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| | PVT. ALBERT M. DE LUDE
Serial No. 2,986,820
412 S. Park St., Saginaw, Mich.
DeLude, like Private Faucher, was one of the members of the Ammunition Train before joining Battery B, and with little or no training for artillery, qualified as cannoneer No. 6 man in Sergt. Dunn’s gun crew. He performed all the duties imposed on him with a precision and alertness required in a gunner throughout all of our fighting activities. DeLude was a fireman—a member of the Saginaw Fire Department—before coming into the army, which especially distinguished him to act in the same capacity at Pont-a-Mousson, but with more antiquated equipment, which he describes in his own words in the following:
“After we got settled in Pont-a-Mousson we organized a Fire Department on November 17, 1918. There were 45 men, of which there were only six experienced firemen from departments of Michigan, so we had to teach the new men their work, and it was some job.
“The first thing we had to do was to get the apparatus together, it was scattered all over the city. After it was all collected it made some fine (?) outfit. It consisted of three hand-pumps, three one-reel carts, one tool cart and one ladder cart. The hose was only 1 1/2 inches, just a little larger than our big garden hose. The pumps were small; tubes with a double cylinder, which took six men to handle it. First you attach the hose to the hydrant, then run the other end in the tub; when the tub is full then the men begin to pump. That’s the way we had to get the pressure. It would throw a stream for a couple of stories. Our ladders were fine. The small ones folded up like a jack-knife, with two hooks on one end so you could hang it on the windowsill, and the big ladder was so heavy it would take the whole National Company to put it up, so we left that alone. The ladder cart was pretty fair. You had to run it up against the building, then turn the crank. Then put the ladder against the building and put it in position.
“Some of the men were fine at posing around the fires. Well, those fellows didn’t last long. There was one fellow by the name of McMullan. He came from the Marquette lumber woods, and he sure could handle an axe. When he got through chopping a floor at a fire we had all the wood we needed for one week, so we didn’t have to worry that we would freeze.
“One night we were called to a fire, which was in a four-story school building, where there were eighty or ninety men billeted. When we got there the smoke was pouring out of the windows in great volumes, so we knew that we had a nice little job at hand. The new men got the pumps ready while we experienced men made for the rooms. We found some stretched out on the floor overcome by smoke. Finally we succeeded in getting everybody out without losing any lives. Then we battled the flames for two hours. The man with the axe and myself reached the first floor, pulling the hose after us and fighting the flames at the same time, and he was also overcome by the smoke, so I got him down the window with a rope and finished the fire myself. Somebody said that after McMullan had come to he said, ‘My God, that was some smoke.’
“A week before we left the department we had a fire that started in a building which was wrecked by a German shell. The roof caved in and the walls were all that was left standing. That is where two of our men nearly got killed.
“We did very good fighting fires with the apparatus we had to use. The Sergeant said that we should get a leather medal for the great work we had done in helping the French protect their city.”
DeLude will be remembered for his devious ways of procuring liquid refreshments when they were scarce. He could make novelties out of paper representing amusing figures, which, when held to the light, would furnish amusement. He was resourceful in creating humor.
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