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Title: Fix bayonets!
Author: John W. Thomason
Release date: January 12, 2025 [eBook #75092]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1927
Credits: Richard Tonsing, Aaron Adrignola, Tim Lindell, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FIX BAYONETS! ***
FIX BAYONETS!
[Illustration: [Soldiers]]
[Illustration:
Flare—Front Line, Champagne.
That night, lying in its shallow, hastily dug holes, the remnant of
the battalion descended through further hells of shelling.
]
FIX BAYONETS!
BY
JOHN W. THOMASON, JR.
_Captain, U. S. Marine Corps_
ILLUSTRATED BY THE AUTHOR
[Illustration: [Soldier]]
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
NEW YORK · LONDON
1927
COPYRIGHT, 1925, 1926, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Printed in the United States of America
Published March, 1926
Reprinted April, May, September, 1926
[Illustration: [Icon]]
TO
THE MEN OF THE FIRST BATTALION
FIFTH REGIMENT
UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS
1918
[Illustration: [Soldiers]]
INTRODUCTION
THE LEATHERNECKS
[Illustration: [Soldier]]
INTRODUCTION
THE LEATHERNECKS
They tell the tale of an American lady of notable good works, much
esteemed by the French, who, at the end of June, 1918, visited one of
the field-hospitals behind Degoutte’s Sixth French Army. Degoutte was
fighting on the face of the Marne salient, and the 2d American Division,
then in action around the Bois de Belleau, northwest of Château-Thierry,
was under his orders. It happened that occasional casualties of the
Marine Brigade of the 2d American Division, wounded toward the flank
where Degoutte’s own horizon-blue infantry joined on, were picked up by
French stretcher-bearers and evacuated to French hospitals. And this
lady, looking down a long, crowded ward, saw on a pillow a face unlike
the fiercely whiskered Gallic heads there displayed in rows. She went to
it.
“Oh,” she said, “surely you are an American!”
“No, ma’am,” the casualty answered, “I’m a Marine.”
The men who marched up the Paris-Metz road to meet the Boche in that
spring of 1918, the 5th and 6th Regiments of United States Marines, were
gathered from various places. In the big war companies, 250 strong, you
could find every sort of man, from every sort of calling. There were
Northwesterners with straw-colored hair that looked white against their
tanned skins, and delicately spoken chaps with the stamp of the Eastern
universities on them. There were large-boned fellows from Pacific-coast
lumber camps, and tall, lean Southerners who swore amazingly in gentle,
drawling voices. There were husky farmers from the corn-belt, and
youngsters who had sprung, as it were, to arms from the necktie counter.
And there were also a number of diverse people who ran curiously to
type, with drilled shoulders and a bone-deep sunburn, and a tolerant
scorn of nearly everything on earth. Their speech was flavored with navy
words, and words culled from all the folk who live on the seas and the
ports where our war-ships go. In easy hours their talk ran from the
Tartar Wall beyond Pekin to the Southern Islands, down under Manila;
from Portsmouth Navy Yard—New Hampshire and very cold—to obscure
bushwhackings in the West Indies, where Cacao chiefs, whimsically
sanguinary, barefoot generals with names like Charlemagne and
Christophe, waged war according to the precepts of the French Revolution
and the Cult of the Snake. They drank the _eau de vie_ of Haute-Marne,
and reminisced on saki, and vino, and Bacardi Rum—strange drinks in
strange _cantinas_ at the far ends of the earth; and they spoke fondly
of Milwaukee beer. Rifles were high and holy things to them, and they
knew five-inch broadside guns. They talked patronizingly of the war, and
were concerned about rations. They were the Leathernecks, the Old
Timers: collected from ship’s guards and shore stations all over the
earth to form the 4th Brigade of Marines, the two rifle regiments,
detached from the navy by order of the President for service with the
American Expeditionary Forces. They were the old breed of American
regular, regarding the service as home and war as an occupation; and
they transmitted their temper and character and view-point to the
high-hearted volunteer mass which filled the ranks of the Marine
Brigade.
[Illustration:
The Leathernecks, the Old Timers.
]
It is a pleasure to record that they found good company in the army. The
2d Division (U. S. Regular was the official designation) was composed of
the 9th and 23d Infantry, two old regiments with names from all of our
wars on their battle-flags, the 2d Regiment of Engineers—and engineers
are always good—and the 12th, 15th, and 17th Field Artillery. It was a
division distinguished by the quality of dash and animated by an
especial pride of service. It carried to a high degree _esprit de
corps_, which some Frenchman has defined as esteeming your own corps and
looking down on all the other corps. And, although it paid heavily in
casualties for the things it did—in five months about 100 per cent—the
2d Division never lost its professional character.
Seven years after, across the world from France, I met a major of the
American General Staff, who was on the Paris-Metz road that last week in
May, 1918, and saw the Marine Brigade. “They looked fine, coming in
there,” he said. “Tall fellows, healthy and fit—they looked hard and
competent. We watched you going in, through those little tired
Frenchmen, and we all felt better. We knew something was going to
happen—” and we were silent, over Chilean wine, in a place on the South
Pacific, thinking of those days and those men....
There is no sight in all the pageant of war like young, trained men
going up to battle. The columns look solid and businesslike. Each
battalion is an entity, 1,200 men of one purpose. They go on like a
river that flows very deep and strong. Uniforms are drab these days, but
there are points of light on the helmets and the bayonets, and light in
the quick, steady eyes and the brown young faces, greatly daring. There
is no singing—veterans know, and they do not sing much—and there is no
excitement at all; they are schooled craftsmen, going up to impose their
will, with the tools of their trade, on another lot of fellows; and
there is nothing to make a fuss about. Battles are not salubrious
places, and every file knows that a great many more are going in than
will come out again—but that is along with the job. And they have no
illusions about the job.
There is nothing particularly glorious about sweaty fellows, laden with
killing tools, going along to fight. And yet—such a column represents a
great deal more than 28,000 individuals mustered into a division. All
that is behind those men is in that column, too: the old battles, long
forgotten, that secured our nation—Brandywine and Trenton and Yorktown,
San Jacinto and Chapultepec, Gettysburg, Chickamauga, Antietam, El
Caney; scores of skirmishes, far off, such as the Marines have nearly
every year—in which a man can be killed as dead as ever a chap was in
the Argonne; traditions of things endured and things accomplished, such
as regiments hand down forever; and the faith of men and the love of
women; and that abstract thing called patriotism, which I never heard
combat soldiers mention—all this passes into the forward zone, to the
point of contact, where war is girt with horrors. And common men endure
these horrors and overcome them, along with the insistent yearnings of
the belly and the reasonable promptings of fear; and in this, I think,
is glory.
[Illustration:
“They looked fine, coming in there ... through those little tired
Frenchmen.”
]
In Charles the Second’s time the English formed the first sea
regiment—soldiers equipped as infantry, to serve on the sea in the
fleet; to clear with musketry the enemy’s decks and fighting-tops when
the ships of the line went into close action; to go ashore and take up
positions when the naval forces would seize a base preliminary to land
operations of the army.
Here, by the way, comes the quip of old time: “Tell it to the Marines.”
They relate of Charles the Second that at Whitehall a certain
sea-captain, newly returned from the Western Ocean, told the king of
flying fish, a thing never heard in old England. The king and the court
were vastly amused. But, the naval fellow persisting, the Merry Monarch
beckoned to a lean, dry colonel of the sea regiment, with a seamed
mahogany face, and said, in effect: “Colonel, this tarry-breeks here
makes sport with us stay-at-homes. He tells us of a miraculous fish that
forsakes its element and flies like a bird over the water!” “Sire,” said
the colonel of Marines, “he tells a true thing. I myself have often seen
those fish in your Majesty’s seas around Barbados—” “Well,” decided
Charles, “such evidence cannot be disputed. And hereafter, when we hear
a strange thing, we will tell it to the Marines, for the Marines go
everywhere and see everything, and if they say it is so, we will believe
it!”
The Continental Congress, on 10 November, 1775, authorized a corps of
American Marines. This was the first Federal armed force to be raised by
the young nation, and it antedated both the Federal army and navy, which
had, until that time, been matters of individual commonwealths. And
since that date Marines have participated honorably in all American
wars, and in some affairs, more or less interesting, where powder was
burnt but which do not rate as wars. (Under international law Marines
can be landed to protect the lives and property of nationals without a
declaration of war.)
Captain Richard Dale’s Marines served with John Paul Jones on the
_Bonhomme Richard_, and it was a grenade thrown from the tops that set
off the powder-magazine of H. M. S. _Serapis_ and turned the tide of
events in favor of the poor old _Richard_, in the fight off Flamborough
Head. There were United States Marines in Barney’s naval force, formed
across the Bladensburg Road when Admiral Cockburn’s people marched to
burn Washington; and they stayed there until the line was turned by
British regulars and they were all, including Barney, casualties; it was
the only material resistance the British met. Marines marched to Mexico
City in 1846; the red stripe on the blue trousers of officers and
non-commissioned officers commemorates to this day service in that war.
They served in the Civil War very widely: Marines died on Henry Hill, at
First Manassas, and on the fire-swept beaches in front of Fort Fisher,
and on the Mississippi around Vicksburg and Island No. 10. Colonel
Huntington’s Marines took Guantanamo, landing from U. S. S. _Marblehead_
in 1898. They marched to Pekin in 1900, and were in the legation guard
shut up there during the Boxer trouble. Cuba knows them, and the
Philippines. They were ashore at Vera Cruz in 1914; every uneasy and
volatile West Indian and Central American republic has become acquainted
with them in a professional way, and their appearance at storm centres
has always produced, very presently, a sweet tranquillity. The navy
takes them there, and sends bluejackets and chow along always. Every
capital ship carries a guard of them. Aboard ship, besides forming the
nucleus of the ship’s landing-force, they man the secondary batteries,
the five-inch guns; furnish guards of honor for the comings and goings
of the admiral and distinguished visitors, and so forth; perform all
manner of curious and annoying details; and post ship’s sentries whose
meticulous ideas about the enforcement of orders lacerate the souls of
jolly mariners, seamen, and engineer ratings. Normally, the strength of
the corps is twenty per cent of the navy; just now there are about
19,000. They constitute an organization within an organization, with
their own commandant, who functions under the secretary of the navy. The
rank and file are good enough Latinists to know what “Semper
Fidelis”—which is their word—means; and any private will assure you that
the Marines are a corps d’élite.
In 1917, when trained soldiers in the United States were at a premium,
the navy offered a brigade of Marines for service in France; it was
regarded desirable for Marine officers to have experience in large
operations with the army; for it is certain that close co-operation
between the army and the navy is a necessary thing in these days of
far-flung battle lines. The British distress at Gallipoli is a crying
witness to this principle. In a navy transport, therefore, U. S. S.
_Henderson_, the 5th Regiment of Marines embarked for France in June,
1917, with the first armed American forces. The 6th Marines followed.
The two regiments constituted the 4th Brigade, and served in the 2d
Division, U. S. Regular, until the division came home, in August, 1919.
About 30,000 Marines were sent to France; some 14,000 of these went as
replacements to maintain the two regiments of the 4th Brigade. A brigade
musters some 7,500 officers and men; this brigade took part in some very
interesting events.
Hereafter I have written of the Marines in the war with Germany; how
they went up, and what they did there, and how some of them came out
again. Being a Marine, I have tried to set forth simple tales without
comment. It is unnecessary to write what I think of my own people, nor
would it be, perhaps, in the best taste.
And I have written of Marines in this war because they are the folks I
know about myself. Those battle-fields were very large, and a man seldom
saw much or very far beyond his own unit, if he had a job in hand. As a
company officer, I always had a job. There is no intent to overlook
those very gallant gentlemen, our friends, the army. Their story is
ours, too.
JOHN W. THOMASON, JR.
[Illustration: [Soldier]]
[Illustration: [Soldiers]]
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. BATTLE-SIGHT 1
II. THE CHARGE AT SOISSONS 73
III. MARINES AT BLANC MONT 131
IV. MONKEY-MEAT 199
V. THE RHINE 227
[Illustration: [Soldiers]]
ILLUSTRATIONS
Flare—Front Line, Champagne _Frontispiece_
PAGE
The Leathernecks, the Old Timers _Facing page_
x
“They looked fine, coming in there ... through those _Facing page_
little tired Frenchmen” xiv
Occasional wounded Frenchmen drifted back 3
Sketches from Captain Thomason’s note-book _Facing page_
6
Platoon column in support, Champagne, 1918 _Facing page_
10
“Catch some alive——” _Facing page_
14
The 2d Engineers _Facing page_
20
A tortured area ... lit by flares and gun-flashes _Facing page_
24
The hill blazed into action—not all the rifle-fire had _Facing page_
gone astray 28
Pencil sketches made on scraps of paper, in Belleau Wood _Facing page_
32
Combat patrol _Facing page_
36
A sprinkling of old-time Marines _Facing page_
40
Some of them had been this way before 47
Boche grenadier _Facing page_
48
So many chaps were not with the brigade very long 51
The Boche had out his pistol _Facing page_
52
Certain designated individuals watched 57
Men fought in its corpse-choked thickets. 59
Bringing in German prisoners at St. Mihiel _Facing page_
60
Ration parties always sweated mightily and
anticipated exciting incidents 63
“Bang away, Lulu——” _Facing page_
68
The automatic-rifle men _Facing page_
78
Prussians from Von Boehn’s divisions in and around the _Facing page_
Bois de Belleau 82
“Keep on to the left until you meet the Moroccans, and _Facing page_
go forward....” 4.30 A. M., July 18, 1918 90
Listening-post rushed by Senegalese _Facing page_
94
A fighting swirl of Senegalese _Facing page_
98
Fighting from tree to tree in the woods south of _Facing page_
Soissons 102
With reason the Boche feared them worse than anything _Facing page_
living 106
The fighting in the woods at Soissons was close and _Facing page_
savage 110
A lieutenant of Marines and a German major, hand to hand _Facing page_
114
Sketches made by Captain Thomason at Soissons on scraps _Facing page_
of paper taken from a feldwebel’s note-book 118
Fighting north of Blanc Mont, Champagne 124
“Carry me back to Ole Virginny” _Facing page_
126
French grenadier—Blanc Mont _Facing page_
136
Those sawed-off shotguns they gave us at St. Mihiel _Facing page_
142
The shells began to drop into the trench 149
A flare during shelling in the front-line trenches _Facing page_
150
In the Essen trench—a runner _Facing page_
154
The morning of October 3d came gray and misty—a patrol _Facing page_
158
“Lordy, ain’t we ever goin’ to get outa this dam’ place
an’ get at ’em—?” 161
Others lay on the ground over which the battalion passed 163
“Oh, Lordy! They’ve got us bracketed!” _Facing page_
164
Before zero hour _Facing page_
168
Flanking fire _Facing page_
172
The hush still hung around them as they moved out of the
flat and began to ascend the long gray slope ahead 175
The first shell came screaming down the line from the _Facing page_
right 176
“Here comes a battalion runner—what’s up anyway?” _Facing page_
180
A few iron-souled Prussians—the Boche had such men—stood _Facing page_
up to meet bayonet with bayonet, and died that way 184
The last few men are always the most difficult to kill 187
A machine-gunner, Champagne 189
“Mademoiselle from Armentières” _Facing page_
194
“Hey, yuh dog-robbin’ battalion runner, you—what’s up!” _Facing page_
200
“He takes the war too serious” _Facing page_
204
The scout officer and the sergeant got him back some _Facing page_
way, both filled with admiration at his language 212
“War—sure—is—hell” _Facing page_
216
“Sweet Ad-o-line” _Facing page_
222
The cooks issued corn-bill hash and dared any man to _Facing page_
growl 228
A nice day for a hike 231
Men walked silent, remembering the old dead _Facing page_
232
One thick-bodied Boche ... His face in a cast of hate _Facing page_
236
They stood in stolid groups, wooden-faced _Facing page_
240
“I tell you, these Boche are dangerous! They have too _Facing page_
many children.” 243
The 1st Battalion of the Rhine—5th Marines took the road 245
“Long Boy” _Facing page_
248
FIX BAYONETS!
I
BATTLE SIGHT
THE FIGHTING AROUND THE BOIS DE BELLEAU
[Illustration: [Soldiers]]
I
BATTLE-SIGHT
THE FIGHTING AROUND THE BOIS DE BELLEAU
I
ATTACK
In the fields near Marigny Marines of the 1st Battalion of the 5th found
an amiable cow. There had been nothing in the way of rations that day;
there were no prospects. All hands took thought and designated a robust
Polish corporal as executioner. He claimed to have been a butcher in a
former existence. He was leading the cow decently away from the road
when a long gray car boomed up, halted with the touch of swank that
Headquarters chauffeurs always affect, and disgorged a very angry
colonel. The colonel’s eye was cold upon the interested group around the
cow. They stood now to attention, the cow alone remaining tranquil, with
a poppy dangling from her languid mouth.
“Lieutenant, what are you doing there——?”
“Sir, you see, the men haven’t had anything to eat, and I thought,
sir—we found this cow wanderin’ around—we couldn’t find any owner—we’d
like to chip in and buy her—we were goin’ to——”
“I see, sir, I see! You were going to kill this cow, the property of
some worthy French family. You will bear in mind, lieutenant, that we
are in France to protect the lives and property of our allies from the
Germans—Release that animal at once! Your rations will be distributed as
soon as possible—carry on—” The colonel departed, and four or five 77s
crashed into a little wood two hundred yards up the road. There were
more shells in the same place. “Hi! Brother Boche must think there’s a
battery over there!”—“Well, there ain’t—” The Marines sat down in the
wheat and observed the cow.
“Property of our gallant allies—yeh!—” “Old man’s in an awful
humor—wonder what—” The lieutenant sucked a straw reflectively. His
sergeant solaced himself with tobacco. The cow ruminated, quite content.
She had nourished herself at will for three delightful days, since her
people, in a farm over toward Torcy—where, at the minute, the Boche was
killing off a battalion of French territorials—had incomprehensibly
turned her out and vanished. Full-fed, she eyed the strangers without
emotion.
“I was a quartermaster sergeant once, sir,” said the platoon sergeant
dreamily. “I remember just what the cuts of beef are. There’d be fine
sirloin on that cow-critter, now.... Mr. Ashby (another flight of 77s
burst in the wood), if we was to take that cow over an’ tie her in that
brush—she oughten to be out here in the open, anyway—might draw fire ...
shell’s liable to hit anything, you know, sir——”
“Sergeant, you heard what the colonel said. But if you think she’d be
safer—I’d suggest volunteers. And by the way, sergeant, I want a piece
of tenderloin—the T-bone part——”
[Illustration:
Occasional wounded Frenchmen drifted back.
]
The cow was duly secured in the wood, men risking their lives thereby.
The Boche shelled methodically for two hours, and the Marines were
reduced to a fearful state of nerves—“Is that dam’ heifer gonna live
forever?—” Two or three kilometres away fighting was going on. The
lieutenant, with his glass, picked up far, running figures on the slope
of a hill. You caught a flicker, points of light on the gray-green
fields—bayonets. Occasional wounded Frenchmen wandered back, weary,
bearded men, very dirty. They looked with dull eyes at the
Americans—“_Très mauvais, là-bas! Beaucoup Boche, là_—” The Marines were
not especially interested. Their regiment had been a year in France,
training. Now they, too, were dirty and tired and very hungry. The war
would get along ... it always had.
A week ago, Memorial Day, there had been no drills. The 2d Division, up
from a tour in the quiet Verdun trenches, rested pleasantly around
Bourmont. Rumors of an attack by the 1st Division, at Cantigny, filtered
in. Cantigny was a town up toward Montdidier. Notions of geography were
the vaguest—but it was in the north, where all the heavy fighting was.
It appeared that the 2d was going up to relieve the 1st.... “Sure! we’ll
relieve ’em. But if they wanted a fight, why didn’t they let us know in
the first place?—We’d a-showed ’em what shock troops can do!”
The division set out in camions; in the neighborhood of Meaux they were
turned around and sent out the Paris-Metz road, along which the civilian
population from the country between the Chemin des Dames and the Marne,
together with the débris of a French army, was coming back. No man who
saw that road those first days of June ever forgot it. A stream of old
men and children and old and young women turned out of their homes
between two sunrises, with what they could carry in their hands. You saw
an ancient in a linen smock and sabots, trundling a wheelbarrow, whereon
rode a woman as old as himself, with a feather-bed and a selection of
copper pots and a string of garlic. There were families in amazing
horse-drawn vehicles, models of the Third Empire, and horses about as
old, clutching unreasonable selections of household effects—onyx clocks
and bird-cages and rabbits—what you like. Women carrying babies.
Children—solemn little boys in black pinafores, and curly-headed,
high-nosed little girls, trudging hand-in-hand. People of elegance and
refinement on inadequate shoes. Broad-faced peasants. Inhabitants of a
thousand peaceful little villages and farms, untouched by the war since
1914. Now the Boche was out again, and those quiet places, that had
drowsed in obscurity while generations lived and worked and died, were
presently to be known to all the world—names like Bouresches, and
Belleau, and Fismes, and Vierzy, and Fismettes. They walked with their
faces much on their shoulders, these people, and there was horror in
their eyes. The Marines took notice of another side of war.... “Hard on
poor folks, war is.” “You said it!”—“Say—think about my folks, an’ your
folks, out on the road like that!...” “Yeh. I’m thinkin’ about it. An’
when we meet that Boche, I’m gonna do something about it—Look—right
nice-lookin’ girl, yonder!”
There were French soldiers in the rout, too. Nearly all were wounded, or
in the last stages of exhaustion. They did not appear to be first-line
troops; they were old, bearded fellows of forty and forty-five,
territorials; or mean, unpleasant-looking Algerians, such troops as are
put in to hold a quiet sector. Seven or eight divisions of them had been
in the line between Soissons and Rheims, which was, until 27 May, a
quiet sector. On that day forty-odd divisions, a tidal wave of fighting
Germans, with the greatest artillery concentration the Boche ever
effected, was flung upon them, and they were swept away, as a levee goes
before a flood. They had fought; they had come back, fighting,
thirty-five miles in three days; and the Boche, though slowed up, was
still advancing. They were holding him along the Marne, and at
Château-Thierry a machine-gun battalion of the American 3d Division was
piling up his dead in heaps around the bridgeheads, but to the northwest
he was still coming. And to the northwest the 2d Division was gathering.
During the 2d, the 3d, and the 4th of June it grouped itself, first the
4th Brigade of Marines, with some guns, and then the regular infantrymen
of the 9th and 23d. Already, around Hautevesnes, there had been a brush
with advancing Germans, and the Germans were given a new experience:
rifle-fire that begins to kill at 800 yards; they found it very
interesting. This was 5 June; the battalion near Marigny, on the left of
the Marine Brigade, had a feeling that they were going in to-morrow....
The men thought lazily on events, and lounged in the wheat, and watched
that clump of trees—and at last an agonized bellow came on the echo of a
bursting shell—“Well—she’s stopped one! Thought she musta dug in—Le’s go
get it——”
Presently there was lots of steak, and later a bitter lesson was
repeated—mustn’t build cooking-fires with green wood, where the Boche
can see the smoke. But everybody lay down on full bellies. Before dark
the last French were falling back. Some time during the night Brigade
sent battle orders to the 1st Battalion of the 5th Marines, and at dawn
they were in a wood near Champillon. Nearly every man had steaks in his
mess-pan, and there was hope for cooking them for breakfast. Instead....
[Illustration:
Sketches from Captain Thomason’s note-book.
]
Those were before the days of lavish maps, to which the Americans
afterwards attained. There was one map to each company, exclusive
property of the captain. Platoon commanders had a look at it—“You’re
here. The objective is a square patch of woods a kilometre and a half
northeast, about. See?—this. Form your platoons in four waves—the guide
will be right. Third Battalion is advancing their flank to conform.
French on the left....” Platoons were formed in four waves, the attack
formation taught by the French, a formation proved in trench warfare,
where there was a short way to go, and you calculated on losing the
first three waves and getting the fourth one to the objective. The
Marines never used it again. It was a formation unadapted for open
warfare, and incredibly vulnerable. It didn’t take long to learn better,
but there was a price to pay for the learning.
The platoons came out of the woods as dawn was getting gray. The light
was strong when they advanced into the open wheat, now all starred with
dewy poppies, red as blood. To the east the sun appeared, immensely red
and round, a handbreadth above the horizon; a German shell burst black
across the face of it, just to the left of the line. Men turned their
heads to see, and many there looked no more upon the sun forever. “Boys,
it’s a fine, clear mornin’! Guess we get chow after we get done
molestin’ these here Heinies, hey?”—One old non-com—was it Jerry
Finnegan of the 49th?—had out a can of salmon, hoarded somehow against
hard times. He haggled it open with his bayonet, and went forward so,
eating chunks of goldfish from the point of that wicked knife.
