ADVANCEMENT FOR TOM
BUT if there is sadness in battle, so also at times does it have its
humorous aspects, some of which are ludicrous to an extreme.
It was just that sort of a reaction that Tom Walton got when, having
laid the body of Major Sweeney on a little knoll by the side of a tree,
he again laid siege to the enemy line.
By this time it was a general free-for-all at that particular point, and
it was vicious and close-range fighting. Tom was having all he could do
to defy two Germans, one of whom was doing his best to bayonet him,
while the other was trying to brain him with a rifle butt, when Ollie
Ogden suddenly appeared upon the scene.
With a single leap—and no one to this day knows why he adopted that
method of attack, except that men often do strange things in the stress
of battle,—Ollie was upon the back of the man trying the bayonetting.
His two arms were gripped about the German’s throat, and his feet were
twined affectionately around his waist and over the stomach. From all
appearances he was there to stay awhile.
The other German—he who had been so seriously intent upon crushing Tom’s
head in with the butt of his rifle—was so startled by the strange
performance that he stood gazing as though stricken, while Tom with a
sudden wrench took the gun from him and added him to the list of
prisoners.
But by this time a dozen men on both sides had abruptly suspended
hostilities to watch the antics of the big German with Ollie on his
back. The latter seemed to be enjoying it as much as anybody.
The Hun first clawed desperately to disengage Ollie’s strangle grip upon
his throat, and failing in that, vainly transferred the same tactics to
disengaging himself from the latter’s feet.
But Ollie held the whip hand. Or rather, he held the bayonet hand; and
with this weapon, rather more effective than a cavalryman’s spur, he
reached backward and downward and gave the German a none too gentle jab
just beneath where he himself sat perched.
“Dunder und blitzen!” shouted the big Boche, as he began to buck
viciously to dislodge Ollie from his back.
Even the Germans who were looking on laughed. But even as they did so
they realized that they had let down their guard and that everyone of
them within range was covered with an American rifle and was a prisoner
unless he preferred sudden death. They realized that the Americans could
conduct warfare and enjoy a little humorous diversion at the same time.
It was a shock to several of them, but they seemed suddenly to realize
that it was good, rather than bad, fortune, and they gave themselves up
entirely to the enjoyment of their comrade’s misery.
“’At a boy,” yelled one Company C man to Ollie, “make ’im prance.”
And Ollie, enjoying himself immensely and not at all loth to give his
companions all the fun they desired, suddenly loosened one foot, gave
his mount a quick backward kick in the stomach, which elicited a
tremendous grunt, and amid a shout of laughter which made men many yards
distant turn suddenly in their fighting, the German started off at a
full gallop toward his own lines.
For a few moments it looked bad for Ollie, unless he elected to make a
quick drop, for none of the Americans dared shoot at the Boche for fear
of hitting him. But either blinded by his rage, or bewildered by the
sudden trick that fate, in the shape of a young American, had played
upon him, the German suddenly turned, made two or three more grotesque
bows in futile effort to throw Ollie from his back, and then came racing
back toward the American lines.
“Give ’im the hook! Give ’im the hook!” came a chorus of advice from
lusty members of Company C, and Ollie, interpreting the hook to mean the
pointed instrument otherwise known as a bayonet, on the end of his
rifle, proceeded to follow instructions. It was rather a vicious jab,
which made the German suddenly draw himself in at the rear and expand in
the stomach in a most ridiculous manner.
“Gott in Himmel, kamarad!” he shouted in a voice that could be heard
above the thunder of cannon and the cracking of rifles.
He was purple in the face, his breath was coming in sharp snorts, and
what strength he had left he was exhausting in vain efforts to swing his
rifle back to knock Ollie from his perch. In his final vicious lunge the
gun slipped from his hands and went skimming through the air, narrowly
missing the heads of several of the German prisoners.
“Kam—kam—,” he gasped, but he hadn’t breath to finish the word. He tried
to buck again, his knees weakened and folded under him, and Ollie,
seeing what was coming, leaned far back and gave a sudden thrust of his
weight forward. The German pitched headlong and with a terrible grunt
hit the ground, Ollie still astride him.
For several seconds he lay there gasping in utter helplessness, and then
he rolled over, almost frothing at the mouth in his rage and
humiliation. He started to shake a fist at Ollie, and a sergeant gently
rested his bayonet on his chest.
