kept the men on their feet. Wheat waist-high is almost as hard to get
through as running water, and the sun was pitiless. To the left of the
battalion, and forward, machine-guns fired from the Chaudun farm; the
17th Company went in and stamped the Maxims flat. In a little hollow
there was a battery of 105s that fired pointblank upon the Marines, the
gunners working desperately behind their gun-shields. The Marines worked
to right and left and beat them down with rifle-fire, and later a
gunnery sergeant and a wandering detachment of Senegalese turned one of
these guns around and shelled the Vierzy ravine with it—range 900
yards—to the great annoyance of the Boche in that place.
Further, a hidden strong point in the wheat held them, and a tank came
and sat upon that strong point and shot it into nothing with a
one-pounder gun. Another place, hidden Saxons, laired behind low
trip-wires in high wheat, raked the line savagely. There was crawling
and shooting low among the poppies, and presently hand-to-hand fighting,
in which the freckled boy saw his brother killed and went himself quite
mad among the wounded and the corpses with his bayonet....
Then, without being very clear as to how they got there, the lieutenant
and his company and a great many others were at the Vierzy ravine, in
the cross-fire of the machine-guns that held it.
The ravine was very deep and very precipitous and wooded. A sunken road
led into it and, while the riflemen stalked the place cannily, a tank
came up and disappeared down the sunken road. A terrific row of rifles
and grenades arose, and a wild yelling. Running forward, the Marines
observed that the tank was stalled, its guns not working; and a gray,
frantic mass of German infantry was swarming over it, prying at its
plates with bayonets and firing into such openings as could be found.
One beauty of the tank is that, when it is in such a difficulty, you can
fire without fearing for your friends inside. The automatic-rifle men
especially enjoyed the brief crowded seconds that followed. Then all at
once the farther slope of the ravine swarmed with running Boches, and
the Americans knelt or lay down at ease, and fired steadily and without
haste. As they passed the tank a greasy, smiling Frenchman emerged head
and shoulders and inquired after a cigarette. There were very many dead
Germans in the ravine and on its slope when they went forward.
[Illustration:
A Lieutenant of Marines and a German major, hand to hand.
]
Wearily now, the exaltation dying down, they left the stone towers of
Vierzy to the right, in the path of the Regulars of the 9th and 23d. On
line northeast of it they halted and prepared to hold. It was a lonesome
place. Very thin indeed were the assault companies; very far away the
support columns.... “Accordin’ to the map, we’re here. Turn those Boche
machine-guns around—guess we’ll stay. Thank God, we must have grabbed
off all their artillery, ’cept the heavies....”
“Lootenant, come up here, for God’s sake! Lord, what a slew o’ Boches!”
Beyond rifle-shot a strong gray column was advancing. There were
machine-guns with it. It was not deployed, but its intention was very
evident.... Here were thirty-odd Marines and a few strays from one of
the infantry regiments—nobody in sight, flanks or rear——
But to the rear a clanging and a clattering, and the thudding of
horse-hoofs!—“Graves, beat it back an’ flag those guns.” Graves ran
frantically, waving his helmet. The guns halted in a cloud of dust, and
a gunner lieutenant trotted up, jaunty, immaculate. He dismounted, in
his beautiful pale-blue uniform and his gleaming boots and tiny jingling
spurs, and saluted the sweating, unshaven Marine officer. He looked with
his glasses, and he consulted his map, and then he smiled like a man who
has gained his heart’s desire. He dashed back toward his guns, waving a
signal.
The guns wheeled around; the horses galloped back; there was a whirl and
bustle behind each caisson, and two gunners with a field-telephone came
running. It all happened in seconds.
The first 75 barked, clear and incisive, and the shell whined away ...
the next gun, and the next.... The little puff-balls, ranging shots,
burst very near the Boche column. Then the battery fired as one gun—a
long rafale of fire, wherein no single gun could be heard, but a
drumming thunder.
Smoke and fire flowered hideously over the Boche column. A cloud hit it
for a space. When the cloud lifted the column had disintegrated; there
was only a far-off swarm of fleeing figures, flailed by shrapnel as they
ran. And the glass showed squirming heaps of gray flattened on the
ground....
The gunner officer looked and saw that his work was good. “Bon, eh?
