose swimming technique was poor.

“He returned to Chile aboard a passing convict ship. He made a short visit home, then was off to the interior of China, where he made a little money. In turn he went to India; to the Philippines; to Hawaii, where he bought swamp lands, parceled the property and sold it to the Chinese tara farmers, and made a little money on that; to the State of Washington on a hydro-electric venture and made a little money on that; to the San Joaquín Valley of California, and made a little money at ranching.”

_Drawn by Joseph Cummings Chase._

Private Carl W. Dasch

_42nd, Division, 167th Infantry, Headquarters Company_

On July 26th-August 1, 1918, near Croix Rouge Farm, he carried messages between the firing lines and battalion headquarters, at the same time picking up wounded men and carrying them out of the barrage to the first-aid station. During the whole series of engagements he did not sleep and his physical energy was taxed to the utmost.]

Captain Bobo was resting up in April, 1917, and contemplating his next venture when Uncle Sam decided that this world had not been made for Germany and advised the Kaiser of our intention to prove it. Bobo hurried to the first recruiting station. And then the San Francisco army doctors played their trick.

They turned him down.

“THE JOLLY OLD RED CROSS”

“The way the army doctors talked to him made the young man wish ardently that instead of being a poor little anemic lad, who could do nothing but swim seven miles and sail schooners through typhoons and knock over tigers, he were one of those brawny athletes who had trained indoors on stenography, dress-goods salesmanship, and cigarettes and therefore were being uproariously welcomed into a selective service army by local draft boards.

“‘But,’ cried young Mr. Bobo in effect, ‘I’m telling the world fair that I want to go to France. And I want what I want when I want it. Now what other speedy way is there of getting to France besides the—Holy mackerel! I’ve got it! The jolly old Red Cross.’”

Bobo wondered, when he was going across, if the Red Cross would ever allow him to sneak close enough to the front “to get gassed or shot or something.”

When Bobo landed in France with the First Division he was assigned to the very humble task of serving soldiers with cocoa and sandwiches. He took up the task seriously, and did his work well, but then he got tired. Finally he got enough courage to suggest a plan to General O’Ryan.

The army doctors were constantly sending men back from the front line because of some physical defects. Steve Bobo wanted the General to give him permission to establish a “Divisional Rest Camp” and fill it with those “darn fine fellows” whom the surgeons were throwing out. “Most of those men,” he said, “are volunteers, and all of them are the best sort of fighters. Instead, then, of sending them back to the rear for reclassification, turn them over to me, sir, we’ll show you something.”

“That was done. Day by day into the Bobo ‘Divisional Rest Camp’ came the men, sad beyond measure because the surgeons had found something in their anatomical architecture which was slightly out of kilter. Daily Captain Bobo put his unpromising material through a series of setting-up exercises. Thus it was that in next to no time he had surrounded himself with a Red Cross unit of husky youngsters who, as Lieut. Colonel J. Leslie Kincaid, Judge-Advocate of the Division, since has phrased it, ‘preferred to live in that part of hell which has no fire escapes.’ By the time Captain Bobo had completed his organization he had forty-seven men in his Red Cross unit, with every man-jack in the outfit carrying papers to prove that the only reason he was not carrying a rifle was that an army surgeon had got the fool notion the man was not physically able to stand the gaff.

“Cried Captain Bobo, when all had been made ship-shape, ‘We’re set, men: Let’s up and at ’em.’ And forward went the fightingest band of Red Cross ‘invalids’ that ever slapped a German dead and then piled him into an ambulance to try to save his life. Up with the front line fighting men, the little Red Cross band found themselves in no time, and, on occasions, hundreds of yards in advance of the front line trenches, out in a sunlit No Man’s Land.”

KNEW HOW TO GET ’EM