The fighting mascot, the true story of a boy soldier

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FIGHTING MASCOT

TOMMTK

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Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I Squeezing in Through the Band ... 1

II Into the Big Noise 9

Chapter I Squeezing In Through The Band

I'M glad I never could learn to play a bugle. If ever I had caught the trick of it I should be blowing it yet, with never a look-in at the fighting.

^^If we was fightin' the Germans with chunes,'' the Bandmaster told me, ^^we'd have ye in the front trenches, me lad, and there 'd be a Hun drop dead every time ye gave a toot. ' '

I got to the front trenches all right, but not with a bugle. I carried a gun. I was three years too young for the firing line — just turned sixteen at my first battlei — but the Colonel couldn^t stand my bugling any longer.

I was a Liverpool lad before I went to war. There's good seafaring blood in my veins, and I might have gone to sea myself. But my mother would say:

'* Stick to the dry land, Tom. Your father 1 was a sailor man, and now he's gone to the bottom, and his ship with him. Stick to the dryland, my lad. There's too many dangers at sea."

So I've stuck to it. But I've been through more dangers on land and been closer to death a hundred times than ever I should have been on the water. There's a bullet hole in my thigh and the scar from the butt of a German's gun on my head, and I should never have got them if I had followed the sea, the days of pirates being over.

My mother and my step-father live at 15 Amelia Street, and the windows of our home look out over the big pier's head on the Eiver Mersey, where the liners come in. There's a little room up under the roof in that house where many's the night I've sat propped up in bed reading *^ Treasure Island" by candle light. I'll not soon forget the awful shock it gave me when my mother would glide in and take the candle away just when the pirates were doing their worst.

I read that grand old book so many times that I shouldn't wonder if I could recite it backward if I tried. The more I read it the more

SQUEEZING 3

I longed to sail away with a ship and see the world. But, remembering what my mother had said, I made up my mind that I should have to look for my adventures on land if there were any for me to find at all. If only I had lived in the days of Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver there would have been plenty of them, but I was afraid I had been born about one hundred and fifty years too late for such things.

That^s what I was thinking just before the big war broke loose, which brought more adventures than Jim Hawkins ever dreamed of. But how could I know the war was coming!

I meant to get into that war, even though I was too young. It was too good to miss, and there might not be another in a life-time. I had blown a bugle a few times — just about enough to make a noise through it — and I thought that if they weren't very particular about how the music sounded I might get into the band of the Fifth King's Liverpool Eegiment, where Billy Clegg, who lived almost next door to us, was a rifleman. That would be a step to getting into the fighting ranks.

I managed it without much trouble, and went with the battalion to Camp Oswestry, the training camp near Cardiff. Nobody asked me whether I was much of a bugler and there was no reason why I should tell them. They would find out soon enough. And they did. The Colonel said I was the worst bugler in the service of the King, and what the Bandmaster said was even worse.

By that time some of the riflemen wanted me as a mascot to bring them luck, and they did their best to help me get into the ranks. I weighed only ninety-six pounds and my height was only four feet ten, so it was hard to convince the Colonel that I was big enough, but the more he heard my bugling the more he seemed to like the idea of my carrying a gun. And at last he made a rifleman of me. I had to throw in three years to my age for good measure. I hope I may be forgiven for that one, for my mother brought me up to tell the truth. Anyway, it was in a good cause.

In May, 1917, a batch of men was being made up for France, and our battalion was chosen. I took the train for Liverpool to say good-bye to my mother and my step-father and my friends.

It was hard at home to say good-bye, for my

SQUEEZING 5

mother cried over me and said she couldn't see why I wanted to go and fight at my age and come home with bullet holes through me and that it had been better had I gone to sea. But she screwed up her courage when it came time for me to go, and when I left the house she came running after me, threw her arms around me and tried to keep back the tears. As I marched down the street she stood in the door and cried after me words that came into my mind many a time after that:

*^Be brave, have faith in God — and come back home!''

That night we crossed England on the train, and the following morning rolled into Folkestone on the Channel. It was May 16, 1917 — my sixteenth birthday. That day we sailed for France.

At the end of the first day's march toward the front there came a drizzling rain. A few hundred yards back from the road an old barn stood on the side of a hill, and it seemed to me it was just the kind of lodging I wanted. I found the door closed, and when I tried to open it a chorus of voices cried out:

^^No room! No room! Get out!"

