I'm reminded of a poem a friend shared with me a while back

Spoiler: The Redheaded Rookie
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The Redheaded Rookie
Author Unknown


He was only a redheaded rookie,
As raw as one ever arrives;
And the poor simple cuss
Was wished upon us
In a crew of sevenry-fives.

He enlisted the last of September,
About a month before starting across;
And he came all the way
On bumpers they say,
From the home that he left in LaCrosse.

When the medical gave him his physical,
It was plain as day to be seen,
There wasn’t a hair
On his cheek anywhere;
And he couldn’t have been seventeen.

But he swore he could vote in Wisconsin,
And was older by far than he looked.
The doctor winked his eye
And let him pass by;
And he held up his hand and was booked.

They put us on board the transports,
And together we started for France.
Then the redheaded rube
Was the regiment’s boob.
To escape it, there wasn’t a chance.

For he asked how the crew weighed the anchor,
And they told him by submarine scales.
And he never did know
What made the ship go
When he saw that it didn’t have sails.

He was sent for the key to the bowsprit
To the captain of Battery B.
The captain sent him back
For some red lamp black
And a camouflage coat for the sea.

So the kidding went on ‘til we landed.
We camped at Coquelin [Ko-k-dan].
Then the redheaded rook
And the fun we partook
When the firing began.

E’re time a near burst was registered,
Long ‘fore our ears caught the sound,
He’d turn deathly pale,
His breathing would fail,
And he’d burrow right into the ground.

It was along in the middle of April,
I guess you all know the day,
When the Huns came across
Our third parados
Near the town they called Ciphaupres [Sif-o-pray].

They called it a raid in the papers;
But you can take it from me, it was worse.
For the list of our dead
Was written in red
(That’s better left out of the verse).

They opened up with camouflaged batteries,
Gun n’er known to exist.
And the whiz and the whine
Of those shells from the Rhine
Simply paralyzed all that they missed.

Three of our guns were now silenced,
In advance they had gotten the range.
They raked us with death
And poisoned our breath,25
And we never got back an exchange.

The earth shook with the fury of Hell
‘Til the hours for shelling did pass.
Then the infantry came
Like a forest aflame.
They came in a solid grey mass.

But three of us yet were unwounded.
It was the rookie, and Adams, and I.
We trained the old gun
In the face of the hun,
And together we worked her in high.

Suddenly two of us got it.
Adams and I were the pair.
That left only one
At the tail of the gun,
The rookie with the rouge in his hair.

As I lay in the lee of the limber
And looked up at the muzzle of the gun,
My heart gave a bound
As my ears caught the sound
Of Old Glory, of Old Number One.

There at the breach block stood the rookie
Cool as a mid-winter’s day.
And shell after shell
On its mission of Hell
He rammed in and sent on its way.

God, how he punished those botches
For who could miss such a mark.
He’d open up lanes
Like the passage of trains
Each time that old Bertha would bark.

Then the deluge closed in upon him.
I saw them swoop in with demands,
And an officer hun
From the point of his gun
For the rookie to put up his hands.

Then the something I saw made me sorry
For all the mean things I had said,
For the jobs I had saved,
And the details I gave
To the rookie with the brick-colored head.

For instead of his hands flying up
To the tune of that corporal’s spiel,
He stunned the mere case
With a slap in the face
With his sand-colored stelliform of steel.

Then he whipped out his big automatic,
And she barked like a litter of hounds,
‘Til a black-bearded hun
With the butt of his gun
Put me out of the hearing of sounds.

The rest of the story is simple,
As they told as they carried me back.
For all the huns that remained
When our guns were obtained
Were caught in our counterattack.

Today they are planting a rookie
At the spot where he fell to his rest.
And the regiment stands
With their hats in their hands
And a medal is pinned to his breast.

It was at the breach of old bertha they found him
With his colt buried down in the sand.
And the rookie, they say,
Made eight Germans pay
Within the range of the reach of his hand.


*NOTE: This poem was printed on a plaque in the Officers’ Club at the Army’s Field Artillery School at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Presumably, it was placed there to teach young officers that the worth of a solider is not measured by outward appearances, but rather by how he responds in crises – the ultimate test for a soldier being personal combat.

The above is taken directly from the copy my friend gave me. I've googled the French names and come up blank, although the city of Aupres was the site of some major battles in WWI. The friend who gave it to me got a print-out from his grandfather, who said his father memorized it during WWI, so he may have messed up the spelling. But that's neither here nor there.)

The point is that here is someone who was definitely cowardly, but stepped up when it really mattered. If your PCs can do the same, no one in your party will complain about them.