Stories from the Trenches: Humorous and Lively Doings of Our 'Boys Over There'
TextTHE 100-POUND TERROR OF THE AIR
WHEN he registered at a New York hotel the clerk looked him over with a supercilious eye. He was a trifle undersized, to be sure, and youngish – twenty-two and weighing only one hundred pounds. And the name, W. A. Bishop, hastily scrawled on the register, meant nothing to the clerk – probably some college stripling in town to give Broadway the once-over. But a little later the same clerk looked at that name on the hotel roster with a sensation as nearly approaching awe as a New York hotel clerk is capable of feeling; for he had learned that the diminutive guest was the world-famous Maj. William Avery Bishop, of the British Royal Flying Corps, who in three months won every decoration Great Britain has created to pin upon the breasts of her gallant fighters.
Mars is a grim god and an exacting master, but he sometimes “smoothes his wrinkled front” at the blandishments of the little god of Love. And it was so in the case of Major Bishop when the gallant knight of the air checked the war-god in the hotel coat room and slipped away with Dan Cupid to Toronto, where his sweetheart was waiting to welcome him. They are to be married before he returns to the front.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reckons Bishop as the greatest air fighter since Guynemer. It says of his exploits:
So far as is known, Major Bishop is the only living man who has a right to wear not only the Military Medal but the Order of Distinguished Service, and not only that, but the Victoria Cross. Yet he is only twenty-two years old, and he blushed and stammered like a schoolboy when he tried to explain something about air fighting at a Canadian club dinner in New York. However, here is his record as piled up in five months at the front:
One hundred and ten single combats with German fliers.
Forty-seven Hun airplanes sent crashing to the earth.
Twenty-three other planes sent down, but under conditions which made it impossible to know certainly that they and their pilots had been destroyed.
Thrilling escapes without number, including one fall of 4,000 feet with his machine in flames.
The most daredevil feat of the war – an attack single-handed on a Boche airdrome, in which he destroyed three enemy machines.
These feats not only won medals for the hero, but rapid promotion. With his appointment as Major, he was also named chief instructor of aerial gunnery – which is his chief hobby – and commander of an airplane squadron.
Bishop went to Europe from his home in Owen Sound, a little Ontario town, where his father is County Registrar, in the spring of 1915 as a cavalry private. Cavalrymen have an easy time these days waiting for the trench warfare to end and the coming of the open fighting, when they can get at the Hun. Bishop didn’t want to wait, so he was transferred to the flying corps. He made no particular impression on these officers, but finally got a place as observer in the spring of 1916. His machine was shot down presently, and when he came out of hospital he was given three months’ leave, most of which he spent at home.
When he went back last fall he tried again, and this time succeeded in qualifying as a pilot. He spent the early winter training in England, and finally reached the front in February. Then things began to happen.
His first enemy plane was brought down within a few days, under circumstances which have not been told, but which were enough to win the Military Medal. By Easter his record was such that he was made flight commander and captain. He celebrated by attacking three German planes single-handed. Four others came to their rescue. He got two; then out of ammunition, he went home. This brought him the D. S. O.
Bishop won the Victoria Cross in a sensational air battle. Here is the official account as given in The Post-Dispatch:
“Captain Bishop flew first to an enemy airdrome. Finding no enemy machine about, he flew to another about three miles distant and about twelve miles within enemy lines. Seven machines, some with their engines running, were on the ground. He attacked these from a height of fifty feet, killing one of the mechanics.
“One of the machines got off the ground, but Captain Bishop, at a height of sixty feet, fired fifteen rounds into it at close range. A second machine got off the ground, into which he fired thirty rounds at 150 yards. It fell into a tree. Two more machines rose from the airdrome, one of which he engaged at a height of 1,000 feet, sending it crashing to the ground. He then emptied a whole drum of cartridges into the fourth hostile machine and flew back to the station.
“Four hostile scouts were 1,000 feet above him for a mile during his return journey, but they would not attack. His machine gun was badly shot about by machine gun fire from the ground.”
Apparently the official reporter was not interested in the Captain’s condition. The damaged machine gun accounts for his strategic retreat, which satisfies officialdom. On Bishop’s behalf, it should be remembered that an aviator lives very close to his machine gun during a fracas – if he lives.
Anyhow, Bishop got the V. C. for this before-breakfast excursion. When he was given a furlough, a few weeks ago, it was suggested that he stop at Buckingham Palace on his way home. There a rather small man with a light beard and a crown pinned the three medals on the breast of the Canadian.
Major Bishop himself is inclined to complain a little at the tools with which he has to work. His faith in incendiary bullets has been shattered, for instance.