The Tommies were wedged in so close they were almost sleeping on top of one another.

I prowled around to the rear, where I found a dog house built against the wall. I took off my pack, got down on hands and knees and began to creep in. Suddenly a man ^s foot was planted on top of my head and shoved me back.

*'Well, blind me eyes!'' somebody croaked inside. ^^I thought it was the dog come back. Welcome to me 'umble 'ome, ye little swab. Come in."

It was so dark inside that I couldn't see him at first, but as he seemed to be lying full length and as the dog house wasn't much more than five feet long I knew he couldn't be very big, especially as there was plenty of room for me alongside him.

*^ Seems just like 'ome, matey," he said. ^^Many's the night in my young days in the old country I've slept in a dog 'ouse."

I thought, ^ ^ This chap must have been a tramp before he joined the army." I asked him if the dogs never objected.

^^I never knew 'em not to," he answered. ^^But I'm death on dogs, matey. A bloke in my trade can't spend much time arguin' with

SQUEEZING 7

'em. He's got to know 'ow to settle 'em."

** What's your trade!" I asked.

*^Well, matey, a sort of a night worker's job was mine. Detective Martin, from Scotland Yard, who's now in A Company, could tell you a thing or two about wot I did. Knows all about me. Been keepin' an eye on me hever since we left England. Did you never 'ear of Bonesey? Well, that's me."

Yes, I had heard of him, and I began to wish I hadn't crept into that dog house. The men in A Company had been talking about Bonesey only that day. They said he had been one of the cleverest housebreakers in England.

My eyes were getting used to the dark and I took a look at him. His name certainly suited him, for he didn't seem to be much but skin and bones, though he looked healthy enough and as if he might be as strong as iron, as some bony men are. He was a middle-aged chap, whose hair was turning gray. He had sharp little eyes, a hard mouth, and an old scar lay across his nose. I thought that with a dark lantern in one hand and a pistol in the other he must have been a desperate looking lad when doing his housebreaking.

8 THE FIGHTING MASCOT iii

That night I dreamed that Bonesey had crept into my room at home and was holding a gun at my head.

Next day we were together on the march, and from that day on through six months of fighting we were pals.

Chapter II Into The Big Noise

THE next day we passed through little villages where houses and churches had been torn with shells. Sometimes there would be nothing left of a village but ruins, with not a living thing in sight except now and then a lonely cat or dog.

The noise of the guns was growing louder and louder. Boom! boom! boom! Even the ground seemed to shake. By afternoon we heard for the first time the rattle of machine guns. Typewriters was the name we learned for them after we got to the trenches, and they sound just enough like them to make a chap think of some girl pounding the keys in an office back home.

Back home ! Oh, home and mother ! "Was I ever going to see them again!

We knew when we heard the clickety-click of those typewriters that we were getting very near. I began to feel afraid. I couldn't help

J it. I felt myself shaking; I could hardly hold my rifle. Billy Matchett, who was marching next to me, laughed. He had nerves of iron, that lad. The noise of the guns made him more and more cheerful the louder it grew. But there were other men — big chaps, too — who were shaking more than I was. They were as white as sheets, and one of them fainted and dropped in the road. He was a poor lad the Tommies had been calling ''Windy Dick'' because he had been frightened ever since we left England. Windy is a word in the trenches to describe a chap who is nervous and jumpy under fire.

But Windy Dick was a good enough sort at heart. He just couldn't help being afraid. While we were crossing the Channel he thought of nothing but submarines, and he had begun to shake the very first day we heard the guns. He had been shaking ever since. When I saw him drop I felt sorry for him and thought of what he had said to me one day on the march :

''Tommy" — and his voice was shaking even then — ' ' I hope I get shot before I 'm caught running away or doing anything like that. It isn't that I'm not willing to die if I have to. It's the

INTO THE BIG NOISE 11

fear of disgracing myself that worries me. I just can't help being afraid. It's my nerves."

We left the poor chap for the water carts to pick up. He was going to have all the chance in the world to show himself a man later on.

It was queer, but the sight of Windy and those other frightened lads braced me up, and the shaky feeling left me after a time.

Once we got a glimpse of Ypres, far off — a ghostly lot of ruins; broken steeples, roofless houses, tumbling walls. Beyond it was a stretch of open ground without a tree or even a blade of grass, for the shells had ploughed up every inch of earth and pitted it with holes. Way off were low hills, half covered with patches of woods.

I thought they were going to send us right into the fighting at the end of that day, but they didn't. Instead we slept beside the road, while our ears buzzed with a noise like the pounding of a thousand boiler makers on sheet iron. Yet with all that clatter most of the Jrag^ went sound asleep as soon as they were curled in their blankets, and didn't wake till morning.

But Billy Clegg, Billy Matchett, old Bonesey and I cuddled up together and talked things over. Three of us were pals already and naturally got together whenever we had a chance and needed a little consolation, but Bonesey, who hadn't been in the same company with us till we got to Boulogne, was a brand-new chum. He seemed to take a liking to us, and he was about as hard to lose as a cootie after that.

Before long the two Billies fell asleep, but Bonesey was a night owl and it was a long time before he stopped talking and dropped off. As for me, I was on the edge of the biggest adventure a boy could ever hope to find, and I lay thinking about it half the night, listening to the guns and watching the rockets and the shells against the black sky.

In the morning the first thing I heard was the voice of Billy Clegg saying:

^ ^ I got some straw down my neck. I can 't get it ouf

Then I discovered that I had a prickly feeling myself and began to dig for it. All around me the lads were doing the same thing.

*^ Straw!'' said the Sergeant. ^^Why, that ain't straw you blighters have got. It's cooties."

And he was right. We all had them — the lit-

INTO THE BIG NOISE 13

tie crawlers that get into every soldier's clothes as soon as he gets to the front and stick to him like a loving brother till he gets back to Blighty. I wonder if Jim Hawkins had those things. I hadn't counted on them when I went adventure hunting.

Before the sun set that day I had gone into the greatest bit of adventure a boy could ever hope to find, for that afternoon we filed into the trenches.

Frightened? Oh, I'll admit it. So was Billy Clegg. I'm not so sure about Bonesey. He kept his mouth shut and looked as serious as an undertaker, and there was no telling how he felt. Billy Matchett was the only one of us who didn't change a bit, no matter how close the shells came. He went in humming a tune.

We relieved the Black Watch, who had been there for weeks and who didn 't like the place a bit. They said it was one of the worst positions on the front — the dirtiest trenches, the biggest rats, the liveliest cooties and the hardest fighting.

'^I feel a bit sorry for you poor blokes," said the big Black Watch trench guide who took us in. *^ After you've been in this blooming hellhole as long as we have you'll be glad enough to get out. Keep your heads down, you popeyed blighters, if you don 't want Fritzie to drill holes through you. ' '

Those Black Watch lads made me open my eyes, I can tell you. Grimy they were as if they had been wallowing in mud for a year, and some had scars from knives or bayonets or bullets across their faces. Their regiment was famous already, for it had been through some of the hottest fighting of the war. Veterans, every one of them, these lads, who had seen more terrible things than I had ever dreamed of, who had killed Germans by the hundreds, who had had more wonderful escapes from death than they could remember. And here I was in their trenches chumming with them — with the heroes I had heard of so often — and one of a regiment come to take their places. It was a strange world, sure enough. Anything might come true after that.

Bonesey nudged me as we filed along.

*'Say, Mascot,'' he whispered; ^^I've seen 'ard-lookin' blokes in my time but never the like of these. Wy, that big lad that's leadin' us 'asn't 'ad a bath in ten years, and, blimey, if I

INTO THE BIG NOISE 15

don't believe 'e was a murderer before 'e joined the army from the looks of 'im. How'd you like to meet a chap like that alone in a dark alley, nowT'

Bonesey was a hard-looking blighter himself, but he looked as sweet as an angel beside those Black Watchers.

I hadn't been in the trenches half an hour before I forgot my fear. It seemed to be a fairly safe place, after all. Shells were flying overhead, and now and then a bullet plunked into the parapet, but hidden down there I didn 't see any pressing need for worry.

That's what I was thinking, when suddenly a fine young lad jumped to the firing step to get a look at the Germans. He lifted head and shoulders above the top, and looked over. Just below him I stood staring up at him, wondering at his recklessness. I saw him wave his cap, like the poor, innocent rookie he was, and I heard a sergeant roar at him to come down. He did come down, that very instant, falling backward almost on top of me, with a bullet hole in his head.

The sight turned me half sick with fear and horror. He was the first man I have ever seen killed, and though I Ve seen hundreds dead and dying since that time I shall never forget the way he came tumbling down in a heap at my feet, without a cry or a groan. You never forget the first dead man ; afterward there are too many to remember.

The Black Watch went away to a well-earned rest before long and their trenches became ours. But the lad who had led us in hung on for a. time to tell us a few more pleasant things about what we might expect. The more he told us the sadder we grew, and the sadder he saw us growing the worse became his story of what we had come to.

CHAPTER III IN DEAD men's ALLEY

MAKE your wills and say your prayers/' said the big Black Watcher, ' ' for if any of you lads get out of this hole alive you'll be lucky, I can. tell you that. Dead Men's Alley we've named it, for of all the blooming unlucky spots on the line this bit of trench is the worst. ' '

Maybe we weren't a nervous lot when we heard that! Ow! I felt cold and shaky all over.

Something happened a few minutes later that didn't make me feel any better, I can tell you.

There came a sound like a railroad train going through a tunnel with the engine whistle going. Then came a crash that seemed to shake the whole trench, and not a hundred feet from where I stood a black column of smoke shot up to the sky. A shell had struck against our sand-bags.

When the smoke cleared away I saw a man's body hanging over our wires and another lying across tlie parapet. Soon the news ran along the line that three others had been struck by pieces of the shell and badly wounded.

A thing that seemed strange to us, who were new to the queer ways of shells, was that a lad who had been standing only two yards from the explosion was not hurt nor even knocked off his feet, though a man close beside him had been blown out of the trench and was one of those I had seen lying dead.

For the first few hours after the Black Watch chap and his regiment of grimy old veterans left us it didn't take much to make us think the Germans were coming. Sometimes one of us would believe he smelled gas and we would grab for our masks. If the German typewriters rattled a little louder than usual our officers would imagine they were getting ready for a raid and would call every man of us to the firing step. The first time I got there I found I couldn't reach to the top, so I got a sand bag and stood on it. That made me just high enough to see over and shoot.

But the first Hun we saw came from another direction than we expected. With a loud buzzing noise he dropped down on us in his airplane

IN DEAD MEN^S ALLEY 19

right out of the sky and swooped along our trench not a hundred feet above our heads, peppering us with lead as he went. One man was killed not ten feet from where I stood and several more dropped not very far away.

I had often wondered what it was going to be like to be under fire and had never once thought that I shouldn't have the nerve to face it. But when I saw that lad fall dead almost at my side while the shadow of that big, buzzing monster was creeping along the trench the old shaky feeling got hold of me again and I was as weak as a baby. I crouched in the bottom of the trench and covered my eyes to shut out the sight of the horrible thing overhead, and I thought of No. 15 Amelia Street and of what a safe, cosy, comfortable home it was. Oh, that little room of mine at home, and ^^ Treasure Island *' by candle light!

It was all over in a moment. The buzzing noise died away and the stretcher bearers were coming through the trench after the dead and wounded.

I got to my feet and looked about to make sure nobody had noticed me. The men I saw were too busy watching the sky to pay any attention to what might be going on in the trench. I looked up. There, far above ns, the Hun was being attacked by one of our own flyers.

They circled round and round each other, firing all the time, and then Fritzie broke away and flew off as fast as he could go, our man giving him a hot chase.

A big, black thunder cloud was rolling up from the East and Fritzie made for it. In a moment they had both disappeared inside of it. While we watched for them we could hear the thunder bellow and see flashes of lightning. They had gone right into the heart of the storm.

Then came a streak of lightning that blinded us, and in the same instant out of the spot from which the flash had come an airplane, disabled and helpless, dropped as straight as a rock over the German lines.

Whether it was our man or Fritzie we had no way of knowing, but a moment later the other plane came swooping out of the storm and circled easily down behind our trenches. Then we knew it was Fritzie who had lost the fight and you should have heard the cheers that our men sent up. Even the Germans heard them way

IN DEAD MEN'S ALLEY 21

off in their lines, and answered them with a terrific rattling of their typewriters.

One of our sentries was killed a few minutes later. I had a good look at him as they carried him past us on a stretcher. He was a man I had known at Oswestry, and he had been joking with me only that morning. I had seen more than one man die that day, but the sight of that lad that I had known so well made death seem more dreadful than ever before. I had heard him speak of his mother and sisters he had left at home, and I felt like crying when I thought of them.

That night we crept into our dug-outs to sleep. Next to me lay Billy Matchett.

*^Well, Mascot,'' said Billy, **here we are in it at last ; right into all that we 've been dreaming about. Seems queer, don't it? Begin to wish you were back home, don't you now?"

* ^ Not yet, Billy, ' ' I answered. * ^ I want to see the whole thing through. Then home will seem like a good place to get back to for a while."

I meant every word of it, for the big adventure was only just beginning then, but if anybody had asked me the same question a month or two later, after we had been shot at and shelled and bombed and gassed and had slept in mud and rain along the Flanders roads I think I should have given a different answer.

Chapter IV The Colonel Gets A Waening

THE Black Watcher liad told us those were the worst dug-outs he had ever been in. I don't believe he exaggerated. They couldn't have been worse. They were so small that only four men could creep into one and they were dirty and smelly. If the four men happened to be big chaps they had to sleep almost on top of one another, but I was so small that there were really only three and a half in ours and, one of them being Billy Matchett, who was long and narrow, we had room to spare.

' ' Sleep tight, Mascot, ' ' said Billy. ' ' No telling how soon they'll call us out of this."

But how can a fellow sleep tight when a rat runs over his face every ^yq minutes! I had no more than dropped off when the first one came. The feet of a rat are the most horrible, cold, clammy things in the world and when they pattered right across my face I came wide awake with a jump and a yell.

Up jumps Billy the same moment.

* * Ow ! I say, Mascot ! I can 't stand tliis, yon know. That thing was kissing me, that's what he was.'^

* ^ Oh, let him kiss yon ; what 's the difference 1 ' ' somebody growls in the dark.

All four of us grumble and squirm a while; then we drop off.

*^0w!'' It's Billy's voice again. *'I say! That rat's come back."

^*Pull your coat over your face and shut up."

Billy and I took the hint, and slept till the Sergeant called us out.

That morning we heard that the Prussian Guard had taken the places of the Saxons in the trenches facing us and that we might expect trouble. Prussians always mean trouble. They're the best fighters in the Kaiser's army — the best, the meanest, the crudest.

The Fritzies' artillery and ^typewriters" were much busier after the Prussians arrived, and our lads on the firing step didn't take any chances in sticking their heads up any higher than they had to.

A lad gets used to the * typewriters " and the rifles, but oh, those big guns ! They sent all

THE COLONEL GETS A WARNING 25

kinds of stuff at us, but the whiz-bangs were the worst. We called them that because of the way they went — with a whiz and a bang. A whiz-bang does a plucky lot of damage when it strikes, and very often they struck much too near to be pleasant. It made me nervous watching them and wondering how much would be left of me if one should explode too close.

One of these things struck our cook house, smashed it to pieces and killed every cook on duty — five of them. Dinner was an hour late that day. After that whenever the food wasn 't up to the mark some lad would be sure to say, ^'I'm thinking it's about time we had some more cooks killed.''

Everybody had an idea that with all that firing the Prussians were getting ready to raid us and to show us what kind of lads they were. But there wasn't one of them to be seen all day — not even a helmet popping up. I know now why they didn't come; they had another kind of a game in mind.

We had all heard, of course, of the miners, the moles who spend all their time tunnelling deep under No Man's Land with shovels and picks hoping to plant a charge of dynamite under the enemy ^s trench. We had seen some of our own, who would disappear into dark holes and be gone for hours. A story spread along the line that the Germans^ miners were digging underneath us and that we might expect to be blown to the sky any minute. We didn't know whether to believe it or not, but it wasn't good for our nerves. As for me, I should rather have heard the whole German army was coming at us than to feel that we might be standing over a mine.

Along came Bonesey, looking glum as an owl.

^* What's the trouble, Bonesey, old boy?" I sung at him, trying to cheer him a bit. ^ ' You 're not worrying about that mine 1 ' '

**Mine be blowed! If one goes off under me I'll never know it, so wot should I care? It's this Scotland Yard lad that's on me nerves, little man. When I joined the army I thought I was goin' to be somewheres where the police wouldn't be botherin' of me, but that lad's got 'is eye on me hevery time I come within sight of 'im. Wot's he think I'm up to now — 'ousebreakin'?"