with Chief Benjamin A. Gicquel, who is the oldest wearer of the
Bennett medal, just as Coleman is the youngest, or the one who
received it last. He was willing enough to talk about the science of
putting out fires; of Department Chief Bonner, the "man of few words,"
who, he thinks, has mastered the art beyond any man living; of the
back-draught, and almost anything else pertaining to the business: but
when I insisted upon his telling me the story of the rescue of the
Schaefer family of five from a burning tenement down in Cherry Street,
in which he earned his rank and reward, he laughed a good-humored
little laugh, and said that it was "the old man"--meaning
Schaefer--who should have had the medal. "It was a grand thing in him
to let the little ones come out first." I have sometimes wished that
firemen were not so modest. It would be much easier, if not so
satisfactory, to record their gallant deeds. But I am not sure that it
is, after all, modesty so much as a wholly different point of view. It
is business with them, the work of their lives. The one feeling that
is allowed to rise beyond this is the feeling of exultation in the
face of peril conquered by courage, which Coleman expressed. On the
ladder he was boss! It was the fancy of a masterful man, and none but
a masterful man would have got upon the ladder at all.
Doubtless there is something in the spectacular side of it that
attracts. It would be strange if there were not. There is everything
in a fireman's existence to encourage it. Day and night he leads a
kind of hair-trigger life, that feeds naturally upon excitement, even
if only as a relief from the irksome idling in quarters. Try as they
may to give him enough to do there, the time hangs heavily upon his
hands, keyed up as he is, and need be, to adventurous deeds at
shortest notice. He falls to grumbling and quarrelling, and the
necessity becomes imperative of holding him to the strictest
discipline, under which he chafes impatiently. "They nag like a lot of
old women," said Department Chief Bonner to me once; "and the best at
a fire are often the worst in the house." In the midst of it all the
gong strikes a familiar signal. The horses' hoofs thunder on the
planks; with a leap the men go down the shining pole to the main
floor, all else forgotten; and with crash and clatter and bang the
heavy engine swings into the street, and races away on a wild gallop,
leaving a trail of fire behind.
Presently the crowd sees rubber-coated, helmeted men with pipe and
hose go through a window from which such dense smoke pours forth that
it seems incredible that a human being could breathe it for a second
and live. The hose is dragged squirming over the sill, where shortly a
red-eyed face with dishevelled hair appears, to shout something
hoarsely to those below, which they understand. Then, unless some
emergency arise, the spectacular part is over. Could the citizen whose
heart beat as he watched them enter see them now, he would see grimy
shapes, very unlike the fine-looking men who but just now had roused
his admiration, crawling on hands and knees, with their noses close to
the floor if the smoke be very dense, ever pointing the "pipe" in the
direction where the enemy is expected to appear. The fire is the
enemy; but he can fight that, once he reaches it, with something of a
chance. The smoke kills without giving him a show to fight back. Long
practice toughens him against it, until he learns the trick of "eating
the smoke." He can breathe where a candle goes out for want of oxygen.
By holding his mouth close to the nozzle, he gets what little air the
stream of water brings with it and sets free; and within a few inches
of the floor there is nearly always a current of air. In the last
emergency, there is the hose that he can follow out. The smoke always
is his worst enemy. It lays ambushes for him which he can suspect, but
not ward off. He tries to, by opening vents in the roof as soon as the
pipemen are in place and ready; but in spite of all precautions, he is
often surprised by the dreaded back-draught.
I remember standing in front of a burning Broadway store, one night,
when the back-draught blew out the whole front without warning. It is
simply an explosion of gases generated by the heat, which must have
vent, and go upon the line of least resistance, up, or down, or in a
circle--it does not much matter, so that they go. It swept shutters,
windows, and all, across Broadway, in this instance, like so much
chaff, littering the street with heavy rolls of cloth. The crash was
like a fearful clap of thunder. Men were knocked down on the opposite
sidewalk, and two teams of engine horses, used to almost any kind of
happening at a fire, ran away in a wild panic. It was a blast of that
kind that threw down and severely injured Battalion Chief M'Gill, one
of the oldest and most experienced of firemen, at a fire on Broadway
in March, 1890; and it has cost more brave men's lives than the
fiercest fire that ever raged. The "puff," as the firemen call it,
comes suddenly, and from the corner where it is least expected. It is
dread of that, and of getting overcome by the smoke generally, which
makes firemen go always in couples or more together. They never lose
sight of one another for an instant, if they can help it. If they do,
they go at once in search of the lost. The delay of a moment may prove
fatal to him.
