Stories from the Trenches: Humorous and Lively Doings of Our 'Boys Over There'

LETTERS FROM THE FRONT

“LAST evening we went out into a field, and read Jane Austen’s ‘Emma’ out loud.”

Do you get the picture? Can you see the fading glory of the sunset sky, and hear the soft breeze, sweetly laden with the scent of new-mown hay, as it murmurs through the gently rustling leaves – a real autumn scene of rural peace and quiet?

Yes? Well, you are quite mistaken. That is an extract from a letter written by an ambulance driver on the French front. And so you see that war is not all horror.

Emerson Low, the son of Alfred M. Low, of Detroit, went to France with a group of college boys. He joined the American Field Ambulance Service, and is now in the thick of the fighting in the Champagne district. The Detroit Free Press prints some extracts from his letters to his family. In one he tells of his trip to the posts:

Day before yesterday several of us started out for the posts. I carried the médecin divisionnaire and went a little before the others. In spite of the fact that the fields are being recultivated and the searness of former battles is somewhat concealed, the road to the front is rather a grim affair, and you are startled when you pass through a town deserted and demolished. There is quite a large town between this one and the front. It is uninhabited except for a few soldiers and a yellow dog that slinks about in the doorways.

I left the médecin divisionnaire at his abri, a little further along the road, a road hidden completely by strips of burlap tied to poles. The first post is in a little wood. There were two of us there, and we tossed a coin to see who would take the first call. I won and waited for an ambulance to come in from one of our three posts. These posts are along the front of the hill where the battle is taking place. They are all reached by going through and then beyond X (you remember the little destroyed town with the church which I spoke of during our first month). The first post was a smaller town than X, and is now razed completely to the ground. The second is about one-fourth of a mile to the right and the third – which can only be reached during the night and left before dawn – is a German abri, formerly a dugout of German officers. The German saucises are directly above the road, and any machine would be shelled in the daytime. The posts are close together and are reached by exposed roads.

My call came about noon. I was given an orderly, and left for the first post. From the road we could see the shells breaking on the hill and in the fields about, where the French batteries were hidden. We reached the post, backed the machine into a wide trench, which hid it from view, and then went into the dugout. It was a new iron dugout, about 30 feet long and 10 or 12 feet broad, with bunks on either side. On top were heaped bags of sand and dirt.

We read until about two o’clock, when several shells fell in the battery field a few meters behind us. Then a few shells fell in a field to the right, and in another moment we were in the midst of a bombardment. It lasted all afternoon. Two men trying to enter the dugout were hit, one in the throat and the other in the shoulder, but not badly. About six o’clock it grew so bad and so many shells fell on the roof of the dugout that we had to leave, cross through some trenches – a strange-looking procession, crouching and running along – and get into a deep cave about twenty feet under the ground, where we stayed until eight o’clock in the evening. Then the firing became intermittent, the shells hit further to the right and left, and we ran back into the dugout.

It was still light and an airplane soared above us, the noise of which is to me, for an unaccountable reason, one of the most reassuring sounds I have ever heard.

Quite jocularly he writes of supper, first having looked at his car which he found uninjured, although covered with dirt from exploding shells. Continuing, he says:

There were about eight of us, the orderly and myself, the lieutenant-doctor in charge, and three or four old brancardiers, who, when they ate their soup made more noise than the shells. After every few spoonfuls, to avoid waste, they poked their mustaches in their mouths and sucked them loudly.

During the evening the firing became steady on both sides, the French battery pouring their shells, which whistled over our dugout. We went to bed, secure in this iron cylinder, whose great ribs stood like the fleshless carcass of a beast, which to destroy would be a worthless task. A stump of a candle lay wrapped in our blankets in the bunks. It was rather comfortable, except that my bed was crossed at the top by a piece of iron just where my head lay.

All through the night there was a continuous commotion in the dugout, the brancardiers running around and talking in loud voices about things we were too sleepy to understand. We had no blessés during the night (an exceptional thing – this morning they had fifty from one post) and were relieved about half-past ten the next morning. I returned to the large town, where our cantonment had been changed to another quarter of the village.

This is an exceptionally fine cantonment and was recently occupied by the British Ambulance, whose place we have taken. I think it was originally an officers’ barracks. Two low cement buildings, faced with red brick and roofed with red tile, stand on one side, and opposite these are the stables, used by the “Genies.” In front of the houses are some trees and grass. Each house (one story in height) is divided into four parts, accessible by four doors.

