WHAT BILL BROWN DID IN THE GREAT TARRANT FIRE
THE great test for Fire-engine 29 and her crew, the test of life or death that firemen wait years for (to see what stuff is in them), came of a mild autumn afternoon, not soon to be forgotten by men who lunch down City Hall way, by men who swarm in the stone hives of Chambers Street and Greenwich Street and Washington Street. This was the day when innocent, wholesome chlorate of potash (excellent for colds) showed what it can do when you take it by the ton with a pinch of fire. This was the day of the great explosions, when it rained red-hot stones and blazing timbers, when whole blocks of lower Manhattan shivered with the concussion. This was Tarrant's day, October 29, 1900.
It all started smoothly enough, with brass gongs tapping out deliberate 62's, at which the big horses in most engine-houses stamped their displeasure, for 62 meant nothing to them—at least not on the first call. But it was great business for Harry and Nigger and Baby, the two blacks and the gray that pull old 29, and there they were at the first tap, breasting the rubber-bound stall chains as if to hurry up laggard electricity, which presently shot its sparks and loosed their fastenings.
Now, down drop the stall chains, and the horses, pounding over the tiles, crowd up three abreast ahead of the engine. Down drop the crew, silently, swiftly, sliding from ceiling to floor like so many blue-shirted ghosts. And click, click, its traces up and collars off the frames, and snap, snap, until the last hook holds.
"H'm," says Baby, as the thick wheels start, "six seconds; might have been worse."
"We'll strike the curb in eight and a half!" snorts Nigger, as the doors swing wide and they bang into Chambers Street.
Out into Chambers Street they go, with Johnnie Marks driving and Bill Brown jamming blazing waste into her fire-box, where wood and oil do the rest. On the back steps rides Captain Devanny, steadying himself by the coal-box, scowling under his helmet, and jerking fast on the alarm-cord as they swing into Greenwich Street. There is the fire just ahead, corner of Warren Street, nasty black smoke choking back the crowd. And here comes the hose-wagon, clanging and rumbling at their heels.
"It's first water for us, Bill," said Devanny.
"There's drugs and stuff in there," said Bill.
Then they fell to work—as firemen do.
"When the first explosion came," said Captain Devanny, telling the story weeks afterward, "I was inside the building, up one flight, at the bottom of a well of fire. McArthur and Buckley were with me, playing a stiff stream to protect the back windows. There's where people in the building had to run to, men and girls; we could see 'em crowding on the balconies over Bishop's Alley, and we wanted to give 'em a chance on the fire-escapes. You see, a red-hot ladder isn't much use to anybody.
A HOT PLACE.
"Well, they got down, every soul of 'em, but by that time big chunks of fire were dropping all around us, and our helmets were crumpling and our clothes were burning. Besides that, we kept hearing little explosions overhead, louder than the fire crackle, louder than pistol shots, and when you hear those in a drug-house you don't feel any too good. I went to the front, and saw fire breaking out everywhere on the fourth and fifth floors. Then I knew it was all up, and ran back to order the boys out. On the stairs I met Gillon, and was just yelling, 'Save yourselves!' when the crash came. It was like cannon, sir, and sounded bzzzzzzzz in my ears for a long time, as I lay in the wreck, with tongues of blue flames licking down over me. I'd been blown clean off the second-floor landing and dropped in the hallway, twenty feet back from the door. McArthur and Gillon were down the elevator shaft, where they'd jumped. Nobody dared lift a head, for a cyclone of fire was all over us."
It is not my purpose to detail the sufferings and final rescue of these flame-bound men. They had some vivid glimpses of death and some cruel burns, but firemen count these nothing, nor is McArthur's act in turning back through fire to save a fallen comrade (Merron) more than ordinary fireman's pluck, nor is Devanny's experience when caught in the second explosion and blown through a shop on Washington Street more than an ordinary hazard of the business. Indeed, this Tarrant fire should have but little of my attention were there not something in it beyond noise and house-smashing. There was this thing in it, overlooked by newspaper reports, yet vastly important, the behavior of Bill Brown, to whom, as a representative, one may say, of engine crew 29, came the great test I spoke of, the rare test which nothing but the highest courage can satisfy. All firemen have courage, but it cannot be known until the test how many have this particular kind—Bill Brown's kind.