“Finnegan”—his platoon commander, a young gentleman inclined to
peevishness before he’d had his morning coffee, was annoyed—“when you
are quite through with your refreshments, you can—damn well fix that
bayonet and get on with the war!” “Aye, aye, sir!” Finnegan was an old
Haitian soldier, and had a breezy manner with very young
lieutenants—“Th’ lootenant want some?”—Two hours later Sergeant Jerry
Finnegan lay dead across a Maxim gun with his bayonet in the body of the
gunner....
It was a beautiful deployment, lines all dressed and guiding true. Such
matters were of deep concern to this outfit. The day was without a
cloud, promising heat later, but now it was pleasant in the wheat, and
the woods around looked blue and cool. Pretty country, those rolling
wheat-lands northwest of Château-Thierry, with copses of trees and
little tidy forests where French sportsmen maintained hunting-lodges and
game-preserves. Since the first Marne there had been no war here. The
files found it very different from the mangled red terrain around
Verdun, and much nicer to look at. “Those poppies, now. Right pretty,
ain’t they?”—a tall corporal picked one and stuck it in his helmet
buckle, where it blazed against his leathery cheek. There was some
shelling—not much, for few of the German guns had caught up, the French
had lost all theirs, and the American artillery was still arriving.
[Illustration:
Platoon column in support, Champagne, 1918.
Drawn by Captain Thomason from notes made in front of Blanc Mont.
]
Across this wheat-field there were more woods, and in the edge of these
woods the old Boche, lots of him, infantry and machine-guns. Surely he
had seen the platoons forming a few hundred yards away—it is possible
that he did not believe his eyes. He let them come close before he
opened fire. The American fighting man has his failings. He is prone to
many regrettable errors. But the sagacious enemy will never let him get
close enough to see whom he is attacking. When he has seen the enemy,
the American regular will come on in. To stop him you must kill him. And
when he is properly trained and has somebody to say “Come on!” to him,
he will stand as much killing as anybody on earth.
The platoons, assailed now by a fury of small-arms fire, narrowed their
eyes and inclined their bodies forward, like men in heavy rain, and went
on. Second waves reinforced the first, fourth waves the third, as
prescribed. Officers yelled “Battle-sight! fire at will”—and the
leaders, making out green-gray, clumsy uniforms and round pot-helmets in
the gloom of the woods, took it up with Springfields, aimed shots.
Automatic riflemen brought their chaut-chauts into action from the hip—a
chaut-chaut is as accurate from the hip as it ever is—and wrangled
furiously with their ammunition-carriers—“Come on, kid—bag o’ clips!—”
“Aw—I lent it to Ed to carry, last night—didn’t think—” “Yeh, and Ed
lent it to a fence-post when he got tired—get me some off a casualty,
before I—” A very respectable volume of fire came from the advancing
platoons. There was yelling and swearing in the wheat, and the lines,
much thinned, got into the woods. Some grenades went off; there was
screaming and a tumult, and the “taka-taka-taka-taka” of the Maxim guns
died down. “Hi! Sergeant!—hold on! Major said he wanted some prisoners—”
“Well, sir, they looked like they was gonna start somethin’—” “All
right! All right! but you catch some alive the next place, you hear?—”
“Quickly, now—get some kind of a line—” “Can’t make four waves—” “Well,
make two—an’ put the chaut-chauts in the second—no use gettin’’em bumped
off before we can use ’em—” The attack went on, platoons much smaller,
sergeants and corporals commanding many of them.
A spray of fugitive Boche went before the attack, holding where the
ground offered cover, working his light machine-guns with devilish
skill, retiring, on the whole, commendably. He had not expected to fight
a defensive battle here, and was not heavily intrenched, but the place
was stiff with his troops, and he was in good quality, as Marine
casualty lists were presently to show. There was more wheat, and more
woods, and obscure savage fighting among individuals in a brushy ravine.
The attack, especially the inboard platoons of the 49th and 67th
Companies, burst from the trees upon a gentle slope of wheat that
mounted to a crest of orderly pines, black against the sky. A
three-cornered coppice this side of the pines commanded the slope; now
it blazed with machine-guns and rifles; the air was populous with wicked
keening noises. Most of the front waves went down; all hands, very
sensibly, flung themselves prone. “Can’t walk up to these babies—”
“No—won’t be enough of us left to get on with the war—” “Pass the word:
crawl forward, keepin’ touch with the man on your right! Fire where you
can—” That officer, a big man, who had picked up a German light
machine-gun somewhere, with a vague idea of using it in a pinch, or, in
any case, keeping it for a souvenir, received the attention of a heavy
Maxim and went down with a dozen bullets through his chest.
[Illustration:
“Catch some alive——”
]
Men crawled forward; the wheat was agitated, and the Boche, directing
his fire by observers in tree-tops, browned the slope industriously. Men
were wounded, wounded again as the lines of fire swept back and forth,
and finally killed. It helped some to bag the feldwebels in the trees;
there were men in that line who could hit at 750 yards, three times out
of five. Sweating, hot, and angry with a bleak, cold anger, the Marines
worked forward. They were there, and the Germans, and there was nothing
else in the clanging world. An officer, risking his head above the
wheat, observed progress, and detached a corporal with his squad to get
forward by the flank. “Get far enough past that flank gun, now, close as
you can, and rush it—we’ll keep it busy.”... Nothing sounds as mad as
rifle-fire, staccato, furious—The corporal judged that he was far
enough, and raised with a yell, his squad leaping with him. He was not
past the flank; two guns swung that way, and cut the squad down like a
grass-hook levels a clump of weeds.... They lay there for days, eight
Marines in a dozen yards, face down on their rifles. But they had done
their job. The men in the wheat were close enough to use the
split-second interval in the firing. They got in, cursing and stabbing.
Meanwhile, to the left a little group of men lay in the wheat under the
very muzzle of a gun that clipped the stalks around their ears and
riddled their combat packs—firing high by a matter of inches and the
mercy of God. A man can stand just so much of that. Life presently
ceases to be desirable; the only desirable thing is to kill that gunner,
kill him with your hands! One of them, a corporal named Geer, said: “By
God, let’s get him!” And they got him. One fellow seized the spitting
muzzle and up-ended it on the gunner; he lost a hand in the matter.
Bayonets flashed in, and a rifle-butt rose and fell. The battle tore
through the coppice. The machine-gunners were brave men, and many of the
Prussian infantry were brave men, and they died. A few streamed back
through the brush, and hunters and hunted burst in a frantic medley on
the open at the crest of the hill. Impartial machine-guns, down the hill
to the left, took toll of both. Presently the remnants of the assault
companies were panting in the trees on the edge of the hill. It was the
objective of the attack, but distance had ceased to have any meaning,
time was not, and the country was full of square patches of woods. In
the valley below were more Germans, and on the next hill. Most of the
officers were down, and all hands went on.
They went down the brushy slope, across a little run, across a road
where two heavy Maxims were caught sitting, and mopped up and up the
next long, smooth slope. Some Marines branched off down that road and
went into the town of Torcy. There was fighting in Torcy, and a French
avion reported Americans in it, but they never came out again ... a
handful of impudent fellows against a battalion of Sturm-truppen....
Then the men who mounted the slope found themselves in a cleared area,
full of orderly French wood-piles, and apparently there was a
machine-gun to every wood-pile. Jerry Finnegan died here, sprawled
across one of them. Lieutenant Somers died here. One lieutenant found
himself behind a wood-pile, with a big auto-rifleman. Just across from
them, very near, a machine-gun behind another wood-pile was searching
for them. The lieutenant, all his world narrowed to that little place,
peered vainly for a loophole; the sticks were jumping and shaking as the
Maxim flailed them; bullets rang under his helmet. “Here, Morgan,” he
said, “I’ll poke my tin hat around this side, and you watch and see if
you can get the chaut-chaut on them—” He stuck the helmet on his
bayonet, and thrust it out. Something struck it violently from the
point, and the rifle made his fingers tingle. The chaut-chaut went off,
once. In the same breath there was an odd noise above him ... the
machine-gun ... he looked up. Morgan’s body was slumping down to its
knees; it leaned forward against the wood, the chaut-chaut, still
grasped in a clenched hand, coming to the ground butt first. The man’s
head was gone from the eyes up; his helmet slid stickily back over his
combat pack and lay on the ground.... “My mother,” reflected the
lieutenant, “will never find my grave in this place!” He picked up the
chaut-chaut, and examined it professionally, noting a spatter of little
thick red drops on the breech, and the fact that the clip showed one
round expended. The charging handle was back. He got to his feet with
deliberation, laid the gun across the wood-pile, and sighted ... three
Boche with very red faces; their eyes looked pale under their deep
helmets.... He gave them the whole clip, and they appeared to wilt. Then
he came away from there. Later he was in the little run at the foot of
the hill with three men, all wounded. He never knew how he got there. It
just happened.
Later in the day the lieutenant was back on the pine-crested hill, now
identified as Hill 142. Captain Hamilton was there, one or two other
officers, and a handful of the 49th and 67th Companies; a semblance of a
line was organized. “Nothing on the right or left; all right, we’ll just
stay here—” Some people from the 8th Company had a Hotchkiss gun, and
some Boche Maxims were put in position. It was said that Blake, of the
17th, had been up, and was bringing the company in. The Boche indulged
himself in violent shelling and raked the hill savagely with all the
machine-guns in the world. From the direction of Torcy a counter-attack
developed; the Boche was filtering cleverly forward and forming
somewhere on the Torcy road, in cover. The Marines were prone, slings
adjusted, killing him. “It’s a quarter-point right windage—” “Naw! not a
breath of air! Use zero—” A file of sweating soldiers, burdened with
picks and shovels in addition to bandoleers and combat gear, came
trotting from the right. A second lieutenant, a reddish, rough-looking
youngster, clumped up and saluted. “You in charge here?” he said to the
Marine officer. “I’m Lieutenant Wythe of the 2d Engineers, with a
detachment. I’m to report to you for orders.” “Well—captain’s right up
yonder—how many men you got?” “Twenty-two, sir—” “Fine! That makes
thirty-six of us, includin’ me—just flop right here, and we’ll hold this
line. Orders are to dig in here—but that can wait—see yonder——?”
Those Engineers, their packs went one way and their tools another, and
they cast themselves down happily. “What range, buddy?—usin’ any
windage—?” A hairy non-com got into his sling and laid out a little pile
of clips.... There was always good feeling between the Marines of the 2d
Division and the Regular Army units that formed it, but the Marines and
the 2d Engineers—“Say, if I ever got a drink, a 2d Engineer can have
half of it!—Boy, they dig trenches and mend roads all night, and they
fight all day! An’ when us guys get all killed off, they just come up
an’ take over the war! They’s no better folks anywhere than the
Engineers....”
[Illustration:
The 2d Engineers.
]
The Boche wanted Hill 142; he came, and the rifles broke him, and he
came again. All his batteries were in action, and always his
machine-guns scourged the place, but he could not make head against the
rifles. Guns he could understand; he knew all about bombs and
auto-rifles and machine-guns and trench-mortars, but aimed, sustained
rifle-fire, that comes from nowhere in particular and picks off men—it
brought the war home to the individual and demoralized him.
And trained Americans fight best with rifles. Men get tired of carrying
grenades and chaut-chaut clips; the guns cannot, even under most
favorable conditions, keep pace with the advancing infantry. Machine-gun
crews have a way of getting killed at the start; trench-mortars and
one-pounders are not always possible. But the rifle and bayonet goes
anywhere a man can go, and the rifle and the bayonet win battles. Toward
midday, this 6th of June, 1918, the condition around Hill 142
stabilized. A small action, fought by battalions over a limited area of
no special importance, it gave the Boche something new to think about,
and it may be that people who write histories will date an era from it.
Between attacks the stretcher-bearers and the Red Cross men on both
sides did their utmost for the wounded who were scattered through the
wheat around the hill, and who now, under the torture of stiffening
wounds and the hot sun, began to cry out. As the afternoon advanced, you
heard pitiful voices! little and thin across the fields: “_Ach, Himmel,
hilf, hilf! Brandighe!... Liebe Gott, brandighe!_”... “First-aid—this
way, First-aid, for the love of God!”... From most wounds men do not
appear to suffer greatly at first. There is the hot impulse of the
attack, and perhaps a certain shock from the missile, so that the nerves
are numb. One has gone forward with the tide at the highest; life is a
light thing to lay down, death a light thing to venture; yonder is the
enemy; one has come a long way to meet him, and now the affair can be
taken up personally. Then something hits—the wheat cuts off all the
world. An infernal racket goes on somewhere—Springfields and Mausers,
Maxim guns and Hotchkiss—sometimes closer, sometimes receding. Bullets
zip and drone around. There may be shells, shrapnel, and H. E.,
searching the ground, one can hear them coming. “Is it gonna hit me—is
it gonna hit me, O Lawd—Christ! that was close!” Presently pain, in
recurring waves. Pride may lock a man’s lips awhile ... left long
enough, most men break, and no blame to them. A hundred brave dead,
lying where the guns cut them down, are not so pitiful as one poor
wailing fellow in a dressing-station....
[Illustration:
A tortured area ... lit by flares and gun-flashes.
]
Forward of the hill, German stretcher-bearers moved openly, unmolested,
at first. The Marines watched them curiously. The enemy, his works are
always interesting. A sergeant said: “Hi! Look at those Fritzies yonder,
right off the road, there—” A lieutenant got his glass on them; two big
men, one with a yellow beard, wearing Red Cross brassards. They carried
a loaded stretcher; it looked like a man lying with his knees drawn up,
under a blanket. “Humph! Got him well covered—officer, probably.” One
stumbled, or the wind blew, and an end of the blanket flapped back,
disclosing unmistakably the blunt snout of a heavy Maxim.—“So that’s it,
eh? Slover—Jennings—Heald—got a rifle, Cannon? Range 350—let ’em have
it—we can play that game, too—” Thereafter it was hard on Red Cross men
and wounded; hard, in fact, on everybody. Like reasonable people, the
Americans were willing to learn from the Boche, from anybody who could
teach them; and if the Boche played the game that way—they could meet
him at it. “Schrechlichkeit—if he wants frightfulness, we can give it to
him—” Later there was a letter, taken from a dead feldwebel in the Bois
de Belleau—“The Americans are savages. They kill everything that
moves....”
Late in the afternoon a great uproar arose to the right. There was more
artillery up now, more machine-guns, more of everything. The 3d
Battalion of the 6th Marines and the 3d Battalion of the 5th attacked
the town called Bouresches and the wood known as Bois de Belleau. They
attacked across the open, losing hideously. Platoons were shot down
entire. The colonel commanding the 6th Regiment, farther forward than
regimental commanders have any business being, was shot and evacuated.
Lieutenant Robertson got into Bouresches, with twenty men out of some
hundred who started, threw the Boche out, and held it. They gained a
footing in the rocky ledges at the edge of the Bois de Belleau,
suffering much from what was believed to be a machine-gun nest at this
point. They tried to leave it and go on, with a containing force to
watch it; they found that the whole wood was a machine-gun nest.
Night descended over a tortured area of wheat and woodland, lit by
flares and gun-flashes, flailed by machine-guns, and in too many places
pitiful with crying of wounded who had lain all the day untended in a
merciless sun. Stretcher-bearers and combat patrols roamed over it in
the dark. Water parties and ration parties groped back from forward
positions over unknown trails. There were dog-fights all over the place,
wild alarms, and hysterical outbreaks of rifle-fire. It was the same
with the Boche; he knew the ground better, and he was determined to
repossess it. His people filtered back through the American strong
points, for the Marines did not hold a continuous line; isolated
positions were connected by patrols and machine-guns laid for
interlocking fire.
At the southern angle of Hill 142 the 49th Company put out a
listening-post—one man down the slope a little way, to watch for
visitors. In the night there was a trampling, a grunt, and one
scream—“Boche!”—At once the hill blazed into action—weary men overspent,
they fired into the dark until their pieces were hot. And after they
found the listening-post fellow, bayoneted. And down the hill a little
huddle of new dead. Not all the rifle-fire had gone astray.
Back in Brigade, officers bent over maps and framed orders for a
stronger attack on the Bois de Belleau at dawn.... Brigade was writing
also to Division: “... casualties severe ... figures on which to base
call for replacements will be submitted as soon as possible....”
[Illustration:
The hill blazed into action—not all the rifle-fire had gone astray.
]
II
REPLACEMENTS
At the crossroads beyond La Voie du Chatelle they met the War.
Behind them, crammed somehow into weeks, were Quantico, the transport,
Brest, a French troop-train. Then there was the golden country around
St. Aignan, the “Saint Onion” of Americans, a country full of growing
wheat and fields of red-topped clover, picture-book houses, and neat
little forests. A country stripped of men, where the women were
competent and kindly. Almost any place you could get noble omelets and
white wine that tasted better than chlorinated water—good kick in it,
too. “I tell you, Boots, an’ you remember it, this here France is a fine
place to have a war in. Now, Haiti, an’ in Nicaragua, an’ in China, it’s
nowhere near as good. I hope Germany will be as good, when—” So Sergeant
McGee, with his double rows of ribbons and his hash marks, over a
canteen full of _eau de vie_—old-timer he was.
The war was represented by demoniac non-coms, instructors in this and
that. Bayonet drills—“Come on, now; lemme hear you—‘_What do we wash our
bay’nets in?—German blood!_’—Aw—sing out like you meant it, you dam’
replacements! I’ll swear, it’s a shame to feed animals like you to the
Germans—” Gas-mask drill—“Take more than five seconds, an’ your Maw gets
a Gold Star—Now!—the gas-alert position—O, for Gawd’s sake, you guy, you
wit’ the two left feet—” “But, sergeant, I find that I have a certain
difficulty—” Sergeants also swear terribly.... There was every kind of
drill, eight hours a day of it, and police work.
Rumors of great battles in the north. Glum and sad civilians—they were
glum and sad everywhere in France, that spring of 1918—talking in
anxious groups after the town crier with his drum passed. Another
troop-train—maybe the same train that was carelessly left alongside a
train containing the wine ration for some French division, the papers in
which case are probably still accumulating. Camions after that. The
replacements debussed late of a June afternoon and went up a great white
road between exactly spaced poplars. They marched first in column of
squads, then in column of files, platoons on opposite sides of the empty
road. At the crest of a slope the column stopped. You could see, hanging
above the sky-line to the north and east, curious shapes—“Look like a
elephant’s head, bows on, wit’ his ears out, don’t they, sergeant?” The
tall non-com who was guiding the column—a silent man—observed to the
replacement officer in charge: “We’ll stop here, sir. Boche sausages
yonder—observation balloons—see the whole country. We’ll wait till
dark.”
[Illustration:
Pencil sketches made on scraps of paper, in Belleau Wood.
]
The detachment was glad to fall out, off the road. It sat in little
groups, silent for the most part, and listened to a mutter and a rumble
in the direction of the blimps. A dark, high plane came into view from
the east; its motor filled the ear with a deep, vibrant droning, oddly
ominous. All at once the air around it was stippled with little
puff-balls, white against the blue. You could hear the drumming of
artillery, and the faint cough of bursting shrapnel, very far off. The
plane went away. “—Yes, sir. Anti-aircraft stuff. Pretty, but it seldom
hits anything—though it does run ’em off. Theirs is black....” The
sergeant only spoke when spoken to; there was a look about his eyes—he
was the survivor of a platoon that was sixty strong two days before. The
sun set, and the day drowsed into the long twilight. Presently the
sergeant said: “We can move now, sir.” The replacements moved, making no
conversation.
A little country road led them off the highway. They passed a shattered
farmhouse where a few soldiers lounged in the dusk. “Regimental, sir.
Gets shelled a lot. No, sir, they don’t expect you to report. Somebody
on the road to meet you....” A little group of officers rose out of the
ditch, yawning. They looked slack and tired. “Replacement column? You in
charge? Yes—assignments made back in Brigade. You’ll go to—Henry: your
battalion gets a hundred and seventy, with five officers. Take ’em off
the head of the column—tell Major Turrill——”
The detachment followed the officer called Henry, who set what they
considered an immoderate pace. He passed the word: “Don’t bunch up; if a
plane comes over low, don’t look up at it—he can see your faces; no
smokin’, an’ don’t talk—” Sergeant McGee thought audibly: “Where have I
seen that bird? Was it in Managua, that time they broke me for ... was
it in Cuba?—where the devil—he was somebody’s sergeant-major—” They
turned off the lane and went through a wheat-field. The sky was
sword-blade blue, with a handful of stars. There was a loom of woods
ahead, the tops of them outlined by greenish flares ceaselessly
ascending somewhere beyond. They heard a machine-gun. “Sounds like one
of these here steam-riveters, now, don’t it?...” A vagrant puff of wind
blew a smell across the column, a smell terrible and searing to the
nose. “Phew! dead hawses—” The officer named Henry spoke crisply. “Those
are not,” he said, “dead horses.” The replacements sweated and felt
cold, and thirsty too. They went on, very silent.
They went through a gap in a hedge and were at another crossroads. “Fall
out here, an’ form combat packs. Leave your stuff under the hedge. Take
one blanket. Come on—quickly, now!—an’ don’t bunch up!—” The
replacements formed combat packs expertly, remembering Parris Island and
Quantico. “Smartly, now! Come by here, fill your pockets—each man take
two boxes hard bread—Where’ll you carry them? How in hell do I
know—There!”
Two goods-boxes sat close together, and the men filed between them. One
box had dried prunes in it, the other bread. “Don’t stop! don’t stop!
Right down that road, an’ keep movin’!”
[Illustration:
Combat patrol.
]
Out over the woods a sound started, a new sound. It was a rumbling
whine, it grew to a roar, and a 77 crashed down just beyond the
crossroads. A cloud blacker than the night leaped up, shot with red
fire—“Lie down, all hands!” Another landed at once; the air was full of
singing particles. The men, flat on their faces, in the dark, waited
numbly for the next order. There were a dozen or so shells all around
the place. The last one hit between the two goods-boxes, where a man was
lying. The boxes and the man vanished in a ruddy cloud—better than if
he’d gotten it in the belly and rolled around screaming.... There were
no more shells—“Say, you know, I saw a arm an’ a rifle goin’ up wit’
that burst—I—who was he, anyway?—” “Keep quiet, there! All right! on
your feet—right down that road—” the officer ordered, and added to
himself—“Dam’ it! Should have remembered they shell La Voie du Chatelle
every night this time—but they acted fine....” A voice spoke up,
excited, amused: “Say! Sergeant McGee—anything like that in Vera Cruz?”
“Pipe down, you Boot.”
They went down a wood-road, black as a pocket, the files pressing close
to keep the man ahead in sight. They went lightly, a weight off each
man’s mind. They had been shelled, and nobody had run away, and only one
man hurt! Most men are afraid when they go up to the front; and what
they fear most is the fear of seeming afraid.... They were ordered to
fix bayonets. The road began to have inequalities in it. There were
noises, explosions, around in the dark. The machine-guns sounded nearer;
the flares showed more starkly on the sky. A man fell into a hole, and
there was an acrid smell that caught at your windpipe. Just ahead, down
the road, came a bright flash and a roar, and fragments ripped through
the woods, and they heard a lamentable crying, getting weaker:
“First-aid! first-aid—” The column came to a dead mule and the wreck of
a cart lying athwart the road, and a smoking hole, and a smell of high
explosive, and the sharp reek of blood. There was a struggling group,
somebody working swiftly in the dark, a whiteness of bandages, and the
white blur of a man’s torso. “Lie still, damn you!”—“O, Jesus! Jesus
Christ! Jesus Christ!—Ahhhhh! Go easy, you—” “Hell, I know it hurts,
guy, but I got to get this bandage on, haven’t I? Come on—quit kickin’—”
Passing around the mule, a man stepped on something neither hard nor
soft—nothing else on earth feels that way—and he floundered to one side,
cursing hysterically.—“Quiet, back there—pass the word, no talking!” The
files obediently passed the word. The column groped on in the dark.
It came out of the woods into a pale stone town—Champillon. There were
no lights in the houses; the place had an air of death about it. There
was a well by Champillon, where the water-parties came back from the
lines in the night for water.... One canteenful was a man’s allowance
for each twenty-four hours. Men, after a time, made a shift to wash and
shave and live not too thirsty out of one canteen a day. The
replacements met two spectres who bore between them, on a long stick,
twenty-odd canteens—the canteens of a platoon. “Hey! Guy!—” this in a
hoarse whisper—“you comin’ up to relieve us?” “Hell, no!” a guide
answered. “These is 1st Battalion replacements.” “I’ll be goddam’. Gonna
leave us in forever—Ain’t we ever gonna be relieved?—” “Close up, there,
and silence——”
[Illustration:
A sprinkling of old-time Marines.
