Part 1
Transcriber’s Note Italic text displayed as: _italic_
DEEDS OF HEROISM AND BRAVERY
[Illustration: Decoration]
[Illustration:
By J. F. Bouchor
Honor to the Brave]
DEEDS OF HEROISM AND BRAVERY
_The Book of Heroes and Personal Daring_
INTRODUCTION BY RUPERT HUGHES
EDITED BY ELWYN A. BARRON
_Profusely Illustrated_
[Illustration: Decoration]
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS NEW YORK AND LONDON Established 1817
DEEDS OF HEROISM AND BRAVERY
Copyright, 1920, by Harper & Brothers Printed in the United States of America
E-V
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. FIELD AND TRENCH ORDEALS
“And a Few Marines” 1
Forward Lancers 10
An Unparalleled Hero 13
The Nemesis of Flame 18
He Jests at Scars 20
Epic of the Foreign Legion 27
“Doc” of the Fifth 32
Couldn’t Stop Them 35
One of Our Boys 41
Guthrie of the Kilties 44
Not So Unspeakable 47
The Medical Corps 48
Some Red Cross Weaklings 49
“Eh! Men, ’Twas Grand!” 55
One Survived 57
Tank Man Talks 58
The Garibaldi Code 62
The Bald Facts 65
O’Leary Stepped In 71
When the Yanks Went In 74
Humor and Heroism 79
England’s Indian Warriors 85
A Lively Introduction 92
A Valiant Gentleman 95
Where Denominations End 100
Buckeyes or Spearheads 103
Corporal Holmes’ Way 106
Not Dead But Fighting 109
When the Light Failed 114
The Cloud of Blacks 116
Hubbell Bagged ’Em 121
Was He a Coward? 123
Two Heroes of Hill 60 128
Colonel Freyberg, V. C. 131
One of the D. S. C. Men 133
Colored Troops Reach the Rhine 135
Good Old Potts 138
It Was Up to Bill 139
The Rendezvous 142
Staying to the End 146
Without the Glamour 147
Big Adam’s Hare Soup 156
A Blue Grass Canadian 158
Mistress “Razzle Dazzle” 165
The Painter Soldier 169
II. WOMEN WHO DARED
Edith Cavell Martyr Heroine 172
A Picardy Heroine 181
Girls of the Battalion 183
Her Ambulance Unit 186
A True Heroine 188
A Heroine of Humanity 190
III. ADVENTURE IN THE AIR
One of the Great “Aces” 191
The Lafayette Escadrille 196
A Legendary Hero 202
Worthy Citation 207
A Challenge Duel 209
An American Wonder 211
One to Twenty-two 215
From Saddle to CockPit 215
Dodging “Jack Death” 221
Warneford’s Triumph 223
One Minute Plus 227
“The Pictures Are Good” 232
Subduing the Turk 235
A Daring Pursuit 237
The Roosevelt Boys 238
Just What He Wanted 249
“The Red Battle Flyer” 253
Pat O’Brien Outwits the Hun 257
The Track and Trackless Winner 259
The Gunboat (Poem) 264
IV. SEA AND SUB-SEA STORIES
Captain Fryatt’s Murder 265
Jules Verne Vindicated 271
Weddigen’s Wonder Feat 274
Torpedoed 281
The Valleys of the Blue Shrouds 288
Rizzo Sinks the _Wien_ 290
Edith Cavell (Poem) 291
As of Old 293
Death in a Submarine 295
A Notable Exploit 297
Rescue Extraordinary 304
I Have a Rendezvous with Death (Poem) 315
Tricking the Turk 317
Canadians (Poem) 318
First of Its Kind 318
Not to Be Forgotten 322
Christmas in the Trenches 324
V. ESPIONAGE AND SPIES
Spying at Its Worst 326
As to Spies in England 348
Edith Cavell’s Betrayer 352
Edith Cavell 354
The Spy Mill 355
Alois the Silent 357
Eye of the Morning 360
Better Wrecker than Spy 363
Delicate Scruples 368
Frustrated Diabolism 369
Here’s to Constable Richings 378
What Gilles Brought In 379
VI. AMERICA AT THE FRONT
The Rock of the Marne 381
America’s Highest War Honor 388
ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOR
Honors to the Brave _Frontispiece_
The Sister of Mercy _Facing page_ 48
Sergeant George E. Burr ” 102
Captain Douglass Campbell ” 152
Corporal Walter E. Gaultney ” 200
Sergeant Herman Korth ” 254
Master Signal Electrician E. J. Moore ” 304
Corporal John J. O’Brien ” 354
INTRODUCTION
_Bravery_
By RUPERT HUGHES
Formerly Major United States Army
Bravery is the beautiful, impatient gesture of the soul at its highest reach, baring its own breast to a fatal wound in its eagerness to deal a fatal blow at something it abhors.
