Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 11, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 January 1918 — Momence Celebrating Return of Favorite Son Friday [ARTICLE]

Momence Celebrating Return of Favorite Son Friday

Lieutenant Patrick O’Brien, member of the British flying corps, arrived in Chicago Monday, showing little effects from his experience. Lieutenant O’Brien, who declared his dislike for vegetable?, but whose food during the seventy-two days he spent in journeying from Germany into Holland consisted of beets a la Hun and cabbage ala more Hun, lost fifty pounds in weight during his experience, including the weight of his long beard, which grew undisturbed because he had no means of'shaving. A delegation appointed by Mayor Tiffany, of Momence, among them which was his brother, John O’Brien and James J. Kirby, president of the First National bank, received' the aviator at the LaSalle street station and took him to the, Blackstone hotel after he had timidly faced a battery of cameras.

All Momence will turn out to greet Lieutenant O’Brien when he arrives there today. Mr. Kirby declared the town’s citizens had decorated “everything except their noses.” O’Brien received his first flying experience at West Pullman. He enlisted in the British flying corps last spring. , On August 17, while he was flying over Flanders with seven British airplanes, his division was attacked by twenty German planes. While O’Brien was 8000 feet above the ground he was shot. He remembers nothing until he awoke in a German emergency hospital, where a surgeon extracted a bullet, which had entered his upper lip from his throat. His head was bruised and he was shaken up, but otherwise was not seriously injured. “I was treated fairly well at the hospital,” he declared. “The surgeon said I was probably a good sportsman, but he considered me a murederer for coming over there from America. He told me I was cut from the- machine, and when they first found me they believed I was dead.”

When he was sufficiently recovered the Lieutenant was taken to the intelligence department, where he was questioned by officers who spoke excellent English. The aviator declared he couldn’t even swear in German. “Officers told me they did not believe many Americans werg coming over,” he said. “I told them they would know how many were there before the war was over.” He was next transferred to a prison camp, where he was served with black bread, “hard enough to kill a horse,” sugar beet jam, vegetable stew, coffee, a substitute tea and “some kin'd of pickled meat” and a little butter.

“The talk among the prisoners was chiefly of food and means of escape, and we had little of either,”- he said.

O’Brien was being taken to the interior of Germany when he made his escape. He said he coughed and complained it was stuffy until* he was permitted to open the window, the only railrbad window he had ever seen that could be opened. He stood up, pretending he was about to reach into a baggage rack, and jumped through the window. He” was stunned by the fall. The train stopped within threequarters of a mile from where he had made his escape. He hurried away and traveled at night 250 miles into Holland, using seventy-two days on the trip. “I slept a delirious sleep during the daytime,” he said. “I hid in oushes. I was close to detection many times in Belgium.” When he reached the Dutch border he dug his way beneath a charged electric fence in plose proximity to a German guard, after he had received a shock in attempting to climb over the fence with an improvised ladder. “In Holland the whole town turned out to see me,” O’Brien said. “I had discarded my uniform. By degrees I acquired clothes which made me look like a tough Belgian.” In Holland he. was taken care of by the British consul and sent to London, where later he was received by King George. He declared he did not know what his immediate plans were. He is now engaged in writing a book on his experiences.