Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 265, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 November 1918 — STORIES OF BRAVERY DISPLAYED BY OUR FIGHTING IRISH-AMERICANS [ARTICLE]

STORIES OF BRAVERY DISPLAYED BY OUR FIGHTING IRISH-AMERICANS

Boys of Ninth Massachusetts and Fighting Sixty-ninth of New York Die Fighting With Smiles on Their Ups, but Huns “Pay”— Yank, Taken Prisoner by Three Huns, Drops Grenade and Kills Captors and Self.

Paris.—“ Will the Irish fight? 7 ’ The same old answer may be made. They will. It can be made on the records of two famous Irish-Amerlcun regiments in France. It is a record that makes men of Irish blood hold their heads high; It is a record that betters the brightest page of America's most glorious military annals. These two regiments (one used to be the old Ninth Massachusetts and the -other the Fighting Sixty-ninth of New York) were in every bad scrap the American army has been in. The tales of their prowess are just now’ filtering back to Paris. They may be told because the censor at headquarters has now ruled that regiments ippy be named for , their part in such fighting as preceded that on the River Vcblc The Ninth and the Sixty-ninth were In almost all of it. The story does not come from official reports. It comes from the lips of two men, one a doctor in the Ninth and the other a chaplain in the Sixty-ninth, who saw what they relate. These two have seen many soldiers die. They know what ibravery and courage and cheerfulness are. Lieut Simon Kelleher of the Ninth

behind. Suddenly one of our shells lit within a few yards of the party. The three Germans ducked. at first our boy had. But/no, he hat! reached into his hip pocket. He dropped a hand gfenade directly at his own feet and those of his captors —and the throe Germans were killed. “I got there quickly afterward to where he lay. He smiled up at me. Yes. he smiled, though his. arm and half his side had been blown off. ' “ *God t boy.’ I said, horrified, ‘why did you do that?* “ ‘Saw me get ’em, did you, Doc?’ he answered. “‘Yes, but—’ l didn’t know what to say as-I tried to dress that frightful wound. Gave Life to Get Three. “‘Well, doctor,’ he said gravely. Td been to commufiion this morning and I guess T was ready to die. But I wnsn’t ready to go to Germany. They searched me for grenades when they got me, the three of them, aud they took those out of my bag and out of my side pocket. But I always carry one tucked into my pants when I go out here, just in case of —well, anything like this. And when those three Germans ducked it came through my mind a lot quicker than I can tell It that three dead Germans and one dead American was a lot more on our side of the score than three live Germans and an American as good as dead in Berlin. f So I let her go.’ “He tried to raise his head and look around. “ 'Never mind, boy, you got them all,’ I assured him. t “ ‘Any—any chance for me, doc ?’ he said. “I didn’t answer and he knew. His remaining hand crept. beneath his blood-soaked tunic, gripped something tight and stayed there. After a moment he spoke again. “‘Doc,’ he said, ‘you know all the boys around our square. I wish they could know I was game. “‘And, doc,’ his voice was weaker, ‘will you—will you tell my mother I had —I had this when —I went.’ “Slowly his hand came out; slowly it opened; that boy’s hand strangely old and worn with the bloodstains and grime. Slowly it opened and there in the blackened palm glistened a tiny, bright silver Crucifix. He was dead.”

