Pretty Good Men Too
O’Malley tells the story of two of the Captain’s drivers—Privates Freddy Schroeder and Leo Smith, both from New York City—who were engaged in their customary hilarious sport when word came to the little Red Cross band that a medical detachment was out beyond the hindside of No Man’s Land and that it had been marooned there for thirty hours without food or water. “Zipp went Red Cross rowdies Freddy and Leo in their tawney ambulances decorated with the big Red Cross—fairest of targets for a German gentleman. And this time when the drivers, their ambulances loaded with grub and water, came to an open stretch of road they got not only machine gun bullet storms but Hunnish high explosives. And as they were sailing along through the metal storm on a straight stretch of open highway, a German shell exploded just ahead of them, so close that they barely had time to come to a stop on the edge of the crater. They were about to reverse and back off to where they had come from when another shell bit the road just behind them and made another crater.
“There were Freddy Schroeder and Leo Smith on an ‘island platform’ of the road, with seemingly nothing left to do but to abandon their ambulances and crawl to safety the best they could. They didn’t do anything of the kind. Right out in the open they tugged at every sizable chunk of débris in sight and built a sort of bridge across the forward shell hole and went onward and brought welcome food and water to the marooned detachment. And in their own good time they came back over their ‘bridge’ again, jumped out and built another ‘bridge’ of the same kind over the second shell hole, and about dusk, sailed victoriously to their Red Cross quarters unharmed.
“Finally there was another day that must be told of. It was the day at St. Souplet when two of the stricken residents of the little town crawled back to our lines and told the Mayor of Busigny (which had just been captured from the Huns) that many civilians, dozens of whom were wounded, were hiding in the cellars of St. Souplet. None of them dared show himself. The German patrols were still poking about the town and their machine guns were sweeping the village streets. Shells were dropping and death threatened the hidden ones in the cellars in other ways, especially in the form of gassing, the poisonous gas naturally tending to work downward to the cellars and other subterranean passages where the men, women, and children of St. Souplet lay hidden.