“Long ’bout April second we passed through Toul and hit the American
front. The First Division outfits was relieved there by us. Most of our
gang got billeted ’round a placed called Boucq. I was at Corniéville
before we went into positions. Our billets were the worst things a man
could imagine. Dirty, cold, and hardly any bunks at all.
“We soon found out that we was goin’ to fight a different kind of
_guerre_ down there than we had been doin’. The country was so muddy and
soft that you couldn’t dig in and make dug-outs. Everything was on the
ground. Course my battery had to get the worse place of all—up in a
swamp. If you got off the little duckboard walks you had to get a detail
to pull you out of the mud. The positions that we had was on the
Germans’ maps, as they had already got a gun belonging to the First
Division, before we took the position over.
“Two days after we got our pieces layed on some Boche targets they began
throwin’ ’em over at us. That was the first time we’d ever been under
real shell-fire in the positions. It was a regular circus. Old Bill
Conway was on gas guard at the time. They gave us a klaxon for a gas
alarm, unless it’s possible to rig up some kind of a tin gong to heat
on. Well, Bill, he was walkin’ post swingin’ the Ford klaxon ’round,
just as uninterested in the _guerre_ as if he had been walkin’ post in a
safe Coast Artillery fort. He had been told to sound that klaxon in case
of gas. A big boy whistled on the way. Sounds just like the whine of a
dyin’ wildcat. Something terrible to listen to, believe me, till you get
kind of fed up on the stuff.
“Bang—Bluey! That two-twenty—we call ’em barrack bags, they’re so damn
big—landed ’bout thirty feet from our last latrine and sent fragments of
itself and trees, with about a ton of dirt, in all directions. Old
Conway, with his eighteen years of continued service, started cranking
that klaxon for all he was worth as he ran toward a bunkhouse.
“Bang! Bang! Bang!
“The Heinies were puttin’ ’em over for fair and too damn close to be
interestin’. Course everybody jerked on the old gas-mask. But Bill
Conway was so excited and scared till he clean forgot all about his own
mask—all he could do was sound that klaxon and shout, ‘Gas!’ The skipper
came tearin’ out of his B. C. station, gas-mask and all. The first thing
he saw was Conway without a mask. ‘Put your mask on, you boob, ’ain’t
you got any sense? I’ll court martial you for disregardin’ orders.’
Conway drops the klaxon and pulls the mask over his bean and face _toot
sweet_.
“Corporal Reynolds, who was gas non-com., comes up about that time and
asks Bill what the devil he sounded the gas alarm for. Bill says, ‘We’re
gettin’ gassed.’ Reynolds, of course, was expected to know gas from
ordinary fresh air, bein’ as how he was the gas non-com., so he pulled
his mask off and sniffed ’round considerable. ‘Hell afire,’ says he,
‘there ain’t no gas.’ Everybody took off their masks and the skipper
gave Conway extra fatigue for causin’ such a disturbance.
“All durin’ the time that they was arguin’ ’bout the gas the old shells
were sailing right over our heads and hittin’ pretty close. One guy got
a splinter in the fat of his thigh and Deacon O’Tell’s underclothes were
ripped off a line where he had ’em dryin’. But that was all the
casualties we had that day. You see, the woods was mighty tall and
strong there and they sorta shielded us from the fragments and hunks.
“Things rattled on that way every day. We used to get shelled every
afternoon ’round three or four o’clock. Couple of the boys got it pretty
soon and they carted ’em off to a hospital. Never seen or heard of ’em
since.
“The _monjayin’_ was _pas bon_. Never got any sugar in the coffee, and
as for milk—well, there wasn’t any ’round them diggin’s. O. D., that’s
one thing that got my goat a long time. You read ’bout all this
Hooverizin’ stuff. How the folks back home is doin’ without sugar—havin’
wheatless, meatless, fireless and all kind of days so the men at the
front can get the best _monjayin’_ there is—and we was starvin’ a good
many times. Course if we hadn’t been Americans we’d have kicked and
raised an awful smell, but bein’ a bunch of Yankees and knowin’ what we
was up against in this _guerre_, we just fooled ’em and kept on
regardless. Now I ain’t sayin’ this so much for myself, cause I’m pretty
hefty and can get along. But we had a bunch of little guys up there that
weren’t more than a bunch of strings. Those kids used to stay up all
night luggin’ ninety-five-pound shells—gettin’ wet most of the time—then
dive into their cold bunks, _cushay_ ’bout two hours and get up to
_monjay_. What the hell do you think they’d get? Maybe a thin slice or
two of bacon—hardtack most of the time, black coffee with no sugar, and
that’s all. Fat breakfast for a fightin’ man. You can’t blame nobody for
them things except the people back at the ports and in the S. O. S. who
are supposed to get the eats up to us.
“That’s a rotten, damn shame, because we always got good eating back
where I was—fresh meats—vegetables—butter—jam—milk in the coffee all the
time,” interrupted O. D.
“Listen to that,” exploded Jimmy. “There you are—everybody for himself
in this army. Those ginks back there ain’t worryin’ much ’bout us guys
that’s fightin’ this _guerre_. ‘Send ’em up a carload of “corn-willy”
and a train of hardtack—that’ll be enough to keep ’em goin’ another
month or two,’ that’s what they say down in the S. O. S., I guess.
“Round about April tenth the Boches thought they’d give our lines a good
feel, so they came over strong and sent gas barrages and high explosive
mixed up with _beaucoup_ shrapnel and other stuff, along with their
doughboys. This happened up in the Bois Brûlé—which means burned woods
in Frog lingo. Now you might think that our boys, bein’ a bit green at
the _guerre_ stuff, would have been sick to their stomachs, or somethin’
like that after gettin’ such rough treatment from the Boches, but it
wasn’t that way at all. I believe that most of the doughboys was just
itchin’ for a good battle, anyway. The way they waded into the Boches
was big stuff. Banged ’em all over the lots. When the ammunition gave
out the fellows started wallopin’ ’em with their fists and the butt-ends
of rifles. You know Boches ain’t no good when it comes to fightin’ at
close quarters. In fact, if you take ’em out of that close formation
stuff that they pull when comin’ over—well, they ain’t worth a hurrah—so
when the Yanks shoved their fists in the snouts it was _finee toot
sweet_.
“The battlin’ kept up for about three or four days. Every time the
Boches tried to get a footin’ in Appremont we’d throw ’em out again.
Soon they got tired, seein’ how impossible it was to stay there, and
went back to their trenches and dug-outs.
“The Boches stayed quiet until the night of April nineteenth, or rather
first thing in the mornin’ of the twentieth. I was up in a position so
close to the front-line trenches that you could throw hand grenades at a
Yankee doughboy, if he was fool enough to stick his bean over the
parapet. About ten men from each battery had been detailed to man a
ninety-five-millimeter battery—some old-fashioned French guns, relics of
the war in 1870.
“Well, O. D., they can talk ’bout battles till they’re blue in the face,
but I’ll always claim that the battle of Seicheprey which was pulled off
that mornin’ was the first big battle of the _guerre_ that this army
ever got mixed up in. We lost five hundred men that one night and the
Boches lost a hell of a lot more—so you can judge by that.
“Funny as the devil how a man kinda knows when somethin’ big is comin’
off. But you do. Every night there’d be _beaucoup_ rockets and
star-shells goin’ up. But this night there was more than _beaucoup_, if
you know what that means. The way those red and different colored
rockets began goin’ up made me think that a bunch of pink, yellow, and
red snakes had been turned loose in heaven and was crawlin’ ’round the
sky. Now and then a star-shell would go up and bust. Then you could see
the trenches and No Man’s Land. But that’s all. There wasn’t a thing
stirrin’. Not a sound. Almost too quiet to be safe.
“Just at the beginnin’ of one o’clock a German gun boomed. Then hell
broke loose all along our front. Never heard such an infernal noise in
all my life. Sounded like a bunch of demons poundin’ on brass-drums with
trip-hammers. _Toot sweet_ our guns began to talk back. They got us up
to the pits and we started to man them crazy-looking
ninety-five-millimeter stove-pipes. That’s what the cannon looked like,
anyway.
“Shells was whizzin’ in from every direction. High explosive cracked
over our beans and rained down like hail. Rat-ta-tat! Ra-ta-tat! Bang!
Bluey! Smash! That was all we could hear up and down the lines. The
barrages roared away like barbarian music. Pretty soon the noise hurt my
ears so till I couldn’t try to listen to orders. Just worked away like a
mechanical man.
“We started to fire just as a shell spilled its load near the first
piece. God! the screech of them three boys that got all torn up was
enough to tear a man’s ear-drums to shreds—couldn’t help but hear ’em
even with the bangin’ of the guns.
“All of us was too busy rammin’ shells in our piece and firin’ the thing
to notice much that was goin’ on, but the flames from the burstin’
shells and the flares made it almost as bright as day ever gets to be in
this country. The yellow light was kinda blindin’ as it came in spurts
and jerks. I looked ahead of us, down toward the trenches and No Man’s
Land. The Boche infantry was coming straight at us with fixed bayonets.
