Part 8

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.

GERMAN FALCON KILLED IN AIR-DUEL

THE old days when armies ceased fighting to watch their two champions in single combat have come back again. It was on the Western front, and the engagement that resulted in the death of Immelman the Falcon, Germany’s most distinguished Ace, was in very truth a duel—no chance meeting of men determined to slay one another, but a formally arranged encounter, following a regular challenge, and fought by prearrangement and without interference. The battle was witnessed with breathless interest by the men of both armies crouched in the trenches, separated by only a few feet of No Man’s Land, while the fire of the anti-aircraft guns on both sides was stilled.

The victor in the spectacular fight was Captain Ball, the youthful English pilot who has only two notches less on the frame of his fighting machine than had the Falcon, who was credited with fifty-one “downs.” The story of the duel, which was declared to have been one of the most sensational events of the war, is told in a letter written by Col. William Macklin, of the Canadian troops, to a friend in Newark, N. J. Colonel Macklin, who was one of the eye-witnesses of the fight, writes in his letter, which is printed in the New York _Tribune_:

One morning Captain Ball, who was behind our sector, heard that Immelman the Falcon was opposite.

“This is the chance I’ve been waiting for; I’m going to get him,” declared Ball.

Friends tried to dissuade him, saying the story of Immelman’s presence probably was untrue. Ball would not listen.

Getting into his machine, he flew over the German lines and dropped a note which read:

“Captain Immelman: I challenge you to a man-to-man fight, to take place this afternoon at two o’clock. I will meet you over the German lines. Have your anti-aircraft guns withhold their fire while we decide which is the better man. The British guns will be silent.

“BALL.”

About an hour afterward, a German aviator swung out across our lines. Immelman’s answer came. Translated it read:

“Captain Ball: Your challenge is accepted. The German guns will not interfere. I will meet you promptly at two.

“IMMELMAN.”

Just a few minutes before two o’clock the guns on both sides ceased firing. It was as though the commanding officers had ordered a truce. Long rows of heads popped up and all eyes watched Ball from behind the British lines shoot off and into the air. A minute or two later Immelman’s machine was seen across No Man’s Land.

The letter describes the tail of the German machine as painted red “to represent the British and French blood it had spilled,” while Ball’s had a streak of black paint to represent the mourning for his victims. The machines ascended in a wide circle, and then:

From our trenches there were wild cheers for Ball. The Germans yelled just as vigorously for Immelman.

The cheers from the trenches continued. The Germans’ increased in volume; ours changed into cries of alarm.

Ball, thousands of feet above us and only a speck in the sky, was doing the craziest things imaginable. He was below Immelman and was, apparently, making no effort to get above him, thus gaining the advantage of position. Rather he was swinging around, this way and that, attempting, it seemed, to postpone the inevitable.

We saw the German’s machine dip over preparatory to starting the nose dive.

“He’s gone now,” sobbed a young soldier at my side, for he knew Immelman’s gun would start its raking fire once it was being driven straight down.

Then, in the fraction of a second, the tables were turned. Before Immelman’s plane could get into firing position, Ball drove his machine into a loop, getting above his adversary and cutting loose with his gun and smashing Immelman by a hail of bullets as he swept by.

Immelman’s airplane burst into flames and dropped. Ball, from above, followed for a few hundred feet and then straightened out and raced for home. He settled down, rose again, hurried back, and released a huge wreath of flowers almost directly over the spot where Immelman’s charred body was being lifted from a tangled mass of metal.

Four days later Ball, too, was killed. He attacked single-handed four Germans. He had shot one down and was pursuing the other three when two machines dropped from behind the clouds and closed in on him. He was pocketed and was killed—but not until he had shot down two more of the enemy.

HE TAUGHT THE “TANK” TO PROWL AND SLAY

ALONG with many other things with finer names, for which credit is due him, Col. E. D. Swinton, of the British Royal Engineers, will go down in history as the father of the tank, that modern war monster and engine of destruction which made its professional début on the Somme battlefield and which did such effective work in French and British drives.

Colonel Swinton is a pleasant, mild-mannered gentleman, the last person in the world one would expect to bear any relationship to the tank. In fact, the virtue of modesty in him is so well developed that he refuses to accept all the glory, and insists upon sharing the parental honors with an American, Benjamin Holt, inventor of the tractor.

“I don’t mean that the Holt tractor is the tank by any means,” he says, “but without the Holt tractor there very probably would not have been any tank.”