“You want to bring the Hun down in flames if you can,” he explained. “That is the nicest way. But you can’t be sure of doing that. I shot six incendiary bullets into one fellow’s petrol tank one day, and the thing wouldn’t blow up.”
Good shooting is what does the trick, he says, and plenty of it.
“Don’t trust to one bullet to kill a Hun. Get him in the head if you can, or at least in the upper part of the body. But get him several times – one bullet is never sure to kill one. Get hunks of them into him; into his head. That does it. The greatest thing to teach the new man is how to shoot.”
Sounds rather bloodthirsty, but this 100-pound fighter knows his enemy and of what he is capable. While Bishop finds bombing quite interesting, he prefers dueling, which he says is still seeking higher altitudes; in fact, when one is flying above 22,000 feet he is never sure that he will not be attacked from above. The unexpected appeals to Bishop, who cites the following as an enjoyable occasion:
“I was about 10,000 feet up, going through a cloud bank, without a thing in my mind but to get back six or seven miles behind the Hun lines and see what was going on, when I heard the rattle of machine guns. I looked back and there were three Huns coming straight for me. We all started firing at about 300 yards. I gave all I had to one fellow and he came to within about ten yards of me before swerving. He went by in flames. I turned on the second and he fell, landing only about 100 yards from the first one, which shows how fast we were going.
“I was excited, and the third machine escaped,” he added apologetically.
An attack, two duels, and two victories while the planes were traveling less than a quarter of a mile, at over 100 miles an hour! Time, perhaps ten seconds.
It was Bishop, according to reports, who invented the plan of diving down and shooting the Germans from behind during an attack. He did not discuss the origin of the idea, but denied that it did much damage. Oh, yes, an occasional machine gun nest, but, then, there are only a few men in these. The real effect was moral. It distracts the Hun to be shot in the back. Also it greatly encourages the infantry who are charging.
“They cheer like mad,” he grinned. “They think we are killing thousands of Huns.”
Traditions gather thick around such a man. Tommy has no demigods in his religion, but he does the best he can with his heroes. So Tommy says that Bishop brought down nine machines in a two-hour fight one day. But Tommy’s best story of him is given to illustrate the nerve which enjoys being called on to fight for life on a split second’s notice.
A Hun flier had used an incendiary bullet on Bishop’s petrol tank that did work, Tommy reports. The battle had been at a low altitude, about two miles up. Bishop’s plane flamed up, and he fell. He was on the point of jumping and had loosed the straps that held him into the fuselage. Airmen dislike being burned to death. But he decided to make a try for life at the risk of this, and after he had fallen 4,000 feet or so took the levers again and pulled up the nose of the plane, straightening her out. Of course, his engine was out, so he began to tail dive, and went a few more thousand feet that way. Then he succeeded in straightening her out once more, but side-slipped, and finally banked just as he struck. One wing of his flaming machine hit first and broke the fall. The loosened straps let him jump clear. He was just behind the British lines, and Tommy rushed up and gathered him in and extinguished the fire in his blazing clothing.
He was not hurt.
THE WATCH-DOGS OF THE TRENCHES
THERE are stories a-plenty of the dash and fire of youth in the trenches. But by no means are all the men young who are battling on the front in France. There are the territorials, the line defenders, the men of the provinces, with wives and children at home.
“They are wonderful, these older fellows,” said an officer enthusiastically, after a visit to the trenches. “They ought to be decorated – every one of them!”
It is of these watch-dogs of the trenches that René Bazin has written in Lisez-Moi, and the article, translated by Mary L. Stevenson, is printed in the Chicago Tribune. Mr. Bazin says:
I am proud of the young fighters, but those I am proudest of are the older ones. These have passed the age when the hot blood coursing through their veins drives them to adventure; they are leaving behind wife, children, present responsibilities, and future plans – those things hardest to cast off. Leaving all this, as they have done, without a moment’s hesitation, is proof enough of their courage. And from the beginning of the war to the present time I have never talked to a solitary commanding officer that he has not eulogized his territorials.
They are essentially trench defenders, lookout men. The young ones do the coursing. These attack, the others guard. But how they do guard, how they hold the ground, once won! Nearing the front, if you meet them on the march as they are about to be relieved, you can recognize them even from afar by two signs: they march without any military coquetry, even dragging their feet a little, and they have everything with them that they can possibly carry – sacks, blankets, cans, bagpipes, cartridge-boxes, with the neck of a bottle sticking out of their trousers pocket. Even when you get near enough to see their faces many of these men do not look at you; they are intent upon their own thoughts. They know the hard week ahead of them. But the wind and rain are already old friends; the mud of the trenches does not frighten them; patience has long been their lot; they accept death’s lottery, knowing well that they are protecting those they have left behind, and they go at it as to a great task whose harvest may not be reaped or even known until months later.