Bravery is poetry, drama in deed instead of word. It has always been lovable and beloved.
There is distinguished valor as there is distinguished art, for there are degrees of courage as of intelligence and talent. Many people think beautiful thoughts: a few express them. Someone frames an old idea with an exquisite twist of phrase and a universal proverb results. So some one citizen expresses in one felicitous act an ideal of his people and is accepted as their national hero.
Conspicuous bravery always owes part of its success to good fortune. At the cry of a leader—or in this war at the arrival of “zero hour” on the wrist watches—a whole regiment went forward, nearly every man doing his duty with complete courage. Some heroes were dogged and unimaginative; some revealed ingenuity or invention. But to a single man fell the opportunity and the inspiration to do some extra task with a certain picturesque felicity. His unluckier companions and his generals rejoiced to celebrate him, diminishing their own prestige to enhance his. And the story of his happy thought becomes the delight of his nation, and perhaps of many nations.
There is a kind of injustice in it as there generally is in awards and preferments. Where all have forgotten selfishness and comfort and cast their lives into the furnace, it seems a pity that only a few should emerge with fame. And yet since we can no more remember all our heroes than we can call the roll of the stars in our sky, it would be a mistake to favor no one, to have no crosses of war.
The schoolboys cherish the name of Leonidas and the 300 Spartans at Thermopylæ. But they ignore the 700 Platæans who perished also, and as bravely. This is regrettable, and yet it is better to make a watchword of the name Leonidas than to forget the whole event because it is more than the brain will carry.
Fame is a lottery with a few capital prizes. The winners show perhaps no more wisdom, no more courage than all the other gamblers. In the baseball phrase they simply “luck in.” Yet they will get their names in the papers, people will boast of knowing them; prestige and fortune will be theirs and oblivion will absorb the others. But if you are going to have lotteries succeed, you must offer capital prizes and pay them. And war is the lottery of lotteries.
There have always been wars and, unless hope shall triumph over experience at last, there always will be wars; and there will always be an appetite for tales of heroism. The earliest literature records them and so must the latest.
Since no man has any more lives to give for his country than our schoolteacher spy had, all heroisms are in a sense equal; for, since a man risks the only life he has, it matters little how, whether from a cave-man’s axe or a shell that shoots eighty miles.
Bravery is no new thing. It cannot be listed as one of the inventions of this war. It is matter for enough pride that there was no failure of it in quality, but rather an unheard-of versatility in it, and an unequaled quantity; for never before was there a war in which so many soldiers were engaged, or so incessantly engaged or under such hardships, or such varied dangers. To an extent unapproached hitherto, nations were mobilized _en masse_. For the first time they settled down at grips in continuous lines from frontier to frontier with no relaxation of vigilance or activity through long years of sun, snow, rain, and mud.
It is curious to note that in this war, innumerable hosts of brave men were dragged into glory—one might say “kicked upstairs”—by conscription.
In America we had the small Regular Army, the slightly larger and very irregular National Guard; then armies of volunteers, followed by armies recruited willy-nilly through the exemption boards. Not only did the draft compel enlistment, but the very prospect of it drove many men to volunteer before they were drawn. This is said in no derogation, for obligations vary and many a man who could not find the way to volunteer was glad to be coerced. And some of the men who volunteered at once would better have stayed at home.
Though the American Armies began in various strata, in a very short time all distinctions were abolished and everybody was “U. S.”
The glory was similarly shuffled. In the records of achievements in ground gained, prisoners taken, casualties endured, the Regular Army, the National Guard divisions and the draft divisions were rivals of such close conclusion that disputes continue as to the actual priorities. In any case the margins are narrow. Here also luck played its part, for the morale of the enemy and the ground to be taken varied enormously from day to day and from place to place.
Curiously, the most successful American hero of the war, judging by the score, was a “conscientious objector,” Sergeant York. His conscience did not lead him to the fanatic lengths of many others who defied the government and refused to obey any commands whatever; strange perverse creatures who were such lovers of liberty that they would do nothing to defend it, men who abhorred the thought of killing their fellow creatures so utterly that they would not lift a finger to put a stop to slaughter and disarm the German butchers. Sergeant York’s religious scruples did not carry him so far, yet he was a reluctant and a tardy entrant into the war, and he was with difficulty persuaded to accept the immortal fame awaiting him.
Sergeant York was a straight-shooting open-living mountaineer. Yet there were city-bred heroes whose impetuosity led them to plunge into the war long before it spread to America. One of these was an actor and a dancer. Wallace McCutcheon, who pretended to British citizenship, got in at the start, and by sheer bravery and persistence rose from private to major. He would indeed have been a colonel if his second wound had caught him fifteen minutes later, for his colonel was killed then and he would have been automatically promoted.
