The Supply Company wagoners Peter J. Seagriff, Albert Richford, A. Brown, Philip Smith and Thomas J. Ferris, won praise for difficult and dangerous tasks courageously performed by night and day.
The Sanitary Detachment, in addition to those mentioned, gave me Milledge Whitlock, Louis Bidwell, John McKeough, John P. Murphy, Patrick Fawcett, Thomas V. Boland, Walter Clark and Sergeant Arthur Firman. Whitlock, Wright and Walker were at an advance aid-post under the river bank all week long.
The most striking incident I heard described took place in Company D as they were waiting in the street of Villers sur Fere about three o’clock in the morning of the 28th. The Germans were raking the streets with high explosives and shrapnel, and men were falling, hit by the flying pieces. The most trying moment in battle is going into action under shell fire, especially at night. The shells come wh-e-e-e-zing over. One goes Whannng! up the road—another in a field to the right! Then one falls on a house and the tiles, plaster, fragments of stone are scattered over the men who are lying in the lee of it. Then another comes, more menacing in its approaching whistle. Men run, drop on the ground, stand petrified. And it lands in the midst of them. There are cries, ceasing suddenly as if cut off with a knife, curses, sobs of “Oh, God!” “They got me!” “For God’s sake, pick me up, Jim.” The survivors rush back, ripping open their First Aid packages, the non-coms bawling orders, everybody working in a frenzy to save the wounded. And then perhaps another shell landing in the same place will send them all away from the troubles of this awful world.
Company D was going through all this, and for the time being, without officers. Buck was gassed the day before; Connelly and Daly had gone off to execute their difficult operation to the right, First Sergeant Geaney being with them; Burke was away on his mission of danger and glory. The remaining Lieutenant had been called to receive orders. Two corporals, Patrick McDonough and John Gribbon, had been working hard, giving first aid to the wounded, and they began to worry about the possible effect of the shelling on the men. So they went up the line to look for some person in higher authority.
They found no officer but they did find Sergeant Tom O’Malley sitting against a stone wall, sucking philosophically at his pipe, as if the wall were the side of a stone fence in his native Connemara. Now the sight of Tom O’Malley breeds confidence in the heart of every soldier in Company D.
“Where’s the officers, Tom?”
“Oi don’t know where th’ hell they are,” says Tom, between puffs of his pipe, and in the slow, soft speech of the West Coast Irish, “If ye were in camp and ye didn’t want to see thim, ye’d be thrippin’ over thim. But now whin ye want t’ know what ye got to do in a foight ye can’t find wan of thim.”
“Well, Tom, we’ll elect you Captain and you take charge of the men until some of the officers get back, or they may be getting out of hand.”
“No, lads, Oi don’t fancy meself in a Sam Brown belt. Dick O’Neill here is a noice young fellah, so we’ll elect Dick Captain, and O’ll make ye fellahs do what he tells ye.” So Sergeant O’Neill, a youth of twenty-one, took charge of the situation, got the men together in small groups under their non-coms, and in places of comparative safety, and had them all ready when Lieutenant Cook came back from the conference to issue their orders to cross the Ourcq.
It is something that we call typically American that a number of men under a stress and in an emergency like this, should get together, choose their own leaders and obey them implicitly for the common good. These four men are Americans of the type we are proudest of. Yet it is worth noting that three out of the four were born in an island whose inhabitants, we are often told, are unfit for self-government. As for Dick O’Neill, he is one hundred per cent American, but it would take a braver man than I can claim to be to tell Dick O’Neill that he is not Irish, too.