Soixante-quinze—!” With an all-embracing gesture and a white-toothed
smile, he went. Already his battery was limbered up and galloping, and
when the first retaliatory shell came from an indignant Boche 155, the
75s were a quarter of a mile away. The Boche shelled the locality with
earnestness and method for the next hour, but he did not try to throw
forward another column.... “Man, I jest love them little 75s!
Swa-sont-cans bon? Say, that Frog said a mouthful!”
[Illustration:
Sketches made by Captain Thomason at Soissons on scraps of paper taken
from a feldwebel’s note-book.
]
The lieutenant wrote and sent back his final report: “... and final
objective reached, position organized at....” and stopped and swore in
amazement when he looked at his watch—barely noon! Sergeant Cannon’s
watch corroborated the time—“But, by God! The way my laigs feel, it’s
day after to-morrow, anyway!—” “Wake those fellows up—got to finish
diggin’ in—No tellin’ what we’ll get here—” Some of his people were
asleep on their rifles. Some were searching for iron crosses among the
dead. A sergeant came with hands and mouth full. “Sir, they’s a bunch of
this here black German bread and some stuff that looks like coffee, only
ain’t—in that dugout—” And the company found that Kriegsbrot and Kaffee
Ersatz will sustain life, and even taste good if you’ve been long enough
without food....
The shadows turned eastward; in the rear bloated observation balloons
appeared on the sky-line. “Them fellers gets a good view from there.
Lonesome, though....” “Wonder where all our planes went—don’t see none—”
“Hell! Went home to lunch! Them birds, they don’t allow no guerre to
interfere with they meals. Now, that’s what I got against this fighting
stuff—it breaks into your three hots a day.” “Boy, I’m so empty I could
button my blouse on the knobs of my spine! Hey—yonder’s a covey o’ them
avions now—low—strung out—Boche! Hit the deck!”
They were Boche—sinister red-nosed machines that came out of the eye of
the sun and harrowed the flattened infantry, swooping one after another
with bursts of machine-gun fire. Also they dropped bombs. Some of them
went after the observation balloons, and shot more than one down,
flaming, before they could be grounded. And not an Ally plane in sight,
anywhere! To be just, there was one, in the course of the afternoon; he
came from somewhere, and went away very swiftly, with five Germans on
his tail. The lieutenant gathered from the conversation of his men that
they thought the Frenchman used good judgment.
That afternoon the Boche had the air. He dropped bombs and otherwise did
the best he could to make up, with planes, for the artillery that he had
lost that morning. On the whole, he was infinitely annoying. There’s
something about being machine-gunned from the air that gets a man’s
goat, as the files remarked with profane emphasis. Much futile
rifle-fire greeted his machines as they came and went, and away over on
the right toward Vierzy the lieutenant saw one low-flying fellow crumple
and come down like a stricken duck. This plane, alleged to have been
brought down by a chaut-chaut automatic rifle, was afterward officially
claimed by four infantry regiments and a machine-gun battalion. Late in
the afternoon the French brought up anti-aircraft guns on motor-trucks
and the terror of the air abated somewhat; but, while it lasted, the
lieutenant heard——
“There comes—” (great rending explosion near by) “Goddamighty! ’nother
air-bomb?”
“Naw, thank God! That was only a shell!”
As dusk fell, the French cavalry rode forward through the lines. The
lieutenant thoughtfully watched a blue squadron pass—“If spirits walk,
Murat and Marshal Ney an’ all the Emperor’s cavalry are ridin’ with
those fellows....”
In the early dawn of the next day the cavalry rode back. One squadron
went through the company’s position. It was a very small squadron,
indeed, this morning. Half the troopers led horses with empty saddles. A
tall young captain was in command. They were drawn and haggard from the
night’s work, but the men carried their heads high, and even the horses
looked triumphant. They had, it developed, been having a perfectly
wonderful time, riding around behind the German lines. They had shot up
transport, and set fire to ammunition-dumps, and added greatly to the
discomfort of the Boche. They thought they might go back again
to-night.... They did.
The night of the 19th the galleys got up, and the men had hot food.
Early the morning of the 20th the division was relieved and began to
withdraw to reserve position, while fresh troops carried the battle on.
The 1st Battalion of the 5th Marines marched back, in a misty dawn,
across the ground they had fought over two days before. In the trampled
fields, where the dead lay unburied, old French territorials were mowing
the ripe wheat and shocking it up. The battle was far away....
