Part 25

“I established dressing-stations in the mountains. Some of these were 10,000 feet above the sea-level. There, on the canvas stretched between two horses, the wounded were brought, or so they started. For many of them died in the long journey, every step of which was torture to a wounded man.

“The most exciting experience I ever had was on the Galician border. We could approach the battle-line only along the Tarnopol road, which ran for fifteen miles directly under German guns. I was speeding along it with an ambulance full of wounded soldiers when a shell struck the roadside and exploded, tearing a great hole in the earth fifty feet away. The concussion stopped us. Then we went on. I travel on my luck. Some time, I suppose, I shall travel too far.”

A TRUE HEROINE

The Type of Woman from Which Fate Fashions Jeannes D’Arc

Had there been a Myra Ivanovna in every sector of the Russian front in the wavering days, it is not extravagant to think the troops of the Czar might have resisted the propaganda as well as the guns of the Germans and pushed on—perhaps to Berlin. Myra was but twenty years of age, a Russian Sister of Mercy. She accompanied her brother, a military doctor, to the front. She was small, and weak and nervous, but she had a resolute will, an indomitable soul, and these gave energy and endurance to her body. She was one of the most active and tireless in ministering to the sick and wounded. The soldiers marveled to see so frail a creature perform such tasks as mark the duties of an ambulance nurse. Naturally, she inspired the devotion of those she served.

It was in 1915. There had been heavy and dogged fighting and there were many wounded. The ambulances and the nurses were kept busy. Then the Germans succeeded in outflanking the regiment to which Myra was attached, and poured a deadly fire into the trenches. M. Kupchinsky, correspondent at the front for a Petrograd paper, told her story. The London _Morning Post_ translated it. Here it is:

“The ambulance near the 10th Regiment was not brought to the rear, despite the instructions of the commander. It was discovered that Sister Ivanovna was employed there in bandaging the wounded.

“‘Let the ambulance station go back,’ she said; ‘I shall stay here, where my hands are wanted.’

“The doctors and the wounded officers appealed in vain—she would not retreat until her brother ordered her to do so. No sooner, however, was the ambulance posted in a new situation than she moved back to her former position with a few volunteers. At this time the enemy’s reinforcements with machine guns opened a deadly fire from some heights commanding the position, and Ivanovna was slightly wounded by a bullet in the left arm. She bandaged the wound herself, and, without saying a word, continued her work.

[Illustration: Women in the Salvation Army Followed the American Army Wherever It Went and They Served Doughnuts to Men in the Front Trenches]

“The position of the regiment was a perilous one. Every moment the strength of the enemy was increasing, and the Russian ranks were decimated by their long exposure to heavy fire. It was necessary to strike a rapid blow, sharp and decisive; but officer after officer was brought in wounded, and at last word came that the commander himself had been killed. Men began to drop back from the front trenches. Indecision in the ranks threatened a panic.

SWORD IN HAND, SHE LED THE ATTACK

“Seeing that the men were wavering, and actuated by indignant horror at the unequal fight, Sister Myra Ivanovna drew a sword from the sheath of a dead officer and ran from the station. She was followed by some of the wounded soldiers, who, with tears in their eyes, implored her to return, and even tried to detain her by holding her arms, but she freed herself.

“Then, her eyes burning with excitement, she went forward. She was not alone, for the soldiers were anxious to defend this frail woman who was leading them back to the trenches, her sword raised in the air.

“The soldiers of the 10th Regiment were wavering in the trenches when, at the critical moment, Sister Myra, surrounded by a group of wounded soldiers, with uplifted sword, rushed toward the trench. At once there was a resounding ‘Hurrah!’ and the rifles of the exhausted soldiers commenced once more their deadly clicking.

“For a moment Sister Myra bent toward the occupants of the trench, and they heard the word ‘_Golubebiki!_’ (Dear ones). Then, rising to her feet, she ran forward, her sword flashing in the air. All the men followed her. But all the time the enemy machine-guns were steadily spitting forth their leaden pellets of death, and, though losing men with every step, the remnants of the company made a wild dash for the enemy’s trench, which they occupied after furious work with the bayonet. The enemy fled precipitately, but in the recesses of the trench, on the bloody ground trodden by the feet of the eager combatants, lay Sister Myra Ivanovna.

“Rough soldiers bent over her, and now that the excitement of the fray was over they wept as they tried vainly to arrest the flow of blood from a wound in her throat. She was carried out of the fire, but before she had proceeded far another bullet struck her, and she fell dead among the group of soldiers.”

