The evening world. Newspaper, May 30, 1918, Page 8

ween Ha pms Bap a { } ; Copyright, 1918, by The THURSDAY, MAY 30, 1918 Four Months in France With the 165th Infantry The Old “Sixty-Ninth” Francis Duffy, Chaplain, Soldiers’ Frignd in Camp and Fearless Under Fire-—-Heroism of Y. M. C. A. % Secretaries—Character Studies of Major Timothy Moynahan, FIFTH INSTALMENT. By George H. Benz Former First Lieutenant, Company d. Written Exclusively for The Evening World. ‘eas Publishing Co. (The New York Evening World.) HE 69th, as New York well knows, ts mostly Catholic, #0 Father Fran cis Duffy of this city is the chaplain of the regiment. While a man ot the cloth, he is no leas a soldier than the highest ranking officer in the outfit and as much a hero as any man who has been decorated with the French War Cross. Father Duffy is more than six feet tall and of powerful build. His face, the expression, the linos, attracts one to him imme- diately. One day, when the shelling in our sector had been particularly active, I was slipping over a muddy “duck board” in a communication trench making m: way to the firing line. I ¢urped a corner and there saw the tall form of the chaplain seeming to shelter a little Irish private he had backed up against the trench sides. The moan of the shells whizzing through the air furnished the doleful music as he held confession. Up in that line, when men were facing and some meeting death every few minutes, you'd find Father Duffy. He was more than {ather confessor to the men—he was their friend, » their pi 1 have seen him bending over a man who was gassed, and lay fn the mud.struggling for air, frothing at the mouth. As the priest's hands closed over the fingers of the dying soldier, into the eyes soon to be closed to all worldly atrife came a look of peace, of that great faith that sends @ man siniling before his Maker. , Back of the lines you'd probably find him playing baseball with some ‘of the boys, or else worming a meal out of a mess Sergeant long after mess call had blown. It takes a Giplomat to do that. Sundays, if we happened to be in @ Village, he would be assootated with the local priest in conducting pervices. That reminds me of a rec- ommendation he made as to the method of collecting alms and con- tributions in the French churches, It ta the custom to send a gaudily ting to that drowsy state when some- thing chilly, ike cold fingers, passed across his face. Then it tried to snuggle in under his chin, He leaped out of bed and with a flashlight he hed under the pillow made out a fair sized rat scampering into a corner. He said he sat up on his cot all night, afraid to sleep again. He got over that, though. I mentioned before, in a casual sort ot way, that Major Timothy Moyna- han was at the head of our battalion. He must have special mention im- attired major domo alead of the cot- lector. The former might be mis- taken for a Spanish Admiral or the deprman at « “tres chic” New York hotel. In his right hand he carries @ long gold-headed and beribboned staff. His voice in a monotone, he makes a plea for alms. The man following him is a con- trast. He is dressed usually tn plain bjaek and bears in his hand a red plush bag, not more than three inches deep. It takes very few of the big copper 10 centime pieces to fill up this bag. Father Duffy objected to this cur- tailment of any one’s liberality. I heard him expounding in almost Perfect French the conviction that the larger the contribution box the larger the contribution. I've often wondered if his advice was accepted, Father Duffy forgot personal dan- ger to serve his lads, and the same can be said of every Y. M,C, A. sec- retary 1 ever met. The last sector v@ held the Y. had a hut above the ground, not more than a mile from the firing line. There one could al- ways get hot chocolate and a “hand- ‘out’ of figs. Tom O'Neil called often. Every morning about 11 o'clock you mediately. Any one who knows him, who has ever been associated with him, will admit that, He ts more than a character—he !s an institution with the 69th, | The Major h: army college, learning all the tricks in beating the boche, and when he returned the command had already made some progress, For instance, we had a “town Major,” that is, an officer who transacts the necessary Dusiness with the French civil popu- lation, hears all of their complaints, and with the Mayor tries to adjust all) claima, This officer, Behrend, was summoned into the presence of the Major to explain in detail. He was at dinner, or, forgetting city customs, supper