There were sons of wealthy parents and sons of humble parents who joined the French, the Canadian or the British forces and fought in the skies, or on land or sea for years before the rest of the nation decided to follow them overseas.
This was a world war indeed, a universal struggle, and there was no race, color, condition, creed, or trade that was not represented and brilliantly represented. Clergymen, priests, waiters, polo-players, convicts, negroes, musicians, ditch-diggers, gunmen, farmers, chorusmen, gamblers—the entire list of heroes would exhaust any classification of the human race or its activities. A complete beadroll of heroes would fill a city directory, and make the most dismal reading.
The only way in which justice can be done to anybody at all, is by omitting even to mention the vast majority, and to select a few at random, like a clutch of sample red apples from an enormous harvest.
It is not feasible to attempt internationalism or non-partisanship. We must ignore the splendid heroism of other nations and leave them to the celebration of their own heroes and the neglect of ours.
Of our own there remains too great a multitude to permit a systematic selection of examples. Some are here because they had the luck to be observed by skillful observers and recorders, as many kings are remembered because their historians or poets were superior to those of other kings.
This volume, then, has all the faults of any other anthology. Yet the most imperfect anthology is better than no bouquet at all; and a bouquet is the happiest representative of a garden, as a framed canvas is the best memorial of a sunset.
In this connection, there is a quaint poem of Emily Dickinson’s; she attached it to some flowers she selected from her garden:
I send two sunsets— Day and I in competition ran. I finished two, and several stars, While He was making one. His own is ample— But as I was saying to a friend, Mine is the more convenient To carry in the hand.
So it may be said of this volume: it does not contain the entire star-crowded firmament of the War of Wars, but it is “more convenient to carry in the hand.”
It would be belittling the bravery of our own men and the men of the Allies to pretend that the enemy lacked courage. The Germans and Austrians fought brilliantly, scientifically, ruthlessly. Individuals displayed the purest heroism and chivalry. But since it is impossible to catalogue everybody, I imagine that this omission, at least, will be indulgently regarded.
America entered the war late but at a time of peculiar desperation. Her appearance on the field changed the whole balance of power.
Before this time, the _generalissimo_, Foch, was like a gambler trying to break the bank with his last remaining gold pieces. Immediately after, he was a man with an inexhaustible supply of remittances. What would have been insane recklessness before now became good strategy, and he could at last follow out his life-motto: “Attack, attack, attack!”
On the other hand the Germans, having entered the war as cold-blooded business men, and conducted it with all the soullessness of the proverbial corporation, realized speedily that the investment was a failure and made every effort to get out as cheaply as possible.
The Allies realized that their victory would be wasted if Germany were permitted to retire with any prestige. A crushing and undeniable defeat was of the utmost importance. Hence the Americans were called upon to attack with human sledgehammers the hinges of the German defense and the strong points of rearguard action. Their losses were therefore huge for the brief time of engagement, since they ran to meet danger with an amazing fire.
Heroes sprang up, as from sown dragon’s teeth; so fast that there was no recording them. In air, on land and sea, and under the land and the sea, our men wrought so godlike well that it is pitiful to leave any of them without his meed of praise.
A word ought to be said also, for the prevented heroes, the unwilling absentees from the battle, those who ate their hearts out in America as instructors in camps, as dealers in supplies, plodders in paper work.
Of the Regular Army officers, who had dedicated their lives to valor, made bravery their profession, hardly more than one-third were even enabled to cross the sea, and a large mass of the small portion that got across was never permitted to come within earshot of the fighting line. War has no bitterer cruelties than the fate of such men.
There were National Guard men and officers, too, who had given a large part of their leisure to military training only to find themselves condemned to inaction. There was a vast amount of plucking by surgeons, for disabilities that had not prevented men from earning success in civil life. But trench life was so searching a test of strength that youth was almost as essential as in the prize ring.
Many of the stay-at-homes had a rightful share in the glory of the men they trained and sent as their delegates to the victory. Conspicuously absent were Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, who did so much to inspire his countrymen with battle-ardor, and General Leonard Wood, who built up the whole system of officers’ training camps, advancing us incalculably along the road to preparedness.
Then there was the thwarted courage of the countless men who tried to volunteer from civil life and were refused in droves, or furnished with an almost ironical uniform to emphasize their domesticity. This was the swivel-chair army, and the badge of service was the silver chevron. At first granted as an honor, it proved so unwelcome that it had to be enforced by order.
Uniforms of a sort were worn also by Red Cross, Y. M. C. A., Knights of Columbus, Jewish Welfare Board, Salvation Army, and other semi-civilians, thousands of whom reached the battle front and many of whom displayed perfect gallantry.
Women to an extraordinary degree took part in this war. The Russian Battalion of Death was the most startling verification of the Amazonian myths, but in every country there were women unnumbered who courted danger with a superb consecration to duty.