Lieutenant Samuel Banta of the Franklin Street company, discovering
the pipe that had just been held by Fireman Quinn at a Park Place
fire thrashing aimlessly about, looked about him, and saw Quinn
floating on his face in the cellar, which was running full of water.
He had been overcome, had tumbled in, and was then drowning, with the
fire raging above and alongside. Banta jumped in after him, and
endeavored to get his head above water. While thus occupied, he
glanced up, and saw the preliminary puff of the back-draught bearing
down upon him. The lieutenant dived at once, and tried to pull his
unhappy pipe-man with him; but he struggled and worked himself loose.
From under the water Banta held up a hand, and it was burnt. He held
up the other, and knew that the puff had passed when it came back
unsinged. Then he brought Quinn out with him; but it was too late.
Caught between flood and fire, he had no chance. When I asked the
lieutenant about it, he replied simply: "The man in charge of the hose
fell into the cellar. I got him out; that was all." "But how?" I
persisted. "Why, I went down through the cellar," said the lieutenant,
smiling, as if it was the most ordinary thing in the world.
It was this same Banta who, when Fireman David H. Soden had been
buried under the falling walls of a Pell Street house, crept through a
gap in the basement wall, in among the fallen timbers, and, in
imminent peril of his own life, worked there with a hand-saw two long
hours to free his comrade, while the firemen held the severed timbers
up with ropes to give him a chance. Repeatedly, while he was at work,
his clothes caught fire, and it was necessary to keep playing the hose
upon him. But he brought out his man safe and sound, and, for the
twentieth time perhaps, had his name recorded on the roll of merit.
His comrades tell how, at one of the twenty, the fall of a building in
Hall Place had left a workman lying on a shaky piece of wall,
helpless, with a broken leg. It could not bear the weight of a ladder,
and it seemed certain death to attempt to reach him, when Banta,
running up a slanting beam that still hung to its fastening with one
end, leaped from perch to perch upon the wall, where hardly a goat
could have found footing, reached his man, and brought him down slung
over his shoulder, and swearing at him like a trooper lest the peril
of the descent cause him to lose his nerve and with it the lives of
both.
Firemen dread cellar fires more than any other kind, and with reason.
It is difficult to make a vent for the smoke, and the danger of
drowning is added to that of being smothered when they get fairly to
work. If a man is lost to sight or touch of his fellows there for ever
so brief a while, there are five chances to one that he will not
again be seen alive. Then there ensues such a fight as the city
witnessed only last May at the burning of a Chambers Street
paper-warehouse. It was fought out deep underground, with fire and
flood, freezing cold and poisonous gases, leagued against Chief
Bonner's forces. Next door was a cold-storage house, whence the cold.
Something that was burning--I do not know that it was ever found out
just what--gave forth the smothering fumes before which the firemen
went down in squads. File after file staggered out into the street,
blackened and gasping, to drop there. The near engine-house was made
into a hospital, where the senseless men were laid on straw hastily
spread. Ambulance surgeons worked over them. As fast as they were
brought to, they went back to bear a hand in the work of rescue. In
delirium they fought to return. Down in the depths one of their number
was lying helpless.
There is nothing finer in the records of glorious war than the story
of the struggle these brave fellows kept up for hours against
tremendous odds for the rescue of their comrade. Time after time they
went down into the pit of deadly smoke, only to fail. Lieutenant Banta
tried twice and failed. Fireman King was pulled up senseless, and
having been brought round went down once more. Fireman Sheridan
returned empty-handed, more dead than alive. John O'Connell, of Truck
No. 1, at length succeeded in reaching his comrade and tying a rope
about him, while from above they drenched both with water to keep them
from roasting. They drew up a dying man; but John G. Reinhardt dead is
more potent than a whole crew of firemen alive. The story of the fight
for his life will long be told in the engine-houses of New York, and
will nerve the Kings and the Sheridans and the O'Connells of another
day to like deeds.