over there, A knock on the doof was heard, “Come in," said the Major, frown- ing as only he can frown, Two Lieutenants entered, and Bonnell Hah,” exploded the Major, is it I can't eat in peace? I start to dine, and what happens?” He waved his hand. “A whole flock of Lieu. | tenants come in on me. And what do you want?” he asked, turning to one. Lesite why might wee « Y. man laboriously nego-1” “agajor, 1 lost my bedding roll, Ya tating his way along 4 rickett¥)iike to go to Langres and buy a mat. “duck board” to the front line, He carried a satchel filled with chocolate and cigarettes for the soldiers, Even when the artillery was particularly faotive he would dodge shells to serve the men, The hut in this sector had been hit by shrapne) so many times that the roof looked like an enlarged aleve. Oddly enough, no Y, map had ever been injured there. Perhaps ap all wise Providence knew the reason Back in the camps the training areas the Y. was even more real. The first shock our system in th came in @ village from a more or less battered piano the Y. man secured rest and music to pleasantly © month tress, &@ wash basin and some things. up soon, with me,” “But can you res?” asked the Major “I'm not sure, but I think I can,’ “But CAN you GET them there? “I don't know, sir.” “You c other T understand we are to move and I'd Mke to have them get them in Lan n't go, Then he turned to the other Lieu tenant, “And what do you want? he asked. Td Uke to go to Langres too, Major "What do you want to go to Lan ares for? ‘Oh, for a change of scenery.” (a ee eee dd been away to the! new | from “somewhere.” A private, who BH Aan aan was counted a good dancer at Shan The Major went back to his, plate | Jey's and could “play by ear,” was ]of Irish stow as the Lieutenants sa | performing with “Over There ab “about faced” and retired, try the piece de resistance, though the | ing mighty hard to » trom a mirth | men paraphrased it into “Over Here.” | explosion Bergt. Murphy joined in occasion- In that same ally, to the utter disregard of Private town the Major had prepared & working schedule for ul Daiton's feeling the compantes in the battalion, Capt This secretury was very “new” on} ityan, Meaney, Smith and Hur the job when he first joined the bat- | thought some talion. 1 believe he France but a few months, termed ordinary hardships. had been in and this was his first introduction to what we improvement might be made, 80 at officers’ school one night, and thi# school was In change of the Major, they broached the subject, “And what's the matter with that His hut was the ground floor of a schedule, It’s & wood scedule. 1 stable, and a portion had been par- know it's a GOOD schedule, I made titioned off as his bedroom, He |i, myselt.” showed up for mess the frst morning | The schedule w. van't hanged, with his eyes indicating plainly that | \Comtianed Paue Morrow.) ~ > A CALL FOR REFORM, Quality le what counts after all, what this country needs he had wooed Morpheus In vain the night before. Capt. Ryan questioned him, but all we could get out of him for a few minutes was the word “rats.” Then he told us. apa tower He had crawled | wite's relatives and better obee.—Ohio fate-tiig biankote and wae just Get ‘bite Journgh onwe® following resolution Fied whereas, It with His w upon mercy, just Ta witness whereot I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed. Done in the District of Columbia this eleventh day of May, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and eighteen and of the independence of the United States the one hundred and forty- second, and he is hereby respectfully requ beseeching Him that He will wisdom to those whb take counsel on our behalf in these da and steadfastness to our people to make sacrifice to the utmost In support of what is just and true, bringing us at last the peace in which men's hearts can be at rest because it s founded Gan POM hy ind good-will. By the President, ROBERT L President Wilson's Memorial Day Proclamation ARE A Proclamation Whereas, The Congress of the United Stared, on the second day of April Ia Resolved by the Senate (the House of Representatives concurring) peculiarly ineumbent in a time of war humbly and deroully to acknowledge our dependence ‘on Almighty God and lo implore His aid and protection, the President of the United States be, ted to commend a day of public humiliation, fasting, to be observed by the people of the United States with religious solemnity ai ‘of fervent supplications lo Almighty God for the safety and welfare of