Jim, Rogers, and I have one room to ourselves off the third hallway and in front. There are three other rooms accessible by the same hallway. It is almost like a separate house, as each division has its flight of steps before the door and there is a main sidewalk running under all the front windows. We have our three stretchers on the floor, two cupboards, a broken mirror, and two camp-stools. We keep our trunks, etc., right in the room and it saves transferring them every trip to the posts. There is a large French window with blue shutters. We certainly are comfortably located. There are no showers after all (we had expected two), except one that is broken, and we wash from our bidons (canteens) with a sponge, which is almost as good.

Jim and Rogers came back yesterday shortly before I did. They had both been to the same post, the second one, and been caught in a gas-attack which lasted for an hour. They sat in the abri with their masks on (the masks are a greenish color, with two big round windows for the eyes) and, of course, with the helmets, the abri was crowded, and from their description they must have looked like so many big beetles crouching together. There is absolutely no danger with the masks, however, and we carry one always with us (even in town) and one fastened in the car.

Last evening we went out into a field and read Jane Austen’s “Emma” out loud. Jim and Rog left this morning for the posts and I go tomorrow.

Of the routine work of the ambulance driver he writes:

On account of the night driving we have lately put two men on each car, a driver and an orderly who just goes back and forth between the posts. Five cars are out every day and eight drivers. Three cars begin at the posts and two wait in the woods. As a car comes in from a post, another is sent out from the woods and this driver takes with him the orderly who has just come in, as only one man is necessary to make the trip from the woods to the hospital. From the hospital the latter returns to the woods, and thus a relay is formed. The day before yesterday I was at post 1; yesterday (beginning at noon), I was en repos for the day; today I am en remplacement, that is practically the same as repose, but if any extra cars are wanted in case of an attack, etc., we have to be within call. I am fourth in the list and don’t expect to go out. Tomorrow I go in my own car, next day repose, next day as orderly to post 3, next day repose, etc. The work is as interesting as ever.

In another letter which The Free Press prints Mr. Low tells of a battle between airplanes directly over his head. The engagement ended with the winging of both machines. The letter reads:

The German machine fell between the lines, the French plane near one of our posts. There was a terrific fight, which we could hardly see, as it was very high in the air. The French plane caught on fire and began to fall. After some meters it was entirely enveloped in smoke and the three aviators had to jump, which was a quicker death. When they were found, parts of their bodies had been burned away.

Just before this the first German shell fell in our cantonment. It was about half-past seven in the morning and we were all asleep when we heard the rush and explosion of an obus. It struck about two meters from the barracks and made a large hole in the road. Three shells usually fall in one place, but no other followed.

For a day of repose it certainly was disturbing.

Yesterday I had a hot shower at the hospital near here. It certainly seemed good, after bathing for two months out of a small reserve water can.

This morning we are at the second post. Before the war there were really enough houses to call it a small town, but it has been so completely destroyed that only stumps of the buildings remain. Batteries have been planted all about it, and at present they are receiving a heavy shelling from the Germans.

Mr. Low seems to possess an excellent nervous organization and a dependable imagination which he finds quite useful. He says:

We are kept in the dugout, which, provided with chairs and a table, is very comfortable. It is rather pleasant to be securely seated here with books and listening to the “rush” of the shells overhead. It is like being before a grate fire and listening to a winter’s storm outside. As long as no blessés are brought in we can sit here and warm our feet until the storm is over. Our beds are all made on the stretchers (placed high enough to keep out the rats), and we intend to spend a pleasant afternoon reading. I have Rog’s Shakespeare, and I am reading “Cymbeline.”

We have just had lunch – hot meat, lentils, camembert, and the inevitable Pinard. The bombardment has nearly died away, so we can sit out a while and enjoy a very delightful August day. This post is reached by an old Roman road, which is rather badly torn up. They have just put up a screen of burlap to conceal it from the saucisses; that is, to hide the traffic on it, for the German gunners know where every road lies.

(Later) A young fellow of about nineteen was just carried in. He was at the battery post a few meters behind us and became half-crazed by the shells during the bombardment. It is quite a common occurrence, especially with the men in the trenches. The French call it commotion, and the mind becomes so stunned that often they lose their speech or become totally stupid. The lieutenant said that this was a bad case and that if another shell fell near the man he would go mad. He asked us to take the fellow back to the hospital as soon as possible, and I had to ride in the back of the ambulance with him all the way to keep him quiet. Fortunately no shells came near the car.

After supper we sat near the edge of the road and watched two or three battalions pass by on their way to the trenches. The road filled with carts and supply wagons as soon as the saucisses descended. These vehicles travel between towns in the rear to a communication trench a little beyond our post, a point which is a terminus for all traffic. From there the ammunition and supplies are carried to the trenches by hand.

There is a little railroad running from that point, beyond our post; horses pulling small flat cars loaded with wood, barbed wire, etc., for the trenches. A young poilu, standing up and waving his arms, came spinning down the hill in an empty car. He nearly caused a collision and I never saw a man so yelled and screamed at as this one was by his sergeant. The officer scolded him for a quarter of an hour and shouted himself hoarse: “Quelle bêtise!”

About nine we went down into the abri, lighted a candle on the table, and read until about ten, when a man burst through the door, shouting:

“Gaz! Gaz! M. Médecin!” and dashed out again. The médecin went outside, and, returning, told us to have our masks ready, that gas was coming over the hill and blowing in our direction. We waited about ten minutes and heard the alarm bell ring – a signal to warn that a gas attack is near. We sat waiting with our masks at our elbows, but the wind carried the gas in another direction and we did not have to use them.

These attacks are frequent, but not dangerous; as at every hour of the day a man stands in the first line trench (with a bell at his side) to give warning of gas. The masks that we always carry at our belts are positive guards against any sort of gas.

We read until twelve and then went to bed, lucky in having only one trip through the day.

HELPING HIS WIFE OUT

An officer was surprised one day when searching the letters of his detachment to read in one of them a passage that was something like this:

“We have just got out of shell-fire for the first time for two months. It has been a hard time. The Germans were determined to take our field bakery, but, by gee! we would not let them. We killed them in thousands.”

This was a letter from one of the bakers to his wife. None of the detachment had been a mile from the base, and they had never seen a German, except as a prisoner. My friend knew the writer well, and could not help (although it was none of his business) asking him why he told such terrible lies to his poor wife. The soldier said:

“It’s quite true what you say, but it’s like this, sir. When my wife and the wives of the other men in the place where I live are talking it all over in the morning I couldn’t think to let her have nothing to say and the others all bragging about what their men had done with the Germans. That’s the way of it, sir.”

MEET TOMMY, D. C. MEDAL MAN

IF war is not a great leveler – and we have been told numberless times that it is – it is certainly the Great American Mixer, and Camp Upton, L. I., is probably the best example extant thereof, so to speak. The Bowery boy and the millionaire rub elbows – you have probably heard that before, but it is nevertheless true – and the owners of Long Island show places sleep in cots next to their former gardeners. But probably the most interesting character at Camp Upton is the barber who was at one time a sergeant in the British Flying Corps, and wears the King’s Distinguished Conduct Medal – that is, he probably would wear it if he hadn’t left it at “’ome in a box.” The New York Sun says:

Down on the muster pay roll the D. C. medal man is Harry Booton, but over in the 304th Field Artillery’s headquarters company barracks they call him Ben Welch, the Jewish comedian. But for all that his real name is Ortheris, who even Kipling himself thought had lain dead these twenty years and more in the hill country of India. And for the brand of service for his reincarnation he has chosen the artillery – the bloomin’, bloody artillery that he used to hate so much when he and Mulvaney were wearing the infantry uniform of the little old Widow of Windsor.

London cockney he was then, a quarter of a century ago, and London cockney he is today. And if there be some who say his name is not really Ortheris, let it be stated that names are of small moment after all. It’s the heart that counts – and the heart of this under-sized little Jewish cockney is the heart of Kipling’s hero – and the soul is his and the tale is his. And instead of telling his yarn to Mulvaney he now tells it to an Italian barber they call Eddie rather than his own gentle name of Gasualdi.

From Headquarters Hill, where the Old Man With the Two Stars looks out and down on his great melting-pot that’s cooking up this stirring army of freedom, you walk a half mile or so west until you stumble on Rookie Roose J 18, where the headquarters company and the band of the 304th Field Artillery play and sing and sleep and work. In one corner of the low, black-walled washroom nestling next the big pine barracks, Eddie the Barber lathers, shaves, and clips hair for I. O. U.’s when he isn’t busy soldiering. And into Eddie’s ears come stories of girls back home and yarns of mighty drinking bouts of other days, and even tales of strange lands and wars and cabbages and kings. Eddie is the confidant of headquarters company.

If you stand around on one foot and then another long enough, and add a bit now and then to the gaiety of the nations represented in Eddie’s home concocted tonsorial parlor you’ll hear some of these wild yarns pass uninterrupted from the right to the left ear of Eddie. And if you’re lucky you may even hear the tale of the D. C. medal – and the five wounds, and the torpedoed bark, and the time the King’s hand was kissed, and all from the lips of Ortheris, alias Harry C. Booton, alias Ben Welch.

