Dem
47
GOP
53
Today, we hear from reader P.H. in Orlando, FL:
My Grandfather was Matthew Patrick Berecy, born of Irish stock in 1890.
In his twenties, he volunteered to be a field ambulance man—a stretcher bearer—on the fields on France, in trench warfare. He would, after the 75mm cannons were silent, climb out of the relative safety of the trenches, and with three other soldier comrades take a stretcher to collect the wounded, the bleeding, and the dying, to do what he could to save lives.
He was a short man at 5'6", but oh, what an athlete. He could swim, sail, play tennis, was a mean pro-am golfer, and handy at rugby.
One day, the mustard gas canisters were again lofted from enemy lines, as they had been for several months of 1918. He and his fellow stretcher-bearers had gas masks on, when they came across a wounded soldier with shrapnel wounds on his bleeding legs, flailing and moaning in the mud, and with each groan, closer to the wicked poisoning of his life-giving lungs, without a mask.
Then came the mustard gas again.
If one was in a pit—a bombed-out crater—one could survive the gas for a while without the mask, as the gas generally settled about 10 inches off the ground. Matt realized that without a mask, the soldier was doomed to die a horrible death on the way to the aid post several hundred yards behind.
So, he instructed the lead stretcher-bearer, who had been sharing his mask with the soldier, holding his breath between times, to not to do that, as they were all floundering in the mud to gain traction with the weight. Matt's instructions were: "Look, I'll give him my mask, and make a run for it."
Matt arrived on the steps on the field hospital unconscious and temporarily blind. He has mistimed his sprint through the craters and the sodden slippery mud by only hours—it was 6:00 a.m., 11th of November, 1918... mere hours before the armistice and the end of World War I.
Matt spent 2 years in a French hospital and finally arrived home in 1920. His body was so changed that his mother didn't recognize him on the wharf. He had aged 20 years, lost all his hair, one third of his weight, and most of his teeth, and his beautiful blue eyes had turned to a dirty gray. His mother fainted when she saw him. It had been 6 long years.
At the start of World War II, he volunteered again for service, in his fifties. The recruiting officer took one look at him, and said, "No, you've done your service to the nation."
He coughed up gas for 4 decades.
Matthew Patrick Berecy passed in 1953. It was not until 2023 before I finally located his grave. On it, inscribed 70 years ago, was a note: "His Duty Nobly Done."
I never met Matt, be died 4 years before I was born.
He named his second Daughter, Yvonne, after the French nurse who spent 18 months in France assigned to him, more than 20 years before. My Aunt Yvonne went on to become a Missionary Nun Catholic nurse in the South Pacific for many decades, from 1960 until 2010, saving—it is estimated—10,000 lives, from disease, from famine, and birth deaths to mother and newly born with western medical and care technology.
The man my grandfather saved on the last day of the war?
My other grandfather.
Robert Jefferson Hancock. They were born in the same year, and the same city. They never again met—their children got married nearly 4 decades after, in 1952.
Thank you, P.H. And... wow. (Z)