our cause, His blessings on our arms, and @ speedy resioralion of an honorable and lasting peace lo the nations of the earth. always been the reverent habit of the people of the United States to turn in humble appeal to Almighty God for His guidance in the affairs of their common life; Now, therefore, 1, Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim Thursday, the thirtieth of May, a day already freighted with sacred and stimulating memories, a day of public humiliation, prayer, and fasting, and do exhort my fellow citizens of all faiths and creeds to assemble on that day in their several places of worship and there, as well as in their homes, to pray Almighty God that He may forgive our sins and shortcomings as a people and purify our hearts to see and love the truth, to accept and defend all things that are Just and right, and to purpose only those righteous acts and judgments which are in conformity ive victory to our armies as they fight for freedom, Wiz » passed the That it being a duty yer and the offering of dark struggle and perplexity, WOODROW WILSON. Secretary of To the Non- Graduating Fathead Class of 1918 Advice Is Something Li from Being Hooked ke Castor Oil: Is Supposed to Be Brain Food, but Hasn’t Enough Brains of Its Own to Keep how to Give but Hard to Take — Fish When the Truant Officer Is Out to Draft Chronic Loafers, Don’t Tell Him You Are a Professional Snow-Shoceller or Ski-Jumper. wht, 1918, by The F Judging trom the Publishing Co, tlock of advice (The New ome folks must, wear earmuffs all the year round like castor oil easy to give, get corns ov pore ¢ any Luming this subject which is donated but but hard to take Advice es from sticking BY ARTHUR (* BUGS”’) York Eve World Advice ts something lispensers are g ‘em into other peo: further, this is the time to say that, while all students in the non-graduating fathead class of 1915 desire to be winners, they should also remember that a fathead never graduates. To quote the Hermit of the Subway at Rush Hour, we might chirp that expertence Is a great teacher, but that a gre teacher doesn't always have great pupils. A ile fish is suppe dowh to be a brain food, consider long and wide re packing your with sardines, We don't know how fish got the reputation for being a skull food, but it shows that anything can be done with a good presi ageut pulling the right wires at the wrong time Fish may be a cerebrum tonic, But how can anything be a brain food that hasn't enough brains of its own to keep from getting hooked? A fish will fall for a dish-faced worm on the end of a bent pin six times out of a half dozen, which gives it a batting ave: Goot League. If fish 1s a skull food, we'll take Me with a slight limp. a loser? You sald it A fish always has {ts feet wet, Showing that tt rage of .1000 in the siean jumping beans How can you be @ winner on a fish that is always has no more brains than the flapper who powders her reflection in the mirror and walks away with her own nose just aa shiny as the handle on the side doo a saloon on Sunday morning If fish is a brain food, w don't doctor and lawyers graduate from aquariums Yea, bo! Some of ‘em m While commending the ambish of all members of the fathead class to accumulate fame in this world of sorrow and elbows, do not allow your desire to be a winner to cause you to step on your own chin, You @an't yee sour Chin ae a gtepping slong Wp success, And as for the win BAER . Love for Wife and Home A Marked Characteristic | Of the Wounded Poilu Miss Ellen N. La Motte, Two Years in French Army Hospita’ in Belgium, Describes Side of Soldier Nurse Sees in Her Book, “The Back- | wash of War.”” By Marguerite Mooers Marshall N American woman, a graduate of Johns Hopkins and a trained sociologist, a mature woman with the simplicity and kindliness ot innate good breeding, the clear, unflinching eyes of utter disillw sionment, was living in Paris when the war began, in the summer of 1914, Almost immediately she—Miss Ellen N, La Motte—went with a friend, en- other American woman who had married an English-* man, to be a nurse in a French Army hospital “some- where in Belgium" and but seven miles from the front. For two years she worked in that hospital, much of the time in the “Salle des Grands Blesses,” where the most horribly and hopelessly wounded patients were brought. Out of the wormwood and gall of her experience ehe distilled a book, “The Backwash of War.” It is a book in certain ways more remarkable than anything any American has written about the great conflict. In it a woman