How firemen manage to hear in their sleep the right signal, while they
sleep right through any number that concerns the next company, not
them, is one of the mysteries that will probably always remain
unsolved. "I don't know," said Department Chief Bonner, when I asked
him once. "I guess it is the same way with everybody. You hear what
you have to hear. There is a gong right over my bed at home, and I
hear every stroke of it, but I don't hear the baby. My wife hears the
baby if it as much as stirs in its crib, but not the gong." Very
likely he is right. The fact that the fireman can hear and count
correctly the strokes of the gong in his sleep has meant life to many
hundreds, and no end of properly saved; for it is in the early
moments of a fire that it can be dealt with summarily. I recall one
instance in which the failure to interpret a signal properly, or the
accident of taking a wrong road to the fire, cost a life, and,
singularly enough, that of the wife of one of the firemen who answered
the alarm. It was all so pitiful, so tragic, that it has left an
indelible impression on my mind. It was the fire at which Patrick F.
Lucas earned the medal for that year by snatching five persons out of
the very jaws of death in a Dominick Street tenement. The alarm-signal
rang in the hook-and-ladder company's quarters in North Moore Street,
but was either misunderstood or they made a wrong start. Instead of
turning east to West Broadway, the truck turned west, and went
galloping toward Greenwich Street. It was only a few seconds, the time
that was lost, but it was enough. Fireman Murphy's heart went up in
his throat when, from his seat on the truck as it flew toward the
fire, he saw that it was his own home that was burning. Up on the
fifth floor he found his wife penned in. She died in his arms as he
carried her to the fire-escape. The fire, for once, had won in the
race for a life.
While I am writing this, the morning paper that is left at my door
tells the story of a fireman who, laid up with a broken ankle in an
up-town hospital, jumped out of bed, forgetting his injury, when the
alarm-gong rang his signal, and tried to go to the fire. The
fire-alarms are rung in the hospitals for the information of the
ambulance corps. The crippled fireman heard the signal at the dead of
night, and, only half awake, jumped out of bed, groped about for the
sliding-pole, and, getting hold of the bedpost, tried to slide down
that. The plaster cast about his ankle was broken, the old injury
reopened, and he was seriously hurt.
New York firemen have a proud saying that they "fight fire from the
inside." It means unhesitating courage, prompt sacrifice, and victory
gained, all in one. The saving of life that gets into the newspapers
and wins applause is done, of necessity, largely from the outside, but
is none the less perilous for that. Sometimes, though rarely, it has
in its intense gravity almost a comic tinge, as at one of the
infrequent fires in the Mulberry Bend some years ago. The Italians
believe, with reason, that there is bad luck in fire, therefore do not
insure, and have few fires. Of this one the Romolo family shrine was
the cause. The lamp upon it exploded, and the tenement was ablaze when
the firemen came. The policeman on the beat had tried to save Mrs.
Romolo; but she clung to the bedpost, and refused to go without the
rest of the family. So he seized the baby, and rolled down the
burning stairs with it, his beard and coat afire. The only way out was
shut off when the engines arrived. The Romolos shrieked at the
top-floor window, threatening to throw themselves out. There was not a
moment to be lost. Lying flat on the roof, with their heads over the
cornice, the firemen fished the two children out of the window with
their hooks. The ladders were run up in time for the father and
mother.
The readiness of resource no less than the intrepid courage and
athletic skill of the rescuers evoke enthusiastic admiration. Two
instances stand out in my recollection among many. Of one Fireman
Howe, who had on more than one occasion signally distinguished
himself, was the hero. It happened on the morning of January 2, 1896,
when the Geneva Club on Lexington Avenue was burnt out. Fireman Howe
drove Hook-and-Ladder No. 7 to the fire that morning, to find two
boarders at the third-story window, hemmed in by flames which already
showed behind them. Followed by Fireman Pearl, he ran up in the
adjoining building, and presently appeared at a window on the third
floor, separated from the one occupied by the two men by a blank
wall-space of perhaps four or five feet. It offered no other footing
than a rusty hook, but it was enough. Astride of the window-sill, with
one foot upon the hook, the other anchored inside by his comrade, his
body stretched at full length along the wall, Howe was able to reach
the two, and to swing them, one after the other, through his own
window to safety. As the second went through, the crew in the street
below set up a cheer that raised the sleeping echoes of the street.