“A true heroine,” writes Mr. Kupchinsky, “a type of the Russian woman who is guiding us to victory.”

Alas! that was in 1915.

A HEROINE OF HUMANITY

This Young Englishwoman Risked Death in a Hideous Form to Save the Lives of Others

The serene courage of self-devotion to the service of humanity does not have the acclaim of the world very often. We have not learned how to measure the values of quiet heroism—the heroism that works in the solitude. We thrill to feats of daring, we are rather complacent to the bravery of scientific experiment, though the risk of life be great.

There is the story of a young Englishwoman, Miss Mary Davies, who, far behind the front with its stimulating excitement and without the inspiration of approving and emulous comrades, calmly, deliberately challenged death in one of its most horrible forms. She had seen the victims of one of the most terrible of war scourges—gaseous gangrene—suffering a loathsome death, and knew how hopelessly the surgeons in the laboratories of the American Ambulance where she served, worked to combat the plague. She realized that if inoculation with the bacilli of the disease could be successfully employed, thousands of wounded men would be saved, and she resolved to make the experiment.

She had seen many examples of the horrible results of this infection and had observed the invariably fatal course of the disease in animals inoculated with the bacilli. She watched and assisted in the experiments in which guinea-pigs were inoculated with gangrene bacilli. She had become convinced of the efficacy of injections with quinine hydrochlorid and had concluded that the experiments on small animals had given all the results of which they were capable and that the time had come for an experiment on a normal human body, and not one from the battlefield, fatigued and wounded and possibly infected by other bacilli.

Well aware that her plan would be prevented if it became known, she determined without a word to any one, to risk her life in an attempt to demonstrate the efficacy of the treatment, which she was convinced would cure the victims of this dread disease.

Her preparations deliberately and completely made, she waited until she was about to leave for a holiday, so that her absence would not disturb the work in the laboratory. She chose the deadliest strain of bacilli in the laboratory, obtained from the latest fatal case, of which two drops of culture sufficed to kill a guinea-pig. Then she inoculated herself in a manner most certain to produce the disease in animals, injecting fifty times the amount used to kill a guinea-pig, making one injection deep into the muscles of her thigh, the other just beneath the skin. Two hours later she quietly came to the laboratory and asked to be treated in the same manner as the animals under experiment.

The surgeons and attendants were greatly alarmed for her. Their experience had taught them the rapidity and horribleness of the effects of gangrene, the most dreaded and the most baffling of the diseases produced by the war. They began treatment of her at once, apprehensive and doubtful of results.

Injections with a quinine solution were made at the points where she had inoculated the deadly bacilli. She was sent to the nearest hospital for observation and further treatment. Quinine injections were given a second time. Symptoms of a slight degree of infection developed within twenty-four hours, but they subsided without operation becoming necessary, and it is more than gratifying to know that recovery was rapid and complete.

Miss Davies has been named a “heroine of science” and her brave and self-sacrificial deed will be properly recognized in medical science; but surely she has won a place in the world’s esteem and memory as a heroine of humanity.

ONE OF THE GREAT “ACES”

Raoul Lufbery, the Connecticut Boy Who Roamed the World to Die a Hero in France

The Great War brought into bold relief no more romantic figure or daring spirit than that of Major Raoul Lufbery, from Wallingford, Conn. The bare facts of his life have the flavor of incidents taken from the adventure story of a highly imaginative fiction writer. There is no need of invention or added color to make his history a thrilling tale. No presentation of it, however bald and commonplace the narrative, can cheat it of its romance and heroism. That he was one of the chief of the American “Aces” is in itself an epitome of adventure that might easily be elaborated into a volume.

Lufbery was an adventurer in the dashing sense of the word. His blood was filled with the essence of unrest, the energy of motion that would not let him stay fixed to place. When he was seventeen years old Wallingford held him too much cabined and confined. He ran away from home as an explorer of the unknown world. Drawn, perhaps, by the spell of ancestral affinities, he made his way to France and wandered from place to place in the land of legend and romance, working at any job that would provide his keep and supply him with funds for his next excursion.

From France he sailed to Algiers, where he remained till he had satisfied his interest, when he set off for other scenes—Egypt, the Balkans, Germany, South America and then back to Wallingford for a peep at the home folks. He chuckled appreciatively on learning that his father was off doing a bit of globe-vagabonding on his own account.

