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....
]