And so, if you will kindly make way for the hero, whose medal is “at ’ome in me box,” – but who did not forget to bring his cockney accent along, to which he has added a dash of the Bowery – you may listen to the tale that was told to the Sun man:

“I was boined down in Whitechapel, Lunnon, and me ole man died seventeen years ago in the Boer War,” the tongue of Harry began his tale: “’E was a soger under ‘Mackey’ McKenzie, and ’e was kilt over in Sout Africey. Well, when Hingland goes into this war I says to meself I’ll join out to an’ do me bit, an’ so I done wit’ the Lunnon Fusileers, and after two or three months trainin’ we was sint to Anthwerp, but we didn’t stop there very long.

“Then we fights in the battle of Mons and Lille – I don’t know how you spells that Lille, but I think it’s ‘L-i-l’ – or somethin’ loik that. Well, in the battle of Mons I gets blowed up. Funny about that. You see, a Jack Johnson comes along and buries me, all except me bloomin’ feet, and then I gets plugged through both legs with a rifle bullet and I’m in the hospital for a month. When I gets out I’m transferred to the Royal Flying Corps and I goes to the Hendon or sumthin’ loike that aereodrome up Mill Hill way, fur trainin’. You see, I was a stige electrician in the Yiddish teaters on the Edgware road, and knowin’ things like that I was mide a helper and learnt all about flying machines.”

The b-r-r-r-r-r of an airplane – the first one to fly over the camp – caused Henry’s ear to cock for a second and then a smile to pop out of his face.

“’Ere’s one of the bloomin’ things now,” he went on. “Well, I was made a sergeant an’ arfter a bad bomin’ of Lunnon by the Fritzes six of us machines was sent to pay compliments to the Germans.

“It was dark and cold and nasty when we started out to attack Frederickshaven and give ’em some of their own medicine.

“Three hundred miles we flies an’ I’d dropped eighteen of my nineteen bums – you see I was riding with Sergeant-Major Flemming – when they opens up on us with their antiguns and five of us flops down, blazin’ and tumblin’. Then somethin’ hits me back and somethin’ else stings me arm and then I felt her wabble and flop. I glances behind and my sergeant is half fallin’ out and just as he tumbled I mikes a grab for ’im. ’E was right behint me and so as to right the machine I grips him with me teeth in his leather breetches and then I throws ’im back and swings into his seat and tramps on the pedal for rising. Up we goes to 9,000 feet, but it was too bloomin’ cold up there, so I come down some and points back for Hingland.

“The sergeant ’e were there with me, and I was glad efen if ’e had been kilt dead. You wouldn’t want ’im back there with them Booches– ’im my pal and my sergeant. I wasn’t going to let the Booches have ’im.

“More’n 300 miles I had to fly – 6 degrees it were – when I caught Queensborough, and then I come down. Funny about that – just as soon as I ’it the ground I fainted loike a bloomin’ lidy.

“An’ I was up in a Hinglish ’ospital in Lunnon when I come to a couple of d’ys after. An’ I wykes a bloomin’ ’ero, and the King ’e sends for me an’ some other ’eroes, and we all goes to Buckingham Palace, and ’is Majesty the King and Queen Mary and a ole bloomin’ mess of them bloomin’ dooks and lydies comes and the King pins the medal on me. Me a ’ero with a D. C. medal. And now I’m warin’ this bloomin’ kiki-ki and hopin’ to get another crack at Kaiser Bill and Fritz the sauerkraut.”

The ’ero was finally invalided out of service and ordered to the munitions factories in northern England. Having no inclination for this work, he stowed away on the Swedish bark Arendale, which was torpedoed when fifteen days out from London. He was picked up by the Dutch steamship Leander and finally landed in New Orleans. The Sun continues:

Then Harry came to New York a little over a year ago and made his abode at 157 Rivington street. By day he worked in a A-Z Motion Picture Supply Company, 72 Hester street, and by night he told brave tales of war and sang snatches of opera that he had learned behind the scenes in London.

Then came America’s entrance into the Great War and the selective service examination. At Board 109 Harry demanded that although he was a British subject he be allowed to go. And after considerable scratching of heads the members of Board 109 decided to ship Harry to Camp Upton with the first increment on September 10, and what was more, to make him the squad leader on the trip.

“Salute me, ya bloomin’ woodchopper,” Harry, ex-Tommy Atkins, shouted in derision at some lowly private who ventured to try a light remark. “Hain’t I yer superior? Hain’t I actin’ corporal? Hain’t I goin’ to be a sergeant-major? Awsk me – hain’t I?”

And the answer was decidedly and emphatically yes. And power to ye, Harry Booton – medal or no medal.