pictures the war shé sees—the physical, mental, moral slime of it—with the same frank, crusading ruth- sness Barbusse shows in his epic of war, “Under Fire.” The women’ vook is not consoling, not evocative of a cheery chuckle, but {t does leave, like “Under Fire,” the sediment of a sane, grim, unimpassioned knowl#age that fighting this war !s a thing which has got to be done. Which same knowledge seems to me a more valuable moral for the men in the front line and the women in the home line of defenses than any amount of ro- mantic hot-spurring. sherman me? she said, “and we were always @ub- Ject to call, for we had no relief. For the same reason, we had to work even it we didn’t feel precisely fit. In the |base hospitals conditions are different and more nearly resemble those in any [vie city hospital. Where I was the work came in wal according as there was fighting or quiet in our seo- tor. Sometimes there was little to de, sometimes more than we could handle. Nor were we very safe, Enemy ate \ships often flew near, although me bombs seemed to be aimed at us, doctors and patients had there was to ut w La Motte re- me ay when IT talked at the Hotel Buckingham, “I n no reason to differ from his opinion, ‘ou see, I have so close to war. To me it is hor le; it is not beautiful, it ts not necessarily ennobling, But I know that ft has to be, “ft am not a pacifist,” she added quickly, her finely arched brows con- tracting. “I am not even one of those »ple you find everywhere who are |the same food, provided by the French ying that this is to be the last|Army, and it was good, on the whole, war, the war whigh will end war, 1) The hospital was arranged with many don’t believe that. I think we shall|#eparate buildings, so that in going |have wars and more wars until hu-'from one ward to another the nurses say at minded to her have si expressed been “Nurses, | manity evolves into something It is hot at present, But I do not see why we had to go outdoors, day or night, and n all sorts of weather. The weather should not tell the truth about war,| Mostly was vile, and, despite our Just as we would tell it when describ- | Stoves, we had difficulty in keeping ing the action of an earthquake or a| Warm, One of the worst things about typhoon, I never ha phoon,” she added reflectively. “I should Ike to go through one and write the impression I received from it, What I have tried to do in my ve been in a ty- | the work was its boredom. | broken up by from a man And sick men in A man a shell isn't so different ished by an automobth re sick men, whether a military hospital or a city how- hook, which was written and pub-|Pital. Some are patient, gratefal, lished a year before America entered |brave—some are not. Putting a man the war, was to tell honestly the im-|!nto khaki doesn't make a Bir Gala- pression war made upon m had of him, “[ have no doubt that conditions as | 1 described them might be duplicated | “But one thing which impressed me most forcibly about all the wounded on the German front, on any front.'men was their touchtng devotion te They seem to me inseparable from) their wives and their homes. Over Jand over again they showed me ple- Miss La Motte has writtef in “The | tures of the little, ordinary, unbeau- Backwash of War" of men with | tiful women to whom they were mar- ghastly wounds who take days for dy- | ried. It seems to me @ great pity that ing; of “a Belgian civilian,” ten years | American wives and mothers and sia- old, shell-wounded, whose mother|ters should be kept away from thetr most reluctantly spent with him the| men serving in France, last night of his life when she might] “Why should an additional haré- have been making much moj by|ship be placed on American soldiers selling drink to English soldiers near| Ypres; of young, orderlies who, by “knowing deputies,’ manage to keep well away from the firing line; of a little ex-Apache bodied hospital ot and their relatives which the French and British do not have to bear? Ak though women in the soldiers’ familtes are not allowed to come into the firet war zone—there is no room for them the Batailion d'Afrique who, after ex-|—the men at stated intervals are sent treme and patient suffering under|home for leave, I can think of noth- much surgical experimentation, died|ing better for American soldlers, twenty minutes before the General] wounded or unwounded, than the came with his medals. privilege of spending leave with @ “There are many people,” she has|member of their family in a Ittte | said, “to write you of the noble