But it is Company K that had to bear the brunt of it. Of the officers, Lieutenant Crane is in the most critical condition, and it was a touching thing as I went through the ward to hear every single man in his platoon forget his own pain to inquire about the Lieutenant. Some of the men are still in very bad shape, Richard O’Gorman, George Sicklick, Val Prang, Sergeant Gleason, Bernard Leavy, Francis Meade, James Mullin and also Mortimer Lynch, Christopher Byrne, Daniel Dooley, Gerard Buckley, Harold Benham, Harold Broe, Kilner McLaughlin, and Buglers Nye and Rice. The cooks did not escape—Pat Boland, William Mulcahy, Moriarty, Thomas O’Donnell and Michael O’Rourke, who, by the way, is one of those Czecho-Slovaks who has chosen to fight under a martial name. The Wisconsins also have been hard hit, and two of their men here, Corporal John Sullivan and Leo Moquin, are painfully burned on account of their exertions in carrying others. I have turned the names of these two in with a recommendation for citation, with those of Staber, Farrell, Ross, Van Yorx, Montross, Beall, Brochon, McCabe and the medicos mentioned. Sergeant Leo Bonnard, in liaison with the French, has received his cross on their recommendation. Lieutenant Tom Martin and Dr. Patton also received the same decoration.

Apart from Lieutenant Crane, none of the officers is in serious condition, though more than half of the officers in the battalion are in the hospital, including Major Moynahan, Captains Hurley, Merle-Smith, and Meaney, Lieutenants Leslie, Stevens, and Rerat, with nearly all the lieutenants of Company K and M, and also Major Lawrence with Lieutenants Patton and Arthur Martin of the Sanitary Detachment, who deserve high praise for their handling of a difficult situation.

The Company M men were not so badly gassed, with the exception of Sergeant Emerson. A good many of them were walking about with eyes only slightly inflamed. I was immediately surrounded by Eustace, Flanigan, Jack Manson, Harry Messmer, Bill Lanigan, Mark White, Jock Cameron and a lot of others, all clamoring for news about the regiment. I made myself a candidate for being canonized as a saint by working at least a hundred first-class miracles when I announced that we had come with the pay. The news was received with a shout, “Gimme me pants, I’m all better now.”

There was one thing that disturbed us. We found most of our injured in these two towns, but there was still a considerable number whose pay we had that we could not find, and nobody was able to tell where they had been sent.

BACCARAT

April 7th, 1918

The reports which have arrived of the death in hospital of Robert Allen, Walter Bigger and Lawrence Gavin of Company K gave us our first information concerning the whereabouts of soldiers whom we could not discover in our trip to the hospital. They died at the new Army Hospital at Bazoilles near Neufchateau. As Tom Johnson of the New York Sun was visiting us, he offered to take me back with him in his car to see them. They are in long, one-story hospital barracks and most of them are almost recovered although Amos Dow and Herbert Kelly are still very sick boys. With the assistance of the two First Sergeants of K and M, Tim Sullivan and James McGarvey, who are also patients, I paid them all off.

I also gave them a bit of news which was more gratefully received than the pay, and that is saying a great deal. One of the hospital authorities told me that a special order had arrived that men of the 165th who would be fit for duty by a certain date should be returned direct to the regiment without going through a casual camp. He told me also that the order was entirely an exceptional one, adding laughingly that he would be glad to get rid of them. He said they were the liveliest and most interesting lot of patients he ever had to deal with, but they made themselves infernal pests by agitating all the time to get back to their confounded old regiment. Howard Gregory came up with a side car to take me back and I had another chance to see our men in the other two hospitals and was glad to find that they are all on the road to recovery.

REHERREY

April 25th, 1918