]
There was a Ph.D. from Harvard in that sweating file, a big, pale,
unhandy private, hounded habitually by sergeants, and troubled with
indigestion and patriotism. For all his training, a pack was not at home
on his shoulders or a rifle easy in his hands. He was aware of his
panoply of war—the full belt dragging at his loins, the straps that cut
into his shoulders, the bulge of prunes in his blouse-pockets, and his
Springfield, increasingly heavy. He reflected, feeling for the road with
clumsy hobnails—for he was blind in the dark—“Now, those men are
undoubtedly of the professional-soldier type. It is all a business with
them. They are tired and they want to rest, and they say so frankly. No
matter how tired I was, I’d never have the courage to say I wanted a
relief. I’d want to awfully, but——”
He thought of the pleasant study back Cambridge way, of the
gold-and-blue sergeant under the “First to Fight!” recruiting
poster—“Your job, too, fella! Come on an’ help lick the Hun! You don’t
wanta wait to be drafted, a big guy like you! We can use you in the
Marines—” A hearty, red-necked ruffian—extremely competent in his
vocation, no doubt. Good enough chaps. Yes ... but ... tea by a sea-coal
fire in the New England twilight, and clever talk of art and philosophic
anarchism—one wrote fastidious essays on such things for the more
discriminating reviews ... scholarly abstractions.... Of all the stupid,
ignorant, uncivilized things, a war! Who coined that phrase, civilized
warfare? There was no such thing!... Here, in the most civilized country
on earth.... The neighborhood of Château-Thierry ... Montaigne’s town,
wasn’t it? The kings of France had a château near it, once. And yet it
was always a cockpit ... since Ætius rolled back Attila in the battle of
the nations, at Châlons—Napoleon fought Champ-Aubert and Montmirail
around here—always war——
The column was through Champillon, dipping into a black hollow. More
shell-holes in the road here.... All at once there was a new shell-hole,
and the doctor of philosophy, sometime private of Marines, lay beside
it, very neatly beheaded, with the rifle, that had been such a bore to
keep clean, across his knees, and dried prunes spilling out of the
pockets that he never had learned to button. The column went on. At dawn
a naval medico attached to the Marine Brigade, with a staff officer,
passed that way.
“Odd, the wounds you see,” observed the naval man, professionally
interested. He looked curiously. “I couldn’t have done a neater
decapitation than that myself. Wonder who—took his identification tags
with it. I see. Replacement, by his uniform—” (For the 5th and 6th
Regiments had long since worn out their forester-green Marine uniforms,
and were wearing army khaki, while the replacements came in new green
clothing.) The staff officer picked up the rifle, snapped back the bolt,
and squinted expertly down the bore. “Disgustin’,” he said. “Sure he was
a replacement. You never catch an old-timer with a bore like
that—filthy! Bet there hasn’t been a rag through it in a week. You know,
surgeon, I was looking at some of the rifles of that bunch of
machine-gunners lying in the brush just across from Battalion; they were
beautiful. Never saw better kept pieces. Fine soldiers in a lot of ways,
these Boche!...”
Meantime the column had passed into heavier woods, and halted where the
rifles ahead sounded very near. They saw dugouts, betrayed by the thread
of candle-light around the edges of the blankets that cloaked their
entrances. One was a dressing-station, by the sound and the smell of it.
The officer named Henry ducked into the other. There a stocky major sat
up on the floor and rolled a cigarette, which he lighted at a guttering
candle. “Replacements in? Well, what do they look like?—”
“Same men I saw in the training area last month, sir. A sprinkling of
old-time Marines—Sergeant McGee, that we broke for something or other in
Panama, is with ’em—and the rest of them are young college lads and boys
off the farm—fine material, sir. Not much drill, but they probably know
how to shoot, they take orders, and they don’t scare worth a cent!
Shelled coming in, at Voie du Chatelle, and some more this side of
Champillon—several casualties. No confusion—nothing like a panic—laid
down and waited for orders—did exactly as they were told—fine men, sir!”
“All right! All right! Rush ’em right up to the companies. Guides are
waiting around outside—company commanders have their orders about
distribution. Start with the 49th and drop ’em off as you go along.
They’ll do—they’ll have to!...”
III
THE BOIS DE BELLEAU
They tried new tactics to get the bayonets into the Bois de Belleau.
Platoons—very lean platoons now—formed in small combat groups, deployed
in the wheat, and set out toward the gloomy wood. Fifty batteries were
working on it, all the field pieces of the 2d Division, and what the
French would lend. The shells ripped overhead, and the wood was full of
leaping flame, and the smoke of H. E. and shrapnel. The fire from its
edge died down. It was late in the afternoon; the sun was low enough to
shine under the edge of your helmet. The men went forward at a walk,
their shoulders hunched over, their bodies inclined, their eyes on the
edge of the wood, where shrapnel was raising a hell of a dust. Some of
them had been this way before; their faces were set bleakly. Others were
replacements, a month or so from Quantico; they were terribly anxious to
do the right thing, and they watched zealously the sergeants and the
corporals and the lieutenants who led the way with canes.
[Illustration:
Some of them had been this way before.
]
One such group, over to the left, followed a big young officer, a
replacement, too, but a man who had spent a week in Bouresches and was
to be considered a veteran, as such things went in those days, when so
many chaps were not with the brigade very long. He had not liked
Bouresches, which he entered at night, and where he lived obscenely in
cellars with the dead, and saw men die in the orange flash of
minenwerfer shells, terribly and without the consolation of glory. Here,
at last, was attack.... He thought, absently watching his flank to see
that it guided true—guide centre was the word—of the old men who had
brought him up to tales of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, in the War
of the Southern Confederacy. Great battles, glamorous attacks, full of
the color and the high-hearted élan of chivalry. Jackson at
Chancellorsville; Pickett at Gettysburg—that was a charge for you—the
red Southern battle-flags, leading like fierce bright-winged birds the
locked ranks of fifteen gray brigades, and the screeching Rebel yell,
and the field-music, fife and drum, rattling out “The Girl I Left Behind
Me”:
“Oh, if ever I get through this war,
And the Lincoln boys don’t find me,
I’m goin’ to go right back again
To the girl I left behind me——”
No music here, no flags, no bright swords, no lines of battle charging
with a yell. Combat groups of weary men, in drab and dirty uniforms,
dressed approximately on a line, spaced “so that one shrapnel-burst
cannot include more than one group,” laden like mules with gas-masks,
bandoleers, grenades, chaut-chaut clips, trudging forward without haste
and without excitement, they moved on an untidy wood where shells were
breaking, a wood that did not answer back, or show an enemy. In its
silence and anonymity it was far more sinister than any flag-crowned
rampart, or stone walls topped with crashing volleys from honest old
black-powder muskets—he considered these things and noted that the wood
was very near, and that the German shells were passing high and breaking
in the rear, where the support companies were waiting. His own artillery
appeared to have lifted its range; you heard the shells farther in, in
the depths of the wood.
[Illustration:
Boche grenadier.
]
[Illustration:
So many chaps were not with the brigade very long.
]
The air snapped and crackled all around. The sergeant beside the
lieutenant stopped, looked at him with a frozen, foolish smile, and
crumpled into a heap of old clothes. Something took the kneecap off the
lieutenant’s right knee and his leg buckled under him. He noticed, as he
fell sideways, that all his men were tumbling over like duck-pins; there
was one fellow that spun around twice, and went over backward with his
arms up. Then the wheat shut him in, and he heard cries and a moaning.
He observed curiously that he was making some of the noise himself. How
could anything hurt so? He sat up to look at his knee—it was bleeding
like the deuce!—and as he felt for his first-aid packet, a bullet seared
his shoulder, knocking him on his back again. For a while he lay quiet
and listened to odd, thrashing noises around him, and off to the left a
man began to call, very pitifully. At once he heard more machine-gun
fire—he hadn’t seemed to hear it before—and now the bullets were
striking the ground and ricocheting with peculiar whines in every
direction. One ripped into the dirt by his cheek and filled his eyes and
his mouth with dust. The lamentable crying stopped; most of the
crawling, thrashing noises stopped. He himself was hit again and again,
up and down his legs, and he lay very still.
Where he lay he could just see a tree-top—he was that near the wood. A
few leaves clung to it; he tried to calculate, from the light on them,
how low the sun was, and how long it would be until dark.
Stretcher-bearers would be along at dark, surely. He heard voices, so
close that he could distinguish words:
“_Caput?_”
“_Nein—nicht alles_—”
[Illustration:
The Boche had out his pistol.
]
Later, forgetting those voices, he tried to wriggle backward into a
shell-hole that he remembered passing. He was hit again, but somehow he
got into a little shell-hole, or got his body into it, head first. He
reflected that he had bled so much that a head-downward position
wouldn’t matter, and he didn’t want to be hit again. Men all dead, he
supposed. He couldn’t hear any of them. He seemed to pass out, and then
to have dreamy periods of consciousness. In one of these periods he saw
the sky over him was dark, metallic blue; it would be nearly night. He
heard somebody coming on heavy feet, and cunningly shut his eyes to a
slit ... playing dead.... A German officer, a stiff, immaculate fellow,
stood over him, looking at him. He lay very still, trying not to
breathe. The Boche had out his pistol, a short-barrelled Luger, rested
it on his left forearm, and fired deliberately. He felt the bullet range
upward through the sole of his foot, and something excruciating happened
in his ankle. Then one called, and the German passed from his field of
vision, returning his pistol as he went....
Later, trying to piece things together, he was in an ambulance, being
jolted most infernally. And later he asked a nurse by his bed: “I say,
nurse, tell me—did we get the Bois de Belleau?”—“Why, last June!” she
said. “It’s time you were coming out of it! This is August....”
IV
COMING OUT
The battalion lay in unclean holes on the far face of Bois de Belleau,
which was “now U. S. Marine Corps entirely.” The sun was low over Torcy,
and all the battalion, except certain designated individuals, slept. The
artillery, Boche and American, was engaged in counter-battery work, and
the persecuted infantry enjoyed repose. The senior lieutenant of the
49th Company, bedded down under a big rock with his orderly, came up
from infinite depths of slumber with his pistol out, all in one swift
motion. You awoke like that in the Bois de Belleau.... Jennings, company
runner, showed two buck-teeth at him and said: “Sir, the cap’n wants to
see you——”
They crawled delicately away from the edge of the wood, to a trail that
took you back under cover, and found the captain frying potatoes in
bacon grease. “Going out to-night, by platoons. Start as soon as it’s
dark, with the 17th. We are next. 6th Regiment outfit makin’ the
relief—96th Company for us. They’ve been here before, so you needn’t
leave anybody to show them the ground. Soon as they get to you, beat it.
Got a sketch of the map? Have your platoon at Bois Gros-Jean—you know,
beyond Brigade, on the big road—at daylight. Battalion has chow
there.—Got it?—Good——”
The lieutenant went happily back to his men. The word had already gotten
around, by the grape-vine route, and grinning heads stuck out of every
hole. “Well, sergeant, pass the word to get set—goin’ out to-night—”
“Yes, sir! Ready right now! Is the division bein’ relieved?”—“No, 6th
Regiment comin’ in—” “Well, sir, I hope to God they ain’t late. Did you
hear, sir, anything about us goin’ back to St. Denis, and gettin’
liberty in Paris, an’ a month’s rest—” That unaccountable delusion
persisted in the Marine Brigade through all of June and into July. It
never happened. “No, I didn’t hear any such thing. But it’s enough to
get out of here. This place is like the wrath of God!”
[Illustration:
Certain designated individuals watched.
]
It was. To begin with, it had been a tangled, rocky wood of a few
kilometres, the shooting-preserve of a French family in happier days.
Even now you could see where a sort of hunting-lodge had been; they said
some Marines had crawled in and bombed a Boche headquarters out of it.
The first of June it was rather a pretty place, with great trees and
flowery underbrush, all green and new in the full tide of spring. It was
a place of no particular military importance other than local. But the
chance of war made it a symbol. The German rolled down to it like a
flood, driving before him forlorn fragments of wrecked French divisions,
all the way from the Chemin des Dames. It was the spearhead of his last
great thrust on Paris. The Americans of the 2d Division were new troops,
untried in this war, regarded with uneasy hopefulness by the Allies.
Their successes came when the Allies very greatly needed a success; for
not since 1914 had the Boche appeared so terrible as in this, the spring
of 1918. For a space the world watched the Bois de Belleau uneasily, and
then with pride and an awakened hope. Men saw in it, foreshadowed,
Soissons, and the 8th of August, that Ludendorf was to call “the black
day of the war,” and an event in a car on a railroad siding, in the
misty November forest of Senlis.
But the men who fought here saw none of these things. Good German
troops, with every device of engineering skill, and all their cunning
gained in war, poured into the wood. Battalions of Marines threw
themselves against it. Day and night for nearly a month men fought in
its corpse-choked thickets, killing with bayonet and bomb and
machine-gun. It was gassed and shelled and shot into the semblance of
nothing earthly. The great trees were all down; the leaves were blasted
off, or hung sere and blackened. It was pockmarked with shell craters
and shallow dugouts and hasty trenches. It was strewn with all the
débris of war, Mauser rifles and Springfields, helmets, German and
American, unexploded grenades, letters, knapsacks, packs, blankets,
boots; a year later, it is said, they were still finding unburied dead
in the depths of it. Finally it was taken, by inches.
[Illustration:
Men fought in its corpse-choked thickets....
]
Now the battalion turned its backs to the tangle and watched with
languid interest the shrapnel that one of the batteries of our 15th
Field was showering on the ruined airdrome in front of Torcy. The white
puff-balls were tinged pink by the setting sun, and jets of reddish dust
went up from the ground under the bursts. A Boche battery was replying,
and heavy shells rumbled far above, searching transport lines. Those
nights, up in northern France, came late and went early. A man could sit
on the edge of his hole, prairie-dog fashion, and write a letter at
10.30; it was not safe to move in the open until after 11.00; it was
nearly midnight when the relieving troops came in. The lieutenant’s
opposite number reported, chap he hadn’t seen since Quantico, back in
another lifetime.—“Well, here we are! Out you go—” “I say, is it you,
Bob? Heard you were killed—” “Oh, not at all—heard the same thing about
you—not strange; lot of serious accidents have happened around here—”
“Well, good luck—” “Sure—bon chance, eh?—so-long——”
[Illustration:
Bringing in German prisoners at St. Mihiel.
Drawn on the field by Captain Thomason.
]
[Illustration:
Ration parties ... always sweated mightily and anticipated exciting
incidents....
]
The platoon left the wood and angled down to the Torcy road. A string of
shells howled overhead, 88s by the sound of them, and broke on the road.
The lieutenant halted and watched: “Dam’ unusual, shellin’ here this
time of night—must know it’s a relief—” It was the conviction of all
that the Boche knew everything, down to the movements of the lowest
corporal.—“I think we’ll cut a corner, and take a chance of gettin’
through the line over yonder—” He led away from the road, through the
trampled wheat to his right, away from the shelling. This was really No
Man’s Land, for the line curved back from the wood, and thrust out again
along the line of another crest, also wooded. Such intervals were
watched by day and patrolled by night, and ration parties, carrying
details, and other wretches who had to traverse them always sweated
mightily and anticipated exciting incidents. It was full of smells and
mysterious horrors in the starlight, that wheat. Once the platoon came
upon a pig, feeding unspeakably.... The woods ahead grew plain; the men
walked gingerly, straining their eyes at the shadows.... “Eighth
machine-gun in there—take it easy, you—risky business, this—wish to God
I’d—” The platoon stopped, frozen, as they heard the charging handle of
a Hotchkiss snick back. A small, sharp voice barked: “Halt—who’
there?”—“Platoon of the 49th—can we get through here?” “My God, I dam’
near gave you a clip! What the hell, comin’ up here—don’t you know you
ain’t supposed to come bustin’ around a machine-gun position you—” “All
right—all right!—shellin’ the road down there”—and the platoon scuttled
past the Hotchkiss gun, while its crew reviled them. Machine-gunners are
a touchy lot, prone to shoot first and inquire afterward; the platoon
gave thanks for a man who didn’t scare.
They turned left now, and went swiftly through the woods northwest of
Lucy. They passed a place where the midnight harassing fire had caught a
ration party; a shell had hit a pushcart loaded with loaves of the round
French war bread which was the main item of the ration on this front;
bread was scattered over an acre or so, and a frenzied sergeant was
routing his ration party out of several holes and trying to collect it
again. Otherwise, an outfit up in the Bois de Belleau wouldn’t eat for
another twenty-four hours. The platoon was amused. They took the road to
La Voie du Chatelle, stepping out. They’d be well behind the usual
shelling, if the Boche was on schedule. Far enough back to talk now, and
relax their hunched shoulders.
Down the road they heard a trampling, and the wind brought a smell of
unwashed men. “Hi! Relief of Frogs comin’ in—!” “Yeh—Frogs. They smell
like camels. We smell like goats.” “Hope this relief carries a bath wit’
it! Me, I’ve got blue mould all up my back.” “Well, next time we come
in, we’ll put showers in that goddam place. Been there long enough to,
already—” “How long we been there?—Le’s see—this is the 5th of July,
ain’t it?—” “Je’s, I don’t keep count of no days! I can’t remember when
we was anywhere else—” This was in a tone so mournful that the file’s
neighbors laughed. “What you doin’ in this war, anyway? Dam’
replacement, jus’ joined up after Hill 142—” “Man,” said the file very
earnestly, “I’ll tell you. So help me Gawd, I wuz dodgin’ the draft!”
The French column came up and passed. Its horizon-blue uniform was
invisible in the dark, but the stars glinted a little on its helmets and
bayonets. “V’la! Yanquis! B’soir, Americains!” “Dam’ right, Frenchie!
Bon chance, huh?” They went on without lagging, well closed up. A man’s
feet dragged going in; there are no such things on a battle-field as
fresh troops, for you always approach by forced marches, infinitely
weary—“but comin’ out—boy, we make knots!—” They reached La Voie du
Chatelle, where Regimental was, and there the old Boche always shelled.
It was a little farm, pretty well knocked to pieces now, but Regimental
was reported to prefer it to a change; they had the Boche’s system down
so that they could count on him. His shelling always fell into method
when he had long enough, and the superior man could, by watching him a
few days, avoid unpleasantness. La Voie du Chatelle, as the world knew,
received his attention from 11.45 to 12.10 every night. Then he laid off
until 3, when his day-shift came on. You could set your watch by it. The
platoon went cheerfully past.
A full kilometre farther they hiked, at a furious pace. Then the
lieutenant considered that they might catch a rest; they had come a long
way and were in a safe spot. Ten minutes’ rest out of every hour was the
rule when possible. He passed the word: “Fall out to the right of the
road,” and sat down himself, a little way off, feeling for his
chewing-tobacco. You didn’t smoke on the front at night—lights were not
safe. And chewin’ was next best. Then he observed that the platoon was
not falling out. They stood in groups on the road, and an angry mutter
reached him. “What th’ell?—Goin’ out, an’ then he wants to rest!” “Yeh,
‘fall out on the right of the road,’ he says, the goddam fool—” The
lieutenant knew his men, as you know men you live in hell with. He got
up, chuckling.—“Well, if that’s the way you feel about it—come on, you
birds!” and he set them a killing step, at which no man complained.
The dawn was coming when they rendezvoused with the battalion in Bois
Gros-Jean—beans for breakfast, and hot coffee, and tins of jam! That
afternoon they had off their clothes for the first time in three weeks
or so, and swam in the Marne at a place called Croutte. And at formation
they heard this order published:
VI Armée
État-Major
6930/2
Au QGA le 30 Juin, 1918.
In view of the brilliant conduct of the 4th Brigade of the 2nd U. S.
Division, which in a spirited fight took Bouresches and the important
strong point of Bois de Belleau, stubbornly defended by a large enemy
force, the General commanding the VIth Army orders that, henceforth,
in all official papers, the Bois de Belleau shall be named “Bois de la
Brigade de Marine.”
The General of Division Degoutte
Commanding VIth Army
(Signed) DEGOUTTE.
“Yeh,” said the battalion. “Now, about this liberty in Paris—” But they
didn’t go to Paris. They took a road that led through Soissons, and St.
Mihiel, and Blanc Mont, and the Argonne-Meuse, to Nieuwied, on the far
side of the Rhine.
SONGS
ONE
“BANG AWAY, LULU”
The Marines have a very noble song: the Marine Corps Hymn. It is taught,
along with close order drill and things like that, to recruits at Parris
Island and on the West Coast. It begins:
“_From the Halls of Montezuma
To the shores of Tripoli,
We have fought our country’s battles
On the land and on the sea_....”
and it closes, gloriously:
“_If the Army and the Navy
Ever look on heaven’s scenes,
They will find the streets are guarded
By United States Marines_....”
This platoon, however, led by a brazen-throated gunnery sergeant, is
roaring out:
“_Bang away, Lulu_....”
[Illustration: [Soldiers]]
II
[Illustration: [Soldiers]]
In the town of Villers-Nancy, where the battalion billeted, they
published this order to the troops:
No. 862’3
Ordre Général No. 318
Xe Armée
État-Major
3e Bureau
AuQG_A_ 30 July 18
_Officers, Non-Commissioned Officers and Soldiers of the Third United
States Army Corps_:
Shoulder to shoulder with your French comrades you were thrown into
the counter-offensive battle which commenced on the 18th of July. You
rushed to the attack as to a festival. Your magnificent courage
completely routed a surprised enemy and your indomitable tenacity
checked the counter-attacks of his fresh divisions. You have shown
yourselves worthy sons of your great country, and you were admired by
your comrades-in-arms.
Ninety-one guns, 7,200 prisoners, immense booty, 10 kilomètres of
country liberated; this is your portion of the spoil of this victory.
Furthermore, you have demonstrated your superiority over the barbarian
enemy of all mankind. To attack him is to vanquish him.
American comrades! I am grateful to you for the blood so generously
spilled on the soil of my country. I am proud to have commanded you
during such days, and to have fought with you for the deliverance of
the world.
(Signed) MANGIN.
II
THE CHARGE AT SOISSONS
The 1st Battalion lay in Croutte-sur-Marne. It drank deep of the golden
July weather, and swam noisily in the Marne, which swung a blue and
shining loop below the town. The battalion took but little interest in
the war, which could be heard growling and muttering intermittently to
the north and east. Indeed, the unpleasant Bois-de-Belleau-Bouresches
area was only a few hours’ march distant, and Château-Thierry was just
up the river. The guns were loud and continuous in that direction.
But the 2d American Division—Marines and troops of the Regular Army—had
just finished a hitch of some thirty-eight days attacking and holding
and attacking again, from Hill 142, on the left, through that ghastly
wood which the French now called the “Bois de la Brigade de Marine,” to
Vaux, on the right; and in this battalion, as in the other units of the
division, such men as had survived were quite willing to think about
something else.
Division Headquarters were over Montreuil way, and thither certain
distinguished individuals were ordered, to return with crosses on their
faded blouses. This furnished pleasant food for gossip and speculation.
Then, vin rouge and vin blanc were to be had, as well as fresh milk for
the less carnally minded, and such supplements to the ration were always
matters of interest. Also, there were certain buxom mademoiselles among
the few civilian families who lingered here in the teeth of the war, and
although every girl was watched by lynx-eyed elders early and late,
their very presence was stimulating and they were all inclined to be
friendly.
The most delightful diversion of all was discussion of the rumor that
rose up and ran through the companies: “Got it hot from a bird that was
talkin’ to a dog-robber at Brigade H. Q.—the division is gonna be sent
back to St. Denis for a month’s rest, an’ leaves, an’ everything!” “Yeh!
we gonna parade in Paris, too.” It was ascertained that St. Denis was
right near Paris. Platoon commanders were respectfully approached:
“Beggin’ the lootenant’s pardon, but does the lootenant think that we—”
The lieutenants looked wise and answered vaguely and asked the captains.
All ranks hung upon the idea.
July 14 came. “Sort o’ Frog Fourth o’ July,” explained a learned
corporal, standing in line for morning chow.
“In Paris, they’s parades, an’ music, an’ fireworks, an’ all that kinder
thing. Speakin’ an’ barbecues, like back home. Celebratin’ the time the
Frogs rose agin ’em an’ tore down some noted brig or other they had.
Now, if I wuz in Paree now, sittin’ in front of the Caffey de Pay——!”
“Don’t try to go there, Corp. J’seen the cellar they’s got fer a brig
here?— If you——”
“Don’t see no flag-wavin’ or such celebrations here. Seen one little
Frog kid with his gas-mask an’ a Frog flag down the street—no more. Why
back home, even in tank towns like this, on the Fourth——”
As a matter of fact, Croutte took on this day no especial joy in the
far-off fall of the Bastille. Croutte was in range of the Boche heavy
artillery; one could perceive, at the end of this street where, in
effect, the house of M’sieu’ le Maire had been! An obus of two hundred
and twenty centimètres. And others, regard you, near the bridge. Some
descended into the river, the naughty ones, and killed many fish. Also,
the avions——
Did it not appear to Messieurs les Officiers that the cannon were louder
this day, especially toward Rheims? And as the day went on, it did
appear so. In the afternoon a Boche came out of a cloud and shot down in
flames the fat observation balloon that lived just up the river from
Croutte. The rumor of St. Denis and fourteen-day leaves waned somewhat.
Certainly there grew to be a feeling in the air....
About one o’clock the morning of the 15th the Boche dropped nine-inch
shells into the town. The battalion was turned out, and stood under arms
in the dark while the battalion gas officer sniffed around busily to see
if the shells were the gas variety. They were not, but the battalion,
after the shelling stopped and the casualties were attended to, observed
that in the east a light not of the dawn was putting out the stars. The
eastern sky was all aflame with gun-flashes, and a growing thunder shook
the still air.
