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Show : : V. . ': - '.'! r imi d FAMOUS r I. ' 1 HSAOHiME HUNTER ffeNi " Skirmish Line " By FLOYD GIBBONS TODAY'S Distinguished Adventurer, boys and girls, is Charles Levine of New York city, an old soldier, and a veteran of the Philippine campaign. Charley has an army citation for gallantry in action and here's how he won it. It was the night of January 22, 1913, and word had come to the army barracks at Jolo that a Moro stronghold had been located eighteen miles in the interior. Charley Levine's outfit Troop H, Eighth Cavalry augmented by two companies of Philippine scouts and one company of native constabulary, started out after the insurrectionists. With them went a "jackass battery" consisting of one three-inch mountain gun hitched to four balky mules, and Charley was one of twelve men assigned to that battery. All night long they forced their way through matted jungle. At daybreak they were in sight of the Moro retreat a rectangular trench, surrounded by a wall of bamboo palings, covered over with a thick matting of cogan grass, and stocked with enough food and supplies and ammunition to withstand a long siege. The Skirmishers Went Too Far. There was no time for rest. The Moros espied the cavalrymen and discharged a blast of rifle fire. The Americans set up their mountain moun-tain gun on a knoll five hundred feet away and let loose a rain of shell-fire shell-fire as the rest of the men deployed in a long skirmish line and advanced ad-vanced on the fort The skirmishers moved on the mountain gun shooting over their heads. Then, suddenly, the lieutenant in charge of the gun shouted, "Hold it, boys. THEY'VE GONE TOO FAR." The skirmishers, almost to the fort now, had advanced into the range of fire of their own artillery. The bombardment ceased. "Somebody will have to go down there and tell them to fall back," the lieutenant snapped. A man was sent down with the message. "We watched him plunge into the jungle growth and strike off toward the line," says Charley. "Suddenly a lithe brown figure streaked out of the underbrush. A bolo flashed and the messenger crashed into the sea of grass DECAPITATED. It was over In a moment. "We gritted our teeth with helpless rage. Another man went forward to his death. The jungle down there was full of Moros. Still another man went down and again that macabre performance perform-ance was repeated." Charley Took the Suicidal Job. It was sheer murder to send a man down into that Moro Infested no-man's no-man's land sheer suicide to volunteer. But in the meantime the skirmishers on the line were firing blindly at the bamboo walls, exposed to the fusillades of the Moros, while they waited for the mountain gun to open a breach. Something had to be done. Charley and a buddy, Claude Underwood, volunteered to try it together. "It wasn't much more than three hundred feet to the line," says Charley, but it looked like miles. The tall grass rippled sleepily In the early morning breeze. Ahead of us lay the Moro fort swathed in swirls of gun smoke which rose sinuously in the damp air. Rifles roared and blasted. "We darted and ducked through the cogan. The crepitation of the grass under our feet the drowsy rustling of the tall shoots made us grip our rifles hard and pivot from one side to the other in the direction direc-tion of the sound. Every movement of the undergrowth looked like a Moro bolo in hand, waiting to pad out silently behind us and cut off our heads, as they had cut off the heads of the others." But evidently no one Moro wanted to tackle two men. They got through to the line. The line fell back and once more the gun on the knoll boomed out and sent its shells screaming into the fort. Great gaps yawned in the walls. The fire from the Moros became feebler and feebler. Surrounded by the Moros. Charley and Claude stayed on the line until the order to charge was sounded. Then they leaped forward with the rest. They stumbled over a muddy creek bottom and swarmed through a gap in the walL The fort was deserted. The Moros had slipped away those that remained re-mained alive leaving behind their dead, their supplies and their ammunition. ammu-nition. The men started back to the knoll. Mopping their sweaty faces, Charley and Claude turned to follow when Out of the jungle came eight Moros, spread fanwise, their bolos poised for their work of decapitation. "We gripped our rifles," says Charley, "and retreated slowly, exchanging glare for glare with the insurrectos. A scatter of rifle fire sounded behind '1 us. Cut off! SURROUNDED! 'The creek bottom,' I roared to ' Underwood. 'Let's run for it!' We ran for that slimy asylum, reaching the creek bed as another burst of gunfire crashed over our heads." They hugged the floor of the creek, breathing hard. It was their last stand. They peered through the grass, but there was no one In sight. Where were those Moros? Why didn't those birds with the bolos come and finish their deadly work. And where were their own pals? Didn't they see the predicament Claude and Charley were In? . Comrades to the Rescue. The suspense was maddening They decided to make a break for It try to shoot their way out. The Moros weren't much good as marksmen. marks-men. They might make it Another crash of rifle fire, and Charley started to get up. An anxious voice yelled: "Get down, Charlie. Stay down, Claude." And Charley says that for the next ten seconds you couldn't have slipped a cigarette paper between him and the ground. Another volley or two and it was all over. The rifle fire had come from the Americans, who had seen those eight bolo-swinging Moros and were trying to drive them off by shooting over Claude's and Charley's heads. Ducking into the creek had saved both their lives, because it gave their buddies a chance to shoot over them and drive off the enemy. Twenty years later, almost to a day, Charley Levine received the army's silver star citation "for gallantry in action against hostile Moros at Jolo, Philippine Islands, January 22, 1913." 0 WNU Service. ! |