Arthur D. Howden Smith, writing in the New York _Evening Post_, declares:

It is practically impossible to get Colonel Swinton to admit outright that he is the parent of the tank; yet father it he did, and he was also the first captain of the tanks in the British Army; he organized the tank unit in France, and he launched the loathly brood of his offspring in their initial victory on the Somme battlefield. If any man knows the tank, he does, for he created it and tamed it and taught it how to prowl and slay.

Colonel Swinton began to think about tanks several years before Austria sent her ultimatum to Servia, but he is scrupulously careful to say that many men were thinking more or less vaguely along the same lines at the same time. Indeed, the proposal of the tank as an engine for neutralizing the effect of machine gun fire was actually made by two sets of men, one to the War Office and one to the Admiralty, and neither group was aware that the other was working along the same lines. Still, we may believe unprejudiced testimony which gives to Colonel Swinton the principal credit for convincing the higher authorities in London that mobile land-forts were practicable.

“In July, 1914, I heard that Mr. Benjamin Holt, of Peoria, Ill., had invented a tractor which possessed the ability to make its way across rugged and uneven ground,” he stated. “But several years before that a plan for a military engine practically identical with the tank had been sketched upon paper, when a tractor of another make was tried out in England. That first plan came to nothing. We weren’t ready for it then.

“The reports of the Holt tractor served to stimulate my interest in the idea all over again, and when I went to France with Lord French in August, 1914, and saw what modern warfare was like, I became convinced that an armored car, capable of being independent of roads and of traversing any terrane to attack fortified positions, was a necessity for the offensive.”

The Colonel, with a quizzical smile, here called attention to the fact that the principal German weapon of slaughter was the invention of an American—Hiram Maxim—and he thought it quite fitting that the weapon to combat it should be credited, at least in part, to the American inventor of the tractor. Continuing, he said:

“By October, 1914, I had a fair conception of the kind of engine which might be relied upon to neutralize the growing German power in machine guns, combined with the most elaborate fortifications ever built on a grand scale. You see, their fire ascendency in the meantime had enabled them to dig in with their usual thoroughness. In October I returned to England to try to interest the authorities at the War Office in my idea. I had my troubles, but I did not have as many troubles as I might have had, because other men of their own accord were working along the same lines.

“You must get this very straight, mind. Whatever credit there may be for inventing the tanks belongs not to any one man, but to many men—exactly how many nobody knows. It is even rather unfair to mention any names, my own as well as those of others. For, besides those men who actually worked to perfect the tanks, there were others who had conceived very similar ideas.

“Still another proof of the plurality of tank inventors is the fact that while one group of us were endeavoring to interest the War Office in the idea, another group of men, entirely ignorant of what we were doing, were trying to get the Admiralty to take up a similar line of experimentation. And it is no more than fair to point out that the first money provided for experimentation with landships, as we called them, came from Winston Spencer Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty. But he was only one of a number of men who played parts in the development of the finished engine. For example, there were two men in particular who worked out the mechanical problems. I wish I could give you their names, but I cannot.”

To the suggestion of the writer in _The Post_ that it seemed strange that so many minds should have been working out the same idea at the same time, Colonel Swinton replied emphatically:

“Not when you consider the situation. The tank, after all, is merely an elaboration, the last word, of military devices as old as the history of military engineering. Its ancestors were the armored automobile, the belfry or siege tower on wheels of the middle ages, and the Roman _testudo_. The need for the tank became apparent to many who studied the military problems demonstrated on the Western front. That is often so in the history of inventions, you know. A given problem occupies many minds simultaneously, and generally several reach a solution about the same time, even though perhaps one receives the credit for the invention above all the others.”

“You spoke about the mechanical problems of the tanks. What were they?”

“Ah, there you are getting on delicate ground. I am glad to tell you all I can about the tanks, but I can’t describe them—not beyond a certain point, that is. I will say just this—the peculiar original feature of them, upon which their efficiency most depends, is the construction of their trackage. It is the feature which enables them not only to negotiate rough and broken ground, but to surmount obstacles and knock down trees and houses. But the full description of the tanks cannot be written until after the war.”

Colonel Swinton described the uproarious mirth of the British infantry on that morning when they had their first sight of the unwieldy tanks clambering over trenches, hills, small forests, and houses, spitting flames as they rolled, lolloping forward like huge armored monsters of the prehistoric past.

“It gave our men quite a moral lift,” he said. “They forgot their troubles. But they soon came to see that the tanks were more than funny, for wherever they attacked the infantry had comparative immunity from machine gun fire, and it is the German machine gun fire which always has been the principal obstacle for our troops.”