The files remarked that they were glad not to be where all that stuff
was lightin’, and after breakfast projected the usual swimming parties.
Aquatic sports were then vetoed by regretful platoon commanders, since
it appeared that Battalion H. Q. had directed the companies to hold
themselves in readiness for instant movement to an unspecified place.
Thereupon the guns eastward took on a more than professional interest.
The civilians looked and listened also. Their faces were anxious. They
had heard that noise before. The hot July hours passed; the battalion
continued to be held in readiness, and got practically no sleep in
consequence. There was further shelling, and the guns were undoubtedly
louder—and nearer.
Breakfast on the 16th was scant, and the cooks held out little
encouragement for lunch. Lunch was an hour early, and consisted of
beans. “Boys, we’re goin’ somewhere. We always gets beans to make a hike
on.” “Yeh! an’ you always gets more than two-men rates—standin’ in line
for fourths, now!”—“What’s that sergeant yellin’ about—fill yo’
canteens? Gonna get ving blonk in mine!”
At noon, the rolling kitchens packed up and moved off, nobody knew
where. The battalion regarded their departure soberly. “Wish I hadn’t et
my reserve rations....” The shadows were lengthening when the bugles
blew “assembly” and the companies fell in, taking the broad white road
that led down the river. At the next town—towns were thick along the
Marne from Château-Thierry to Meaux—they passed through the other
battalions of the 5th Marines, jeeringly at ease beside the road.
Greetings were tossed about, and the files gibed at each other. “Where
you bums goin’?” “Dunno—don’ care— But you see the ole 1st Battalion is
leadin’, as usual!” “Aw—.... Close up! close up!”
Beyond them was the 6th Regiment of Marines, arms stacked in the fields
by the river. Each battalion took the road in turn, and presently the
whole Marine Brigade was swinging down the Marne in the slanting
sunlight. Very solid and businesslike the brigade was, keen-faced and
gaunt and hard from the great fight behind them, and fit and competent
for greater battles yet to come. The companies were under strength, but
they had the quality of veterans. They had met the Boche and broken him,
and they knew they could do it again. The rumble of the guns was behind
them, and the rumor of the leave area still ran strong enough to
maintain a slow volubility among the squads. They talked and laughed,
but they did not sing. Veterans do not sing a great deal.
It was getting dusk when the 1st Battalion of the 5th, leading, rounded
a turn in the road and came upon an endless column of camions, drawn up
along the river road as far as one could see. The companies became
silent.
“Camions! They rode us to Chatto-Terry in them busses—” “Yeh! an’ it was
a one-way trip for a hell of a lot of us, too!” “Close up! Close up an’
keep to the right of the road.”
“Camions! That’s a sign they want us bad, somewhere on the line,”
commented the lean first lieutenant who hiked at the head of the 49th
Company. “Walter”—to the officer beside him—“I wonder what happened
yesterday an’ to-day, with all that shooting.” “Don’t know—but this
Château-Thierry salient is mighty deep an’ narrow, unless the Boche
spread himself yesterday.... If we were to break into it, up near one of
the corners....” “Yes! Well, we’re right on the tip of it here—can jump
either way—Lord there’s a lot of these conveyances.”
Later the battalion knew what had happened on July 15, when the Boche
made his final cast across the Champagne country toward Rheims and
Épernay; and his storm divisions surged to the Marne, and stayed, and
lapped around the foot of the gray Mountain of Rheims, and stayed. Just
now the battalion cared for none of these things. It had no supper; it
faced a crowded trip of uncertain duration, and was assured of various
discomforts after that.
Well accustomed to the ways of war, the men growled horribly as they
crammed into their appointed chariots, while the officers inexorably
loaded the best part of a platoon into each camion, the dusk hiding
their grins of sympathy. “Get aboard! get aboard! Where’ll you put yo’
pack? Now what the hell do I know about yo’ pack—want a special
stateroom an’ a coon vallay, do yuh, yuh—!” The sergeants didn’t grin.
They swore, and the men swore, and they raged altogether. But, in much
less time than it took to tell about it afterward, the men were loaded
on. The officers were skilled and prompt in such matters.
Wizened Annamites from the colonies of France drove the camions.
Presently, with clangor and much dust, they started their engines, and
the camion train jolted off down the river road. A red moon shone wanly
through the haze. The Marne was a silver thread through the valley of a
dream, infinitely aloof from the gasoline-smelling tumult.... “Valley of
the Marne! ... the Marne ... some of us will not see you again....”
[Illustration:
The automatic-rifle men.
]
A camion, as understood by the French, is a motor-vehicle with small
wheels and no springs to speak of. It finds every hole in the road, and
makes an unholy racket; but it covers ground, the roadbed being of no
consequence, as the suffering files bore witness. To the lieutenant of
the 49th, nursing his cane on the driver’s seat of a lurching camion,
beside two Annamitish heathen who smelt like camels and chattered like
monkeys, came scraps of conversation from the compressed platoon behind
him. “Sardines is comfortable to what we is!...” “Chevawz forty—hommes
eight! Lord forgive me, I uster kick about them noble box cars. They say
it wuz taxicabs an’ motor-trucks that won the first battle of the
Marne—yeh! If they rushed them Frogs up packed like this, you know they
felt like fightin’ when they got out!”... “I feel like fightin’
now!—take yo’ laigs outer my shortribs, you big embus-kay.”
“Night before last they shelled us, an’ we stood by last night—when do
we sleep?—that’s what I wanna know—” But sleeping isn’t done in camions.
The dust on the road rose thick and white around the train, and rode
with it through the night. The face of the moon, very old and wise,
peered down through the dust. They left the river, and by the testimony
of the stars it seemed to the lieutenant that they were hurrying north.
Always, on the right, the far horizon glowed with the fires of
war—flares, signal-lights, gun-flashes from hidden batteries; the route
paralleled the line. The lieutenant visualized his map: “Followin’ the
salient around—to the north—the north—Soissons way, or Montdidier....
The Boche took Soissons....”
Quiet French villages along the road, stone houses like gray ghosts
under the pale moon, and all lights hooded against Boche planes. Long,
empty stretches of road. Shadowy columns of French infantry, overtaken
and passed. Horse-drawn batteries of 75s on the move. Swift staff cars
that dashed by, hooting. Then, long files of horsemen, cloaked and
helmeted, with a ghostly glint of lanceheads over them—French cavalry.
Presently, dawn, with low clouds piling up in the rosy sky. And along
the road, wherever there were groves, more cavalry was seen, at ease
under the trees. Horses were picketed, lances and sabres stuck into the
ground, and cooking-fires alight.
The Marines had not met the French horse before. They now looked
approvingly upon them. Men and horses were alike big and
well-conditioned. All morning the camions passed through a country
packed with troops and guns, wherever there was cover from the sky.
Something big was in the air.
It was mid-forenoon when the train stopped, and the battalion climbed
out on cramped legs. “Fall in on the right of the road.... Platoon
commanders, report.... Keep fifty yards’ distance between platoons....
Squads right.... March!” and the companies moved off stiffly, on empty
stomachs. The little dark Annamites watched the files pass with
incurious eyes. They had taken many men up to battle.
II
Company by company, the 1st Battalion passed on, and behind them the
other battalions of the 5th Marines took the road and, after them, the
6th. “None of the wagons, or the galleys—don’t see the machine-gun
outfits, either,” observed the lieutenant of the 49th Company, looking
back from the crest of the first low hill. Here the battalion was
halted, having marched for half an hour, to tighten slings and settle
equipment for the real business of hiking. “They may get up to-night,
chow an’ all—wonder how far we came, an’ where we’re goin’. No,
sergeant—can’t send for water here—my canteen’s empty, too. All I know
about it is that we seem to be in a hurry.”
[Illustration:
Prussians from Von Boehn’s divisions in and around the Bois de
Belleau.
A page from Captain Thomason’s sketch-book.
]
The dust of the ride had settled thick, like fine gray masks, on the
men’s faces, and one knew that it was just as thick in their throats! Of
course the canteens, filled at Croutte, were finished. The files swore
through cracked lips.
The battalion moved off again, and the major up forward set a pace all
disproportionate to his short legs. When the first halt came, the usual
ten-minute rest out of the hour was cut to five. “Aw hell! forced
march!” “An’ the lootenant has forgot everything but ‘close up! close
up!’— Listen at him——”
The camions had set them down in a gently rolling country, unwooded, and
fat with ripening wheat. Far across it, to the north, blue with
distance, stood a great forest, and toward this forest the battalion
marched, talkative, as men are in the first hour of the hike, before the
slings of the pack begin to cut into your shoulders.... “Look at them
poppies in the wheat.”—“They ain’t as red as the poppies were the
mornin’ of the 6th of June, when we went up to Hill 142—” “Yep!
Beginnin’ to fade some. It’s gettin’ late in the season.” “Hi—I’m
beginnin’ to fade some myself—this guerre is wearin’ on a man ...
remember how they looked in the wheat that mornin’, just before we hit
the Maxim guns?—red as blood—” “Pore old Jerry Finnegan picked one and
stuck it in the buckle of his helmet—I seen it in his tin hat after he
was killed, there behin’ the Hill.... I’ll always think about poppies
an’ blood together, as long as I live—” This last from little Tritt, the
lieutenant’s orderly.
“Long as you live—that’s good!” gibed Corporal Snair, of the Company
Headquarters group. “Don’t you know by now how expendable you bucks
are?”—The lieutenant heard, and remembered it, oddly enough, in a
crowded moment the next day, when he lost the two of them to a
hard-fought Maxim gun.
No wind moved across the lonely wheatland; the bearded stalks waved not
at all, and the sun-drenched air was hot and dead. Sweat made muddy
runnels through the thick white dust that masked the faces of the men.
Conversation languished; what was said was in profane monosyllables.
Clouds came up, and there were showers of rain, with hot sunshine
between. Uniforms steamed after each shower, and thirst became a
torture. The man who had the vin blanc in his canteen fell out and was
quite ill. “Hikin’—in—a dam’—Turkish bath——”
After interminable hours, the column came to the forest and passed from
streaming sunshine into sultry shades. It was a noble wood of great
high-branching trees, clean of underbrush as a park. Something was doing
in the forest. Small-arms ammunition was stacked beside the road, and
there were dumps of shells and bombs under the trees. And French
soldiers everywhere. This road presently led into a great paved highway,
and along it were more of the properties of war—row upon row of every
caliber of shell, orderly stacks of winged aerial bombs, pile after pile
of rifle and machine-gun ammunition, and cases of hand-grenades and
pyrotechnics. There were picket-lines of cavalry, and park after park of
artillery, light and heavy. There were infantrymen with stacked rifles.
Gunner and horseman and poilu, they looked amicably upon the sweating
Marines, and waved their hands with naïve Gallic friendliness. The
battalion came out of its weariness and responded in kind. “Say, where
do they get that stuff about little Frenchmen? Look at that long-sparred
horse soldier yonder—seven feet if he’s an inch!”—“Them gunners is fine
men, too. All the runts in the Frog army is in the infantry!”—“Well, if
these Frawgs fights accordin’ to their size, Gawd pity the old Boche
when that cavalry gets after him—lances an’ all!” “You said it! Them
little five-foot-nothin’ infantry, with enough on they backs, in the way
o’ tents an’ pots an’ pans, to set up light housekeepin’ wit’, and that
long squirrel gun they carry, an’ that knittin’-needle bayonet—!
Remember how they charged at Torcy, there on the left——?”
The French were cooking dinner beside the road. For your Frenchman never
fights without his kitchens and a full meal under his cartridge-pouches.
They go into the front line with him, the kitchens and the chow, and
there is always the coffee avec rhum, and the good hot soup that smells
so divinely to the hungry Americans, passing empty. “When we goes up to
hit the old Boche, we always says adoo to the galleys till we comes out
again—guess the idea is to starve us so we’ll be mad, like the lions in
them glad-i-a-tor-ial mills the corp’ril was tellin’ about.”—“Hell! we
don’t eat, it seems—them Frawgs might at least have the decency to keep
their home cookin’ where we can’t smell it!”
The highway led straight through the forest. Many roads emptied into it,
and from every road debouched a stream of horses, men, and guns. The
battalion went into column of twos, then into column of files, to make
room. On the left of the road, abreast of the Marines, plodded another
column of foot—strange black men, in the blue greatcoats of the French
infantry and mustard-yellow uniforms under them. Their helmets were
khaki-colored, and bore a crescent instead of the bursting bomb of the
French line. But they marched like veterans, and the Marines eyed them
approvingly. Between the foot, the road was level-full of guns and
transport, moving axle to axle, and all moving in the same direction. In
this column were tanks, large and small, all ring-streaked and striped
with camouflage, mounting one-pounders and machine-guns; and the big
ones, short-barrelled 75s.
The tanks were new to the Marines. They moved with a horrific clanging
and jangling, and stunk of petrol. “Boy, what would you do if you seen
one of them little things comin’ at you? The big ones is males, and the
little ones is females, the lootenant says....” “Chillun, we’re goin’
into somethin’ big— Dunno what, but it’s big!”
The sultry afternoon passed wearily, and at six o’clock the battalion
turned off the road, shambling and footsore, and rested for two hours.
They found water and filled canteens. A few of the hardier made shift to
wash. “Gonna smear soapsuds an’ lather all over me—the Hospital Corps
men say it keeps off mustard-gas!” But most of the men dropped where the
platoon broke ranks and slept. Battalion H. Q. sent for all company
commanders.
Presently the lieutenant of the 49th returned, with papers and a map. He
called the company officers around him, and spread the map on the
ground. He spoke briefly.
“We’re in the Villers-Cotterets woods—the Forêt de Retz. At H hour on D
day, which I think is to-morrow morning, although the major didn’t say,
we attack the Boche here”—pointing—“and go on to here—past the town of
Vierzy. Eight or nine kilomètres. Three objectives—marked—so—and so. The
2d Division with one of the infantry regiments leading, and the 5th
Marines, attacks with the 1st Moroccan Division on our left. The Frog
Foreign Legion is somewhere around too, and the 1st American Division.
It’s Mangin’s Colonial Army—the bird they call the butcher.
“The 49th Company has the division’s left, and we’re to keep in touch
with the French over there. They’re Senegalese—the niggers you saw on
the road, and said to be bon fighters. The tanks will come behind us
through the woods, and take the lead as soon as we hit the open.
“No special instructions, except, if we are held up any place, signal a
tank by wavin’ a rag or something on a bayonet, in the direction of the
obstacle, and the tank will do the rest.
“No rations, an’ we move soon. See that canteens are filled. Now go and
explain it all to your platoons, and—better take a sketch from this
map—it’s the only one I have. Impress it on everybody that the job is to
maintain connection between the Senegalese on the left and our people.
Tritt, I’m goin’ to catch a nap—wake me when we move——”
It was dark when the battalion fell in and took the road again. They
went into single file on the right, at the very edge of it, for the
highway was jammed with three columns of traffic, moving forward. It
began to rain, and the night, there under the thick branches, was
inconceivably black. The files couldn’t see the man ahead, and each man
caught hold of the pack in front and went feeling for the road with his
feet, clawing along with the wheels and the artillery horses and
machine-gun mules. On the right was a six-foot ditch, too deep in mud to
march in. The rain increased to a sheeted downpour and continued all
night, with long rolls of thunder, and white stabs of lightning that
intensified the dark. The picked might of France and America toiled on
that road through the Villers-Cotterets forest that night, like a great
flowing river of martial force....
And after the 5th Marines have forgotten the machine-guns that sowed
death in the wheat behind Hill 142, and the shrapnel that showered down
at Blanc Mont, before St. Étienne, they will remember the march to the
Soissons battle, through the dark and the rain....
As guns and caissons slewed sideways across the files, or irate
machine-gun mules plunged across the tangle, the column slowed and
jammed and halted on heavy feet; then went on again to plunge blindly
against the next obstacle. Men fell into the deep ditch and broke arms
and legs. Just to keep moving was a harder test than battle ever
imposed. The battalion was too tired to swear. “I’m to where—I have to
think about movin’ my feet—! Plant—the left foot—an’—advance the
right—an’—bring up the—left foot—an’——”
[Illustration:
“Keep on to the left until you meet the Moroccans, and go forward....”
4.30 A. M., July 18, 1918.
]
No battle ever tried them half as hard as the night road to Soissons....
The rain ceased, and the sky grew gray with dawn. The traffic thinned,
and the battalion turned off on a smaller road, closed up, and hurried
on. Five minutes by the side of the road to form combat packs and strip
to rifle and bayonet. “Fall in quickly! Forward!”
Overhead the clouds were gone; a handful of stars paled and went out;
day was coming. The battalion, lightened, hastened. They perceived,
dimly, through a mist of fatigue, that a cloudless day was promised and
that the world was wonderfully new washed and clean—and quiet! Not a gun
anywhere, and the mud on the road muffled the sound of hobnailed boots.
“Double time! Close up! Close up, there!”
There had been fighting here; there were shell-holes, scarred and
splintered trees. The battalion panted to a crossroads, where stone
buildings lay all blasted by some gale of shell-fire. And by the road
what looked like a well! The files swayed toward it, clutching at dry
canteens—“Back in ranks! Back in ranks, you——!”
Then, barbed wire across the roadway, and battered shallow trenches to
right and left, and a little knot of French and American officers, Major
Turrill standing forward. The leading company turned off to the left,
along the trenches. The 49th followed in column. “Turn here,” ordered
the major. “Keep on to the left until you meet the Moroccans, and go
forward....” The 49th went beyond the trench, still in column of route,
picking its way through the woods. The lieutenant looked back at his men
as he went; their faces were gray and drawn and old; they were
staggering with weariness—“Fix bayonets—” and the dry click of the steel
on the locking-ring ran along the ragged column, loud in the hush of
dawn.
III
It was 4.35, the morning of July 18.
Miles of close-laid batteries opened with one stupendous thunder. The
air above the tree-tops spoke with unearthly noises, the shriek and
rumble of light and heavy shells. Forward through the woods, very near,
rose up a continued crashing roar of explosions, and a murk of smoke,
and a hell of bright fires continually renewed. It lasted only five
minutes, that barrage, with every French and American gun that could be
brought to bear firing at top speed. But they were terrible minutes for
the unsuspecting Boche. Dazed, beaten down, and swept away, he tumbled
out of his holes when it lifted, only to find the long bayonets of the
Americans licking like flame across his forward positions, and those
black devils, the Senegalese, raging with knives in his rifle-pits. His
counter-barrage was slow and weak, and when it came the shells burst
well behind the assaulting waves, which were already deep in his
defenses.
[Illustration:
Listening-post rushed by Senegalese.
]
The 49th Company, running heavily, sodden with weariness, was plunging
through a line of wire entanglements when the guns opened. A French
rifleman squatted in a hole under the wire, and a sergeant bent over him
and shouted: “Combien—how far—damn it, how you say?—combien—kilomètre—à
la Boche?” The Frenchman’s eyes bulged. He did violent things with his
arms. “Kilomèt’? _kilomètres?_ Mon Dieu, cent mètres! Cent mètres!” Half
the company, still in column, was struggling in the wire when, from the
tangle right in front, a machine-gun dinned fiercely and rifle-fire ran
to left and right through the woods.
It was well that the woods were a little open in that spot, so that the
lieutenant’s frantic signals could be seen, for no voice could have been
heard. And it was more than well that every man there had been shot over
enough not to be gun-shy. They divined his order, they deployed to the
left, and they went forward yelling. That always remained, to the
lieutenant, the marvel of the Soissons fight—how those men, two days
without food, three nights without sleep, after a day and a night of
forced marching, flung off their weariness like a discarded piece of
equipment, and at the shouting of the shells sprang fresh and eager
against the German line.
Liaison—to keep the touch—was his company’s mission—the major’s last
order. To the left were only the smoky woods—no Senegalese in sight—and
to the left the lieutenant anxiously extended his line, throwing out the
last two platoons, while the leading one shot and stabbed among the
first Boche machine-guns. He himself ran in that direction, cursing and
stumbling in wire and fallen branches, having no time for certain Boches
who fired at him over a bush.... Finally, Corbett, the platoon
commander, leading to the left, turned and waved his arms. And through
the trees he saw the Senegalese—lean, rangy men in mustard-colored
uniforms, running with their bayonets all aslant. He turned back toward
his company with the sweetest feeling of relief that he had ever known;
he had his contact established; his clever and war-wise company would
attend to keeping it, no matter what happened to him.
The battle roared into the wood. Three lines of machine-guns, echeloned,
held it. Here the Forêt de Retz was like Dante’s wood, so shattered and
tortured and horrible it was, and the very trees seemed to writhe in
agony. Here the fury of the barrage was spent, and the great trunks,
thick as a man’s body, were sheared off like weed-stalks; others were
uprooted and lay gigantic along the torn earth; big limbs still crashed
down or swayed half-severed; splinters and débris choked the ways
beneath. A few German shells fell among the men—mustard-gas; and there
in the wet woods one could see the devilish stuff spreading slowly, like
a snaky mist, around the shell-hole after the smoke had lifted.
Machine-guns raved everywhere; there was a crackling din of rifles, and
the coughing roar of hand-grenades. Company and platoon commanders lost
control—their men were committed to the fight—and so thick was the going
that anything like formation was impossible. It was every man for
himself, an irregular, broken line, clawing through the tangles,
climbing over fallen trees, plunging heavily into Boche rifle-pits. Here
and there a well-fought Maxim gun held its front until somebody—officer,
non-com, or private—got a few men together and, crawling to left or
right, gained a flank and silenced it. And some guns were silenced by
blind, furious rushes that left a trail of writhing khaki figures, but
always carried two or three frenzied Marines with bayonets into the
emplacement; from whence would come shooting and screaming and other
clotted unpleasant sounds, and then silence.
[Illustration:
A fighting swirl of Senegalese.
]
From such a place, with four men, the lieutenant climbed, and stood
leaning on his rifle, while he wiped the sweat from his eyes with a
shaking hand. Panting, white or red after their nature—for fighting
takes men differently, as whiskey does—the four grouped around him. One
of them squatted and was very sick. And one of them, quite young and
freckled, explored a near-by hole and prodded half a dozen Boches out of
it, who were most anxious to make friends. The other three took interest
in this, and the Boches saw death in their eyes. They howled like
animals, these big hairy men of Saxony, and capered in a very ecstasy of
terror. The freckled Marine set his feet deliberately, judging his
distance, and poised his bayonet. The lieutenant grasped his arm—“No!
No! take ’em back—they’ve quit. Take ’em to the rear, I tell you!” The
freckled one obeyed, very surly, and went off through the tangle to the
rear. The lieutenant turned and went on.
To left and right he caught glimpses of his men, running, crawling,
firing as they went. In a clearing, Lieutenant Appelgate, of the 17th
Company, on the right, came into view. He waved his pistol and shouted
something. He was grinning.... All the men were grinning ... it was a
bon fight, after all....
Then little Tritt, his orderly, running at his side, went down, clawing
at a bright jet of scarlet over his collar. The war became personal
again—a keening sibilance of flesh-hunting bullets, ringing under his
helmet. He found himself prone behind a great fallen tree, with a
handful of his men; bark and splinters were leaping from the round trunk
that sheltered them.
“You”—to a panting half-dozen down the log—“crawl back to the stump and
shoot into that clump of green bushes over there, where you see the new
dirt—it’s in there! Everything you’ve got, and watch for me up ahead.
Slover”—to Sergeant Robert Slover, a small, fiery man from
Tennessee—“come on.”
They crawled along the tree. Back toward the stump the Springfields
crackled furiously. Somewhere beyond the machine-gun raved like a mad
thing, and the Boches around it threw hand-grenades that made much smoke
and noise. The two of them left the protection of the trunk, and felt
remarkably naked behind a screen of leaves. They crawled slowly,
stopping to peer across at the bushes. The lieutenant caught the dull
gleam of a round gray helmet, moved a little, and saw the head and the
hands of the Boche who worked the gun. He pushed the sergeant with his
foot and, moving very carefully, got his rifle up and laid his cheek
against the stock. Over his sights, the German’s face, twenty metres
away, was intent and serious. The lieutenant fired, and saw his man
half-rise and topple forward on the gun.
Then things happened fast. Another German came into view straining to
tear the fallen gunner off the firing mechanism. Slover shot him. There
was another, and another. Then the bush boiled like an ant-heap, and a
feldwebel sprang out with a grenade, which he did not get to throw. It
went off, just the same, and the Marines from the other end of the tree
came with bayonets.... Presently they went on.... “There’s a squad of
them bastards to do orderly duty for the corp’ral an’ little Tritt,”
said the sergeant. “Spread out more, you birds.”
[Illustration:
Fighting from tree to tree in the woods south of Soissons.
A chaut-chaut automatic rifle in action.