In truth, these men from the provinces – vine-growers, teamsters, little peasant farmers, the most numerous of all among today’s combatants – will have played a magnificent rôle in the Great War. History will have to proclaim this, in justice to the French villages, and may the Government see fit to honor and aid these silent heroes who will have done so much to save the country.
They disappear quickly, lost in the defiles or swallowed up by the mist, which night has thickened. Once in the trenches, they find the work begun the previous week and which has been carried on by their comrades’ hands, and when it comes their turn to guard the battlements they hide themselves in the same holes in the clay wall. No unnecessary movements, no flurry, no bravados, no setting off of flashes or grenade and bomb-throwing, by which the younger troops immediately show their presence in the trenches, and which only provokes a reply from the enemy.
They are holding fast, but they keep still about it. Suddenly the Boches are coming. There are some splendid sharpshooters in this regiment, and in the attack of the Seventh and in the surprise attempt of the Fourteenth at daybreak it was seen what these men could do. An officer said to me: “They suffer the least loss; they excel in shelters of earthwork, they merge right into the turf.”
Many of the sectors of the front are held by this guard of older men. When the German reserves were hurled in pursuit of the Belgian Army in 1914, threatening the shores of Pas de Calais, a territorial division checked the onslaught of the best troops of the German Empire. Of their work in the trenches, Mr. Bazin writes:
But do not let anyone think theirs is a life of inaction; work is not lacking; even night is a time of reports, of revictualing, of reconnoitering, or repairing barbed-wire entanglements.
When the sector is quiet, however, the territorial enjoys some free hours. He writes a great deal; makes up for all the time past when he wrote almost no letters at all and for all the time to come when he promises himself to leave the pen hidden on the groove of the ink-well, idle on the mantel. One of them said to me: “They have put up a letter-box in my village. What will it be good for after the war – a swallow’s nest?”
Many of these letters contain only a recital of uneventful days and the prescribed formalities of friendship or love, banal to the general public but dear enough to those who are waiting and who will sit around the lamp of an evening and comment on every word. I know young women throughout the country who receive a letter from their husbands every day. The war has served as a school for adults. Sometimes expediency entirely disappears and it is the race which speaks, and the hidden faith, and the soul which perhaps has never thus been laid bare.
Here is a letter which has been brought to my notice. For a year it had been carried in the pocket of a territorial who wrote it as his last will and testament, and when he was killed it was sent to his widow. Read it and see if you would not like to have had him who wrote it as a friend and neighbor:
“My dear, today, as I am writing these lines, my heart feels very big, and if you ever read them it will be because I died doing my duty. I ask you, before I go, to bring up our children in honor and in memory of me, for I have loved them very dearly, and I shall have died thinking of them and of you. Tell them I died on the field of honor, and that I ask them to offer the same sacrifice the day France shall need their arms and hearts. Preserve my certificate of good conduct, and later make them know that their father would like to have lived for them and for you, whom I have always held so dear. Now, I do not want you to pass the rest of your life worshiping one dead. On the contrary, if during your life you meet some good, industrious young fellow capable of giving you loyal aid in rearing our children, join your life with his and never speak to him of me, for if he loves you it would only cast the shadow of a dead man upon him – it is over, my dear. I love you now and forever, even through eternity. Good-bye! I shall await you over there. Your adoring Jean.”
As showing the dogged, determined character of these men, Mr. Bazin relates the following incident:
Lately, when both wind and rain were raging, an officer told me of going up to two lookout men, immovable at their posts in the first line trench, and joking with them, he said:
“Let’s see, what do you need?”
“Less mud.”
“I am in the same boat. What else?”
“This and that – ”
“You shall have it, I promise you. Tired?”
“A little.”
“Discouraged?”
They made a terrible face, looked at him, and together replied: “If you have come to say such things as that, sir, you better not have come at all. Discouraged? No, indeed! We’re not the kind who get discouraged!”
ALL IN THE SAME COUNTRY
The German officer who confiscated a map of Cripple Creek belonging to an American traveler, and remarked that “the German Army might get there some time,” should be classed with the London banker who said to a solicitous mother seeking to send cash to San Antonio, Texas, for her wandering son: “We haven’t any correspondent in San Antonio, but I’ll give you a draft on New York, and he can ride in and cash it any fine afternoon.”
GENERAL BELL REDEEMS HIS PROMISE
THE youngsters at Camp Upton looked with admiring and envious eyes at the ribbons pinned on the left breast of the man who entered headquarters. Then they looked up at the face of the wearer of these emblems of service in the Indian Wars, Cuba, and the Philippines, and they saw a sturdy campaigner of field and desert, his face bronzed by many scorching suns. On the left sleeve of his coat were the three bars of a sergeant with the emblem of the supply department in the inverted V.