And the odd part of it is that what he did seems a little thing, and it took only a minute to do, and it saved no life and made no difference whatever in the outcome of the fire, yet to the few who know—or care—it stands in the memories of the department as a fine and unusual bit of heroism.
What happened was this: Engine 29, pumping and pounding her prettiest, stood at the northwest corner of Greenwich and Warren streets, so close to the blazing drug-house that Driver Marks thought it wasn't safe there for the three horses, and led them away. That was fortunate, but it left Brown alone, right against the cheek of the fire, watching his boiler, stoking in coal, keeping his steam-gage at 75. As the fire gained chunks of red-hot sandstone began to smash down on the engine. Brown ran his pressure up to 80, and watched the door anxiously where the boys had gone in.
Then the explosion came, and a blue flame, wide as a house, curled its tongues half-way across the street, enwrapping engine and man, setting fire to the elevated railway station overhead, or such wreck of it as the shock had left. Bill Brown stood by his engine, with a wall of fire before him and a sheet of fire above him. He heard quick footsteps on the pavements, and voices, that grew fainter and fainter, crying: "Run for your lives!" He heard the hose-wagon horses somewhere back in the smoke go plunging away, mad with fright and their burns. He was alone with the fire, and the skin was hanging in shreds on his hands, face, and neck. Only a fireman knows how one blast of flame can shrivel up a man, and the pain over the bared surfaces was—well, there is no pain worse than that of fire scorching in upon the quick flesh seared by fire.
Here, I think, was a crisis to make a very brave man quail. Bill Brown knew perfectly well why every one was running; there was going to be another explosion in a couple of minutes, maybe sooner, out of this hell in front of him. And the order had come for every man to save himself, and every man had done it, except the lads inside. And the question was, Should he run or should he stay and die? It was tolerably certain that he would die if he stayed. On the other hand, the boys of old 29 were in there. Devanny and McArthur, and Gillon and Merron, his friends, his chums: he'd seen them drag the hose in through that door—there it was now, a long, throbbing snake of it—and they hadn't come out. Perhaps they were dead. Yes, but perhaps they weren't. If they were alive, they needed water now more than they ever needed anything before. And they couldn't get water if he quit his engine.
Bill Brown pondered this a long time, perhaps four seconds; then he fell to stoking in coal, and he screwed her up another notch, and he eased her running parts with the oiler. Explosion or not, pain or not, alone or not, he was going to stay and make that engine hum. He had done the greatest thing a man can do—had offered his life for his friends.
It is pleasant to know that this sacrifice was averted. A quarter of a minute or so before the second and terrible explosion, Devanny and his men came staggering from the building. Then it was that Merron fell, and McArthur checked his flight to save him. Then it was, but not until then, that Bill Brown left Engine 29 to her fate (she was crushed by the falling walls), and ran for his life with his comrades. He had waited for them, he had stood the great test.
It were easy to multiply stories of the firemen, stories of the captains, stories of the chiefs—there is no end to them. However many may be told or written, they are but fragments of fragments. New York has one hundred and thirty-six engine companies, forty hook-and-ladder companies, besides the volunteers on Staten Island, and there is not one of these but has its proud record of courage and self-sacrifice. Other lives show bravery for gain, bravery for show, bravery for sport; these show bravery for the public good and for no other reason—unselfish bravery. Think what the firemen do! They give up regular sleep, they give up home life, they bear every exposure, they face death in many forms as a matter of daily routine, they never refuse an order, lead where it may (such a case is practically unknown), and they do all this for modest pay and scant glory. Three or four dollars a day will cover their earnings, and as for the glory, what is it? For some a medal, a tattered paper with roll-of-honor mention, a picture in the newspapers; for most of them nothing. Yet they are cheerful, happy men. Why? I have wondered about this.
