Part 7

“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.

[Illustration:

© _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

[Illustration:

_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.

[Illustration:

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.”

[Illustration:

_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

Lieutenant-Colonel Kincaid remembers a little something about Bobo and “his Rough-necks” on a particular occasion.

“I merely want to say,” he remarked, “that in the middle of the Hindenburg show Captain Bobo said ‘Presto!’ and ten ambulances appeared from nowhere at a moment when, believe me, ambulances were needed.