]
Afterward, sweating and panting, the freckled one who had started back
with prisoners caught up with the lieutenant. “Lootenant, sir!” he
gasped, wiping certain stains from his bayonet with his sleeve. “Them
damn Heinies tried to run on me, an’ I jest natcherly had to shoot ’em
up a few—” and he looked guilelessly into the officer’s eyes. “Why
you—Hell! ... fall in behind me, then, an’ come along. Need another
orderly.”
He pondered absently on the matter of frightfulness as he picked his way
along. There were, in effect, very few prisoners taken in the woods that
morning. It was close-up, savage work. “But speakin’ of frightfulness,
one of these nineteen-year-olds, with never a hair to his face—” A
spitting gust of machine-gun bullets put an end to extraneous musings.
Later, working to the left of his company, he was caught up in a
fighting swirl of Senegalese and went with them into an evil place of
barbed wire and machine-guns. These wild black Mohammedans from West
Africa were enjoying themselves. Killing, which is at best an acquired
taste with the civilized races, was only too palpably their mission in
life. Their eyes rolled, and their splendid white teeth flashed in their
heads, but here all resemblance to a happy Southern darky stopped. They
were deadly. Each platoon swept its front like a hunting-pack, moving
swiftly and surely together. The lieutenant felt a thrill of
professional admiration as he went with them.
The hidden guns that fired on them were located with uncanny skill; they
worked their automatic rifles forward on each flank until the doomed
emplacement was under a scissors fire; then they took up the matter with
the bayonet, and slew with lion-like leaps and lunges and a shrill
barbaric yapping. They took no prisoners. It was plain that they did not
rely on rifle-fire or understand the powers of that arm—to them a rifle
was merely something to stick a bayonet on—but with the bayonet they
were terrible, and the skill of their rifle grenadiers and
automatic-rifle men always carried them to close quarters without too
great loss.
They carried also a broad-bladed knife, razor-sharp, which disembowelled
a man at a stroke. The slim bayonet of the French breaks off short when
the weight of a body pulls down and sidewise on it; and then the knives
come out. With reason the Boche feared them worse than anything living,
and the lieutenant saw in those woods unwounded fighting Germans who
flung down their rifles when the Senegalese rushed, and covered their
faces, and stood screaming against the death they could not look upon.
And—in a lull, a long, grinning sergeant, with a cruel aquiline face,
approached him and offered a brace of human ears, nicely fresh, strung
upon a thong. “B’jour, Americain! Voilà! Beaucoup souvenir ici—bon!
Désirez-vous? Bon——!”
Later, on the last objective, there was a dignified Boche major of
infantry, who came at discretion out of a deep dugout, and spoke in
careful English: “Und I peg of you, Herr leutnant, to put me under
trusty guard of your Americans true-and-tried! Ja! These black savages,
of the art of war most ignorant, they would kill us prave Germans in
cold plood!... The Herr General Mangin, that”—here a poignant string of
gutturals—“I tell you, Herr leutnant, der very name of Mangin, it is
equal to fünf divisions on unser front!”
[Illustration:
With reason the Boche feared them worse than anything living.
]
Back with his own men again, the company whittled thin! Was there no
limit to the gloomy woods?... Light through the trees yonder!——
The wood ended, and the attack burst out into the rolling wheatland,
where the sun shone in a cloudless sky and poppies grew in the wheat. To
the right, a great paved road marched, between tall poplars, much
battered. On the road two motor-trucks burned fiercely, and dead men lay
around them. Across the road a group of stone farm-buildings had been
shelled into a smoking dust-heap, but from the ruins a nest of never-die
machine-guns opened flanking fire. The khaki lines checked and swirled
around them, and there was a mounting crackle of rifle-fire ... and the
bayonets got in. The lines went forward to the low crest beyond, where,
astride the road, was the first objective; and the assault companies
halted here to reform. A few Boche shells howled over them, but the
Boche was still pounding the wood, where the support battalions
followed. The tanks debouched from the forest and went forward through
the infantry.
In a hollow just ahead of the reformed line something was being dealt
with by artillery, directed by the planes that dipped and swerved above
the fight. The shells crashed down and made a great roaring murk of
smoke and dust and flickering flames of red and green. The lieutenant,
his report to the major despatched, and his company straightened out,
along with men from other units and a handful of Senegalese who had
attached themselves to him, ran an expert eye along his waiting squads,
and allowed his mind to settle profoundly on breakfast. “Let’s see—it’s
July, an’ in Texas they’ll be havin’ cantaloupes, and coffee, an’ eggs,
an’ bacon, an’—” Second Lieutenant Corbett, beside him, groaned like a
man shot through the body, and he realized that he had been thinking
aloud. Then Corbett seized his arm, and gasped: “Lordy! Look at——”
The shelling forward had abated, but the smoke and murk of it still hung
low. Into this murk every man in the line was now peering eagerly.
Advancing toward them, dimly seen, was a great body of Germans, hundreds
upon hundreds, in mass formation——
Pure joy ran among the men. They took out cartridges, and arranged them
in convenient piles. They tested the wind with wetted fingers, and set
their sights, and licked their lips. “Range three-fifty—Oh, boy, ain’t
war wonderful! We been hearin’ about this mass-formation stuff, an’ now
we gets a chance at it——!”
Then: “Aw, hell! Prisoners!” “The low-life bums, they all got their
hands up!” “Lookit! One o’ them tanks is ridin’ herd over them—” It was
the garrison of a strong point.
The artillery had battered them, and when it lifted, and they had come
out of their holes, they found a brace of agile tanks squatting over
their defenses with one-pounders and machine-guns. They had very
sensibly surrendered, en masse, and were now ambling through the
attacking lines to the rear.
[Illustration:
The fighting in the woods at Soissons was close and savage.
]
The officers’ whistles shrilled, and the attack went on. The woods fell
away behind, and for miles to left and right across the rolling country
the waves of assault could be seen. It was a great stirring pageant
wherein moved all the forces of modern war. The tanks, large and small,
lumbered in advance. Over them the battle-planes flew low, searching the
ground, rowelling the Boche with bursts of machine-gun fire. The
infantry followed close, assault waves deployed, support platoons in
column, American Marines and Regulars, Senegalese and the Foreign Legion
of France, their rifles slanting forward, and the sun on all their
bayonets. And behind the infantry, straining horses galloped with
lean-muzzled 75s, battery on battery—artillery, over the top at last
with the rifles. On the skirts of the attack hovered squadrons of
cavalry the Marines had seen the day before, dragoons and lancers,
marked from afar by the sparkle and glitter of lanceheads and sabres.
And forward through the wheat, the Boche lines broke and his strong
points crumbled; standing stubbornly in one place; running in panic at
another; and here and there attempting sharp counter-attacks; but
everywhere engulfed; and the battle roared over him. The Boche was in
mixed quality that day. Some of his people fought and died fighting; a
great many others threw down their arms and bleated “Kamaraden” at the
distant approach of the attackers.
The rest was no connected story. Only the hot exaltation of the fight
kept the men on their feet. Wheat waist-high is almost as hard to get
through as running water, and the sun was pitiless. To the left of the
battalion, and forward, machine-guns fired from the Chaudun farm; the
17th Company went in and stamped the Maxims flat. In a little hollow
there was a battery of 105s that fired pointblank upon the Marines, the
gunners working desperately behind their gun-shields. The Marines worked
to right and left and beat them down with rifle-fire, and later a
gunnery sergeant and a wandering detachment of Senegalese turned one of
these guns around and shelled the Vierzy ravine with it—range 900
yards—to the great annoyance of the Boche in that place.
Further, a hidden strong point in the wheat held them, and a tank came
and sat upon that strong point and shot it into nothing with a
one-pounder gun. Another place, hidden Saxons, laired behind low
trip-wires in high wheat, raked the line savagely. There was crawling
and shooting low among the poppies, and presently hand-to-hand fighting,
in which the freckled boy saw his brother killed and went himself quite
mad among the wounded and the corpses with his bayonet....
Then, without being very clear as to how they got there, the lieutenant
and his company and a great many others were at the Vierzy ravine, in
the cross-fire of the machine-guns that held it.
The ravine was very deep and very precipitous and wooded. A sunken road
led into it and, while the riflemen stalked the place cannily, a tank
came up and disappeared down the sunken road. A terrific row of rifles
and grenades arose, and a wild yelling. Running forward, the Marines
observed that the tank was stalled, its guns not working; and a gray,
frantic mass of German infantry was swarming over it, prying at its
plates with bayonets and firing into such openings as could be found.
One beauty of the tank is that, when it is in such a difficulty, you can
fire without fearing for your friends inside. The automatic-rifle men
especially enjoyed the brief crowded seconds that followed. Then all at
once the farther slope of the ravine swarmed with running Boches, and
the Americans knelt or lay down at ease, and fired steadily and without
haste. As they passed the tank a greasy, smiling Frenchman emerged head
and shoulders and inquired after a cigarette. There were very many dead
Germans in the ravine and on its slope when they went forward.
[Illustration:
A Lieutenant of Marines and a German major, hand to hand.
]
Wearily now, the exaltation dying down, they left the stone towers of
Vierzy to the right, in the path of the Regulars of the 9th and 23d. On
line northeast of it they halted and prepared to hold. It was a lonesome
place. Very thin indeed were the assault companies; very far away the
support columns.... “Accordin’ to the map, we’re here. Turn those Boche
machine-guns around—guess we’ll stay. Thank God, we must have grabbed
off all their artillery, ’cept the heavies....”
“Lootenant, come up here, for God’s sake! Lord, what a slew o’ Boches!”
Beyond rifle-shot a strong gray column was advancing. There were
machine-guns with it. It was not deployed, but its intention was very
evident.... Here were thirty-odd Marines and a few strays from one of
the infantry regiments—nobody in sight, flanks or rear——
But to the rear a clanging and a clattering, and the thudding of
horse-hoofs!—“Graves, beat it back an’ flag those guns.” Graves ran
frantically, waving his helmet. The guns halted in a cloud of dust, and
a gunner lieutenant trotted up, jaunty, immaculate. He dismounted, in
his beautiful pale-blue uniform and his gleaming boots and tiny jingling
spurs, and saluted the sweating, unshaven Marine officer. He looked with
his glasses, and he consulted his map, and then he smiled like a man who
has gained his heart’s desire. He dashed back toward his guns, waving a
signal.
The guns wheeled around; the horses galloped back; there was a whirl and
bustle behind each caisson, and two gunners with a field-telephone came
running. It all happened in seconds.
The first 75 barked, clear and incisive, and the shell whined away ...
the next gun, and the next.... The little puff-balls, ranging shots,
burst very near the Boche column. Then the battery fired as one gun—a
long rafale of fire, wherein no single gun could be heard, but a
drumming thunder.
Smoke and fire flowered hideously over the Boche column. A cloud hit it
for a space. When the cloud lifted the column had disintegrated; there
was only a far-off swarm of fleeing figures, flailed by shrapnel as they
ran. And the glass showed squirming heaps of gray flattened on the
ground....
The gunner officer looked and saw that his work was good. “Bon, eh?
Soixante-quinze—!” With an all-embracing gesture and a white-toothed
smile, he went. Already his battery was limbered up and galloping, and
when the first retaliatory shell came from an indignant Boche 155, the
75s were a quarter of a mile away. The Boche shelled the locality with
earnestness and method for the next hour, but he did not try to throw
forward another column.... “Man, I jest love them little 75s!
Swa-sont-cans bon? Say, that Frog said a mouthful!”
[Illustration:
Sketches made by Captain Thomason at Soissons on scraps of paper taken
from a feldwebel’s note-book.
]
The lieutenant wrote and sent back his final report: “... and final
objective reached, position organized at....” and stopped and swore in
amazement when he looked at his watch—barely noon! Sergeant Cannon’s
watch corroborated the time—“But, by God! The way my laigs feel, it’s
day after to-morrow, anyway!—” “Wake those fellows up—got to finish
diggin’ in—No tellin’ what we’ll get here—” Some of his people were
asleep on their rifles. Some were searching for iron crosses among the
dead. A sergeant came with hands and mouth full. “Sir, they’s a bunch of
this here black German bread and some stuff that looks like coffee, only
ain’t—in that dugout—” And the company found that Kriegsbrot and Kaffee
Ersatz will sustain life, and even taste good if you’ve been long enough
without food....
The shadows turned eastward; in the rear bloated observation balloons
appeared on the sky-line. “Them fellers gets a good view from there.
Lonesome, though....” “Wonder where all our planes went—don’t see none—”
“Hell! Went home to lunch! Them birds, they don’t allow no guerre to
interfere with they meals. Now, that’s what I got against this fighting
stuff—it breaks into your three hots a day.” “Boy, I’m so empty I could
button my blouse on the knobs of my spine! Hey—yonder’s a covey o’ them
avions now—low—strung out—Boche! Hit the deck!”
They were Boche—sinister red-nosed machines that came out of the eye of
the sun and harrowed the flattened infantry, swooping one after another
with bursts of machine-gun fire. Also they dropped bombs. Some of them
went after the observation balloons, and shot more than one down,
flaming, before they could be grounded. And not an Ally plane in sight,
anywhere! To be just, there was one, in the course of the afternoon; he
came from somewhere, and went away very swiftly, with five Germans on
his tail. The lieutenant gathered from the conversation of his men that
they thought the Frenchman used good judgment.
That afternoon the Boche had the air. He dropped bombs and otherwise did
the best he could to make up, with planes, for the artillery that he had
lost that morning. On the whole, he was infinitely annoying. There’s
something about being machine-gunned from the air that gets a man’s
goat, as the files remarked with profane emphasis. Much futile
rifle-fire greeted his machines as they came and went, and away over on
the right toward Vierzy the lieutenant saw one low-flying fellow crumple
and come down like a stricken duck. This plane, alleged to have been
brought down by a chaut-chaut automatic rifle, was afterward officially
claimed by four infantry regiments and a machine-gun battalion. Late in
the afternoon the French brought up anti-aircraft guns on motor-trucks
and the terror of the air abated somewhat; but, while it lasted, the
lieutenant heard——
“There comes—” (great rending explosion near by) “Goddamighty! ’nother
air-bomb?”
“Naw, thank God! That was only a shell!”
As dusk fell, the French cavalry rode forward through the lines. The
lieutenant thoughtfully watched a blue squadron pass—“If spirits walk,
Murat and Marshal Ney an’ all the Emperor’s cavalry are ridin’ with
those fellows....”
In the early dawn of the next day the cavalry rode back. One squadron
went through the company’s position. It was a very small squadron,
indeed, this morning. Half the troopers led horses with empty saddles. A
tall young captain was in command. They were drawn and haggard from the
night’s work, but the men carried their heads high, and even the horses
looked triumphant. They had, it developed, been having a perfectly
wonderful time, riding around behind the German lines. They had shot up
transport, and set fire to ammunition-dumps, and added greatly to the
discomfort of the Boche. They thought they might go back again
to-night.... They did.
The night of the 19th the galleys got up, and the men had hot food.
Early the morning of the 20th the division was relieved and began to
withdraw to reserve position, while fresh troops carried the battle on.
The 1st Battalion of the 5th Marines marched back, in a misty dawn,
across the ground they had fought over two days before. In the trampled
fields, where the dead lay unburied, old French territorials were mowing
the ripe wheat and shocking it up. The battle was far away....
The battalion entered the woods and turned off the road toward the blue
smoke of the galleys, from which came an altogether glorious smell of
food. One of the company officers ran ahead of the 49th to find a place
to stack arms and pile equipment. Presently he beckoned, and the
lieutenant led his people to the place—a sort of clearing, along one
side of which lay a great fallen tree. Under an outthrust leafy branch
something long and stiff lay covered with a blanket.
“Stack arms ... fall out!”
Graves, the officer who had gone ahead, was standing by the blanket. “Do
you know who’s under this?” he said. The lieutenant stooped and looked.
It was little Tritt....
After breakfast, some of the men enlarged the pit where the machine-gun
had been and tidied it up.... They wrapped the body in a blanket and two
German water-proof sheets that were handy, and buried the boy there.
“... But before he got it, he knew that we were winning.” The men put on
their helmets and went away, to look for others who had stopped in the
woods ... to gather souvenirs.
“Well, he’s where he ain’t hungry, an’ his feet don’t hurt from hikin’,
an’ his heavy marchin’ order won’t never cut into his shoulders any
more....” “No, nor no damn Boche buzzards drop air-bombs on him——”
“Wonder where we’ll hit the old Boche next——”
[Illustration:
Fighting north of Blanc Mont, Champagne.
]
SONGS
TWO
“CARRY ME BACK TO OLE VIRGINNY”
The old Boche helmet made an excellent thing to cook with. You jabbed a
few holes in it with a bayonet, so’s to have a draft, and a mess-kit
fitted over it beautifully. When you could get it, strips of high
explosive, picked up around a 155-mm. gun position, made the best fuel,
giving you a fine, hot, smokeless fire. Smoke was not desirable on the
front.
The chap on the opposite page is frying hard bread in bacon grease; he
will sprinkle a little beet-sugar on it and have a real delicacy.
Filling, too. As he goes about this domestic labor, he is humming “Carry
me back to Ole Virginny.” But the files in the background are attracted
by the smell—not the song.
[Illustration: [Soldiers]]
III
[Illustration: [Soldier]]
The taking of Blanc Mont is the greatest single achievement of the
1918 campaign—the Battle of Liberation.
—MARSHAL PÉTAIN.
III
MARINES AT BLANC MONT
The battalion groped its way through the wet darkness to a wood of
scrubby pines, and lay down in the slow autumn rain. North and east the
guns made a wall of sound; flashes from hidden batteries and flares sent
up from nervous front-line trenches lighted the low clouds; occasional
shells from the Boche heavies whined overhead, searching the transport
lines to the rear. It lacked an hour yet until dawn, and the companies
disposed themselves in the mud and slept. They had learned to get all
the sleep they could before battle.
A few days before, this battalion, the first of the 5th Regiment of
Marines, a unit of the 2d Division, had pulled out of a pleasant town
below Toul, in the area where the division rested after the Saint-Mihiel
drive, and had come north a day and a night by train, to
Chalons-sur-Marne. Thence, by night marches, the division had gathered
in certain bleak and warworn areas behind the Champagne front, and here
general orders announced that the 2d was detached from the American
forces and lent by the Generalissimo as a special reserve to Gouraud’s
4th French Army.
Forthwith arose gossip about General Gouraud, the one-armed and able
defender of Rheims, who had broken the German offensive in July. “A big
bird with a beak of a nose and one of these here square beards on
’im—holds hisself straighter than the run of Frog generals,” confided a
motorcycle driver from division headquarters. “Seen him in Challawns.
They say he fights.”
“Yeh, ole Foch has picked the right babies this time,” observed the
files complacently. “Special reserve—that’s us all over, Mable! Hope
they keep us in reserve—but we know they won’t! The Frogs have got
something nasty they want us to get outa the way for them. An’ we see
Chasser d’Alpinos and Colonials around here. Somethin’ distressin’ is
just bound to happen.”
“Roll your packs, you birds! The lootenant passed the word we’re goin’
up in camions to-night!”
The battalion got aboard in its turn, just as dusk deepened into dark,
rode until the camion train stopped, and marched through the rain to its
appointed place.
I
The dawn came very reluctantly through the clouds, bringing no sun with
it, although the drizzle stopped. The battalion rose from its soggy
blankets, kneading stiffened muscles to restore circulation, and
gathered in disconsolate shivering groups around the galleys. These had
come up in the night, and from them, standing under the dripping pines,
came a promising smell of hot coffee. Something hot was the main
consideration in life just now. But the fires were feeble, and something
hot was long in coming. The cooks swore because dry wood couldn’t be
found, and wet wood couldn’t be risked, because it would draw
shell-fire. The men swore at the weather and the slowness of the kitchen
force, and the war in general, and they all growled together.
“Quite right—entirely fitting and proper!” said the second-in-command of
the 49th Company, coming up to where his captain gloomed beside the
galley. “We wouldn’t know what to do with Marines who didn’t growl. But,
El Capitan, if you’ll go over to that ditch yonder, you’ll find some
Frog artillerymen with a lovely cooking-fire. They gave me hot coffee
with much rum in it. A great people, the Frogs—” But the captain was
already gone, and the second-in-command, who was a lean first lieutenant
in a mouse-colored raincoat, had to run to catch up with him.
They returned in time to see their company and the other companies of
the battalion lining up for chow. This matter being disposed of, the men
cast incurious eyes about them.
The French artillerymen called the place “the Wood of the Seven
Pigeons.” There were no pigeons here now. Only hidden batteries of 105s,
with their blue-clad attendants huddled in shelters around them. The
wood was a sparse growth of scrubby pines that persisted somehow on the
long slope of one of the low hills of Suippes, in the sinister Champagne
country. Many of the pines were blackened and torn by shell-fire, and
the chalky soil was pockmarked with shell craters from Boche
counter-battery work, searching for the French guns camouflaged there.
Trenches zigzagged through the pines, old and new, with belts of rusty
wire. There were graves.
North from the edge of the pines the battalion looked out on desolation
where the once grassy, rolling slopes of the Champagne stretched away
like a great white sea that had been dead and accursed through all time.
Near at hand was Souain, a town of the dead, a shattered skeleton of a
place, with shells breaking over it. Beyond and northward was Somme-Py,
nearly blotted out by four years of war. From there to the horizon, east
and west and north and south, was all a stricken land. The rich topsoil
that formerly made the Champagne one of the fat provinces of France was
gone, blown away and buried under by four years of incessant shell-fire.
Areas that had been forested showed only blackened, branchless stumps,
upthrust through the churned earth. What was left was naked, leprous
chalk. It was a wilderness of craters, large and small, wherein no yard
of earth lay untouched. Interminable mazes of trench work threaded this
waste, discernible from a distance by the belts of rusty wire
entanglements that stood before them. Of the great national highway that
had once marched across the Champagne between rows of stately poplars,
no vestige remained.
The second-in-command, peering from the pines with other officers of the
battalion, could see nothing that moved in all the desolation. Men were
there, thousands of them, but they were burrowed like animals in the
earth. North of Somme-Py, even then, Gouraud’s hard-fighting Frenchmen
were blasting their way through the lines that led up to the last
strongholds of the Boche toward Blanc Mont Ridge, and over this mangled
terrain could be seen the smoke and fury of bursting shrapnel shell and
high explosive. The sustained roar of artillery and the infernal
clattering of machine-guns and musketry beat upon the ears of the
watchers. Through glasses one could make out bits of blue and bits of
green-gray, flung casually about between the trenches. These, the only
touches of color in the waste, were the unburied bodies of French and
German dead.
“So this, Slover, is the Champagne,” said the second-in-command to one
of his non-coms who stood beside him. The sergeant spat. “It looks like
hell, sir!” he said.
The lieutenant strolled over to where a French staff captain stood with
a knot of officers in the edge of the pines, pointing out features of
this extended field, made memorable by bitter fighting.
“Since 1914 we have fought hard here,” he was saying. “Oh, the French
know this Champagne well, and the Boche knows it too. Yonder”—he pointed
to the southwest—“is the Butte de Souain, where our Foreign Legion met
in the first year that Guard Division that the Prussians call the
‘Cockchafers.’ They took the Butte, but most of the Legion are lying
there now. And yonder”—the Frenchman extended his arm with a gesture
that had something of the salute in it—“stands the Mountain of Rheims.
If you look—the air is clearing a little—you can perhaps see the towers
of Rheims itself.”
A long grayish hill lay against the gray sky at the horizon, and over it
a good glass showed, very far and faint, the spires of the great
cathedral, with a cloud of shell-fire hanging over them.
“All this terrain, as far as Rheims, is dominated by Blanc Mont Ridge
yonder to the north. As long as the Boche holds Blanc Mont, he can throw
his shells into Rheims; he can dominate the whole Champagne Sector, as
far as the Marne. Indeed, they say that the Kaiser watched from Blanc
Mont the battle that he launched here in July. And the Boche means to
hang on there. So far, we have failed to dislodge him. I expect”—he
broke off and smiled gravely on the circle of officers—“you will see
some very hard fighting in the next few days, gentlemen!”
It was the last day of September, and as the forenoon went by an
intermittent drizzle sent the battalion to such miserable shelters as
the men could improvise. Company commanders and seconds-in-command went
up toward ruined Somme-Py for reconnoissance, and returned to profane
the prospect to their platoon leaders.
“I do not like this place,” declared the captain of the 49th Company to
his juniors. “It looks like it was just built for calamities to happen
in.”
“Yep, and all the division is around here for calamities to happen
to.... A sight more of us will go in than will ever come out of it!”
Meantime it was wet and cold in the dripping shelters. Winter clothing
had not been issued, and the battalion shivered and was not cheerful.
“Wish to God we could go up an’ get this fight over with!”
“Yes, an’ then go back somewhere for the winter. Let some of these here
noble National Army outfits we’ve been hearin’ about do some of the
fightin’! There’s us, and there’s the 1st Division, and the 32d—Hell! we
ain’t hogs! Let some of them other fellows have the glory——”
“Gawd help the Boche when we meets him this time! Somebody’s got to pay
for keepin’ us out in this wet an’ cold.”
[Illustration:
French grenadier—Blanc Mont.