•was In Paris the other day. He tells (the story of his boys. And most of the time he Is either laughing, or tears Involuntarily creep out the corners of his eyes and drop unashamed down his browned cheeks. Lieutenant Kelleher’s stories show that the Irish boys of his regiment, the boys of Boston, South Boston, Roxbury, Cambridge and Charlestown, fought with the cool courage that held the fire on Bunker Hill until those Americans of an earlier day “saw the whites of their eyes.” They show that these boys—and-most of them were mere beys-'died face to the front, a grim smile on their lips, fighting, doing their soldiers' duty to the last breath of ebbing life. Each heartbeat of the all-too-few left throbbed but to one purpose—to fight. No man of the Ninth died, says Lieutenant Kelleher, without taking toll and more of enemy lives with him. One for Each Shot. “Just now the names of these heroes may not be mentioned. But “Kelly and Burke and Shea” are there, all of them, and many more. Lieutenant Kelleher says nothing of his own gallantry. But his stories show that he. too, served. He was not called on for the supreme sacrifice. But he offered his life a thousand times on first aid dressing expeditions to the farthest outposts and beyond. *Td been told there was a wounded man in an advanced traverse,” he says. “I crawled slowly up to get him. I heard . his labored breathing in tne lulls of the gunfire. And then I rounded the corner of the trench. There he sat, propped against the wall. His breath came in tearing gasps and with' each one the blood gushed from hiss chest; for he had been shot through the lungs. He was a boy I had known all my life. “‘They got you bad. Pack,’ I sail* as I tried to help him. “They sure did, Sime,’ he replied. •But looka there.’ “I followed the wave of the empty pistol he still held in his hand, and there stretched across the opposite parapet were six dead Germans, one for every shot in his gun. They had got him only when the gun had emptied. I stopped the bleeding as best I could and we got him back to an ambulance. But he died four hpurs later. I guess his life was well paid for. Tt wav this same sharp raid of the Germans that produced one of the coolest bi*£ of desperate courage I ever saw. One of our boys had been captured by three Germans and he was being led off as they retreated, one on either side of him and one

Won’t Stop Fighting. It’s Chaplain Hanley who tells the story of the Sixty-ninth. They refer to the chaplain as holding the clerical record for mileage in No Man’s land. They can’t keep him off patrols. Chaplain Hanley knows the story of most of the casualties of the Sixty-ninth. He substantiates the statement that not a man has been killed or wounded by a German bayonet, notwithstanding the regiment has encountered in pitched and open battle three of the five divisions of the Prussian Guard at one time and another of its career. Needless to say, the Prussiau Guard division can make no such boast. Father Hanley says the hardest time they have with casualties in the Sixty-ninth is to make them stop fighting when they’re hit. He is himself just recovering from a wounded leg. > “The officers are as bad as the men,” he declares. ‘The day I got this wound I was working up with Captain Hurley’s company. They’d been driven back a little by a vicious German barrage and they were on a little ridge. They’d got orders to hold it, and they did, for four days/ When they left it they went ahead. “Weir, I was up there this day and I heard of a wounded man ahead and a little to one side, just over the edge of the hill toward the German lines. I told the captain I’d better go to him find he wanted to detail a couple of men to help me. I declined and started off by myself, crawling on my stomach underneath a stream of machine-

gun bullets that would ■ have clipped me had I raised on my elbow. “I’d gone perhaps 50 yards when I heard a rustle in the grass behind me, and there were two of Hurlew’s boys. They said the captain had sept them to carry me back if anything happened. Now listen to the rest of it. I sent them chasing back to their company and crawled ahead. Just as I got to this ridge the bullet got me. My wounded man was across an open space and I knew’ I couldn’t get to him. I was afraid if I waited till dark I’d bleed to death, so I put a tourniquet ou my leg and started back.

Forgot About Wound. “Now all of this Is just preliminary. They got me back to a hospital a day later and I’d hardly got settled in my cot when who should they put down in the cot next to me but Captain Hurley himself. He was badly smashed up in the leg, too. The leg had been dressed at the dressing station and when they got him settled they started to take off his clothes. As they pulled at his shirt he let out a howl. “The shirt was stuck to his chest with blood* He had a wound there that the doctors at the dressing station had never discovered. “ ‘Why, captain,’ said the doctor, looking puzzled at the casualty tag. it doesn’t say anything about the chest. When did you get this one?’ “‘What day is this?’ asked the, cap tain. “ ‘Wednesday,’ said a nurse. “ ‘Now, let’s see,’ said the captain. ‘Chaplain, you were up there yesterday. I must have got this on Monday.’ “All the time he’d been sending men out to take care of me he’d had that hole in his own chest and the shirt frozen over his big heart With his own blood.

“ ‘You’re a captain,’ I said % to him. ‘You’re always cautioning the boys to report wounds and get them cared for. You. stayed up there two days and you never even told me about it.’ “ ‘Honest, chaplain.’ he replied, ‘I forgot all about it. You know we had orders to hang onto that dinky hill. And we were awful busy.’ ”