When two divisions of German shock troops pile up on a regiment of
American fighting men, one does not need to be gifted in imagination to
see war in all its ramifications and vicissitudes.
I admit that to those of us who participated the picture as a whole is
blurred by proximity while spots are multicolored and accentuated into
sheets of concentrated lightning.
The historian of the future will view the battle from afar and do much
better, particularly as he will not be hampered by individual facts.
Therefore we shall tell you the story and not the history of the 38th’s
recent unpleasantness.
The scene is laid in that erstwhile heavenly little valley of the
Surmelin which finds its resting place on the banks of the River Marne.
The semi-mountainous ridges that flank this little valley are wooded
with what the French call trees; they are tangled with shrubs and
second growths that make for ideal machine-gun nests, as we shall see.
Down in the bosom of the valley meanders the Surmelin river, so called
we presume because the French do not know our word “crick.” It is
heavily foliaged creek; its value we first recognized in its production
of trout through the agency of the festive “OF” grenade tossed into its
tiny pools.
This valley is a series of golden wheat fields and garden patches.
Not fields as you know them but as the French crofter laboriously
cultivates by hand to the limits of one man’s activities—small, though
profuse, spots of shining cereal decorated resplendently with carmine
red poppies. * * * * *
The maps show this valley to be the gateway to Paris—that is, from the
farthest point of the second German drive to the Marne. Would you call
it the 38th’s good fortune to be given this gateway to defend? Anyway,
the fates so decreed and we were rushed by the fastest means possible
from our training billets, with French beds five feet high, at Arc,
Cour le Vecque, and Comprey, to stem the tide and thereby block the way
to Paris.
The 38th had made some marches before and has since, but none of us
will forget when we pulled into the woods back of St. Eugene that last
day of our trek. We had revised the tables of field equipment on the
way so that when we got there we didn’t bother to spread our blankets.
We simply laid down and hoped in a maudlin, disconnected way one of the
shells the Germans welcomed us with would make a direct hit and end it
all.
The Colonel was right there ahead of us. Nobody ever knows how he does
it but he is always ahead of us and we have gotten used to a confident
feeling of knowing it’s all right to go anywhere the Colonel is ahead.
He warned us about aeroplane observation and gas shells and said, “Be
ready for orders to move up!”
Our position was taken without delay on the south bank of the Marne,
which is about fifty yards wide and which at that time separated us
from the enemy. The Colonel gave orders directly opposite to the “live
and let live” principle. “Don’t let anything alive show itself on the
other side except those you go over and get for information!”
So we gave them some lessons in rifle fire.
* * * * *
With the French opposite them the Germans had an insulting and cocky
way of strolling about their business in plain view at a few hundred
yards. The French custom of running themselves ragged trying to hit the
enemy with a hand grenade did not appeal to us, so we became, in the
German opinion, disgustingly belligerent with our rifles.
Their movements soon after our advent became surreptitious and
reptilian. So at night we paddled over in various nondescript
flotillas, dug them out of their holes or chased their patrols around
a bit—and sometimes got chased back again somewhat the worse for wear.
They sprinkled us with H. E.’s and gas and we likewise sprinkled them.
It was a great game and we thrived on it.
One dark night a patrol of theirs came over right at the point of a
sentry post of ours. As they reached for the bank with a boat-hook a
Yank accommodatingly took hold and pulled them in. He said, “Come on
over, Fritz. We are waiting for you,” and our men proceeded to pacify
one boat load of misdirected Huns.
That sort of thing was our daily, or rather nightly, ration, until
prisoners and intelligence officers began to tell a new story. The
Boche were preparing for another grand offensive and this time their
objective was Paris with no stops.
The French on our right were generous with their warnings and made
feverish arrangements for something or other—we thought at the time
it was for battle. Aeroplanes and scouts verified this rumor and it
looked like business. So the whole thing so far as our sector was
concerned—the Gateway to Paris, the Valley of the Surmelin—was put up
to the Colonel, U. G. McAlexander, who at once proceeded to make hay
while the making was good.
“Rowe, you hold the front line with two companies of your battalion,
don’t you?”
“Yes, sir, with two companies in their immediate support,” answered
Major Rowe, commander of the 2nd Battalion.
“Very well,” said the Colonel. “Thicken the lines by moving one company
up. This will give you three company fronts on our sector and your
remaining company will entrench themselves in echelon formation, so,”
indicating on map with pencil marks the exact position he wished them
in. “They will act in close support on the extreme right and also as a
right flank rearguard. The weak point on this line is on our right. I
don’t believe the French will hold and I shall arrange my regiment to
meet that contingency.”