The battalion entered the woods and turned off the road toward the blue
smoke of the galleys, from which came an altogether glorious smell of
food. One of the company officers ran ahead of the 49th to find a place
to stack arms and pile equipment. Presently he beckoned, and the
lieutenant led his people to the place—a sort of clearing, along one
side of which lay a great fallen tree. Under an outthrust leafy branch
something long and stiff lay covered with a blanket.
“Stack arms ... fall out!”
Graves, the officer who had gone ahead, was standing by the blanket. “Do
you know who’s under this?” he said. The lieutenant stooped and looked.
It was little Tritt....
After breakfast, some of the men enlarged the pit where the machine-gun
had been and tidied it up.... They wrapped the body in a blanket and two
German water-proof sheets that were handy, and buried the boy there.
“... But before he got it, he knew that we were winning.” The men put on
their helmets and went away, to look for others who had stopped in the
woods ... to gather souvenirs.
“Well, he’s where he ain’t hungry, an’ his feet don’t hurt from hikin’,
an’ his heavy marchin’ order won’t never cut into his shoulders any
more....” “No, nor no damn Boche buzzards drop air-bombs on him——”
“Wonder where we’ll hit the old Boche next——”
[Illustration:
Fighting north of Blanc Mont, Champagne.
]
SONGS
TWO
“CARRY ME BACK TO OLE VIRGINNY”
The old Boche helmet made an excellent thing to cook with. You jabbed a
few holes in it with a bayonet, so’s to have a draft, and a mess-kit
fitted over it beautifully. When you could get it, strips of high
explosive, picked up around a 155-mm. gun position, made the best fuel,
giving you a fine, hot, smokeless fire. Smoke was not desirable on the
front.
The chap on the opposite page is frying hard bread in bacon grease; he
will sprinkle a little beet-sugar on it and have a real delicacy.
Filling, too. As he goes about this domestic labor, he is humming “Carry
me back to Ole Virginny.” But the files in the background are attracted
by the smell—not the song.
[Illustration: [Soldiers]]
III
[Illustration: [Soldier]]
The taking of Blanc Mont is the greatest single achievement of the
1918 campaign—the Battle of Liberation.
—MARSHAL PÉTAIN.
III
MARINES AT BLANC MONT
The battalion groped its way through the wet darkness to a wood of
scrubby pines, and lay down in the slow autumn rain. North and east the
guns made a wall of sound; flashes from hidden batteries and flares sent
up from nervous front-line trenches lighted the low clouds; occasional
shells from the Boche heavies whined overhead, searching the transport
lines to the rear. It lacked an hour yet until dawn, and the companies
disposed themselves in the mud and slept. They had learned to get all
the sleep they could before battle.
A few days before, this battalion, the first of the 5th Regiment of
Marines, a unit of the 2d Division, had pulled out of a pleasant town
below Toul, in the area where the division rested after the Saint-Mihiel
drive, and had come north a day and a night by train, to
Chalons-sur-Marne. Thence, by night marches, the division had gathered
in certain bleak and warworn areas behind the Champagne front, and here
general orders announced that the 2d was detached from the American
forces and lent by the Generalissimo as a special reserve to Gouraud’s
4th French Army.
Forthwith arose gossip about General Gouraud, the one-armed and able
defender of Rheims, who had broken the German offensive in July. “A big
bird with a beak of a nose and one of these here square beards on
’im—holds hisself straighter than the run of Frog generals,” confided a
motorcycle driver from division headquarters. “Seen him in Challawns.
They say he fights.”
“Yeh, ole Foch has picked the right babies this time,” observed the
files complacently. “Special reserve—that’s us all over, Mable! Hope
they keep us in reserve—but we know they won’t! The Frogs have got
something nasty they want us to get outa the way for them. An’ we see
Chasser d’Alpinos and Colonials around here. Somethin’ distressin’ is
just bound to happen.”
“Roll your packs, you birds! The lootenant passed the word we’re goin’
up in camions to-night!”
The battalion got aboard in its turn, just as dusk deepened into dark,
rode until the camion train stopped, and marched through the rain to its
appointed place.
I
The dawn came very reluctantly through the clouds, bringing no sun with
it, although the drizzle stopped. The battalion rose from its soggy
blankets, kneading stiffened muscles to restore circulation, and
gathered in disconsolate shivering groups around the galleys. These had
come up in the night, and from them, standing under the dripping pines,
came a promising smell of hot coffee. Something hot was the main
consideration in life just now. But the fires were feeble, and something
hot was long in coming. The cooks swore because dry wood couldn’t be
found, and wet wood couldn’t be risked, because it would draw
shell-fire. The men swore at the weather and the slowness of the kitchen
force, and the war in general, and they all growled together.
“Quite right—entirely fitting and proper!” said the second-in-command of
the 49th Company, coming up to where his captain gloomed beside the
galley. “We wouldn’t know what to do with Marines who didn’t growl. But,
El Capitan, if you’ll go over to that ditch yonder, you’ll find some
Frog artillerymen with a lovely cooking-fire. They gave me hot coffee
with much rum in it. A great people, the Frogs—” But the captain was
already gone, and the second-in-command, who was a lean first lieutenant
in a mouse-colored raincoat, had to run to catch up with him.
They returned in time to see their company and the other companies of
the battalion lining up for chow. This matter being disposed of, the men
cast incurious eyes about them.
The French artillerymen called the place “the Wood of the Seven
Pigeons.” There were no pigeons here now. Only hidden batteries of 105s,
with their blue-clad attendants huddled in shelters around them. The
wood was a sparse growth of scrubby pines that persisted somehow on the
long slope of one of the low hills of Suippes, in the sinister Champagne
country. Many of the pines were blackened and torn by shell-fire, and
the chalky soil was pockmarked with shell craters from Boche
counter-battery work, searching for the French guns camouflaged there.
Trenches zigzagged through the pines, old and new, with belts of rusty
wire. There were graves.
North from the edge of the pines the battalion looked out on desolation
where the once grassy, rolling slopes of the Champagne stretched away
like a great white sea that had been dead and accursed through all time.
Near at hand was Souain, a town of the dead, a shattered skeleton of a
place, with shells breaking over it. Beyond and northward was Somme-Py,
nearly blotted out by four years of war. From there to the horizon, east
and west and north and south, was all a stricken land. The rich topsoil
that formerly made the Champagne one of the fat provinces of France was
gone, blown away and buried under by four years of incessant shell-fire.
Areas that had been forested showed only blackened, branchless stumps,
upthrust through the churned earth. What was left was naked, leprous
chalk. It was a wilderness of craters, large and small, wherein no yard
of earth lay untouched. Interminable mazes of trench work threaded this
waste, discernible from a distance by the belts of rusty wire
entanglements that stood before them. Of the great national highway that
had once marched across the Champagne between rows of stately poplars,
no vestige remained.
The second-in-command, peering from the pines with other officers of the
battalion, could see nothing that moved in all the desolation. Men were
there, thousands of them, but they were burrowed like animals in the
earth. North of Somme-Py, even then, Gouraud’s hard-fighting Frenchmen
were blasting their way through the lines that led up to the last
strongholds of the Boche toward Blanc Mont Ridge, and over this mangled
terrain could be seen the smoke and fury of bursting shrapnel shell and
high explosive. The sustained roar of artillery and the infernal
clattering of machine-guns and musketry beat upon the ears of the
watchers. Through glasses one could make out bits of blue and bits of
green-gray, flung casually about between the trenches. These, the only
touches of color in the waste, were the unburied bodies of French and
German dead.
“So this, Slover, is the Champagne,” said the second-in-command to one
of his non-coms who stood beside him. The sergeant spat. “It looks like
hell, sir!” he said.
The lieutenant strolled over to where a French staff captain stood with
a knot of officers in the edge of the pines, pointing out features of
this extended field, made memorable by bitter fighting.
“Since 1914 we have fought hard here,” he was saying. “Oh, the French
know this Champagne well, and the Boche knows it too. Yonder”—he pointed
to the southwest—“is the Butte de Souain, where our Foreign Legion met
in the first year that Guard Division that the Prussians call the
‘Cockchafers.’ They took the Butte, but most of the Legion are lying
there now. And yonder”—the Frenchman extended his arm with a gesture
that had something of the salute in it—“stands the Mountain of Rheims.
If you look—the air is clearing a little—you can perhaps see the towers
of Rheims itself.”
A long grayish hill lay against the gray sky at the horizon, and over it
a good glass showed, very far and faint, the spires of the great
cathedral, with a cloud of shell-fire hanging over them.
“All this terrain, as far as Rheims, is dominated by Blanc Mont Ridge
yonder to the north. As long as the Boche holds Blanc Mont, he can throw
his shells into Rheims; he can dominate the whole Champagne Sector, as
far as the Marne. Indeed, they say that the Kaiser watched from Blanc
Mont the battle that he launched here in July. And the Boche means to
hang on there. So far, we have failed to dislodge him. I expect”—he
broke off and smiled gravely on the circle of officers—“you will see
some very hard fighting in the next few days, gentlemen!”
It was the last day of September, and as the forenoon went by an
intermittent drizzle sent the battalion to such miserable shelters as
the men could improvise. Company commanders and seconds-in-command went
up toward ruined Somme-Py for reconnoissance, and returned to profane
the prospect to their platoon leaders.
“I do not like this place,” declared the captain of the 49th Company to
his juniors. “It looks like it was just built for calamities to happen
in.”
“Yep, and all the division is around here for calamities to happen
to.... A sight more of us will go in than will ever come out of it!”
Meantime it was wet and cold in the dripping shelters. Winter clothing
had not been issued, and the battalion shivered and was not cheerful.
“Wish to God we could go up an’ get this fight over with!”
“Yes, an’ then go back somewhere for the winter. Let some of these here
noble National Army outfits we’ve been hearin’ about do some of the
fightin’! There’s us, and there’s the 1st Division, and the 32d—Hell! we
ain’t hogs! Let some of them other fellows have the glory——”
“Gawd help the Boche when we meets him this time! Somebody’s got to pay
for keepin’ us out in this wet an’ cold.”
[Illustration:
French grenadier—Blanc Mont.
]
“Hear your young men talk, El Capitan? They’re goin’ to take it out on
the Boche—they will, too. Don’t you take any more of this than your rank
entitles you to! I’m gettin’ wet.”
The second-in-command and the captain were huddled under a small sheet
of corrugated iron, stolen by an enterprising orderly from the French
gunners. The captain was very large, and the other very lean, and they
were both about the same length. They fitted under the sheet by a sort
of dovetailing process that made it complicated for either to move. A
second-in-command is sort of an understudy to the company commander. In
some of the outfits the captain does everything, and his understudy can
only mope around and wait for his senior to become a casualty. In
others, it is the junior who gets things done, and the captain is just a
figurehead. In the 49th, however, the relation was at its happiest. The
big captain and his lieutenant functioned together as smoothly as parts
of a sweet-running engine, and there was between them the
undemonstrative affection of men who have faced much peril together.
“As for me,” rejoined the captain, drawing up one soaked knee and
putting the other out in the wet, “I want to get wounded in this fight.
A bon blighty, in the arm or the leg, I think. Something that will keep
me in a nice dry hospital until spring. I don’t like cold weather. Now
who is pushin’? It’s nothin’ to me, John, if your side leaks—keep off o’
mine!”
So the last day of September, 1918, passed, with the racket up forward
unabated. So much of war is just lying around waiting in more or less
discomfort. And herein lies the excellence of veterans. They swear and
growl horribly under discomfort and exposure—far more than green troops;
but privations do not sap their spirit or undermine that intangible
thing called morale. Rather do sufferings nourish in the men a cold,
mounting anger, that swells to sullen ardor when at last the infantry
comes to grips with the enemy, and then it goes hard indeed with him who
stands in the way.
On the front, a few kilometres from where the battalion lay and listened
to the guns, Gouraud’s attack was coming to a head around the heights
north of Somme-Py and the strong trench systems that guarded the way to
Blanc Mont Ridge. Three magnificent French divisions, one of Chasseurs,
a colonial division, and a line division with a Verdun history,
shattered themselves in fruitless attacks on the Essen Trench and the
Essen Hook, a switch line of that system. Beyond the Essen line the
Blanc Mont position loomed impregnable. Late on the 1st of October, a
gray, bleak day, the battalion got its battle orders, and took over a
mangled front line from certain weary Frenchmen.
Gathering the platoon leaders and non-coms around them, the captain and
the second-in-command of the 49th Company spread a large map on the
ground, weighting its corners with their pistols.
“You give the dope, John,” ordered the captain, who was not a man of
words, and his junior spoke somewhat in this manner: