_42nd, Division, 167th Infantry, Headquarters Company_
On July 26th-August 1, 1918, near Croix Rouge Farm, he carried
messages between the firing lines and battalion headquarters, at the
same time picking up wounded men and carrying them out of the barrage
to the first-aid station. During the whole series of engagements he
did not sleep and his physical energy was taxed to the utmost.]
Captain Bobo was resting up in April, 1917, and contemplating his next
venture when Uncle Sam decided that this world had not been made
for Germany and advised the Kaiser of our intention to prove it. Bobo
hurried to the first recruiting station. And then the San Francisco
army doctors played their trick.
They turned him down.
“THE JOLLY OLD RED CROSS”
“The way the army doctors talked to him made the young man wish
ardently that instead of being a poor little anemic lad, who could do
nothing but swim seven miles and sail schooners through typhoons and
knock over tigers, he were one of those brawny athletes who had trained
indoors on stenography, dress-goods salesmanship, and cigarettes and
therefore were being uproariously welcomed into a selective service
army by local draft boards.
“‘But,’ cried young Mr. Bobo in effect, ‘I’m telling the world fair
that I want to go to France. And I want what I want when I want it. Now
what other speedy way is there of getting to France besides the—Holy
mackerel! I’ve got it! The jolly old Red Cross.’”
Bobo wondered, when he was going across, if the Red Cross would ever
allow him to sneak close enough to the front “to get gassed or shot or
something.”
When Bobo landed in France with the First Division he was assigned to
the very humble task of serving soldiers with cocoa and sandwiches.
He took up the task seriously, and did his work well, but then he got
tired. Finally he got enough courage to suggest a plan to General
O’Ryan.
The army doctors were constantly sending men back from the front line
because of some physical defects. Steve Bobo wanted the General to give
him permission to establish a “Divisional Rest Camp” and fill it with
those “darn fine fellows” whom the surgeons were throwing out. “Most
of those men,” he said, “are volunteers, and all of them are the best
sort of fighters. Instead, then, of sending them back to the rear for
reclassification, turn them over to me, sir, we’ll show you something.”
“That was done. Day by day into the Bobo ‘Divisional Rest Camp’ came
the men, sad beyond measure because the surgeons had found something
in their anatomical architecture which was slightly out of kilter.
Daily Captain Bobo put his unpromising material through a series of
setting-up exercises. Thus it was that in next to no time he had
surrounded himself with a Red Cross unit of husky youngsters who, as
Lieut. Colonel J. Leslie Kincaid, Judge-Advocate of the Division, since
has phrased it, ‘preferred to live in that part of hell which has no
fire escapes.’ By the time Captain Bobo had completed his organization
he had forty-seven men in his Red Cross unit, with every man-jack in
the outfit carrying papers to prove that the only reason he was not
carrying a rifle was that an army surgeon had got the fool notion the
man was not physically able to stand the gaff.
“Cried Captain Bobo, when all had been made ship-shape, ‘We’re set,
men: Let’s up and at ’em.’ And forward went the fightingest band of
Red Cross ‘invalids’ that ever slapped a German dead and then piled
him into an ambulance to try to save his life. Up with the front line
fighting men, the little Red Cross band found themselves in no time,
and, on occasions, hundreds of yards in advance of the front line
trenches, out in a sunlit No Man’s Land.”