_2nd Division, 5th Regiment, 18th Company, U. S. M. C._
This soldier is a fine type of Marine and showed himself to be a brave
and valiant soldier at the Battle of Belleau Woods, now known as the
Bois de la Brigade de Marine. He was wounded in action June 10, 1918,
in this engagement.]
There was the stink from decaying bodies, the filth of days and weeks
of unmarked accumulation. “Ah! you would say ‘Roméo, Houle, you are
lying’ were I to tell you some unbelievable things that I have really
lived through. We go mad over there. My God! I am sick of adventure,
for the adventures I have had will plague my sleep until I die.”
His first acquaintance with the trench under fire was at Richebourg.
“There Charles Lapointe, the first of our company to die, looked over
the edge of the trench. That is death. Machine guns all the day sweep
the trench edges. If you raise your hand your fingers will be cut off
as by a knife. Well, Lapointe looked over the trench; and nobody knows
what he saw. His brother was there to lay him down. He buried him (as
we ever must the dead) in a hollow pit in our trench. And the brother
had for a time the agony of having to fight and feel the earth over
Charley’s breast give under his feet.”
He fought in the first line again at Laventie, and there got his first
taste of gas. It came while he was trying for a little rest after a
turn at guard duty. Some one having stolen the two empty sandbags he
had been using for bedding, he spread his overcoat on the ground and
pulled a blanket over him. “The sun meantime was shining hotly on the
heaps of dead bodies which lay not far outside the trench, and I was
glad to cover my head with the blanket to shut out some of the awful
stink. And that is how the smell of decaying bodies saved my life.
Arthur Robillard, a car conductor back in Montreal, was on guard duty.
I was roused by his falling over me. As I sat up something got me by
the throat and I began to strangle for my life. The air was rent with
awful cries. Many of my comrades lay dying and dead about me. I hurled
myself in semi-madness into a huge crater near by in which there was a
little water, and I fell in it face down.