Howe looked down, nodded, and took a firmer grip; and that instant
came his great peril.
A third face had appeared at the window just as the fire swept
through. Howe shut his eyes to shield them, and braced himself on the
hook for a last effort. It broke; and the man, frightened out of his
wits, threw himself headlong from the window upon Howe's neck.
The fireman's form bent and swayed. His comrade within felt the
strain, and dug his heels into the boards. He was almost dragged out
of the window, but held on with a supreme effort. Just as he thought
the end had come, he felt the strain ease up. The ladder had reached
Howe in the very nick of time, and given him support, but in his
desperate effort to save himself and the other, he slammed his burden
back over his shoulder with such force that he went crashing through,
carrying sash and all, and fell, cut and bruised, but safe, upon
Fireman Pearl, who grovelled upon the door, prostrate and panting.
The other case New York remembers yet with a shudder. It was known
long in the department for the bravest act ever done by a fireman--an
act that earned for Foreman William Quirk the medal for 1888. He was
next in command of Engine No. 22 when, on a March morning, the Elberon
Flats in East Eighty-fifth street were burned. The Westlake family,
mother, daughter, and two sons, were in the fifth story, helpless and
hopeless. Quirk ran up on the scaling-ladder to the fourth floor, hung
it on the sill above, and got the boys and their sister down. But the
flames burst from the floor below, cutting off their retreat. Quirk's
captain had seen the danger, and shouted to him to turn back while it
was yet time. But Quirk had no intention of turning back. He measured
the distance and the risk with a look, saw the crowd tugging
frantically at the life-net under the window, and bade them jump, one
by one. They jumped, and were saved. Last of all, he jumped himself,
after a vain effort to save the mother. She was already dead. He
caught her gown, but the body slipped from his grasp and fell crashing
to the street fifty feet below. He himself was hurt in his jump. The
volunteers who held the net looked up, and were frightened; they let
go their grip, and the plucky fireman broke a leg and hurt his back in
the fall.
"Like a cry of fire in the night" appeals to the dullest imagination
with a sense of sudden fear. There have been nights in this city when
the cry swelled into such a clamor of terror and despair as to make
the stoutest heart quake--when it seemed to those who had to do with
putting out fires as if the end of all things was at hand. Such a
night was that of the burning of "Cohnfeld's Folly," in Bleecker
Street, March 17, 1891. The burning of the big store involved the
destruction, wholly or in part, of ten surrounding buildings, and
called out nearly one-third of the city's Fire Department. While the
fire raged as yet unchecked,--while walls were falling with shock and
crash of thunder, the streets full of galloping engines and ambulances
carrying injured firemen, with clangor of urgent gongs; while
insurance patrolmen were being smothered in buildings a block away by
the smoke that hung like a pall over the city,--another disastrous
fire broke out in the dry-goods district, and three alarm-calls came
from West Seventeenth Street. Nine other fires were signalled, and
before morning all the crews that were left were summoned to Allen
Street, where four persons were burned to death in a tenement. Those
are the wild nights that try firemen's souls, and never yet found them
wanting. During the great blizzard, when the streets were impassable
and the system crippled, the fires in the city averaged nine a
day,--forty-five for the five days from March 12 to 16,--and not one
of them got beyond control. The fire commissioners put on record their
pride in the achievement, as well they might. It was something to be
proud of, indeed.
Such a night promised to be the one when the Manhattan Bank and the
State Bank across the street on the other Broadway corner, with three
or four other buildings, were burned, and when the ominous "two nines"
were rung, calling nine-tenths of the whole force below Central Park
to the threatened quarter. But, happily, the promise was not fully
kept. The supposed fire-proof bank crumbled in the withering blast
like so much paper; the cry went up that whole companies of firemen
were perishing within it; and the alarm had reached Police
Headquarters in the next block, where they were counting the election
returns. Thirteen firemen, including the deputy department chief, a
battalion chief, and two captains, limped or were carried from the
burning bank, more or less injured. The stone steps of the fire-proof
stairs had fallen with them or upon them. Their imperilled comrades,
whose escape was cut off, slid down hose and scaling-ladders. The
last, the crew of Engine Company No. 3, had reached the street, and
all were thought to be out, when the assistant foreman, Daniel
Fitzmaurice, appeared at the fifth-story window. The fire beating
against it drove him away, but he found footing at another, next
adjoining the building on the north. To reach him from below, with the
whole building ablaze, was impossible. Other escape there was none,
save a cornice ledge extending halfway to his window; but it was too
narrow to afford foothold.
Then an extraordinary scene was enacted in the sight of thousands. In
the other building were a number of fire-insurance patrolmen, covering
goods to protect them against water damage. One of these--Patrolman
John Rush--stepped out on the ledge, and edged his way toward a spur
of stone that projected from the bank building. Behind followed
Patrolman Barnett, steadying him and pressing him close against the
wall. Behind him was another, with still another holding on within the
room, where the living chain was anchored by all the rest. Rush, at
the end of the ledge, leaned over and gave Fitzmaurice his hand. The
fireman grasped it, and edged out upon the spur. Barnett, holding the
rescuer fast, gave him what he needed--something to cling to. Once he
was on the ledge, the chain wound itself up as it had unwound itself.
Slowly, inch by inch, it crept back, each man pushing the next flat
against the wall with might and main, while the multitudes in the
street held their breath, and the very engines stopped panting, until
all were safe.
John Rush is a fireman to-day, a member of "Thirty-three's" crew in
Great Jones Street. He was an insurance patrolman then. The
organization is unofficial. Its main purpose is to save property; but
in the face of the emergency firemen and patrolmen become one body,
obeying one head.
That the spirit which has made New York's Fire Department great
equally animates its commercial brother has been shown more than once,
but never better than at the memorable fire in the Hotel Royal, which
cost so many lives. No account of heroic life-saving at fires, even as
fragmentary as this, could pass by the marvellous feat, or feats, of
Sergeant (now Captain) John R. Vaughan on that February morning six
years ago. The alarm rang in patrol station No. 3 at 3.20 o'clock on
Sunday morning. Sergeant Vaughan, hastening to the fire with his men,
found the whole five-story hotel ablaze from roof to cellar. The fire
had shot up the elevator shaft, round which the stairs ran, and from
the first had made escape impossible. Men and women were jumping and
hanging from windows. One, falling from a great height, came within
an inch of killing the sergeant as he tried to enter the building.
Darting up into the next house, and leaning out of the window with his
whole body, while one of the crew hung on to one leg,--as Fireman
Pearl did to Howe's in the splendid rescue at the Geneva Club,--he
took a half-hitch with the other in some electric-light wires that ran
up the wall, trusting to his rubber boots to protect him from the
current, and made of his body a living bridge for the safe passage
from the last window of the burning hotel of three men and a woman
whom death stared in the face, steadying them as they went with his
free hand. As the last passed over, ladders were being thrown up
against the wall, and what could be done there was done.
Sergeant Vaughan went up on the roof. The smoke was so dense there
that he could see little, but through it he heard a cry for help, and
made out the shape of a man standing upon a window-sill in the fifth
story, overlooking the courtyard of the hotel. The yard was between
them. Bidding his men follow,--they were five, all told,--he ran down
and around in the next street to the roof of the house that formed an
angle with the hotel wing. There stood the man below him, only a jump
away, but a jump which no mortal might take and live. His face and
hands were black with smoke. Vaughan, looking down, thought him a
negro. He was perfectly calm.
"It is no use," he said, glancing up. "Don't try. You can't do it."
The sergeant looked wistfully about him. Not a stick or a piece of
rope was in sight. Every shred was used below. There was absolutely
nothing. "But I couldn't let him," he said to me, months after, when
he had come out of the hospital, a whole man again, and was back at
work,--"I just couldn't, standing there so quiet and brave." To the
man he said sharply:--
"I want you to do exactly as I tell you, now. Don't grab me, but let
me get the first grab." He had noticed that the man wore a heavy
overcoat, and had already laid his plan.
"Don't try," urged the man. "You cannot save me. I will stay here till
it gets too hot; then I will jump."
"No, you won't," from the sergeant, as he lay at full length on the
roof, looking over. "It is a pretty hard yard down there. I will get
you, or go dead myself."
The four sat on the sergeant's legs as he swung free down to the
waist; so he was almost able to reach the man on the window with
outstretched hands.
"Now jump--quick!" he commanded; and the man jumped. He caught him by
both wrists as directed, and the sergeant got a grip on the collar of
his coat.