The name of the tank Colonel Swinton explained was originally a bit of _camouflage_. People who saw them in the process of erection variously described them as snowplows for the Russian front and water tanks for the armies in Egypt. The latter name stuck. And it may not be generally known that this mechanical beast of war is divided into two sexes.

“Some tanks are armed with small guns firing shells,” said Colonel Swinton. “These are used especially against machine gun nests. They are popularly known in the tank unit as males. Other tanks carry machine guns and are intended primarily for use against enemy infantry. They are the females. There is no difference in the construction.”

Colonel Swinton was detailed from his post in the British War Cabinet to act as assistant to Lord Reading in his mission to the United States to tighten the bonds of efficiency between the two countries in their war programs.

During the fall of 1914, Colonel Swinton was the English official eye-witness of the fighting in Flanders and France. Before that he was perhaps best known to the general public as a writer of romances in which was skillfully woven the technique of war. One of his stories, “The Defense of Duffer’s Drift,” is used as a text-book at West Point.

NOT A SELF-STARTER

“Sam, you ought to get in the aviation service,” a Chicago man told a negro last week. “You are a good mechanic and would come in handy in an aeroplane. How would you like to fly among the clouds a mile high and drop a few bombs down on the Germans?”

“I ain’t in no special hurry to fly, Cap,” the negro answered. “When wese up ’bout a mile high, s’pose de engine stopped and de white man told me to git out an’ crank?”

TRY IT ON YOUR WIFE

Extract from lecture by N. C. O.:

“Your rifle is your best friend, take every care of it; treat it as you would your wife; rub it thoroughly with an oily rag every day.”

HE WAS GOING AWAY FROM THERE

He—“So your dear count was wounded?”

She—“Yes, but his picture doesn’t show it.”

He—“That’s a front view.”

TAKING MOVING PICTURES UNDER SHELL-FIRE

TAKING moving pictures while exploding shells from pursuing warships and torpedo-boats are sending up geysers that splash your fleeing launch and stall the motor is a little out of the run of even an American war correspondent’s daily stunt. Capt. F. E. Kleinschmidt, who has been billeted with the Austrian marine forces at Trieste, has recently had such an experience while accompanying an expedition to the Italian coast to remove a field of mines, an occupation quite dangerous enough without the shell-fire. He tells this story in the St. Louis _Post-Dispatch_:

Captain M——, commander of the marine forces of Trieste, had told me I should hold myself ready at a moment’s notice for an interesting adventure. Presuming it would be another airplane flight over the enemy’s territory, I kept my servants and chauffeur up late, and then finally lay down, fully dressed, with cameras and instruments carefully overhauled and packed. At seven o’clock next morning the boatswain of the launch _Lena_ called at the hotel and told me to follow him. “The captain,” he said, “could not accompany me.” But he had instructions to take me out to sea and then obey my orders. An auto took us to the pier, where a fast little launch was ready. This time she had a machine gun, with ready belt attached, mounted in her stern, and flew the Austrian man-of-war flag. Not until we were well out to sea did the boatswain tell me we were to sneak over to the Italian shore and demolish a hostile mine field. The prevailing fog and exceptionally calm weather made it an ideal day to accomplish our purpose. The fog prevented the Italians from seeing us, and the calm sea made it possible to lift and handle the mines with a minimum of danger to ourselves. Two tugboats and a barge had already preceded us early in the morning. After an hour’s run the three vessels suddenly appeared before us, and we drew alongside the tugboat No. 10, already busy hoisting a mine. I jumped aboard and reported to Captain K——, in charge of the expedition.

To my chagrin he refused to let me stay. The first reason was, it was too dangerous work, and he would not take the responsibility of my being blown up; and, secondly, we might be surprized by the Italians at any moment and be sent to the bottom of the sea. All my arguing and insisting upon the orders from his superior proved useless. He insisted upon my return or written orders clearing him of all responsibility. So I had to go back in the launch to Trieste and report to Captain M—— about the scruples of the commander of the mine expedition. I also offered to leave my servants (two Austrian soldiers) ashore and sign a written waiver of all responsibility should anything happen to me.

The ever-generous and obliging Captain M—— said he would accompany me himself, so out we raced for the second time, and I had the satisfaction to stay and photograph. The most dangerous work, namely, the lifting of the first mine, had been accomplished during my return to Trieste. The nature of the beast had been ascertained. The construction was a new one, of the defensive type. With good care and a smooth sea, the mines could be hoisted, made harmless and be saved. There would be, he hoped, no explosions, and, working quietly, we would not draw an Italian fleet down upon us.