This was a direct statement as usual; no equivocation in the Colonel’s
remarks. But we were all greatly surprised, as everybody else had
complete confidence in the gallantry of the French division on our
right. It was our first introduction to the depth of the man in his
preparation for battle. But for his judgment on their instability this
would be a requiem, not a story.
The regiment was arranged on advanced and original principles of
“formation in depth.” The 2nd Battalion, Major Rowe, as above; then
the 1st Battalion, Major Keeley, and the 3rd, Major Lough. The Colonel
looked us over individually and collectively, took a rifle to a point
near the river in broad daylight, sniped a while as though to challenge
the enemy, and said, “Let ’em come.”
* * * * *
The evening of July 14th (1918) came with a darkness you could feel.
French crickets cricked in a language we could not understand. Night
birds winged their uncertain way in pursuit of life, liberty, and
happiness. Frogs croaked and walked—not hopped—after the manner of no
other frogs on earth. The Y.M.C.A.—God bless them!—sent chocolates
and cigarettes down to the men in the very front lines. The rolling
kitchens steamed up in preparation of the boys’ one hot meal per day
to be delivered by carrying parties to the front. Company commanders
made the usual night reconnaissance of their positions, chatted with
the lieutenants and again learned that a plebiscite of the men would
produce a reiteration of the Colonel’s “Let ’em come.”
Our artillery lugged over the usual intermittent harrassing fire, but
the murmuring pines and whispering hemlocks went A.W.O.L.[1] so far as
looking out for the Germans was concerned. For all the noise they made
you could hear your eyelashes meet. Their quiet finally became ominous
and there was a general stiffening of our cerebral vertebra.
At exactly 12 o’clock it happened.
All the demons of hell and its ally, Germany, were unleashed in a
fierce uproar that transcended all bombardments of the past. It
thundered and rained shells, H.E.’s shrapnel and gas. They swept our
sector as with a giant scythe, and as far back as their guns would
reach.
For hours that seemed weeks we huddled in our tiny splinter proofs or
open slit trenches in the horrible confusion of it all, but we lovingly
patted our, as yet, cold steel and awaited the second shock we knew
would come—the shock of bodies, material bodies that we could see, feel
and fight—something tangible, so that we could release our mad lust to
kill this great snake that was slowly coiling around us, this furious
beast that was volcanically tearing at our vitals.
God, what hallucinations under a pounding like that!
Yes, we wanted them to come. We wanted anything to come that we could
see, feel, and fight. We wanted to fight, I tell you. Not to lie there
on the rocking ground with hell crashing and the devils snatching at
our guts, our eyes, our lungs.
What was that in our lungs?
Yes, Damn them, Gas!
They are not satisfied to drench us at long distances with all the
steel they can crowd into space but the dirty, ghoulish, primeval Hun
racks his warped and tortured brain for a method more becoming the
slime and filth of his rotten being.
Well, so be it. We fight him back with his weapons, so on with the gas
masks, it’s only a bluff. He can’t come himself in his poison—and he’s
coming, he’s coming! It became a song in our hearts—“He’s Coming! He’s
Coming!”
* * * * *
We began to brighten perceptibly. Instead of the earth rocking it
became the gentle tossing of a languorous, moonlit sea. We leaned our
heads in genuine affection against the dirt sides of our little slit
trench and began to marvel at its motherly shelter. How they could
churn up the whole world and never drop one in! Of course they could
not drop one in. They had no brain, the swine.
If a chemist could run them through a Pasteur filter, he would
get a trace of intellectual process about the mental grade of the
Pithecanthropus erectus!
That’s it. He is shooting away his fireworks in the vain hope of
something. Wonder what it is. Anyway, he shot it away for eight hours
on our support and reserve lines, but at about 4 o’clock on the morning
of the 15th he lifted his general bombardment on the front line and
started a rolling barrage, one hundred meters in three minutes.
Behind it, almost hugging it, they came!
God, weren’t we glad to see the grayness of them!
This was more like. Something we could see, feel and fight. And when we
say they came we mean two divisions of them.
“When two divisions of German shock troops pile up on a regiment of
American fighting men”—Do you remember what we told you!
Well! they piled up, at first with excellent formation and a
distribution of machine guns, as bumble bees distribute themselves
after the small boy wallops their nest with his handful of switches—all
over everywhere.
On the river bank where they came in crowds, boats, and pontoon
bridges, it was eye to eye, tooth to tooth, and hand-to-hand. It was
a strange silence after the barrage had passed. The tack-tack-tack of
machine guns, mounted and firing from boats as they came, and the clash
of steel as the bayonets met sounded like a death stillness compared to
it.
The lines on the river were fought out completely. The barrage had not
reached the railway bank and reënforcements could not be sent to them.
They paid the supreme price, but the action delayed the enemy advance
so that the organizations in depth could unlimber and meet the advance
with the result as stated above—this is a story, not a requiem.
Their barrage got away from them, an unpardonable crime in military
science but humanly pardonable when one learns they thought it
impossible to be met and fought on the river bank.
* * * * *
Our line of resistance was the Metz-Paris Railway. The embankment is
some nine feet high with tiny slit trenches on the forward edge but
not sufficiently forward to be on the military crest. When the Boche
started their advance across the wheat fields intervening, some five
hundred yards, this embankment became a living thing and American
Springfields began to laugh in their faces.
That wasn’t fair. They had been assured with all German sangfroid that
there would be no resistance after their barrage. But those were shock
troops brought from afar with orders. “To Paris. No Stop-overs.”
Though their brains became loose-leaf ledgers with no index and the
Kaiser became a more ghastly figure, they were fighters. I should say,
professional soldiers. So they came on. We admit they looked like the
whole German army and we had to wonder if the little old Springfield
would keep on laughing. We had been warned of a big offensive, but we
did not know the Boche thought our front was like a city park, free for
all.
The Springfield did keep on laughing and after covering about half the
distance they were transferred from a soldiers’ maneuver column into
a German military omelet. However, their machine guns had infiltrated
through the high wheat and covered our front as flies cover spilled
molasses.
The rest hit the ground and continued their advance in a more becoming
manner, like a mole. They wriggled themselves, many of them to the very
foot of the railway embankment, where they were safe from our fire for
the above mentioned reason. They rested, then charged the crest, were
hurled back; rested, threw stick grenades and charged some more, but
never successfully, until the splendid heroes of that line joined their
comrades of the river bank, joined them on that long journey to that
land which knows no war.
Then came the supporting troops from their immediate rear in a charge
to which history will never do justice. They couldn’t come before, as
there is only room for a certain number to fight on the forward edge.
To the Germans on the embankment the Kaiser must have taken on a more
material aspect; they saw visions of Paris, but visions only, which
disappeared like mist in the sunshine.
It was not sunshine that hit them. No. It was an earthquake. San
Francisco one April morning of 1906 had nothing on that shock which
must have been felt back in the Reichstag. Bayonets, rifle butts, fists
and teeth. Our boys in khaki were overwhelmed by numbers in gray.
But the McAlexander spirit; that is God-given and Heaven-sent!
The Colonel had said, “Let ’em come.” Well, here they are, and God, the
joy of it all!
* * * * *
Did you ever turn yourself loose in a mad passion that knew no limit?
Were you ever blinded by blood and lust to kill and let yourself go
in a crowd where you could feel their bodies crumble and sink to the
depths below you, then brace yourself on them, and destroy, destroy,
destroy!
I hope not, but we did—and what do numbers amount to against spirit? In
San Francisco the earthquake subsided and we were left to contemplate
and ponder. There was no subsiding of these seismic demons of Colonel
Ulysses Grant McAlexander, once they had their orders. We were to hold
that railroad. Did we hold it, Go down there and count the German
graves. Six hundred before one company alone. Ask the prisoners, pens
of them, why they didn’t fulfil their mission. They don’t know just
what happened, but whatever it was, it was awful, colossal.
Sir, they did not even take the first line of resistance of the
38th. An officer, later captured, stated that only twelve of the 6th
Grenadiers, the Kaiser’s favorite Prussian shock troops, returned to
their side of the Marne.
Yes, back they went, and they stood not upon the manner of their
going, although I will say their machine guns covered their retreat
to the limit of their ability. Without their usual “nest” arrangement
they were comparatively easy picking for us. For instance, during the
retreat Corporal Newell with his squad augmented by two men went down
into the field and captured five guns, killing or capturing their crews.
* * * * *
During the heat of battle one lone private crawled down the embankment
through the wheat to the flank of a machine-gun crew who were too busy
on their front to know where his shots were coming from. He picked off
seven Germans and dragged the gun back with him. These incidents are
not typical, but they serve to illustrate the many, many remarkable
individual feats of heroism of the 38th, under the stress of battle.
No grander man lived than Lieutenant Kenneth P. Murray, killed in a
flank attack which started in a line from the railway to the church in
Mézy, drove in one hundred and eighty-five prisoners, but from which
only three returned, the company commander and two privates. Lieutenant
Mercer M. Phillips died on the railway with a blood-dripping bayonet
on the rifle in his hands. Lieutenant David C. Calkins, whose troops
blocked the enemy’s progress at the river edge until the barrage passed
and those in his support could get into action, made the supreme
sacrifice.
Many, many other splendid souls, born leaders of brave men, joined the
great majority with a smile on their lips and pistols empty.