]
“Hear your young men talk, El Capitan? They’re goin’ to take it out on
the Boche—they will, too. Don’t you take any more of this than your rank
entitles you to! I’m gettin’ wet.”
The second-in-command and the captain were huddled under a small sheet
of corrugated iron, stolen by an enterprising orderly from the French
gunners. The captain was very large, and the other very lean, and they
were both about the same length. They fitted under the sheet by a sort
of dovetailing process that made it complicated for either to move. A
second-in-command is sort of an understudy to the company commander. In
some of the outfits the captain does everything, and his understudy can
only mope around and wait for his senior to become a casualty. In
others, it is the junior who gets things done, and the captain is just a
figurehead. In the 49th, however, the relation was at its happiest. The
big captain and his lieutenant functioned together as smoothly as parts
of a sweet-running engine, and there was between them the
undemonstrative affection of men who have faced much peril together.
“As for me,” rejoined the captain, drawing up one soaked knee and
putting the other out in the wet, “I want to get wounded in this fight.
A bon blighty, in the arm or the leg, I think. Something that will keep
me in a nice dry hospital until spring. I don’t like cold weather. Now
who is pushin’? It’s nothin’ to me, John, if your side leaks—keep off o’
mine!”
So the last day of September, 1918, passed, with the racket up forward
unabated. So much of war is just lying around waiting in more or less
discomfort. And herein lies the excellence of veterans. They swear and
growl horribly under discomfort and exposure—far more than green troops;
but privations do not sap their spirit or undermine that intangible
thing called morale. Rather do sufferings nourish in the men a cold,
mounting anger, that swells to sullen ardor when at last the infantry
comes to grips with the enemy, and then it goes hard indeed with him who
stands in the way.
On the front, a few kilometres from where the battalion lay and listened
to the guns, Gouraud’s attack was coming to a head around the heights
north of Somme-Py and the strong trench systems that guarded the way to
Blanc Mont Ridge. Three magnificent French divisions, one of Chasseurs,
a colonial division, and a line division with a Verdun history,
shattered themselves in fruitless attacks on the Essen Trench and the
Essen Hook, a switch line of that system. Beyond the Essen line the
Blanc Mont position loomed impregnable. Late on the 1st of October, a
gray, bleak day, the battalion got its battle orders, and took over a
mangled front line from certain weary Frenchmen.
Gathering the platoon leaders and non-coms around them, the captain and
the second-in-command of the 49th Company spread a large map on the
ground, weighting its corners with their pistols.
“You give the dope, John,” ordered the captain, who was not a man of
words, and his junior spoke somewhat in this manner:
“Here, you birds, look at this map. The Frogs have driven the Boche a
kilometre and a half north of Somme-Py. You see it here—the town you
watched them shell this morning. They have gotten into the Prussian
trench—this blue line with the wire in front of it. It’s just a fire
trench, mostly shell-holes linked up. Behind it, quite close, is the
Essen trench, which is evidently a hum-dinger! Concrete pill-boxes and
deep dugouts and all that sort of thing—regular fort. The Frogs say it
can’t be taken from the front—they’ve tried. We’re goin’ to take it. On
the other side of that is the Elbe trench, and a little to the left the
Essen Hook, and in the centre the Bois de Vipre—same kind o’ stuff, they
say. We’re to take them. You see them all on the map.... Next, away up
in this corner of the map, is the Blanc Mont place. Whoever is left when
we get that far will take that, too.... Questions?... Yes, Tom, we ought
to get to use those sawed-off shotguns they gave us at St. Mihiel—though
when we get past the Essen system, we’ll be in the open, mostly.... The
old Deuxième Division is goin’ in to-night—it’s goin’ to be some party!”
“Gunnery sergeants send details from each platoon for
bandoleers—ammunition-dump is around Battalion Headquarters somewhere,”
added the captain. “We get a few rifle-grenades, and some
shotgun-shells. And make the men hang on to their reserve rations, for
Christ’s sake! Probably won’t eat again until after this is over. Move
out of here as soon as it’s dark. That’s all.”
“Two hundred and thirty-four men, sir, and seven officers, not counting
the galley force and the office force that we’re leaving behind,”
reported the second-in-command, falling in beside the captain as the
company moved off with the rest of the battalion in the gathering
darkness. They went in double file, dim shapes in the gloom, down the
muddy, tortuous road.
“The company’s in better shape than it ever has been,” replied the
captain thoughtfully. “St. Mihiel was a walk-over, but it was fine
training for them, and even our greenest replacements had a chance to
get over being gun-shy. And the non-coms are fine, too ... hope we don’t
lose too many of them. You and I have come all the way from Belleau Wood
together, John—I’m no calamity-howler—but there’s something about this
dam’ Champagne country that gets you——”
“Too many men died here, I reckon,” said the lieutenant. “You feel ’em
somehow, in the dark.... Something creepy about those flares, isn’t
there?”
The road here was screened on the side toward the enemy by coarse mats
of camouflage material erected on tall poles. Through this screen the
German flares, ceaselessly ascending, shone with cold, greenish
whiteness, so that men saw their comrades’ faces weirdly drawn and pale
under their helmets. The files talked as they went——
“I’ve seen the time I’d have called those things pretty—but now—reckon
hell’s lit with the same kind of glims!” ... “Remember the flare that
went up in our faces the night we made the relief in Bellew Woods?
Seemed to me like everybody in the world was lookin’ at me.” “Bois de
Belleau! mighty few in the battalion now that remember them days,
sonny....” “Listen to that dam’ Heine machine-gun over yonder ... like a
typewriter, ain’t it?” “Useter run a typewriter myself, back befo’ Texas
declared war on Germany—in a nice dry office it was, an’ this time o’
night I’d be down on the drug-store corner lookin’ ’em over.—” “Somebody
shoot that bum, talkin’ about lookin’ ’em over!” “Hey! Th’ angels’ll be
lookin’ him over, this time to-morrow night, they will!” “Yes, they
will! I’ll live to spit on the grave of the man that said that!”—“My
word! Don’t these 1917 model gyrines talk rough, Mac!” marvelled one old
non-com to another.
[Illustration:
Those sawed-off shotguns they gave us at St. Mihiel.
]
The road passed into the desolation and wound north, kilometre after
kilometre. Presently the camouflage ended and the battalion felt
exceedingly naked without its shelter. Then a slope to the left screened
the way, the crest of it sharply outlined as the flares ascended. Beyond
that crest the machine-guns sounded very near; now and again the air was
filled with the whispering rush of their bullets, passing high toward
some chance target in the rear. The upper air was populous with shells
passing, and the sky flickered with gun-flashes, but the road along
which the battalion went enjoyed for the time an uneasy immunity. The
rests were all too short; the sweating files swore at their heavy packs;
the going was very hard. Presently the road ceased to be a road—merely a
broken way across an interminable waste of shell-holes, made passable
after a fashion by the hasty work of French engineers, toiling behind
the assault of the infantry.
The battalion skirted stupendous craters of exploded mines—“Good Gawd!
you could lose my daddy’s house, an’ his barn, too, in that there hole!
’Taint no small barn, either!” The stars had come out, and shone very
far off and strangely calm. The dark was foul with all the reek of an
old battle-field. “After midnight,” conjectured the files. “Are we ever
goin’ to get across this accursed place?”
The files plodded on each side of the tumbled track, and as they neared
Somme-Py a pitiful stream of traffic grew and passed between them, the
tide of French wounded ebbing to the rear. They were the débris of the
attacks that had spent themselves through the day—walking wounded,
drifting back like shadows in stained blue uniforms, men who staggered
and leaned against each other and spoke in low, racked voices to the
passing files; and broken men who were borne in stretchers, moaning—“Ah,
Jesu!...” “Doucement, doucement!!...” Farther back the ambulances would
be waiting for them.... The battalion went on in close-mouthed silence.
Very little talking now, no laughing at all.... “El Capitan, regardez—we
be sober-minded men approaching—what we approach—” said the
second-in-command, hitching the sling of his musette bag well out of the
way of his gas-mask. “I have always,” replied that stolid veteran, “held
that war was a serious business.” ... “This is Somme-Py. Can’t those
bums ahead set a better pace?”
The column went quickly through the town, into which shells were
falling, stumbling over the débris of ruined walls and houses. There was
a very busy French dressing-station there, under the relic of a church.
It was too dark to see, but each man caught the sound and the smell of
it. They cleared the town and went on to a crossroads. French guides
were to have met the battalion there, for the line was just ahead, but
the guides were late. There was a nerve-racking halt. The next battalion
in column closed up; a machine-gun outfit, with its solemn, blasé mules,
jammed into the rifle companies.
The 49th was the leading company, just behind the Battalion Headquarters
group, and the second-in-command went up to where the major and his
satellites were halted.
“Crossroads are always a dam’ bad business, Coxy,” the major was
observing to his adjutant. “Just askin’ for it here—no tellin’ how late
our Frog friends will be—get the men moved into that ditch off the road
yonder—Ah! thought so!”
A high, swift whine that grew to a shrieking roar, and a five-inch shell
crashed down some fifty yards to the right of the crowded road.
Everybody except the mules were flat on the ground before it landed, but
wicked splinters of steel sung across the road, and a machine-gunner,
squatting by his cart, collapsed and rolled toward the edge of the road,
swearing and clutching at his thigh. The men moved swiftly and without
disorder to the ditch, which was a deep communication-trench paralleling
the road. Another shell came as they moved, falling to the left, and
then another, closer, this time between the road and the trench. A mule
or two reared and plunged, stricken; a Marine whose head had been unduly
high slumped silently down the side of the trench with most of his head
gone. “Damn! Jimmie stopped somethin’ the size of a stove-lid!” “Fool
oughta kept his head down!” “Some very hard men you have in your
company, El Capitan,” commented the second-in-command, a few feet away,
crouching by the side of the captain. “Now, I may stop one, but nobody’s
goin’ to get to say that about me, I’ll bet!” “Nor me, John!”... “Face
it when it comes, but no use lookin’ for it!”
More shells came, landing along the road, between the road and the
trench, and one or two of them in the trench itself. Cries and groans
came from the head of the column; stretcher-bearers hurried in that
direction; the battalion lay close and waited. Then the shelling
stopped. Up forward the major drew a long breath. “Just harassin’ fire
on these crossroads. I was afraid we were spotted. Now, those guides—” A
little group of Frenchmen arrived panting at the head of the column and
the men were quickly on the move again. “If Brother Boche had kept
flingin’ them seabags around here, he’d a-hurt somebody. Where do we go
from here?”
Said the major, coming to the head of the 49th with a French
guide—“Francis, we’re takin’ the regimental front—division’s putting
four battalions in the line. The 6th will be on our left; infantry
brigade on the right. Let me know how your sector looks—my P. C. will
be—I’d better send a runner with you. Here’s your guide.”
That company moved off, and the other companies, going into position in
the battered Prussian trench, facing the formidable Essen work. The
French riflemen they found there were hanging on in the very teeth of
the enemy. Their position had been hastily constructed a few days before
by the hard-pressed Boche and was a mere selection from the abundant
shell craters, connected by shallow digging. The Marines stumbled and
slipped through its windings. It was cluttered up with dead men, for it
had been strongly held and dearly won. The 49th took over the part
allotted to it from some ten platoons of Frenchmen, eight or ten men to
a platoon, in command of a first lieutenant. It was what was left of a
full battalion.
Courteous and suave, although he swayed on his feet from weariness and
his eyelids drooped from loss of sleep, the Frenchman summed up the
situation for the Marine captain. “We hold this fire trench. In your
sector are four communication trenches running to the Essen work, which
is about a hundred metres distant. We hold most of the boyau on the
extreme right; the others we have barricaded. You cannot take this Essen
trench by frontal assault!”—“Why can’t we?” growled the American.
[Illustration:
The shells began to drop into the trench.
]
“When it is light you will see, M. le Capitaine! You can only get
forward by bombing your way in the boyaux. They are too strong in
machine-guns, the Boche. Now I take my men and go. Seven days and nights
we have been on our feet ... those of us who are left are very tired....
It is well that you be watchful in this place, but do not stir up the
Boche yonder. They shoot with minenwerfers when you frighten them. Such
a one finished my pauvre capitaine and six men with him. Bon chance, mon
capitaine! Bon jour!”
“Cheerful bird, wasn’t he?” remarked the captain. “Wonder if that thing
I stepped on just outside his hole was his captain? John, before it gets
good daylight, don’t you want to take a look-see at this Essen Trench?
Take whoever you want and see how the land lies.”
The Essen Trench had been very active when the companies were being
posted; staccato bursts of machine-gun fire had ripped across the
intervening dark, and Springfields had answered. There had been some
bombing around traverses in the boyaux. But when, in the creeping
grayness of the dawn, the lieutenant from the 49th ventured across to it
with his orderly and a sergeant, he found the Boche retiring. Filing
quickly through the communication trenches, the battalion occupied it
without difficulty, and, looking around them, were very glad they hadn’t
had to take it by storm.
[Illustration:
A flare during shelling in the front-line trenches.
]
And the captain understood why the French lieutenant had said it
couldn’t be stormed. The French had tried the evening before to cross
the scant distance and get into it. Most of those who had charged lay as
the Boche Maxims had cut them down. In one place, between two boyaux
that formed with the opposed lines a rough square of perhaps one hundred
yards, he counted eighty-three dead Frenchmen. Lying very thick near the
lip of their own trench, the bodies formed a sort of wedge, thinning
toward the point as they had been decimated, and that point was one
great bearded Frenchman, his body all a mass of bloody rags, who lay
with his eyes fiercely open to the enemy and his outthrust bayonet
almost in the emplacement where the Boche guns had been.
The company, which had learned its own bitter lesson in frontal attacks
on machine-guns, gave passing tribute. “Them Frogs, they eat
machine-guns up. Fightin’ sons o’ guns, they are. Wonder if any chow is
comin’ up to-day?” They made themselves comfortable among the dead and
waited the next move with equanimity.
“Two hundred and thirty-one men, sir,” reported the second-in-command,
sliding into the shallow dugout where the captain was holed up. “Mighty
lucky so far. I’m goin’ to sleep. There’s some shellin’, especially
toward the left, but most of the outfit is pretty well under cover.”
II
Gouraud’s battle roared on to the left with swelling tumult. The
Americans, in their sector, passed the day in ominous quiet. They
wondered what the delay was, speculated on the strategy of attack—which
is a matter always sealed from the men who deliver the attack—and wore
through to the evening of October 2. At dark, food came up in marmite
cans—beef and potatoes and a little coffee. “Put ours on that mess-tin
there,” directed the second-in-command, as his orderly slid in with his
and the captain’s rations. The captain sat up in his corner a little
later. “What th’ hell, John?”—sniff—sniff! “Has that dead Boche on the
other side of you begun to announce hisself? Phew!” The
second-in-command rose from the letter he was writing by the stub of a
candle and sniffed busily—sniff—snnnn—“Damnation! Captain, it’s our
supper!” With averted face he presented the grayish chunks of beef that
reposed on the mess-tin. “Urggg—throw it out!” He disappeared up the
crumbled steps to the entrance of the hole.
A few minutes later he slid down again, followed in a shower of dust and
clods by a battalion runner. “All the beef was bad, El Capitan! What the
young men are saying about the battalion supply would make your hair
curl!—And here’s our attack orders.”
There was a brief pencilled order from the major, and maps. The two
officers bent over them eagerly. “Runner!—Platoon commanders report
right away—” ... “What do you make of it, John? Looks like General
Lejeune was goin’ to split his division and reunite it on the field....
Hmmm! Ain’t that the stunt you claim only Robert E. Lee and Napoleon
could get away with?... All here? Get around—the map’s about oriented——”
“Here we are, in the Essen Trench—seems that the Marines move down to
the left to here—and the 9th and 23rd move to the right—to here. These
pencil lines show the direction of attack—then we jump off, angling a
little to the right, compass bearing—and the infantry outfits point
about as much to the left. That brings us together up here about three
kilometres, and we go on straight, a little west of north from there, to
Blanc Mont——
[Illustration:
In the Essen trench—a runner.
]
“Essen Hook and Bois de Vipre are the first objectives—Blanc Mont final
objective.... That means we pass to the flank of the Hook and join up
behind the Viper Woods—we’ll get some flanking fire, but we will cut
both positions off from the rear, and we won’t get near as many men shot
up as we would in frontal attack. Might be worse——”
“That’s all we know about the division orders— For the battalion, the
major says the 5th Regiment will follow the 6th in support at the
jump-off, and the zero hour will be communicated later—some time in the
morning, I reckon. That’s all.”
The morning of October 3 [1918] came gray and misty. From midnight until
dawn the front had been quiet at that point—comparatively. Then all the
French and American guns opened with one world-shaking crash. From the
Essen Trench the ground fell away gently, then rose in a long slope,
along which could be made out the zigzags of the German trenches. The
Bois de Vipre was a bluish mangled wood, two kilometres north. Peering
from their shelters, the battalion saw all this ground swept by a
hurricane of shell-fire. Red and green flames broke in orderly rows
where the 75s showered down on the Boche lines; great black clouds
leaped up where the larger shells fell roaring. The hillside and the
wood were all veiled in low-hanging smoke, and the flashes came redly
through the cloud. Far off, Blanc Mont way, a lucky shell found and
exploded a great ammunition-dump—the battalion felt the long tremor from
the shock of it come to them through the earth and watched, minutes
after the high crimson flare of the explosion, a broad column of smoke
that shot straight up from it, hundreds of feet, and hung in air,
spreading out at the top like some unearthly tree.
The men crowed and chortled in the trench. “Boy, ain’t Heinie gettin’ it
now!” “Hear that shell gurglin’ as she goes?—That’s gas.” “Listen to
them 75s. You know, I never see one of them little guns that I don’t
want to go up and kiss it. Remember that counter-attack they smeared in
front of us at Soissons?”
The heavens seemed roofed over with long, keening noises—sounds like the
sharp ripping of silk, magnified, running in swift arcs from horizon to
horizon. These were the quickfiring 75s, the clear-cut bark of the
discharges merging into a crashing roar. Other sounds came with them,
deeper in key, the whine growing to a rumble—these were the heavier
shells—105s, 155s, 210s. Almost, one expected to look up and see them,
like swift, deadly birds, some small, some enormous, all terrible.
Gas-shells could be distinguished from the high explosive by the throaty
gurgle of the liquid in them. “Move down the trench to the left,” came
the order.
The battalion moved, filing around the traverses with judicious
intervals between men, so that the Boche shells might not include too
many in their radius of death. For Heinie was beginning to shoot back.
He had the range of his vacated trench perfectly, and, holding the high
ground, he could see what he was shooting at. Shells began to crash down
among the companies, whole squads were blotted out, and men choked and
coughed as the reek of the high explosive caught at their windpipes.
[Illustration:
The morning of October 3d came gray and misty—a patrol.
]
“Lordy, ain’t we ever goin’ to get outa this dam’ place an’ get at
’em—?” A shell with a driving-band loose came with a banshee scream, and
men and pieces of men were blown into the air. “That was in the first
platoon,” said the second-in-command, shaking the dirt off his gas-mask.
“Something ought to be done about that gunner, El Capitan!” Another
landed in the opposite lip of the trench where the two officers
crouched, half-burying them both. “My God, cap’n! You killed?” “Hell,
no! Are you?”
[Illustration:
“Lordy, ain’t we ever goin’ to get outa this dam’ place an’ get at
’em—?”
]
“Far enough to the left,” the major sent word. “We will wait here. The
6th leads—we’re the last battalion in support to-day.”
Coming from the maze of trenches in the rear, the assault regiment began
to pass through the 5th, battalion following battalion at 500-yard
distances. A number of French “baby” tanks started with the assaulting
waves, but it was an evil place for tanks. Tank traps, trenches so wide
that the little fellows went nose-down into them and stuck, and direct
fire from Boche artillery stopped the most of them. Wave after wave, the
6th went forward. For a moment the sun shone through the murk, near the
horizon—a smouldering red sun, banded like Saturn, and all the bayonets
gleamed like blood. Then the cloud closed again.
When an attack is well launched it is the strategy of the defenders to
concentrate their artillery fire on the support waves that follow the
assault troops, leaving the latter to be dealt with by machine-gun and
rifle fire. So the battalion, following on in its turn, was not happy.
“Wish to Gawd we wuz up forward,” growled the files. “’Nothin’ up there
but machine-guns. This here shellin’ gets a man’s goat. Them bums in the
6th allus did have all the luck!...” “Lootenant, ain’t we ever gonna get
a chance at them Boches? This bein’ killed without a chance to kill back
is hell—that’s what it is!”
The battalion was out of the trench now, and going forward, regulating
its pace on the battalion ahead. All at once there was a snapping and
crackling in the air—a corporal spun round and collapsed limply, while
his blouse turned red under his gas-mask—the man beside him stumbled and
went down, swearing through grayish lips at a shattered knee—the men
flattened and all faces turned toward the flank.
“Machine-guns on the left!”—“Hell! It’s that Essen Hook we’ve got to
pass—thank God, it’s long range! Come on, you birds.” And the battalion
went on, enduring grimly. Finally, when well past its front, which ran
diagonally to the line of advance, the 17th Company, that had the left,
turned savagely on the Essen Hook and got a foothold in its rear. A
one-pounder from the regimental headquarters company was rushed up to
assist them, and the men yelled with delight as the vicious little
cannon got in direct hits on the Boche emplacements. Hopelessly cut off,
the large body of Germans in this formidable work surrendered after a
few sharp and bloody minutes, and the 17th, sending back its prisoners,
rejoined the battalion.
[Illustration:
Others lay on the ground over which the battalion passed.
]
Prisoners began to stream back from the front of the attack, telling of
the success of the 6th. Wounded came with them, some walking, some
carried on improvised stretchers by the Boche “kamarads.” Most of them
were grinning. “Goin’ fine up there, boys, goin’ fine!” “Lookit,
fellers! Got a bon blighty—We’ll give ’em your regards in Paris!”
Others of the 6th lay on the ground over which the battalion passed.
Some lay quietly, like men who rested after labor. Others were mangled
and twisted into attitudes grotesque and horrible as the fury of the
exploding shells had flung them. There were dead Germans, too. Up
forward rifle-fire and machine-guns gave tongue, and all the Boche guns
raged together. “Reckon the 6th is gettin’ to Blanc Mont now.” The
second-in-command looked at his watch. Inconceivably, it was noon.
For a while now the battalion halted, keeping its distance from the unit
ahead. The men lay on their rifles and expressed unreasonable yearnings
for food. “Eat? Eat? Hell! Shock troops ain’t supposed to eat!” Officers
cast anxious glances toward the utterly exposed left. The French attack
had failed to keep abreast of the American.
The left company, the 17th, was in a cover of scrubby trees. The other
companies were likewise concealed. Only the 49th lay perforce in the
open, on a bleak, shell-pocked slope. A high-flying Boche plane spotted
its platoon columns, asprawl eighty or a hundred yards apart on the
chalky ground. “No good,” said the second-in-command, cocking his head
gander-wise in his flat helmet, “is goin’ to come of that dam’
thing—guess all our noble aviators have gone home to lunch.” The plane,
high and small and shining in the sky, circled slowly above them. Far
back of the Boche lines there was a railroad gun that took a wireless
from the wheeling vulture. “Listen,” said the captain, “listen to th——”
[Illustration:
“Oh, Lordy! They’ve got us bracketed!”
]
There were lots of shells passing over—the long, tearing whine of the
75s, the coarser voices of the Boche 77s replying, and heavy stuff, but
most of it was breaking behind or in front of the battalion. Into this
roof of sound came a deeper note—a far-off rumble that mounted to an
enormous shattering roar, like a freight train on a down-grade. The
company flattened against the ground like partridges, and the world
shook and reeled under them as a nine-inch shell crashed into the earth
fifty yards ahead, exploding with a cataclysmic detonation that rocked
their senses. An appalling geyser of black smoke and torn earth leaped
skyward, jagged splinters of steel whined away, and stones and clods
showered down. Before the smoke had lifted from the monstrous crater the
devastating rumble came again, and the second shell roared down fifty
yards to the rear.
“Oh, Lordy! They’ve got us bracketed!”
“I saw that one! I saw it—look right where the next one’s gonna hit,
an’—” “Look where it’s gonna hit! Lawd, if I jest knew it wasn’t gonna
hit me—ahh——!”
The third shell came, and men who risked an eye could see it—a dark,
tremendous streak, shooting straight down to the quivering earth. A
yawning hole opened with thunder fairly between two platoon columns, and
the earth vomited.... It was wonderful shooting. All the shells that
followed dropped between the columns of prone men—but not a man was hit!
The heavy projectiles sank far into the chalky soil, and the explosions
sent the deadly fragments outward and over the company. More than a
dozen shells were fired in all, the high sinister plane wheeling
overhead the while. Then the company went forward with the battalion,
very glad to move.
“Any one of those nine-inch babies would have blotted out twenty of us,”
marvelled a lieutenant, leading his platoon around a thirty-foot crater
that still smoked. “Or ripped the heart out of any concrete-and-steel
fortification ever built—the good Lawd was certainly with us!”