This ghost of the old Army seemed to feel a little out of place for a moment, and then he turned to Sergeant Dunbaugh and said:
“I’d like to see the General, if you please.”
“Have you an appointment?” asked Dunbaugh a bit hesitatingly.
“Well, no, but the General told me to come back, so I am here.”
As the General was then out in the camp Sergeant Dunbaugh suggested that the old soldier tell him just what he wanted to see him about, and, says the New York Sun:
So the story of Sergeant Busick was told – the story of a once trim young trooper and a once dashing lieutenant of the Seventh Cavalry, immortalized by Custer and honored by a whole army.
Twenty years ago Edward Busick was assigned as a private to G Troop of the Seventh, stationed at Fort Apache, Arizona. At that time G was officially lacking a captain, so a certain young lieutenant was acting commander, and for his orderly he chose one Trooper Busick.
One evening, a year later, the lieutenant received sudden orders to report immediately to a staff post. All that night his orderly worked with him packing his personal belongings and helping him get ready for an early-morning start. It was a long job, and a hard one, but the orderly didn’t mind the work in the least; all he cared about was the loss of his troop commander.
“Don’t suppose I’ll ever see you again, Busick, but if I do, and there’s anything I can do for you, I’ll be glad to do it,” the lieutenant told him when the job was finished and the last box had been nailed down.
It wasn’t very much for a lieutenant to say to his orderly, but it meant a great deal to this trim young trooper. Somehow, in the old Army, orderlies get to thinking a great deal of their officers and Busick happened to be just that particular kind. He had an especially good memory, too.
The whirligig of fate that seems to have so much to do with Army affairs sent the lieutenant to the Philippines, where, as colonel of the suicide regiment, he won everlasting honor for his regiment and a Congressional medal for valor for himself. Then on up he jumped until his shoulder-straps bore the single star of a brigadier. Then another star was added, and he became chief of staff and ranking officer in the whole Army.
And all the while the whirligig that looks after enlisted men saw to it that Trooper Busick added other colored bars to his service ribbons. And slowly he added pounds to his slim girth and a wife and children to his fireside. But as a heavy girth and a family aren’t exactly synonymous with dashing cavalrymen, Sergeant Busick saw to it that he was transferred from the roving cavalry to the stationary Coast Artillery. And through all the years he remembered the lieutenant and his promise that if he ever wanted anything he would try to get it for him.
One month ago Sergeant Busick got a furlough from his Coast Artillery company at Fort McKinley, Portland, Me., and bought a ticket to Camp Upton, New York. There were only a few men here then, so he didn’t have any great difficulty in seeing his old first lieutenant.
For half a minute or so General Bell, commanding officer of the Seventy-seventh Division of the National Army and one-time first lieutenant of the Seventh Cavalry, didn’t recognize his old orderly – but it was for only half a minute.
“You’ll sleep in our quarters with us tonight,” General Bell ordered. “Tomorrow we’ll see about that old promise.”
So that night Sergeant Busick had the room between Major-General Bell’s and Brigadier-General Read’s. But sleeping next to generals was pretty strong for an ordinary sergeant and he didn’t accept General Bell’s invitation to have mess with him.
And a little later Busick told his old commander that the big request that he had come across the continent to make was that he be transferred to the Seventy-seventh division and allowed to serve under the General. But army tape is still long and red, so all that the General could do was to send the sergeant back to his post and promise that he would do all that he could. This, it proved, was sufficient.
For Sergeant Edward Busick, smiling and happy with his reassignment papers safely tucked away in the pocket of his blouse under his half a foot of service ribbons, came back to report for duty. It took twenty years to do – but he’s done it.
And the National Army of Freedom hasn’t any idea as yet how much richer in real soldier talent and color it is today. But a certain old campaigner, who used to be a first lieutenant of cavalry, knows.
NO GREAT LOSS
An American stopping at a London hotel rang several times for attendance, but no one answered. He started for the office in an angry mood, which was not improved when he found that the “lift” was not running. Descending two flights of stairs, he met one of the chambermaids.
“What’s the matter with this dashed hotel?” he growled. “No one to answer your call and no elevator running.”
“Well, you see, sir,” said the maid, “the Zeps were reported and we were all ordered to the cellar for safety.”
“ – !” ejaculated the American. “I was on the fifth floor and I wasn’t warned.”
“No, sir,” was the bland reply, “but you see, sir, you don’t come under the Employers’ Liability Act, sir.”