side,| transplanted ‘home’ in Paris or one |the heroic side, the exalted side of| of the provinces. And why the raling | war, I must write you of what I have|@gainst allowing relatives of eoldiers |seen, the other side—the backwash,|to serve in hospitals or canteens im You don’t get a medal for sustained | France? One of the English women Tnobility. You get it for the impetu-| nurses in the hospital with me wae ous tion of the moment, an action|the wife of an officer, who frequently quite out of keeping with the trend|came to see her, Why not? of one's daily life. You speak of the| “There is on good result the war her's end of the purse, remember that Cain was a winner, Yet no uviator who was decorated for|already has accomplished," concluded bables or bobsleds are named after Cat 1 polit 4 Zeppelin single-handed, | Misa La Mo A note of hopetulnoss have been winners, but thelr motto was “Disgraced but not dofeated.” ext breath you add-—and he| coloring her sombre voice, “The And it is the e led himself, a few days later, by ded ambition of the “ae Prince to reverse the tel his old man while felling him that nothing is lo! ompting to fly when he was drunk | scope of women's activities has been phone charges of st a AI HAO AOA | une gas broadened. It's « fine So it goes, There is a dirty sedimen In ome save fonor, Cain was a winner, but that was before they had juries, ‘ s i for & woman to learn that she at the bottom of most squls, War,|can run an elevator, or be a condueter And while we have twelve good men and true to shoot dice and pick | oi) aw it 1s, 18 not necessarily a/on a streect car, or in some other wes | thelr teeth in @ jury room, there ain't a chance of anybody else Betting | Fitoring process by which men and/go out into the world and earn away with the Cain stuff again nations may be purified own living. The woman who wante to Which about concludes the baccalaureate address to the non-gradu- | 1 asked her to tell me something of| help fight the war need not be @ ating fathead class of 1918 and suburbs, except to advise you that when | the work of a war nurse In a hospital | nurse at the front. ‘There ts plentyet the truant officers come around to draft the chronic loafers, don't tell | at the fronts fea oe at home, and the way she te ‘em that you are a professional snow shoveller or ski jumper, This is We worked thirteen hours @ day,” taking it over is splendic June. Choose your exit, and don’t try to beat your nelghbor to the street. | _ The Dasher’ s Dictionary | Soldier Exhibits Snake OMMISSIONED Officer—One who| camouflageable blue uniform, come | QyeRGT. JOVL 'T. ASHWORTH, Quar- | one rst American units te ( has to be saluted. monly supposed to be having a hell- S termaster Corps, visited’ a news- ets n Fran¢ Non-Com.—One who does not| UV4 anne time Sailing around and sein . caught Bud under @ rock in > marrying pretty Irish and paper office the other night tO) roxas two years ago,” the Sergeant|have to be saluted, but who bas tol pi. i, every port, and to a pens ave something ated o “Bud,” , is 4 e i mething print M an ut ial tinued I treated him. kindly,| 5 obeyed on the hop better grub than is obtainable im any who r ntly returner rem vance | and that's why he 1 se me Here Private—The only man in the army | army meas. with him. When taken from a heavy |e allowed Rud to crawl Inside hie | Ne istnieoA pall tebourd box Bud" uncolled his scaly | #hirt bosom, where he remained dur-| who enjoys any real liberty a college graduate turned Hl body leisurely, shook hia twelve | ing the remainder of his visit | Cook—The one man (with the ex- | trapeze performer from choice; in and ton and darted out his} "F feed him every ten days. Hel ception of the meas sergeant) who, Other words, a nut ked tongue in na attract and a spoonful of con=| oan spill the beans. Red ¢ Man--A bird who'é like mined entio: jens all beaten up together.| yeaa Sergeant—See Cook » In the army, but who can't ges Pershing went after Villa, | peroxide and give him a bath in lukes hen aaiiod Ima ca OIL 4. Gtauas Wontar pees yo has been with me in France from | worm water | Miteher Fy i apie » Raabe et es ee aD : An anus in. ist July up to two weeks ago,” ex-| The Sergeant says he was sent|to find out what yo disguise—Rey rom “Stars and plained the Sergeant, who says he en-| back because was injured by the] serve getting it. Stripes,” published by American Ege liesed ip the army ip 1900 apd waa ip ‘caplemion of @ whell im & CalMeem Salor-4 persom wearing @ non- peditionary Force in France, \’ 4 Pa I~ ’ {