To the company commanders, gathered at dark in a much disfigured Boche
shelter in the Wood of Somme-Py, the major gave information. “The 6th
took Blanc Mont, and they are holding it against heavy counter-attacks.
Prisoners say they were ordered to hold here at any costs—they’re
fighting damned well, too! The infantry regiments piped down the Bois de
Vipre, just as we did the Essen Hook. The division is grouping around
the Ridge, but we’re pretty well isolated from the French. To-night we
are going on up and take the front line, and attack toward
St.-Etienne-à-Arnes—town north of the Ridge and a little west. Get on up
to Blanc Mont with your companies—P. C. will be there, along the road
that runs across the Ridge.”
III
Not greatly troubled by the Boche shelling, that died to spasmodic
bursts as the night went on, the battalion mounted through the dark to
its appointed place. Here, beside a blasted road that ran along Blanc
Mont, just behind the thin line of the 6th, the weary men lay down, and,
no orders being immediately forthcoming, slept like the dead that were
lying thickly there. Let the officers worry over the fact that the
French had fallen behind on each flank, that the division was, to all
purposes, isolated far out in Boche territory—let any fool worry over
the chances of stopping one to-morrow—to-morrow would come soon enough.
“The lootenant says to get all the rest you can—don’t—nobody need
to—tell—me—tha——”
[Illustration:
Before zero hour.
]
In the deep dugouts behind the road the battalion commanders prodded at
field-maps and swore wearily over the ominous gaps behind the
flanks—three kilometres on one flank, five on the other, where the
French divisions had not kept pace. Into these holes the Boche had all
day been savagely striving to thrust himself, and his success would mean
disaster. Already the 6th had a force thrown back to cover the left
rear, disposed at right angles to the line of advance.... And orders
were to carry the attack forward at dawn. On top of that, after midnight
a Boche deserter crawled into the line with the cheering news that the
Germans were planning an attack in force on the American flanks at dawn;
a division of fresh troops—Prussians—had just been brought up for that
purpose. It looked bad—it looked worse than that. “Well,” said Major
George Hamilton of the 1st Battalion of the 5th, “orders are to attack,
and, by God, we’ll attack”—a yawn spoiled the dramatic effect of his
pronouncement—“and now I’m going to get some sleep. Coxy, wake me at
5.30—that will be an hour.”
And at dawn, while the Ridge shook and thundered under the barrage that
went before the Boche flank attack, and the 6th held with their rifles
the branch behind the left, the 5th Marines went forward to carry the
battle to St.-Etienne.
They went in column of battalions, four companies abreast. For the 1st
Battalion, still in support, the fourth day of October began as a weary
repetition of the day before. Shells whooped down into the platoon
columns as they waited for the 2d and 3d Battalions to get clear;
machine-guns on the left took toll as they rose up to follow. Noon found
them well forward of the Ridge, lying in an open flat, while the leading
battalions disappeared in pine woods on a long slope ahead. It had
fallen strangely quiet where they lay.
“Now what’s comin’, I wonder?” “Anything at all, ’cept chow.” “Boy,
ain’t it quiet here? What do you reckon—” “Don’t like this,” said one
old non-com to another. “Minds me of once when I was on a battle-wagon
in the China Sea. Got still like this, and then all at once all the wind
God ever let loose come down on us!” “Shouldn’t wonder—Hey! She’s
opening up again! That there 2d Battalion has sure stuck its foot in
somethin’!”
Up forward all hell broke loose. Artillery, machine-guns, rifles, even
the coughing detonations of grenades, mounted to an inconceivable fury
of sound. “Here comes a battalion runner—there’s the skipper, over
there—what’s up, anyway?”
The second-in-command came through his company with a light in his eyes,
and he sent his voice before him. “Deploy the first platoon, Mr.
Langford. Three-pace interval, be sure. Where’s Mr. Connor? Oh, Chuck,
you’ll form the second wave behind Tom. About fifty yards. Other two
platoons in column behind the company flanks. On yo’ feet, chillun!
We’re goin’ up against ’em!”
[Illustration:
Flanking fire. “Hey! She’s opening up again.”
]
[Illustration:
The hush still hung around them as they moved out of the flat and
began to ascend the long gray slope ahead.
]
And so, all four companies in line, the 1st Battalion, a thousand men,
went up against the Boche. “Capitan,” said the second-in-command, as
they started, “we’re swingin’ half-left. This tack will take us right to
St.-Etienne, won’t it? We were pointin’ a little one side of it
before—major give you any dope?” “The Boche have come out of
St.-Etienne—two full infantry regiments, anyhow, and a bunch of Maxim
guns—and hit the second and third in the flank. Must be pretty bad.
We’re goin’ up to hit them in the flank ourselves. ’Bout a kilometre,
I’d say. Wait until their artillery spots this little promenade. None of
ours in support, you know.”
The hush still hung around them as they moved out of the flat and began
to ascend the long gray slope ahead, the crest of which was covered with
a growth of pines. There was no cover on the slope—a few shell-holes, a
few stunted bushes and sparse tufts of grass. Across a valley to the
left, 800 to 1,000 yards away, rose another ridge, thickly clothed with
underbrush, that ran back toward Blanc Mont. Forward and to the right
was the heavy pine timber into which the other battalions had gone, and
from which still came tumult and clangor. Tumult and clangor, also, back
toward Blanc Mont, and further back, where the French attacks were
pushing forward, and drumming thunder on the right, where the Saxons
were breaking against the 9th and 23d Infantry—but here, quiet. Voices
of non-coms, rasping out admonitions to the files, sounded little and
thin along the line. Every man knew, without words, that the case was
desperate, but to this end was all their strength and skill in war, all
their cunning gained in other battles, and their hearts lifted up to
meet what might come. “More interval—more interval there on the left!
Don’t bunch up, you——”
“That ridge over yonder, capitan—” said the second-in-command softly.
“It’s lousy with the old Boche! And forward—and behind the flank, too!
This is goin’ to be—Ahhh—shrapnel!”
[Illustration:
The first shell came screaming down the line from the right.
]
The first shell came screaming down the line from the right, and broke
with the hollow cough and poisonous yellow puff of smoke which marks the
particular abomination of the foot-soldier. It broke fairly over the
centre of the 49th, and every head ducked in unison. Three men there
were who seemed to throw themselves prone; they did not get up again.
And then the fight closed upon the battalion with the complete and
horrid unreality of nightmare. All along the extended line the saffron
shrapnel flowered, flinging death and mutilation down. Singing balls and
jagged bits of steel spattered on the hard ground like sheets of hail;
the line writhed and staggered, steadied and went on, closing toward the
centre as the shells bit into it. High-explosive shells came with the
shrapnel, and where they fell geysers of torn earth and black smoke
roared up to mingle with the devilish yellow in the air. A foul murky
cloud of dust and smoke formed and went with the thinning companies, a
cloud lit with red flashes and full of howling death.
The silent ridge to the left awoke with machine-guns and rifles, and
sibilant rushing flights of nickel-coated missiles from Maxim and Mauser
struck down where the shells spared. An increasing trail of crumpled
brown figures lay behind the battalion as it went. The raw smell of
blood was in men’s nostrils.
Going forward with his men, a little dazed perhaps with shock and sound
such as never were on earth before, the second-in-command was conscious
of a strangely mounting sense of the unreality of the whole thing.
Automatically functioning, as a company officer must, in the things he
is trained to do, there was still a corner of his brain that watched
detached and aloof as the scene unrolled. There was an officer rapped
across the toe of his boot by a spent bullet—the leather wasn’t even
scratched—who sat down and asserted that his foot was shot off. There
was Lieutenant Connor, who took a shrapnel dud in his loins, and was
opened horribly....
There was a sergeant, a hard old non-com of many battles, who went
forward beside him. His face was very red, and his eyes were very
bright, and his lean jaw bulged with a great chew of tobacco. His big
shoulders were hunched forward, and his bayonet glinted at a thirsty
angle, and his sturdy putteed legs swung in an irresistible stride. Then
there was, oddly audible through the din, the unmistakable sound that a
bullet makes when it strikes human flesh—and a long, crumpled, formless
thing on the ground turned to the sky blind eyes in a crawling mask of
red. There were five men with a machine-gun, barrel and mount and
ammunition-boxes, and a girlish, pink-cheeked lieutenant went before
them swinging a pair of field-glasses in his hand. Over and a little
short of them a red sun flashed in a whorl of yellow smoke, and they
were flattened into a mess of bloody rags, from which an arm thrust
upward, dangling a pair of new, clean glasses by a thong, and remained
so.... The woods on the crest were as far away as ever through the
murk—their strides got them nowhere—their legs were clogged as in an
evil dream—they were falling so fast, these men he had worked with and
helped to train in war. There was a monstrous anger in his heart ... a
five-inch shell swooped over his head, so near that the rush of air made
his ear-drums pop and burst. He was picked up and whirled away like a
leaf, breath and senses struck from him by the world-shattering
concussion.
[Illustration:
“Here comes a battalion runner—what’s up, anyway?”
]
The second-in-command was pulled to his feet by Gunner Nice, who had
taken the second platoon. His head lolled stupidly a moment, then he
heard words—“an’ that shell got all the captain’s group, sir—all of ’em!
An’ my platoon’s all casualties—” He pulled himself together as he went
forward. His raincoat was split up the back, under his belt. His
map-case was gone—the strap that had secured it hung loosely from his
shoulder. There was blood on his hands, and the salt taste of it in his
mouth, but it didn’t seem to be his. And the front of the battalion was
very narrow, now. The support platoons were all in the line. Strangest
of all, the gray slope was behind them—the trees on the crest were only
a few yards away.
Behind and to the left the machine-guns still raved, but the artillery
fell away. A greenish rocket flared from the pines ahead, and right in
the faces of the panting Marines machine-guns and rifles blazed. In the
shadow of the pines were men in cumbersome green-gray uniforms, with
faces that looked hardly human under deep round helmets. With eyes
narrowed, bodies slanting forward like men in heavy rain, the remnant of
the battalion went to them.
It was the flank of the Boche column which had come out of St.-Etienne
and struck the leading battalions of the 5th. It had watched first with
keen delight, then with incredulity, the tortured advance of the
battalion. It had waited too long to open its own fire. And now, already
shaken by the sight of these men who would not die, it shrank from the
long American bayonets and the pitiless, furious faces behind the steel.
A few Brandenburger zealots elected to die on their spitting Maxim guns,
working them until bayonets or clubbed rifles made an end. A few
iron-souled Prussians—the Boche had such men—stood up to meet bayonet
with bayonet, and died that way. The second-in-command saw such a one, a
big feldwebel, spring against one of his sergeants with the long
Prussian lunge that throws the bayonet like a spear to the full reach of
the arm. It is a spectacular thrust, and will spit like a rabbit what
stands in its way. But the sergeant, Bob Slover, a little fiery man with
a penchant for killing Germans, ran under it and thrust from the ground
for the Boche’s throat. And as his point touched, he pulled the trigger.
The feldwebel’s helmet flew straight into the air, and the top of his
head went with it.
A great many more flung away their arms and bleated “Kamaraden” to men
who in that red minute knew no mercy. Some hid in holes, or feigned
death, to be hunted out as the press thinned. And the rest scuttled
through the fringe of trees and back down toward St.-Etienne, while the
Marines, lying prone or taking rest for their Springfields, killed them
as they ran. This same rifle-fire, directed against the flank and rear
of the column which had pushed to the right against the other battalions
of the 5th, broke that force and dispersed it. There was a battery of
field-guns down the slope, 500 yards or so. The gunners—those who were
lucky—took to cover after the first burst of fire. “Thank Gawd fer a
shot at them dam’ artillerymen! Battle-sight, an’ aim low, you
birds—don’t let any of them bastards get away!”... “Sergeant, reckon the
lootenant would let us go down an’ take them 77s?”—“Shut up an’ work yo’
bolt, you dam’ fool!—Whatinell you think you are—a army core?”—“Besides,
Mr. Connor’s dead....” On the hill beyond St.-Etienne new trenches
scarred the slope; there were many Germans milling there, some 1,500
yards away. “Save your ammunition and lay low,” the word was passed.
“We’re on our own out here.” And the battalion, a very small battalion
now, little more than a hundred men, lay along the crest they had
stormed, with their dead and wounded and the Boche dead and wounded
around them.
[Illustration:
A few iron-souled Prussians—the Boche had such men—stood up to meet
bayonet with bayonet, and died that way.
]
[Illustration:
The last few men are always the most difficult to kill.
]
Almost immediately the Boche began to react. He opened on them a storm
of fire, high explosive and shrapnel, and his machine-guns dinned
fiercely. A counter-attack began to form toward St.-Etienne. Sweating
gunners struggled into position with the two machine-guns that were left
in the battalion, and these, with their crews, were knocked out by
shell-fire before either had been in action long enough to fire a clip.
But the rifles gave tongue and continued to speak—the last few men are
always the most difficult to kill—and the Boche had little taste for
rifle-fire that begins to kill at 700 yards. That counter-attack shortly
returned whence it came, and the one that followed it went back also.
The rifles fell silent, for the Boche infantry was in cover, or too far
away to waste scant ammunition on. “O Lord, for one battery of 75s or a
machine-gun outfit! All the Boches in the world, an’ nothin’ to reach
’em with!” lamented the captain of the 49th. “We’re clean away from our
guns, and those devils seem to know it—look at ’em, yonder! Heard a
shell from ours to-day, John? I haven’t.”—“Plenty from the other side,
though—damn few of us left, capitan. Eastin’s got it, Tom Langford’s got
it—Chuck Connor, and Matthews. Don’t know where Geer is. Guess I’m the
only officer you have left—here’s Captain Whitehead.”
Whitehead, of the 67th Company, plumped down beside them. Small, very
quick and wiry, with his helmet cocked on the side of his head, he gave
the impression of a fierce and warlike little hawk. “Hunt’s comin’ over,
Francis,” he said. “Bad place; worst I ever saw. Got about thirty men
left. Hell that our machine-guns got knocked out so quick, wasn’t
it?—must be two regiments of Fritzies on our front yonder!”
Captain Hunt, senior in the field, a big, imperturbable Californian,
came, and Lieutenant Kelly, promoted by casualties in the last hour to
command of the 66th Company. “How does it look to you, gentlemen?” said
Hunt. “Damn bad” was the consensus of opinion, with profane
embellishments. Followed some technical discussion. “Well,” concluded
the senior captain, “we’ve accomplished our mission—broke up their
attack—better hook up with the rest of the regiment. We’ll find them
through the woods to the right. Move off your companies—Kelly, you go
first.”
[Illustration:
A machine-gunner, Champagne.
A sketch made on the field.
]
Nobody remembers very clearly that swing to the right, through a hail of
machine-gun fire and an inferno of shelling. They found the companies of
the 2d Battalion digging in astride a blasted road, and went into
position beside them.
“I’ve organized the company sector with twenty men—all we’ve got
left—you and I make twenty-two,” reported the second-in-command,
dropping wearily into the shell-hole where the captain had established
himself. “Lord, I’m tired ... and what I can’t see,” he added in some
wonder, fingering the rents in his raincoat, “is why we weren’t killed
too....”
That night, lying in its shallow, hastily dug holes, the remnant of the
battalion descended through further hells of shelling. The next night
tins of beef and bread came up. There was some grim laughter when it
came. “Captain,” reported the one remaining sergeant, after distributing
rations in the dark, “they sent us chow according to the last strength
report—three days ago—230-odd rations. The men are building breastworks
out of the corned-willy cans, sir!—twenty of ’em——”
Some runners got through, and Division H. Q., well forward in a
pleasantly exposed spot on the Souain road, built up a picture of a
situation sufficiently interesting. Four infantry regiments were thrust
saw-wise northwest to northeast of Blanc Mont; all were isolated from
each other and from the French, who had lagged behind the flanks. Four
little islands in a turbulent Boche sea, and the old Boche doing his
damnedest. The Marine major-general commanding, Lejeune, it is related,
went serenely to sleep. And they relate further that a staff colonel
who, like Martha, was careful and troubled about many things, came to
rouse him with a tale of disaster: “General, general, I have word from
the front that a regiment of Marines is entirely surrounded by the
Germans!”
“Yes, colonel? Well, sir,” said the general, sadly and sleepily, “I am
sorry for those Germans!”—and returned to his slumbers.
More days and nights, slipping, characterless, into each other. Being
less than a company in strength, the 1st Battalion of the 5th was not
called on to attack again. They lay in their holes and endured. “Until
the division has accomplished its mission,” said the second-in-command,
rubbing his dirt-encrusted and unshaven chin. “That means, until the
rest of the outfit is killed down as close as we are. Then we’ll be
relieved, an’ get a week’s rest and a gang of bloodthirsty replacements,
an’ then we can do it all over again.” “Yes,” replied the captain,
turning uneasily in the cramped, coffin-shaped hole in which they lay.
He scratched himself. “I have cooties, I think. In plural quantities.”
“Well, you would have that orderly strip the overcoats off a covey of
dead Boches to furnish this château of ours. The Boche is such an
uncleanly beast.... I have cooties, too, my capitan. Hell ... ain’t war
wonderful!”
And after certain days the division was relieved. The battalion marched
out at night. The drumming thunder of the guns fell behind them and no
man turned his face to look again on the baleful lights of the front. On
the road they passed a regiment of the relieving division—full, strong
companies of National Guardsmen. They went up one side of the road; and
in ragged column of twos, unsightly even in the dim and fitful light,
the Marines plodded down the other side. They were utterly weary, with
shuffling feet and hanging heads. The division had just done something
that those old masters in the art of war, the French, and the world
after them, including Ludendorff, were to acknowledge remarkable. They
had hurled the Boche from Blanc Mont and freed the sacred city of
Rheims. They had paid a price hideous even for this war. And they were
spent. If there was any idea in those hanging heads it was food and
rest.
The Guard companies gibed at the shrunken battalion as they passed.
Singing and joking they went. High words of courage were on their lips
and nervous laughter. Save for a weary random curse here and there, the
battalion did not answer.... “Hell, them birds don’t know no better....”
“Yeh, we went up singin’ too, once—good Lord, how long ago!... They
won’t sing when they come out ... or any time after ... in this war.”...
“Damn you, can’t you march on your own side the road? How much room you
need?”
SONGS
THREE
“MADEMOISELLE FROM ARMENTIÈRES”
It was nice, back in billets, resting between battles, to sit on a bench
in the sun and watch the world go by. Odette, the strapping and genteel
daughter of the baker of Croutte-sur-Marne, here herds the duck Anatole
into the courtyard of her mother’s bakery. (M. Boulanger was last heard
from on the Chemin des Dames; Mme. Boulangère keeps the establishment
going.) The duck Anatole has been ordered for dinner by two lieutenants
of the 1st Battalion, the consideration being 37 francs 80 centimes. Two
privates of the 49th Company are choiring softly “Mademoiselle from
Armentières” as she passes. It is just as well that neither Odette nor
Anatole comprend l’anglais.
[Illustration: [Soldiers]]
IV
[Illustration: [Hands rolling a cigarette]]
At various times and places in 1918 the 2d Marine Division was subsisted
on the French ration, a component part of which was preserved Argentine
beef with carrots in it. This was called monkey-meat by the Marines of
the 4th Brigade. Men ate it when they were very hungry.
IV
MONKEY-MEAT
In a mangled place called the Wood Northwest of Lucy-le-Bocage two
lieutenants of the Marine Brigade squatted by a hole the size of a
coffin and regarded with attention certain cooking operations. The
older, and perhaps the dirtier of the two, was intent upon a
fire-blackened mess-kit, which was balanced on two stones and two German
bayonets over a can of solidified alcohol. In the mess-kit was simmering
a grayish and unattractive matter with doubtful yellowish lumps, into
which the lieutenant fed, discriminatingly, bits of hard bread and
frayed tomatoes from a can.
“Do what you will with it,” he observed, “monkey-meat is monkey-meat.
It’s a great pity that damn Tompkins had to get himself bumped off last
night when we came out. He had a way with monkey-meat, the kid did—hell!
I never have any luck with orderlies!” He prodded the mess of Argentine
beef—the French army’s canned meat ration—and stared sombrely. His eyes,
a little bloodshot in his sunburnt, unshaven face, were sleepy.
The other waited on two canteen cups stilted precariously over a
pale-lavender flame. The water in them began to boil, and he supplied
coffee—the coarse-ground, pale coffee of the Frogs—with a spoon that
shook a little. He considered: “S’pose I’d better boil the sugar in with
it,” he decided. “There isn’t so much of it, you know. We’ll taste it
more.” And he added the contents of a little muslin sack—heavy
beet-sugar that looked like sand. His face was pale and somewhat
troubled, and his week’s beard was straggling and unwholesome. He was
not an out-of-doors man—and he was battalion scout officer. A gentleman
over-sensitive for the rude business of war, he would continue to
function until he broke—and one sensed that he would suffer while about
it....
“I don’t like monkey-meat. Before this smell”—he waved his spoon
petulantly—“got into my nose I never could eat it. But now you can’t
smell but one thing, and, after all, you’ve got to eat.”
The smell he referred to lay through the wood like a tangible fog that
one could feel against the cheek and see. It was the nub-end of June,
and many battalions of fighting men had lain in the Wood Northwest of
Lucy, going up to the front a little way forward or coming out to stand
by in support. It was a lovely place for supports; you could gather here
and debouch toward any part of the sector, from Hill 142, on the left,
through the Bois de Belleau and Bouresches, to Vaux, where the infantry
brigade took on. Many men had lain in the wood, and many men lay in it
still. Some of these were buried very casually. Others, in hidden
tangles of it, along its approaches, and in the trampled areas beyond it
where attack and counter-attack had broken for nearly a month of days
and nights, hadn’t been buried at all. And always there were more, and
the June sun grew hotter as it made toward July.
[Illustration:
“Hey, yuh dog-robbin’ battalion runner, you—what’s up!”
]
Troops lay in the wood now; a battalion of the 6th and two companies of
the 5th Regiment outfit, half of which was still in line on the flank of
the Bois de Belleau. These companies had come out at dawn, attended by
shell-fire; they had plunged into the wood and slept where they halted,
unawakened—except the wounded—by the methodical shelling to which the
Boche treated the place every day. Now, in the evening, they were awake
and hungry. They squatted, each man in his hole, and did what they could
about it. A savage-looking lot, in battered helmets and dirty uniforms.
But you saw them cleaning their rifles....
The scout officer, with his hand out to lift away the coffee, which was,
in his judgment, boiled, heard: “Mr. Braxton? Yeh, he’s up thataway,
with the lootenant.” “Hey, yuh dog-robbin’ battalion runner, you—what’s
up? Hey?” “Scout officer? Over yonder, him wit’ the green blouse—” and a
soiled battalion runner, identified by his red brassard and his air of
one laden with vital information, clumped up and saluted sketchily.
“Sir, the major wants to see the battalion scout officer at battalion
headquarters. The major said: Right away, sir.”
The scout officer swore, inexpertly, for he was not a profane fellow,
but with infinite feeling. “Good God, I hope it ain’t—If you can keep my
coffee hot, Tommie—Be right back as soon as I can. Save my slum. Don’t
let anything happen to my slum—” The words trailed in the air as he went
swiftly off, buckling his pistol-belt. The battalion commander was that
kind of an officer.
The lieutenant growled in sympathy: “Somebody’s always takin’ the joy
out of life. Jim, he’s hungry as I am, an’ that’s as hungry as a bitch
wolf. That’s the trouble with this war stuff; man misses too many
meals.” He took the cooking from the fire and replaced the lids on the
little alcohol-cans with care. Canned heat was quite hard to come by;
the Boche was much better provided with it; he was indebted for this to
a deceased German gentleman, and it was the last he had.
“No tellin’ what the old man wants. Glad I ain’t a scout officer. This
war’s hard on Jim—he takes it too serious. I’ll wait, though.” Absently
he drank the tomato juice left in the can. He tried his coffee, and
burned his mouth. “Wish I had the man here that invented this aluminum
canteen cup! Time the damn cup’s cool enough so you won’t burn the hide
off yo’ lip, the coffee’s stone cold.” Then, later: “Not boiled enough.
Jim, he’s used to bein’ waited on—never make a rustler, he won’t....
“Well, he’s long in comin’. Old man sent him forward to make a map or
something, most prob’ly.” He tasted the slum. “That Tompkins! Why the
hell he had to stop one—only man I ever knew that could make this
monkey-meat taste like anything! And he goes and gets bumped off. Hell!
That’s the way with these kids. This needs an onion.”
[Illustration:
“He takes the war too serious.”
]
He ate half the mess, with scrupulous exactness, and drank his coffee.
He put the lid on the mess-kit, and covered Jim’s coffee, now getting
cold. He smoked a cigarette and talked shop with his platoon sergeant.
