How John Gill Earned a Distinguished Service Cross, May 1919

From The Badin Bulletin, May 1919. Go to http://newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/2014236802/1919-05-01/ed-1/seq-5/ to see a nice picture of John H. Gill in uniform.

Distinguished Service Cross

Among the boys recently discharged from the army, and now working for the Company, none we believe has a finer record than John H. Gill, formerly from Henderson in this State.

John is one of the number who helped Europe and the world to a proper understanding of the sort of fighting stuff to be found in our good-humored, smiling American lads. That’s John—he doesn’t feel natural if he hasn’t something to be smiling over; and most of the time he has.

The story, as John tells it, or rather as one has to drag it out of John, is very short. Entered service July 25, 1917, and was trained at Camp Sevier. Left Camp Sevier April 30, 1918; sailed May 8; landed at Brest, France, and went to the Infantry Specialties School at Langres for one month. From there he passed in July direct to the first lien trenches at Ypres. Left Ypres in September for the St. Quentin front. It was in the fighting near Bellecourt, on September 25, that he was wounded—nine times before the Boche stopped him. (The italics are mine, not John’s.) Then they took him to a hospital at Bath, England, to rest for a while.

And Uncle Sam reached out both hands to him. One arm went around the boy’s shoulders; the other hand pinned something on his breast.

It was the Distinguished Service Cross.

And yet John doesn’t look like a battle-scarred veteran who went thru some of the most bitter fighting of the Great War. He’s just a normal, healthy-minded, good-tempered American boy, very much averse to talking about what went on “over there.”

He is now a member of the Townsite draughting force, under Nuebling.