There is no stranger or more persistent falsehood than the claim that women are less belligerent than men. It has been constantly reiterated that if women had the vote, or even the say, there would be no more wars. As if history had not abounded in women whose native ferocity or patriotism inspired them to frenzies of wrath, or self-sacrifice!
In this war as in all wars, mothers surrendered their boys with fortitude, or compelled them into the ranks. Mothers without sons to give envied their luckier sisters. Women made speeches, posters, wrote articles, poems, songs, did office work, drove ambulances, trucks, and toiled in munitions factories where danger was more unceasing than on the battle front.
The Red Cross women and their untrained aids, many of them women of noble birth or of the most delicate heritages, shared the hardships of the men. The Salvation Army women made doughnuts and pies in the front line trenches. The Y. M. C. A., the Y. W. C. A., and numerous other organizations crowded to the front. Actors and actresses faced death in order to make cheer for the soldiers about to die.
The difficulty was always to keep the throngs back from the fighting-lines rather than to whip them forward.
The fighting-line was indeed a vague term, for children were killed in their cradles in cities far distant from the battle front. Worshipers in a Paris church were killed on a Good Friday by a shot from a German cannon fired eighty miles away.
The raids by Zeppelins and aeroplanes, the planting of explosives in factories, the sowing of mines in seas, the activities of spies and _saboteurs_ made it uncertain just where danger was. There was courage everywhere.
The variety of dangers was beyond anything hitherto recorded, and a certain supremacy in dauntlessness might be claimed by our generation; for men are most easily frightened by risks they are not used to, and every month seemed to bring some new astonishment. The submarine and the flying machine had never been employed in wars before. They were as terrifying to their passengers as to their targets. They brought remote civilians and non-combatants into their field of fire by intention or indifference.
The air-raids over London and Paris and the sinking of the _Lusitania_ and various hospital ships horrified the world. The first gas attacks added a new shudder to war. The prolonged and hideous imprisonment in the trenches where men stood to arms in icy mud kept the soul and the body on the rack. The hand grenade came again into fashion with a new deadliness. The machine-gun literally sprayed the field with bullets, mowing men down as with the scythe of death. The tanks were such a prodigy as the first elephants brought into battle. Depth bombs for submarines, land-mines, cannon on railroad tracks, trench-knives, incendiary bullets, barbed wire charged with lightning—it would be impossible to enumerate the new devices for inflicting wounds and death.
Yet science could not invent a way to frighten men out of their wits or out of their patriotism. The men in danger simply took what came and held on while the scientists in the rear devised some new defense for the new offense.
Nothing was more spectacular than the development of the air-duel and the air-battle by whole fleets of airships. The penalty for bad luck in such an encounter was to fall thousands of feet in a blazing machine. But candidates for these super-chivalrous jousts were innumerable.
Naval warfare had its novelties in frightfulness as well. Vessels were subject to destruction by a planted or a drifting mine or by a torpedo shot from an unseen submersible. The destruction of a populous ship was like the cataclysm that annihilates a city. The tortures of patrol duty, the management or the pursuit of submarines, the combats with airships, the protection of convoys, and numberless new-fangled terrors were all superimposed on the ancient dangers of seafaring.
Besides the fighting navy there was the mercantile marine charged with the transportation of incredible amounts of supplies and millions of soldiers. With these ships the submarine worked fearful havoc, filling the Seven Seas with hulks and corpses.
Yet in spite of all the surprises of science, this war, like all other wars of the past—and it is safe to say of the future—was waged upon the most ancient lines, and its battle-technic was reducible to simple terms.
A, B and C attack D, E and F. A superiority in weapons must be met by a superiority in morale or a superiority in tactics. Ability to attack and to endure attack are the proofs of fitness to survive. The victor will be the latter one to quit fighting. While the war must be won by masses of men, the quality of the mass is the algebraic total of the individual qualities.
A hero is a man plus. A coward is a man minus. A few heroes will counteract the influence of many cowards or even lend them strength enough to become heroes also.
In its individual heroes, moral, spiritual and physical, lies therefore the prosperity of a nation. It is well that a nation should keep its eye on its heroes, and reward them well, at least with fame.
This volume devoted to accounts of individual achievements is something more than picturesque. It is as important to the record as the consideration of any of the larger aspects of war. It strikes the human note, and the human note is vital in so human a thing as a war; since war gives humanity its widest and fiercest vibration from the utmost baseness to the supreme nobility.
THE SOLDIER
_By_
Rupert Brooke
If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave once her flowers to love, her ways to roam, A body of England’s, breathing English air, Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think this heart, all evil shed away, A pulse in the eternal mind, no less Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given; Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness, In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
From _The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke_, Copyright, 1915, by John Lane Company.
Deeds of Heroism and Daring
“AND A FEW MARINES”
Eye-witness Account of the Belleau Wood Action in the Marne Salient Beginning June 6th, 1918