He gave some very hard words and his last candle-end to a pale private
who admitted blistered heels, and then stood over the man while he
tallowed his noisome socks. He interviewed his chaut-chaut gunners, and
sent them off to beg new clips from the battalion quartermaster
sergeant. It grew into the long French twilight; Boche planes were
about, and all the anti-aircraft stuff in the neighborhood was furiously
in action. Strolling back to his hole, the lieutenant observed that the
pale private had resumed his shoes and was rolling his puttees with a
relieved look. At this moment the nose-cap of a 75 came whimpering and
hirpling down out of the heavens and gutted the fellow.... When that was
cleaned up, the lieutenant lay in his hole, weighing the half-empty
mess-kit in his hands, and trusted that nothing unseemly had happened to
Jim. He thought of going up to battalion to see what was doing—but the
major liked for you to stay with your men, unless he sent for you....
“Well! Might as well get some sleep....”
Toward dark the Boche began to slam 77s and 150s into the Wood northwest
of Lucy. It became a place of horror, with stark cries in the night,
between the rending crashes of the shells. About an hour before midnight
the word was passed and the two companies got out and went up across the
pestilential wheat-fields and into the Bois de Belleau.
That same afternoon an unassigned colonel had come up to Brigade
Headquarters. Wanted to go to Paris, he did, and the brigade commander
said that the only way to get there was to bring in a prisoner. One
prisoner; seven days’ leave. Be glad to get a prisoner. Intelligence had
word of a new division or so moved in over there last night;
identification not yet positive.
This colonel took steps. He was a man of parts and very desirous of the
fleshpots of the Place de l’Opéra. There was an elegant French captain
attached to brigade for no very evident reason—just attached—spoke
English and knew vintages. Said to be an expert on raids. The colonel
put it up to him in such and such a way: would he go? Yes, but
certainly. Just a small raid, my colonel? Oh, a very small raid. Now, as
to artillery support—a map was broken out.
Brigade artillery officer—chap the colonel knew out on the Asiatic
station—happened in. How about it—just about half as much stuff as you
fellows wasted on the Tartar Wall that time—eh? Sure: it could be
arranged. Ten minutes’ intensive; say, one battery; where you want it?
Brigade intelligence took thought: They’ve got some kind of a strong
point out from the ruined airdrome in front of Torcy. Their line is
through Torcy; battalion in there. Left of the Bois—see here? Our photos
show two big craters—some of the heavy stuff they shot at the railroad
the 29th of May, or the 30th, most likely—eh, m’sieur le capitaine?
Might look at that, colonel. Best jump-off is from Terry’s
battalion—about here—he has two companies here. Six hundred yards to go;
keep the Bois well away—well starboard, as you leathernecks say; come
back the same route. Wheat. Little gully here. Craters just beyond. Main
line at least a hundred metres back. Good? Let’s call up Terry and see
if he’ll give you the men.... Terry would give him twenty-five men and
two chaut-chauts and not a Marine more. Who wanted a raid, anyway?
Sending two support companies up to the Bois as soon as it’s dark. Looks
interestin’ on the right.... Good! All set. Start your covering fire at
23 hours 15. You jump off at 23 hours 19. Take you six minutes to get
over, huh? “All right, colonel, bonne chance!”
Just before dark the colonel and Captain de Stegur were at battalion
headquarters. “Whitehead will give you your men, and I’m sending my
scout officer along. Needs that sort of thing. Be sure you come back
where you went out. Crabbe’s to the right of there. You know Crabbe.
Shoots quick.”
“But, my colonel,” represented Captain de Stegur, “one should arrange,
one should explain, one should instruct—in effect, one should
rehearse——”
“Rehearse hell, sir! I’m due in Paris to-morrow night. Where those
Marines, major? I’ll tell ’em what I want——”
So it was that a wedge of men debouched into the wheat at 23 hours 19
minutes;[1] it being sufficiently dark.
Footnote 1:
11.19 P. M.
The battalion scout officer and a disillusioned sergeant, with hash
marks on his sleeve, were the point. The men were echeloned back, right,
and left with an automatic rifle on each flank. In the centre marched
the colonel, smoking, to the horror of all, a cigar. Smoking was not
done up there, after dark. With him was the elegant French captain, who
appeared to be very gallantly resigned to it. The story would, he
reflected, amaze and delight his mess—if he ever got back with it! These
droll Americans! He must remember just what this colonel said: a type,
_Nom de Dieu_! If only he had not worn his new uniform—the cloth chosen
by his wife, you conceive——
The 75s flew with angry whines that arched across the sky and smote with
red and green flames along a line.... There was a spatter of rifle-fire
toward the right; flares went up over the dark loom of the Bois; a
certain violence of machine-gun fire grew up and waxed to great volume,
but always to the right. Forward, where the shells were breaking, there
was nothing....
The scout officer, leading, had out his canteen and wet his dry mouth.
He was acutely conscious of his empty stomach. His mind dwelt yearningly
on the mess-kit, freighted nobly with monkey-meat and tomatoes, awaiting
him in the dependable Tommy’s musette. “Hope to God nothing happens to
old Tommy!” The wheat caught at his ankles and he hated war. Lord, how
these night operations make a man sweat! He went down a little gully and
out of it, the sergeant at his shoulder, breathing on his neck. That
crater—he visualized his map—it should be right yonder—two of them. A
hundred metres forward the last shells burst, and he saw new dirt.
Ahead, a spot darker than the dark; he went up to it. Away on the right
a flare soared, and something gleamed dull in the black hole at his
feet—a round, deep helmet with the pale blur of a face under it; a
click, and the shadow of a movement there, and a little flicker; a
matter of split seconds; the scout officer had a bayonet in his stomach,
almost—Feldritter Kurt Iden, Company 6 of the Margrave of Brandenburg
Regiment (this established later by brigade intelligence, on examination
of the pay-book of the deceased), being on front post with his squad,
heard a noise hard on the cessation of the shelling, and put out his
neck. Dear God, shoot! Shoot quickly!
The scout officer was conscious of a monstrous surge of temper. He
gathered his feet under him, and his hands crooked like claws, and he
hurled himself. In the same breath there was a long, bright flash right
under his arm, and the mad crack of a Springfield. The disillusioned
sergeant had estimated the situation, loosed off from the hip at perhaps
seven feet, and shot the German through the throat. Too late to stop
himself, the scout officer went head first into the crater, his hands
locking on something wet and hairy, just the size to fill them; and
presently he was at the bottom of the crater, dirt in his mouth and a
buzzing in his head, strangling something that flopped and gurgled and
made remarkable noises under his hands. There were explosions and people
stepped hard on his back and legs. He became sane again and realized
that whatever it was it was dead. He groped in his puttees for his
knife, and cut off its shoulder-straps and a button or two, and looted
its bosom of such papers as there were—these being details the complete
scout officer must attend to. More explosions, and voices bleating
“Kamaraden!”—terribly anxious voices—in his ear.
The disillusioned sergeant, a practical man, had ducked into the crater
right behind the scout officer. The raiding-party in his rear had
immediately fired their weapons in all directions. A great many rifles
on forward stabbed the dark with sharp flame, and some of these were
very near. The sergeant tossed a grenade at the nearest; he had toted
that Frog citron grenade around for quite a while, somewhat against his
judgment; he now reflected that it was good business—“grenades—I hope to
spit in yo’ mess-kit they are—ask the man that used one—” It was good
business, for it fell fair in the other crater, thirty feet away, where
the rest of that front-post squad were beginning to react like the brave
German men they were. Two of these survived, much shaken, and scuttled
into the clever little tunnel that connected them with the Feldritter’s
crater, emerging with pacific cries at the sergeant’s very feet. Being a
man not given to excitement, he accepted them alive, the while he
dragged the scout officer standing. “We got our prisoners, sir. Le’s
beat it,” he suggested. “Their lines is wakin’ up, sir. It’s gonna be
bad here——”
The colonel, as gallant a man as ever lived, but not fast, barged into
them. “Prisoners? Hey? How many? Two? Excellent, by God! Give ’em here,
young man!” and he seized the unhappy Boches by their collars and shook
them violently. “Thought you’d start something, hey? Thought you’d start
something, hey?”
The scout officer now blew his whistle, the sergeant shouted in a voice
of brass, and the colonel made the kind of remarks a colonel makes. The
French captain, close alongside, delightedly registered further events
for narrative. The raiding-party gathered itself—chaut-chaut gunners
slamming out a final clip—and they all went back across the wheat. It is
related by truthful Marines there present that every German in Von
Boehn’s army fired on them as they went, but no two agree as to the
manner of their return. It is, however, established that the colonel,
bringing up the rear, halted about half-way over, drew his hitherto
virgin pistol, and wheeled around for a parting shot—something in the
nature of _un beau geste_. Seeing this, the tall French captain, to his
rear and left, drew his pistol and wheeled also, imagining pursuit. The
colonel—and to this attest the scout officer and the sergeant—then shot
the Frenchman through the—as sea-going Marines say—stern-sheets.
[Illustration:
The scout officer and the sergeant got him back some way, both filled
with admiration at his language.
]
The scout officer and the sergeant got him back some way, both filled
with admiration at his language.
“If I had my time to do over, I’d learn this here Frog _habla_,”
remarked the sergeant afterward. “I don’t know what the bird said, but
it sure sounded noble. Ample, I called it. Powerful ample.”
By the time they stumbled through the nervous outposts to their own
place, the French captain had lapsed into English. “As a wound, you
perceive, it is good for a permission. But it is not a wound. It is an
indignity! And, besides, my new breeches! _Ah, Dieu de Dieu! Ce sale
colonel-ci!_ What will my wife say! That one, she chose the cloth
herself! _Tonnerre de canon!_”—and he sank into stricken silence.
The raiding-party shook down in their several holes, praising God, and
went to sleep. The colonel, with his prisoners, received the compliments
of Battalion Headquarters and departed for brigade. The scout officer
observed, to his amazement, that they had been out of their lines less
than twenty minutes. “Where’s the 49th?” he wanted to know first. “Hell,
Jim, they went up to the Bois right after the major sent for you. An’
the 17th. We’re moving Battalion Headquarters up there now. Get your
people and come along. Attack or something.”
After a very full night, the scout officer crawled and scuttled along
the last tip of the Bois de Belleau, looking for a hole that a battalion
runner told him about. “Seen the lootenant diggin’ in just past that
last Maxim gun, sir. Right at the nose of the woods where the big rocks
is. There’s about a dozen dead Heinies layin’ by a big tree, all
together. Can’t miss it, sir.” The scout officer had no desire to be
moving in the cool of the morning, when all well-regulated people are
asleep if possible, and if you moved here the old Boche had a way of
sniping at you with 88s—that wicked, flat-trajectory Austrian gun—but he
followed an urge that only Tommie could supply. “The damn slum will be
cold, but two sardines and a piece of chocolate ain’t filling!” He
ducked low behind a rock as an 88 ripped by and burst on the shredded
stump of a great tree; he tumbled into a shell-crater, atop an
infantryman and three bloated Germans long dead; he scrambled out and
fell over two lank cadavers in a shallow hole, who raised their heads
and cursed him drowsily; and he came at last to a miserable shelter
scooped in the lee of a rock. Here two long legs protruded from under a
brown German blanket, and here he prodded and shook until the deplorable
countenance of his brother officer emerged yawning.
“Say,” demanded the scout officer, “you save my slum? Gimme my slum.”
“Why, hello, Jim! Why didn’t you come back, like you said you was? Where
you been? You said you was comin’ right back.”
“Didn’t you save me my monkey-meat? We went on a raid, damn it. I——”
“Raid? Raid? What raid?”
“Oh, we went over to Torcy. Gimme my monkey-meat.”
[Illustration:
“War—sure—is—hell.”
]
“Well, you see, Jim—the fact is—well, we got moved up here right after
you left, and they attacked from in here, an’ we came on in after them.
Just got to sleep——”
“I haven’t had any sleep or any chow or anything—two sardines, by the
bright face of God!—” The scout officer pounced upon a frowsy musette
bag which the other had used for a pillow and jerked out a
fire-blackened mess-kit. He wrenched the lid off and snarled horribly.
“Empty, by God!”
His hands fell lax across his knees. He looked sadly over the blasted
fields to Torcy, and he said, with the cold bitterness of a man who has
tried it all and come to a final conclusion: “War—sure—is—hell.”
SONGS
FOUR
“SWEET AD-O-LINE”
There were places like this down in the Touraine country, around the
town Americans called St. Onion. Canals with poplars mirrored in them,
where it was pleasant to loaf at the end of the day. The women were
kindly and disposed to make friends; it is a pity that there were not
enough to go around. They had, also, an eye for corporals and sergeants;
the bored privates on the bank, sentimental souls, are singing “Sweet
Ad-o-line....” or it may be something very different. The sergeant, a
sensitive spirit, will presently see that they get some Extra Police
Duty.
[Illustration: [Soldiers]]
V
THE RHINE
[Illustration: [Soldier]]
V
THE RHINE
The bugles went while it was still as dark as the inside of a dog. There
was swearing and sickly yellow candle-light in the billets, mean houses
in a mean little Rhine-Province town, and the chow lines formed on the
company galleys in an icy December rain. The rain pattered on helmets
and mess-kits, and fell in slanting lines through the smoky circles of
light where the cooking-fires burned feebly. The faces of the Marines,
as they filed out of the dark for food, were gray and frowsy. The cooks
issued corn-bill hash, and dared any man to growl on the coffee. How the
hell could it be biled enough, with wet wood and very little of
that—been up all night as it is—you sports just pull in your necks! The
companies gulped their ration in sullen silence, rolled damp blankets
into the prescribed pack, and when the bugles squawked assembly, they
fell in without confusion or enthusiasm. Platoon sergeants, with
flash-lights or lanterns, called the rolls; somewhere out in front,
first-sergeants received the reports; officers clumped along the lines
to their units, grumbling.—“All here, first sergeant?”—“Beg the capt’n’s
pardon—couldn’t see you in the dark, sir—all present-counted-for, sir!—”
“Nice day for a hike. Major says, goin’ to the Rhine to-day. Eighteen or
twenty kilomets—don’t know exactly. Dam’ such a war! I’d like the old
kind, where you went into winter quarters—Brrr—” The captain pulled his
collar around his ears.
Presently a bad-tempered drawling voice bayed “Squads right—march!—”
There was a shuffle of hobnails in the mud, and the rattle of
rifle-slings. The 1st Battalion of the 5th Marines took the road.
These German roads were all honestly metalled, but the inch or so of mud
on the surface was like soup underfoot, and the overcoats soaked up the
rain like blotting-paper. It was the kind of a morning with no line
between night and daylight. The blackness turned to gray, and, after a
while, the major, on his horse, could look back and see the end of his
column. The battalion, he reflected, was up to strength again. It hadn’t
been this large since it went to Blanc Mont, the end of September. He
shut his eyes on that thought—a hundred and thirty men that came out,
where a thousand went in—then replacements, and, after the Armistice,
more replacements. Perhaps the quality was running down a little. The
new chaps didn’t seem as tall and broad as the old men, the tall,
sunburnt leathernecks that went out the road from Meaux, toward
Château-Thierry, in the spring. Odd, just six months since the
spring.... But a few veterans and hard drilling between fights would
keep the temper in an outfit ... one remembered a phrase in an order of
the division commander’s—“The 2d Division has never failed to impose its
will upon the enemy....” And to-day it crossed the German Rhine.... He
swung out of his saddle and stood by the road to watch them pass; 1,200
men, helmets and rifles gleaming a little in the wet gray light....
[Illustration:
The cooks issued corn-bill hash and dared any man to growl.
]
The road led eastward through a country of low hills, sodden in the
rain. Untidy clouds sprawled on the crests and spilled wet filaments
into the valleys. The land was all in cultivation, laid off in precise
squares and oblongs; some newly ploughed, some sparsely green with
turnips and rape. It looked ugly and ordered and sullenly prosperous.
There was slow conversation in the column.
[Illustration:
A nice day for a hike.
]
“—Anybody know where we goin’ to-day?” “Damfino—naw—I did hear the
skipper’s orderly say we’d make the Rhine, some time—” “How far—” “Some
guy was lookin’ at a map at battalion. Said it was about thirty
kilomets.” “Jesus on his golden throne!—It’s always ’bout thirty
kilomets in this dam’ country—” “Yeh! But I remember one time it was
twelve kilomets. The night we hiked up to Verdun, back last March. Had a
Frawg guide—little shrimp wit’ a forked beard. Ask him how far, all he’d
say was: ‘Dooz kilomets—dooz kilomets—’ Hiked all night in the rain,
like this, an’ at daylight we come to a sign, wit’ the name of the place
we’re goin’ to, an’ it said ‘Dooz kilomets’—that guide, he let on that
he was right su’prised—” But there were very few men in the column who
remembered the hike to Verdun, in the early spring of 1918; in one
company eight, in another eleven; in the whole battalion the barest
handful. It had been a long road. The first way-station was the Bois de
Belleau; a lot of people stopped there, and were there yet. And there
were more, comfortably rotting in the Forêt de Retz, south of Soissons.
And more yet, well dead around Blanc Mont. And a vast drift of them back
in hospitals. Men walked silent, remembering the old dead.... Twelve
hundred men hiking to the Rhine, and how many ghosts.... The mist rolled
around the column.
“—You replacements never knew Corp’ral Snair, that got bumped off at
Soissons, dallyin’ with a Maxim gun. He was a musical cuss, an’ he uster
sing a song to the tune of the ‘Old Gray Mare—She Ain’t What She Uster
Be’—somethin’ like
‘The U. S. flag will fly over Germany
Less than a year from now——’
[Illustration:
Men walked silent, remembering the old dead.
]
—and now it is, an’ it’s a pity he ain’t here to see it—” “Well, but
he’s restin’ easy where he is—me, I’m cold as hell an’ this dam’ drizzle
is drainin’ down my neck——”
There was nothing but the mist and the rain, and a mean, cold little
wind with a bite in it. North and south, from the edge of Holland to the
Metz gateway, all the armies were marching. Ahead, just out of contact,
went the German armies. The battalion passed a dense little wood of
firs—Christmas-tree woods, the battalion called them. This clump showed
unmistakably that it had been a camp; but there was no litter; the Boche
who bivouacked there had left it neat and clean. Along the road in
orderly piles were some hundreds of the round German helmets, and parked
precisely in a cleared place, where horse-lines had been, was a battery
of 105 field howitzers. The old Boche was jettisoning what he didn’t
need. The battalion observed and was thoughtful.
“What about the ole Boche?—You think he was licked enough?” “No, I
don’t. That stuff back there, they laid it down under orders, like they
do everything. It’s stacked—it ain’t just thrown away. An’ look how they
police up behind themselves—” “Yeh! Remember the other day, when we was
advance-guard, we could see their rear-guard, sometimes—perfect order,
an’ all that—not like a defeated outfit, at all!” “Sure! I hope to spit
in yo’ mess-kit it ain’t! An’ those little towns back yonder, with the
arches an’ the flags and the welcome returnin’ heroes stuff—none o’ that
was for us—” “They ain’t licked enough. Look at this country—winter
ploughin’ done—everything ship-shape—no shell-holes—no trenches—no barb’
wire—who in hell won this war, anyway?” “You said it. We oughter got up
in here an’ showed the old Boche what it was like, to have a war in his
own yard.” “Well, I’ve been in all of it, an’ pers’nally I was glad when
the shootin’ stopped. I got me some sleep an’ a full belly, an’ a pair
of new shoes—an’ some fireman’s underwear, too. An’ I was right proud
not to be killed. I ain’t prepared to die—” “We know you ain’t,
sergeant—we know—” “Aw, belay that—I mean, I was glad, myself, but we
oughter gone on—oughter’ve finished it while we was at it. He wasn’t
licked enough, an’ now he’s goin’ home like a peacock wit’ seven
tails——!”
This was the consensus of opinion, delivered with consideration in the
rain. The replacements, especially those who had joined up after the
Armistice, in Belgium, were savagely regretful. The chaps who had come
in after the Champagne, and been among those present at one fight, were
bloodthirsty, but to a lesser degree. Only the veterans were entirely
calm.
The rain fell, the road grew heavier. The battalion, soaked and
miserable, plodded on. They passed through many villages, all alike; all
ugly and without character. The houses were closed and shuttered. You
saw few people, but you always had the feeling of eyes behind the
shutters. One thick-bodied Boche, in uniform—an artilleryman, by his
leather breeches—stood in the doorway of a house, smoking a porcelain
pipe that hung to his knee. His face was set in a cast of hate. He stood
and stared, and the battalion, passing, looked him over with respect.
[Illustration:
One thick-bodied Boche.... His face in a cast of hate.
]
“Understand a bird like that.” “Yeh—he’s honest. Those dam’ Heinies in
the billet last night, they made me sick. That fellow that talked
English. Says he was glad his American frien’s, present by agreement in
the Rheinlan’, to welcome—says that to me, an’ would the Herr Soldier
like a good cup of coffee?” “Dam’ his remarks—how ’bout the coffee?”
“Well, it tasted funny, but it was hot.” “Old guy at our billet gave us
some cognac. Hot stuff! He didn’t let on, though.—You know those trick
certif’cates a soldier’s family gets in Germany?—Colored picture like a
Croi’ Guerre certif’cate, shows a fat, beer-drinkin’-Heinie angel
standin’ over a dead Boche—signed Wilhelm I. R.—you know. Well, this
bird had six of them in his front room, all framed on the wall. I
gathered they was his sons. Four bumped off at Verdun in 1916. One very
recent—Soissons, July.—Wonder if we met that fella? He stood there an’
looked at me while I was readin’ them, an’ he looked like a wolf. I
don’t blame him—. But howcome he gave us the cognac—?” Later the
battalion learned that the Boche had orders to be hospitable....
Toward noon the clouds lifted, and the rain slowed to a thin drizzle,
although it did not stop. The battalion filed between hills toward a
great valley, dimly seen. The hills towered over them, dark,
menacing—“No wonder the ole Boche has such a mean disposition, livin’ in
a country like this—” The battalion came into a town with paved streets
and trolley-cars and tall factory chimneys that did not smoke. Platoon
commanders said it was Remagen; those towers to the right would be the
bridge. There was a bridge, a great steel structure of high black
arches. The battalion filed upon it. Under it black water flowed
swiftly, with surges and eddies dimpled by the rain. High rocky hills
came down out of the mist on the farther side.
“So this is the Rhine,” remarked the battalion. “Hell!” A few files were
interested. A lank Texan said: “I don’t see much to make a fuss about.
You boys ever see the Trinity in overflow time? Ten miles from bank to
bank, in the McKenzie Bend country—why, we’d call this a creek down
where I come from—” “Naw, it ain’t much river—an’ no more is your dam’
Trinity! I was raised in Sent Louie—Ole Miss’sip’, now—” “Well, rivers
in this country are mainly over-touted. That Marne, it wouldn’t be much
more’n a branch, down South. I never saw that there Vesle River, but a
guy in the 32d Division, that was with me in Neuilly, he says you could
mighty near jump across it.” “Heard anything about chow?—Galleys went on
ahead awhile ago—when do we eat——”
For four years no hostile troops with arms in their hands had seen this
river; only sad files of prisoners had crossed it, under German guard.
The battalion turned right on the eastern bank and went up the river, on
a broad road between a cliff and the swift black water. There were many
houses, a continuous town. It was past noon of a Friday, the 13th
December, and the Boche school-children were out. They gathered to look
at the passing column. The Marines eyed them keenly. These kids were
different. They did not point or talk or cry out, after the manner of
children. They stood in stolid groups, wooden-faced, with unwinking
pale-blue eyes. The boys were nearly all in field-gray uniform cloth—cut
down, perhaps, from the cast-off clothes of an elder. Some of them wore
boots and round soldier-caps. They carried books and lunch-boxes,
knapsack fashion, on their shoulders.—“Look, will you—that kid there
ain’t more’n a yearlin’, and they’ve got him in heavy marchin’ order
a’ready!” “Yeh,—they start ’em early—that’s howcome they’re the way they
are—these Boche.” There were round-faced little girls with straw-colored
braids, in cloaks. They did not look poorly fed, like the waxen-faced
children the battalion remembered in France. And at every corner there
were more of them. The battalion was impressed.—“Say—you see all those
kids—all those little square-heads! Hundreds of ’em, I’ll swear!
Something’s got to be done about these people. I tell you, these Boche
are dangerous! They have too many children——”
[Illustration:
They stood in stolid groups, wooden-faced.
]
[Illustration:
“I tell you, these Boche are dangerous! They have too many children.”
]
[Illustration:
The 1st Battalion of the Rhine—5th Marines took the road.
]
SONGS
FIVE
“LONG BOY”
One of the very few soldier songs that survived the Atlantic
voyage—although it suffered some sea change—was “Long Boy.” It ran (with
variations):
“_Good-bye, Maw! Good-bye, Paw!
Good-bye, mule, with your old hee-haw...._
· · · · ·
_I’ll bring you a Turk an’ a Kaiser too,
And that’s about all one fellow can do...._”
This file is cheering his soul in the angle of the bridge at
Silly-le-Long, just outside of Cognac Pete’s buvette. In a little while
an M. P. with no ear for music will run him in.
[Illustration: [Soldier]]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
● Typos fixed; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.
● Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
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