[Illustration:

© _Press Illustrating Service._

Major Raoul Lufbery, an American, Who Was Loved by Fellow-Flyers]

He stopped at home for a year, when the wander-bubbles of his blood got into ferment again, and trotting down to New Orleans he was tempted by military possibilities and enlisted in the Regular Army. He was sent to the Philippines, where he displayed such proficiency as rifleman that he won all the regimental prizes for the best marksmanship. That skill in getting bullets into the right spot was one of his great assets when he came to battling in the air over the fields of France.

But even the Army waxed tame for Lufbery, and when his term of enlistment expired he was ready and eager to nose out what the still strange parts of the world had to offer him. He sailed for Japan, sampled the beauties and novelties of that country and then dipped into China. From China he went into India. A characteristic anecdote is told of him as ticket-seller in one of the railway stations of India. It has been said that he sustained himself with any kind of odd job as he roamed the world, and ticket-selling was one of the tedious sort of occupations least to his liking. A pompous type of native one day stood at the wicket.

“Want a ticket?” Lufbery asked.

“Say ‘Sir’ when you speak to me,” said the native, loftily.

THE PRICE OF A JOB

With never a wink, Lufbery left his place, approached the offended person, took him by the back of the neck and with neatness and dispatch ejected him from the station. Under English civil law one is promptly summoned for assault, and as the person Lufbery had treated so summarily in accord with his own ideas of fitness chanced to be the richest and most influential merchant of Bombay, the summons cost the ticket-seller his place. Cochin-China was his resort, Saigon his haven, and there, if you please, he viewed with envious admiration the aerial antics of Marc Pourpe, the famous trick flyer.

There came a day when Pourpe lost his mechanic, and his exhibitions came to a stop while he made vain quest among the natives for a substitute. None cared for the office, preferring infinitely the understood foundation of Mother Earth to antics in the air. Quite right—Lufbery applied for the job. Was he a mechanic? No. Did he know anything about an aeroplane motor? Not a thing.

“Why the deuce, then, do you come bothering me?” demanded the irritated Pourpe.

“I don’t know the job now,” Lufbery said, “but I can learn. You only have to show me once. Take me on. You won’t regret it. I’m not afraid of work.”

Marc Pourpe is quoted as saying to some friends later in relating the incident:

“His reasoning was full of logic. His method was original. I agreed, and I will say that never have I seen a person more devoted, more intelligent and more useful. He is already better informed about a motor than most of the so-called mechanics of Paris. Moreover, this boy has hung his hat in every country in the world. He is not a man, he is an encyclopedia. He can tell you what the weather is in a given season in Japan, in Egypt, in America, or in France. He observes everything and once he has noticed it, it is engraved on his memory.

“He told me that in all his travels he had never been more than a week without working. He was hospital interne at Cairo, a stevedore in Calcutta, station master in India, a soldier in America. I am glad he is now a mechanic.

“If he likes it, I will take him back with me at the end of my tour and will keep him with me. It is rare to find a good mechanic. His name is _Raoul Lafberg_, and he spent his childhood in the vicinity of Bourges. If I return with him, you will see what a sympathetic character chance has thrown in my way. So once more in my life everything goes well.”

This shift of name on the sudden from Lufbery to Lafberg was due to a hope that the Frenchified turn would the more favorably determine Pourpe to engage his services, especially as Lufbery spoke French fluently, having learned it in his three years’ stay in France.

JOINS THE FOREIGN LEGION

So it was that Lufbery, as Pourpe’s mechanic, found himself in France when the war storm burst. Pourpe, who had a new type of plane, promptly enlisted as a flyer for his beloved France. As an American Lufbery could not be accepted except as a member of the Foreign Legion, which he hastened to join in the expectation that he could be transferred thence to service with his friend, which was done. But they were not long together at the front. Pourpe was killed the first or second of December, 1914.

Thereupon Lufbery applied for admission to the regular French air service, which was granted and in a short time he was on the front with the Escadrille of bombardment, V. 102.

But it was not until he joined the newly organized Escadrille Lafayette that his career of distinction began. His first victim was brought down, over Etain, July 30, 1916, the second five days later. He was cited by the French Government thus:

“A model of address, of coolness, of courage. He has distinguished himself by numerous long distance bombardments and by the daily combats he has had with enemy aeroplanes. On July 30 he unhesitatingly attacked at close range four enemy machines. He shot one of them down near our own lines. He successfully brought down a second on the 4th of August, 1916.”

His record grew apace. He got his third August 8, his fourth August 12, his fifth October 12, and became an “Ace.” In December he brought down two in one day after a fight that nearly cost him his life as his jacket was torn with bullets. That victory gained him the award of the Legion of Honor. Incidentally, he was the first American to receive from England the British Military Cross which was conferred on him June 12, 1917, when his record had mounted to ten enemy planes.

That tenth plane exploit, by the way, was memorable. Lufbery was alone at an altitude of 18,000 feet when, at a distance, he saw a formation of seven Boche machines. Two of them were two-seater observation machines, the others were the protective escort. He flew into the sun to wait for a chance to attack. Soon one of the seven cut loose from the others, and immediately Lufbery dived for it and began firing, taking the enemy by surprise. After thirty shots or so his gun jammed, but no more shots were necessary. The enemy machine wobbled, shifted and began its downward plunge, and as Lufbery volplaned away he saw the wrecked machine crash into the German trenches.

In an article written for the French publication _La Guerre Aérienne_, Lufbery describes an encounter he had one day when he was sent scouting over the Vosges, the panoramic beauty of which had so enthralled him he flew in sheer delight of the vision, nevertheless “all the time on guard.”

Suddenly an enemy appeared a little below and behind him. He wrote:

“It is a little one-seater biplane of the Fokker or Halberstadt type. A glance around assures me that he is alone. I am surprised at this, for it is certainly the first time that a machine of this sort has deliberately placed itself in a position so disadvantageous for fighting. Perhaps it is a trap. One never knows! If it only may prove to be a beginner, lacking experience, who listens to nothing but his courage in his purpose to become one of the great Aces of his country.”

ATTACKS A MASTER OF HIS ART

“However that may be, the wind keeps blowing from the west and carries me farther and farther into the lines. It will not do to allow the Boche to have this advantage too long: I decide to begin the attack without losing another second.

“An about face, followed by a sudden double spin, carries me a little behind my adversary. Profiting by this advantage I dive upon him, but with a remarkable skill he gets out of range of my machine gun. He has anticipated my maneuver and parried the blow before it was struck. I am now aware that I have to do with a master of his art. This first encounter has proved it to me.

“Making my machine tango from right to left, I saw him again below me but much nearer than before by at least forty yards.

“Suddenly he noses up as if to begin a looping, and in this awkward position fires a volley at me which I dodge by a half turn to the right. A second time I attack but with no more success. The wind carries us to the north of Mulhouse, and I begin to ask myself if I am not playing my adversary’s game for him in delaying longer.

“At this moment I chanced to glance in the direction of Belfort, which was about twelve miles within our lines. I perceived in the air little white flakes. Evidence of the presence of a Boche.

“A lucky chance! I had now an excuse for abandoning without loss of honor the match, which I confess I am not at all sorry to leave. Only before leaving my adversary I feel that I must show him that I appreciate that he is a valiant foe and respect him as such. Drawing my left arm out of the fuselage I wave him a sign of adieu. He understands and desires to show courtesy on his part, for he returns my farewell.

“All my attention is turned toward him whom I already consider as my new prey, a big white two-seater of very substantial appearance.

“I draw nearer and nearer to him. Good luck! For the first time since I have been a chaser I am going to have the good fortune to battle within our lines. Also this increases my confidence until it makes me disregard measures of caution, even the science of tactics.

“Another motive impels me to take more than ordinary risks. I am determined that he shall not escape me, and I make up my mind to shoot at him until I have won the victory.

“What joy if I can only lodge a ball in his motor, or in his gasoline tank, which would oblige him to make a landing on French soil! Then I should be able to speak with the conquered and ask them their impressions of the aerial duel in which they had just taken part. But there is an old French proverb which says ‘You must not sell the skin of the bear before you have killed him.’ I had occasion that day to prove the wisdom of this as you shall soon see.”

“POOR COUCOU”

“Enough of dreaming! The moment for action has arrived. Quickly I place myself in the rear and on the tail of my enemy from whom I am separated by a distance of about fifty yards. Then I open fire with my machine gun, and continue firing up to the moment when my plane, his superior in speed, arrives so near the big two-seater that a collision seems inevitable.

“Quickly I pull up, leap over the obstacle, and fall in a glide on the right wing. Increasing my speed I re-establish my equilibrium and prepare to tempt fortune a second time.

“Curse the luck! It is of no use. The motor, the soul of my aeroplane, has received a mortal wound and is about to draw its last breath.

“Turning my head I discover that the ailerons are also seriously injured. My enemy fortunately does not seem to wish to profit by the situation. He continues his flight in the direction of his own lines. Perhaps I have wounded him very seriously. I hope so. Anyway, his flight leaves me master of the field. But that is a very small consolation. And also of short duration; for I am coming down faster and faster. At last I safely take the ground on the nearest flying field within gliding distance.