“Come on, Prince,” he ordered, to another gale of laughter. “You can
show us some new steps on the way to the rear of the line. Barnum and
Bailey want you.”
The big fellow rose to his feet, and suddenly spying one of his fellow
countrymen grinning, gave him a slap across the face which sent him
reeling.
“Kamarad!” yelled an American youth mockingly, and the hostilities ended
as swiftly as they had begun.
The sergeant ordered two men to accompany the batch of prisoners to the
rear, after all of them had been disarmed, and the last seen of Ollie’s
bucking broncho whom the sergeant called Prince, he was leading the
procession, glum but silent.
“Don’t try that again,” the sergeant commanded, feeling impelled to
administer some rebuke to the spirited young Ollie; but even as he spoke
his mouth twitched suspiciously, and he turned suddenly to say something
to another group of men.
“No sergeant,” answered Ollie demurely, and a dozen soldiers grinned
broadly, even as they brought their rifles up and started forward into
the thick of the fire again.
Why none of them had been hit while they stood forth as open targets,
watching the strange performance which Ollie staged, remains one of
those mysteries of Divine Providence.
They were out in the broad open land beyond the wood now, and in the
distance they could see what still remained standing of Thiaucourt, the
objective for which they had fought so valiantly, and for the attaining
of which so many of their brave comrades already had died.
The battle took on a new fury. From every conceivable shelter machine
guns popped away at the advancing Americans, who were without protection
against the terrible fire. There was no chance to dig in. Their furthest
thought was to turn back. Orders were to take the town. Speedy
advancement, even at great cost, was the only course open to them.
Seemingly every standing bit of battered wall and terrace protected one
or more of the German rapid-fire guns. Where was their artillery? Why
didn’t the American heavies pave the way? The answer was obvious. The
infantry had far outdistanced the artillery, and the tanks had become
stranded for the time being on the opposite side of the thick wood.
Clearly there was nothing to it but an infantry onslaught that with many
deaths as the price would carry the town by storm.
But just at that moment when many a man and officer, stifling criticism
or complaint, nevertheless was thinking that too terrible a task had
been placed upon them, a broad dark shadow passed between them and the
sun, and more speedily than any cloud ever travelled on a clear day,
flitted across that blood-soaked intervening stretch of land and toward
the town.
Instinctively Tom and scores of others looked upward. As if in one voice
there rose a tremendous cheer. Above them was the greatest armada of the
air the world had ever seen. It was heading directly for a point above
Thiaucourt, and another piece of shrewd strategy was being revealed.
As enemy anti-aircraft guns began to send their projectiles toward the
fleet, it suddenly swerved upward and into a zig-zag course, but its
general direction remained unaltered.
Every conceivable sort of aeroplane was in the formation. In the centre,
convoyed and surrounded by swifter, lighter, more easily manipulated
planes, were the great bombers, manned by crews of five, six, eight, ten
and even a dozen men. These were to inflict the damage, while the others
fought off all interference, acted as scouts and couriers, or in other
ways guided the attack and kept the headquarters informed of the
progress made.
And then occurred one of the most thrilling feats—or happy
accidents—ever witnessed in the air.
Half a dozen of the one-man scout planes were scurrying along in the
formation of an upright V. A dozen enemy anti-aircraft guns were trained
upon them. One sent a shot squarely into one of the two highest of the
planes. It staggered for an instant, and a quick gasp went up from the
American soldiers on the ground as it suddenly crumpled and began to
fall.
But they had not recovered their breath when the pilot, somehow
extricating himself from his seat in the falling plane, gave a wild
leap. His jump was inward in the V-shaped formation. Men held their
breath as he dropped straight downward. Then someone gave a shout. It
was all in the fraction of a minute, but it seemed an eternity of time.
So far as could be seen from the ground his leap was but a few yards to
the next plane, and he was almost directly above it.
The shout that had been one merely of startled anticipation broke into
tremendous applause as, for only a second, the falling man was obscured
from sight by the wings of the plane under him, and then that plane
quivered for a moment as with a tremendous shock, then righted itself,
and the pilot, evidently divining rather than having seen what had
happened, and having received the frantic signals of half a dozen pilots
nearest him, began a slow and cautious descent downward.
“He landed safely!” one man shouted frantically.
“Looks like it, but he may be unconscious and roll off any minute,”
another supplemented.
Men stood breathless, their hearts seeming hardly to beat, in the face
of this most thrilling of all the excitements they ever had witnessed or
participated in.