I ain’t jokin’ you, boy, but there was some kind of a cold thing chasin’
up and down my old spine for a few minutes. I could almost see our
doughboys strainin’ down in their trenches waitin’ to get up and at ’em.
“At last they let ’em go to it. It was some smash-up when they hit them
Germans. The Boches was at least five to one stronger than us and their
weight counted enough to make us fall back to the streets of Seicheprey.
“I speak of streets and Seicheprey as if it might have been a regular
village. But it wasn’t. Seicheprey was just like a village ghost. Not a
house standin’ up—everythin’ littered about. Stones, bricks, wood heaps,
rubbish, barbed-wire entanglements were in the streets and every place.
The fightin’ down there was all hand to hand.
“We had been told to fall back with the infantry in case it was
necessary to let the Boches come on so that our reinforcements could get
up and give us a hand. But Lieutenant Davis, who was runnin’ our
battery, was off that fallin’-back stuff. He says, ‘Stick to it, boys,
and give ’em hell!’ We stuck all right, but it was hot stickin’.
“There was one boy only about eighteen years old in our crew, and when
Johnson got his arm ripped off by shrapnel and it flew off and hit
Jackson, the kid, he got up from the blow a wild man. That’s one of the
worst things I’ve seen in this _guerre_.
“Jackson’s face was drippin’ blood and he was swingin’ Johnson’s arm
around to hit the boys that was tryin’ to get him out of the pit. It’s
damn hard to work with a madman next to you cursing and prayin’ in the
same breath. Finally they cornered him and carried him out. Johnson was
stone dead, o’ course, and they had to get him out, as we was steppin’
all over him and trippin’ up. Sergeant Broadhead and Shorty Williams
picked poor Johnson up and was gettin’ back toward a dug-out, when high
explosive got ’em both—scooped Broadhead’s stomach right off him and
gashed the legs off of Shorty. Course we heard ’em groanin’ as the noise
of the battle would go up and down just like a piece of music. But they
quit sufferin’ soon, as both the lads went west _toot sweet_.
“All liaison with the other outfits was shot to hell, and we could only
guess at what was goin’ on with the doughboys and batteries. From the
rifle and machine-gun firin’ and the shoutin’ and cursin’, too—for there
was _beaucoup_ of that, and it sounded worse than the barrages, I judged
that there must be some awful battlin’ down in topsy-turvy Seicheprey.
Accordin’ to doughboys that I saw later, the Boches got mashed up all
over that place.
“You see, when the scrappin’ started down in Seicheprey it wasn’t in
formation. Everybody was by himself—or almost that way. That made it
rotten for the Boches, as they ain’t got any guts once they’re alone. So
the doughboys whaled ’em for a bunch of ghouls. Tell me they stripped
right down from helmets on and started in bare fist or with bayonets.
“The Boches got some kind of a signal back to their batteries to throw
over gas, and all of a sudden it looked as if the night had gone green.
Green is the gas warnin’, you know.
“‘Gas! Gas!’ You could hear that cry everywhere when the noise of the
battle would let you. We stopped workin’ our piece long enough to jerk
gas-masks on. I swear but we looked like a bunch of devils with them
things on, ’specially when the flames would shoot up around us.
“Our gang was gettin’ it pretty hot ’round the gun-pits and there was so
many of the fellows wounded and lyin’ out beyond the pits that the
Sanitary guys couldn’t drag ’em in fast enough. Most of these wounded
had been on the ammunition details and were hit on the way to the guns
with shells. Every forty-five minutes a few of us would get relieved and
crawl into the dug-out for a minute’s rest. The Sanitary men asked for
volunteers to help ’em get the wounded in. Every man who was on relief
at that minute jumped up and went out to bring the boys in. That’s the
kind of spirit they had.
“A chap by the name of Wilson from F Battery had gone out to bring in
some other lad and he got both of his own legs blown off. My old pal,
Frank Gordon, heard Wilson moanin’ out there and he ran out to get him.
“I’ll never forget what happened just as Frank got on top of the little
trench that ran ’round our gun. He had Wilson’s legless body slung over
his back. Shrapnel screamed like a hell-cat and good old Gordon’s left
arm and part of his head were jerked right out of socket and went flyin’
over our heads. Gordon and Wilson toppled out of sight. I saw it all and
couldn’t stop myself. I jumped the trench, grabbed the first moanin’
body I come to. Couldn’t see ’em as there wasn’t so much flares goin’,
and ran for the dug-out that they was usin’ as a first-aid station. I
found out that I had brought Ray Mason in.”