“The Jolly Old Red Cross”
“The way the army doctors talked to him made the young man wish ardently that instead of being a poor little anemic lad, who could do nothing but swim seven miles and sail schooners through typhoons and knock over tigers, he were one of those brawny athletes who had trained indoors on stenography, dress-goods salesmanship, and cigarettes and therefore were being uproariously welcomed into a selective service army by local draft boards.
“‘But,’ cried young Mr. Bobo in effect, ‘I’m telling the world fair that I want to go to France. And I want what I want when I want it. Now what other speedy way is there of getting to France besides the—Holy mackerel! I’ve got it! The jolly old Red Cross.’”
Bobo wondered, when he was going across, if the Red Cross would ever allow him to sneak close enough to the front “to get gassed or shot or something.”
When Bobo landed in France with the First Division he was assigned to the very humble task of serving soldiers with cocoa and sandwiches. He took up the task seriously, and did his work well, but then he got tired. Finally he got enough courage to suggest a plan to General O’Ryan.
The army doctors were constantly sending men back from the front line because of some physical defects. Steve Bobo wanted the General to give him permission to establish a “Divisional Rest Camp” and fill it with those “darn fine fellows” whom the surgeons were throwing out. “Most of those men,” he said, “are volunteers, and all of them are the best sort of fighters. Instead, then, of sending them back to the rear for reclassification, turn them over to me, sir, we’ll show you something.”
“That was done. Day by day into the Bobo ‘Divisional Rest Camp’ came the men, sad beyond measure because the surgeons had found something in their anatomical architecture which was slightly out of kilter. Daily Captain Bobo put his unpromising material through a series of setting-up exercises. Thus it was that in next to no time he had surrounded himself with a Red Cross unit of husky youngsters who, as Lieut. Colonel J. Leslie Kincaid, Judge-Advocate of the Division, since has phrased it, ‘preferred to live in that part of hell which has no fire escapes.’ By the time Captain Bobo had completed his organization he had forty-seven men in his Red Cross unit, with every man-jack in the outfit carrying papers to prove that the only reason he was not carrying a rifle was that an army surgeon had got the fool notion the man was not physically able to stand the gaff.
“Cried Captain Bobo, when all had been made ship-shape, ‘We’re set, men: Let’s up and at ‘em.’ And forward went the fightingest band of Red Cross ‘invalids’ that ever slapped a German dead and then piled him into an ambulance to try to save his life. Up with the front line fighting men, the little Red Cross band found themselves in no time, and, on occasions, hundreds of yards in advance of the front line trenches, out in a sunlit No Man’s Land.”