Lieutenant Colonel Frank H. Adams, that great soldier with a lion’s
heart, and yet who led his command by an irresistible personal
magnetism, by precept and example and never an unkind word—that big,
handsome, he-fighter won the Distinguished Service Cross by standing in
the way of a whole regiment, not one that he had any direct connection
with, but one nearby that was practically routed by the shock the 38th
stood and fought back. He brought comparative order out of chaos and
succeeded in getting them in a support position.
We could mention hundreds of great deeds by great men on that day, but
this is a story of the 38th, not of the indomitable spirits that go to
make it up, or we would never reach the end.
* * * * *
At 10 o’clock, on the 15th, our front was fairly cleared and we
were beginning to feel that it was a great day, when something else
happened. Can you, who were not with us, imagine how a prohibitionist
feels on a yachting party? Completely surrounded by hell and damnation
and can’t get off.
The enemy had penetrated to our left like the boll weevil through a
Southerner’s cotton patch and fortified himself with minenwerfers,
machine guns and barbed wire. They did not penetrate to our right. No,
they simply walked over and wondered how much of a hike it was to
Paris. We were then aware of the reason for “Feverish preparations on
the part of the French on our right.”
Do you remember what we told you? We thought it was to fight, but
evidently no such idea ever marred the sweet thoughts of the 131st.
Say what you please, make any defense you like. They weren’t there.
And that’s the business we have in hand just now. They weren’t there.
Whence they came or whither they went we know not. A. W. O. L. most
likely, but that is neither here nor there.
On the morning of July 15, 1918, when Colonel McAlexander was hurling
battalion after battalion of the 38th into the Surmelin valley, the
Gateway to Paris, and out-fighting, out-maneuvering, out-generaling the
Kaiser’s favorites, there were no friendly troops on our right where
they had been on the evening of the 14th.
However, thank God for a real soldier’s instinct. The Colonel had
anticipated and was prepared to meet a right flank attack. Good old
Captain Reid was there to meet them when they tried to consolidate
their line through our regiment. He met them first with rifle fire,
then with the bayonet, and finally with butts. He fought them all over
the ridge and down on every side except our side. He never let them
set foot on our sector of the Marne and though it cost him nearly his
entire command he was there when fresher troops could get to him for
relief.
On the left we repulsed a heavy rear attack and a light flank attack
with a handful of the most exhausted troops in France—old “G” company
reduced to fifty-two men from two hundred and fifty-one—taking up new
positions and fighting off ten to one is a picture that will ever live
in the memory of the 38th.
Major Rowe made desperate efforts to reinforce, but the Boche, just at
that place, had us under direct fire of Austrian 88’s, German 77’s, and
one pounders. You know what direct fire means. Effective forces can’t
be sent against it, that’s all.
* * * * *
So, for three days we fought on our flanks, for three days the German
high command gave us all they had in their desperation to open the
gateway. The Colonel received an order. “Fall back if you think best.”
[Illustration: “THE DAY IS DONE.”
After a long, hard day, the voice of the bugle was a welcome sound to
the ears of the tired soldiers.]
He answered, “Is it up to my decision?”
The answer: “Yes.”
The Colonel’s answer: “Then I hold my lines!”
God, what a world of torture and yet solace in that answer! What a
world of pain and joy! We were shot to ribbons, cut to small sections,
unfed, and oh, so tired; but the drive would never have stopped once
they consolidated their lines through the 38th.
It was Paris for them and a terrible defeat for us if we withdrew and
gave them the little Surmelin valley. The Colonel had been studying the
attack orders taken from captured German officers and knew as no one
else knew what it meant to fall back.
He was there for a soldier’s purpose and did a soldier’s duty. He paid
an awful price, made sacrifices of officers and men that tore his heart
to pieces. But he held the Gateway to Paris and not only that, drove
them back across the Marne and _followed them across_.
Believe it or not, it was an absolute physical impossibility, but we
went right on after them and fought them again at Jaulgonne—still
nobody on our right, mind you—where for several days and several nights
it steadily rained and where for the same length of time we hammered
them with shot and bayonet until they fell back with such impetus that
our next big battle was at Fismes on the River Vesle.
One soldier was heard to remark: “I don’t see any more prisoners coming
in. I wonder what can be the matter?”
Second soldier: “Didn’t you hear the Colonel say he had all the
information he needed?”
There are not many of us left of the old 38th. There has been
considerable talk in French circles about “Regiment d’elite,”
“unconquerable tenacity,” and the like. Yes, our flag is to be
decorated with the Croix de Guerre and it is generally recognized in
high French command that “McAlexander’s defense was peculiarly American
in conception, plan and execution.” You see we have been under French
command and our deeds have not been recounted at home. All the glory
goes to the High Command.
Things like this though, we keep close to our hearts: