Polytechnic High School - Caerulea Yearbook (Long Beach, CA)

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5 .H ...QQ 18 CAERULEA '19 lish, French, arithmetic-in fact, anything which is called for. At the end of the day I go shopping. Buy me some post-cards -not scenery, but the kind a feller sends to a girl, you know. Since I don't know the girl and don't know the feller very well, these orders make me somewhat nervous but I do my best. My reward is the name many of them call me, Sunshine . It makes me happy every time I hear it, for I feel that at last I'm really needed some- where and missed when I'm not there. Sincerely, Eleanor Thayer Hugo Hihn has received- the distinguished decoration of the Croix cle Guerre, the greatest honor bestowed by the French govern- ment. The officers of highest rank salute the recipient of the Croix de Guerre. Mr. Hihn is so extremely modest that it was with much difficulty he was induced to give the story to Caerulea. We have since learned that he received two other decorations for distinguish-ed bravery. Hugo's story follows. I was a member of the lst Division 5th field artillery. As we were shock troops I managed to get into the thick of things. Ten' days after we had landed in France we were on our way to Chateau Thierry. We were also at Argonne Forest, at Metz, at St. Mihiel, and at Ponto Messon. Twenty-five of our boys were detailed for reconnoitering in map- making with a French troop. My buddy was a Los Angeles boy whom we named Sister because of his blonde hair and pink-and- white complexion. We traveled only at night. There were no lights in France at night for fear that Heinie would discover us from his air planes, The food on such trips consisted of hard-tack, canned

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VICTORY 17 stretches of barbed Wire entanglements in No lVIan's Land Cand the German wire is so horriblej and sees how the earth seems to have been literally uptorn and moiled into an irritable quagmire, he clenchcs his fists involuntarily and mutters oaths of hatred for the bloody Huns. I have ridden for a day and night by automobile through village after village all of which were totally destroyed and beaten to the earth with not a human soul alive in them. Please give my best regards to all, and remember I constantly' think of Long Beach High. Yours very sincerely, Leonard G. Nattkemper. Miss Eleanor Thayer, a popular French and Latin teacher in L. B. H. S. for the past several years, in doing her bit has become a beloved companion and adopted sister to our wounded heroes in Letterman Hospital, San Francisco. I'm just as enthusiastic as ever over my job. I wouldn't swap it for any other in the world except one in France. I never had any brothers so it's lots of fun to be adopted by fifty at once. You ought to follow me round for a day to really understand just what my job is. I'm jolly with the cheerful ones, jolly up the blue ones, argue with the few Whose real or fancied wrongs are making Bolsheviki, give advice on all sorts of known and unknown matters, write letters, and translate French lettersf you may be sure I'm adding a great deal to my stock of sentimental wordsj. Most of the boys, however, seem to be rather down, if anything, on French girls: so I don't have much French work. I sew on service stripes and buttons, teach basket and tray making, bead work, Eng-

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v1cToRY ' ' ' 19 tomatoes, and beans. One night the cook got reckless and decided to have a real feed. Preparations for supper had scarcely begun when Zip! Bang! a shell struck just ahead of us. The smoke had disclosed our location to the ever watchful Heinie. Dousel went our glim and we disappeared under the shelter of the friendly culverts. A second shell came even nearer and a third one tnok' kitchen, supper wagon-everything. No supper that night! After what seemed hours one of our American boys crawled out from under the shelter, thinking he might discover the location of the hostile gun. Sure enough, he soon detected a puff of smoke from an adjacent forest covered hill. E Without stopping to consult the officer in command, five boys started out on a voyage of discovery. As noiselessly as possible we aproached the hill and crawled toward the spot from which the smoke had seemed to come. For a long time we discovered no signs of life and we were about to give up in despair, but the kid who had seen the smoke said, I know it was here, so we kept up the search. Suddenly we saw just in front of us a gm sticking up about eight inches from the surface of the ground. We had nearly crawled into a hidden gun pit and eight German gunners, It didn't take us long to get back to headquarters to make our report to the French officer. Our number augmented to twelve, we again came in on each side of the trail which the Germans had dug to'the gun pit, and we just walked right in on them. The sergeant called out, Rause mit em! The Huns put up no show of fight, but simply lined up, hands up, and the sergeant disabled the gun. Then we marched our pris- oners to headquarters and delivered them over to the officer as if they had been a parcel. ' A week or ten days later a dispatch rider delivered a little boa. to the French major, who requested us five fellows to step forward while the rest of the company stood at attention. We didn't' know what was going to happen to us. I thought perhaps we were going 1