Shall we think of firemen as braver than other men, as finer or more devoted? No and yes. I should say that most of them, to start with, had no such superiority, but came into the department (usually by opportunity or drift) out of unpromising conditions, came in quite as selfish and timorous, quite as human as the ordinary citizens. And the life did the rest. The life changed them, made them braver and better. Why? Because it is a brave, unselfish life, and no man can resist it. Put a convict in the fire department and he will become an honest man—or leave. It's like changing scamps into heroes on the battle-field, only these battles of hose and ax are all righteous battles to save life, to avert loss and suffering. In the whole business of fighting fires there is no place for a mean or a base motive, and can be none. Therefore, meanness and baseness go out of fashion just as whining goes out of fashion on a football team. It's the fashion among firemen to do fine things.
Let me give a further instance to show what this fire department fashion does for men at the very top—for battalion chiefs and deputy chiefs and the chief himself. It swings them into line like men in the ranks. With the chance to work less, they find themselves working harder. With orders to take from no one, they assume voluntarily a severer duty than any man would put upon them. And this even if power has come through the way of politics, through influence or scheming. Let the most spoils-soaked veteran become chief of a city fire department and I believe we should see him, in spite of himself, forgetting his pocket-stuffing principles, and seeking the heroic goal, though it kill him. Which it probably would. As a matter of fact, New York has never had a chief who did not work harder than his men, and spare himself less than he spared his men.
Take our present chief, Edward F. Croker, the youngest man who ever held this place. Let me run over his twenty-four hours, from eight in the evening, when he goes on night duty at the Great Jones Street engine-house. From now until daylight he will cover personally some two hundred stations on the first alarm—that is, everything from Twenty-third Street to the Battery, the region of greatest danger. And on the second or third alarm he will cover the whole of Manhattan Island. That means answering every night from two to a dozen calls scattered over a great area. It means a pair of horses (Dan and John, usually) and driver clean worn out when morning comes. And it means to the chief, besides physical fatigue, an exhausting responsibility in quickly judging each fire and outlining the way of fighting it.
Almost a day's work this, one would say, but it is only a beginning. However broken his rest, the chief is up at seven in the morning—and note that what sleep he gets, three, four, five hours, is at an engine-house, not at his home—and by nine he is at headquarters, in Sixty-seventh Street, ready for a hard morning transacting business for the department, doing as much work as a merchant in his counting-room. This until one o'clock.
Then no luncheon (all fire chiefs are two-meal men), but off for a four-hours' spin behind Kitty and Belle, his daylight team, driving from station to station for the work of inspection, holding the reins himself for arm exercise, seeing with his own eyes how the work is going, holding every man to his duty. Studying the city, too, as he goes about, noting its growth and changes from the view-point of a fire expert, detecting weak points, bad streets, defective structures, fixing in mind the danger spots, here oil, there lumber, yonder paint or chemicals, and planning always for the defense.
After this inspection tour comes the only time in the day when the chief is not on duty, an hour and a half or two hours, when he gets a glimpse of his family and eats his dinner. Even then the fire buggy waits outside, and many a time this brief home stay is cut short and off goes the chief, dropping knife and fork, to answer a third alarm. There is some perversity about fires, so his wife and children think, that makes more of them start between six and eight in the evening (this is really a fact) than at any other period of the day.
A FALLING WALL.
So here we have a chief who actually holds himself ready for hardest service twenty-two hours in every twenty-four, who seldom knows a night's unbroken rest, who never takes a day off—not even Sundays or holidays, but uses these for longer inspection tours, driving forty or fifty miles of a Christmas day over Long Island or out into Queens County, or up through the Westchester region.
And he is never ill, and he never complains!
To watch the chief at a big fire is a thing worth doing, though not easy to do, for he moves about constantly, up-stairs and down-stairs, from roof to roof, from engine to engine, in danger like his men, not sending his orders merely, but following after to observe their execution. "I expect each of my captains," he told me one day, "to know the location and general condition of every alleyway, every stairway, every hydrant, every fire-escape in his section. When I get to a fire the captain must tell me what I want to know, and do it quick. Will we find water in there behind the smoke? Is there a back door at the end of that passage? How about the balconies? Where does this lane between the houses come out? And a dozen other things. If you want to fight fires well you must know the ground as if you lived on it."