Knew How to Get ’Em
Lieutenant-Colonel Kincaid remembers a little something about Bobo and “his Rough-necks” on a particular occasion.
“I merely want to say,” he remarked, “that in the middle of the Hindenburg show Captain Bobo said ‘Presto!’ and ten ambulances appeared from nowhere at a moment when, believe me, ambulances were needed.
“Colonel Montgomery, weeping for ambulances, thought of Captain Bobo. He gave the Red Cross man the high sign, and Captain Bobo just brushed aside a lot of flying metal and stepped close enough to Colonel Montgomery to ask the Colonel what was on his system. ‘Ambulances,’ shouted the Colonel, ‘but I don’t know where to get ‘em.’ ‘I do,’ answered Captain Bobo. ‘If you’ll give me a fast car I’ll flush a whole covey of ambulances, sir.’
“Colonel Montgomery commandeered General O’Ryan’s racing car and Captain Bobo climbed in. The Captain stepped on the accelerator and exploded toward Paris, a trip of 158 miles. And toward the middle of the next afternoon back came Bobo hellbent with ten ambulances in his wake. We were too busy then to ask him where he had got them, but when things had quieted down for a moment some days later we made inquiries. And we got this Bobo person’s number. Let me tell you in confidence—don’t repeat this to a soul, remember—this Bobo is an ambulance stealer. He and his gang were out and out Red Cross crooks. He had crashed into Paris, grabbed up every ambulance standing along a curb, bamboozled the drivers into believing that they were to take his orders, and had crashed out of Paris again at the head of his string of sputtering booty; and made straight for the front again at a time when I don’t know what we would have done if it hadn’t been for Captain Bobo and his ambulances.”
O’Malley takes up the story again: “Bobo and his associates had had no sleep for almost thirty-six hours.
“They were dirty, unshaven, haggard; nevertheless, they spent that night and all the next day picking up the white-faced, shattered boys who lay among the shell holes groaning with the thirst horrors which only those who have lost pints of blood know. Back to the ‘battalion aid post’ the lads were brought by Captain Bobo and his buddies, or variously to ‘first stations,’ which sometimes were within 200 yards of the front line trenches—to dressing stations, or to the main dressing station back at ‘railhead.’ And there the sufferers received attentions, which sometimes meant a merciful anesthetic and sometimes the grimy but gentle fingers of Captain Bobo on cold, white eyelids as he closed the staring eyes forever.”
Bobo and his daredevils became an institution with their division. Where danger lay, so long as there were wounded there, Bobo’s squad gloried.
“One day, the Captain and his Red Cross crew learned that if they wanted to get their ambulances out to where the wounded lay they would have to circle the toe of a wooded knoll over an open road on which rained machine gun bullets every time anything alive showed itself to the Huns concealed in the woods on the hill. But they wanted to get to the wounded.
“They started their engines and ‘stepped on ‘em’ so hard that the little ambulances would bang out into the open and whiz around the marked turn joyously, while the phut-phut-phut-phut of the Hun machine guns whipped the atmosphere into ribbons and the splinters from the racing ambulances flew high in air. Then they had to come back around that open turn again, and they went out again and back, and out and back, their ambulances looking a bit worm-eaten when the day was over but the Captain and each of the other Red Cross drivers still ‘all in one piece.’”