Four other heavier planes stood by the smaller one as it began its
descent, and then, “Look! Look!” the cry went up, as a big, swift German
machine hovered for a moment in the skies like a giant vulture, then
swooped downward with a speed that was startling, straight for the
little group that had formed to save a single American life.
Even as it did so, two large American planes detached themselves from
the bombing formation, and headed for the Boche. They took him on either
side just as he opened his machine guns at the smaller planes below.
Throughout the war there was a chivalry among the airmen of the enemy
armies that was at once an inspiration and an honor. The few violations
of it gave it greater emphasis. This pilot evidently was one of those
brutes who, had he been a submarine commander, would have taken rescued
men upon his deck, and then submerged, to let them drown like rats; or
one, maybe, who could calmly murder children, girl children, of his own
country, and mutter, “One less mouth to feed.” For it is of record that
some Germans did commit these and even greater atrocities throughout the
war.
From a little above and on either side of him, the American planes
opened a terrible fire—it was a fire of machine gun and incendiary
bullets—and a dozen struck him at the same time. There was a burst of
flame that swept the plane from stem to stern; its nose suddenly turned
downward, and with a dive that only narrowly missed the little group on
which the German had directed his attack, he fell to earth a mixed and
mangled mass of man and mechanism.
As the group of little planes flew by, not more than a hundred yards
above them, on the way to a safe landing place half a mile in the rear,
another shout of approval went up from the men on the ground. And just
over the rear of the top wing of one of the machines a grinning face
appeared and a waving arm seemed to send back a genial how-do-you-do.
It might have been the signal too, for the tremendous aerial attack that
was at that moment launched upon the German gunners and infantrymen,
hidden in what they believed the safe and impregnable protection of the
town. Tons upon tons of highly explosive bombs were dropped, as the big
fleet circled and circled over what once had been a happy and prosperous
French village. A constant cloud of thick black smoke went up as incense
to Mars, and every attempt of the German airmen to attack the bombers
was repulsed with disaster.
Finally two swift scout planes detached themselves from the fleet,
dashed for nearly a mile northward over the German army, then as
suddenly turned and continuing on back beyond the machines they had
helped convoy, made straight for where temporary brigade headquarters
then stood.
In five minutes the orders came to the men who had witnessed these
scenes.
“The enemy is retreating, leaving only a small rear guard. Advance and
take the town. Remain there for further orders.”
That meant that they were within sight of rest and recuperation, and
every man needed it badly. They were a tired and frazzled but determined
lot. They were ravenously hungry, too, for they had not eaten for many,
many hours.
Detachments of engineers were coming up directly behind them. The enemy
artillery was grumbling now from an increasing distance, coming only in
a scattered fire, the gunners evidently taking pot luck, without any
well-defined idea of where the Americans might be.
“Advance!” The order rang out all down the line, and the men went
forward on the last lap of the bitter battle for their first objective.
[Illustration: “The Khaki-Clad Warriors Surged Into the Town for
Hand-to-Hand Combat.”]
For half an hour there was some hard fighting, and then the Germans,
what remained of them, threw up their hands as the khaki-clad warriors
surged into the town for hand-to-hand combat.
It was a clean-cut victory, even though at heavy cost. Far to the north
could be heard the grumbling rumble of the German guns, but even as the
men listened they knew that the course was swinging eastward, ever
eastward, to avoid the pitiless pincers that the strategy of Foch and
Pershing were beginning to close relentlessly upon them, eastward toward
the Rhine!
“Dig in!” And the most welcome news of the day, the promise of a night
of needed rest, was responded to with alacrity. No chances were being
taken with German trickery.
It was late afternoon and dusk was laying its cloak over the land when a
brigadier arrived, briefly consulted with Captain McCallum, and then
departed. In a moment he returned, however, and again spoke to the
company commander. The latter turned abruptly and called the name of Tom
Walton.
Wonderingly Tom approached and saluted.
“Thomas Walton,” the captain announced, in what Tom thought were
terribly solemn tones, “by order of the commander of this brigade I
advance you to the place of sergeant.”
“What—,” Tom began impetuously, even for the moment forgetting
discipline.
“For the capture of a German colonel, who is also a much-wanted spy,”
the general supplemented. “Young man, I congratulate you.”
Tom came to a stiff salute; the general responded, turned abruptly and
strode off.
Tom Walton was left with his captain to be assigned to his new duties.
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