kilometre and a half north of Somme-Py. You see it here—the town you
watched them shell this morning. They have gotten into the Prussian
trench—this blue line with the wire in front of it. It’s just a fire
trench, mostly shell-holes linked up. Behind it, quite close, is the
Essen trench, which is evidently a hum-dinger! Concrete pill-boxes and
deep dugouts and all that sort of thing—regular fort. The Frogs say it
can’t be taken from the front—they’ve tried. We’re goin’ to take it. On
the other side of that is the Elbe trench, and a little to the left the
Essen Hook, and in the centre the Bois de Vipre—same kind o’ stuff, they
say. We’re to take them. You see them all on the map.... Next, away up
in this corner of the map, is the Blanc Mont place. Whoever is left when
we get that far will take that, too.... Questions?... Yes, Tom, we ought
to get to use those sawed-off shotguns they gave us at St. Mihiel—though
when we get past the Essen system, we’ll be in the open, mostly.... The
old Deuxième Division is goin’ in to-night—it’s goin’ to be some party!”
“Gunnery sergeants send details from each platoon for
bandoleers—ammunition-dump is around Battalion Headquarters somewhere,”
added the captain. “We get a few rifle-grenades, and some
shotgun-shells. And make the men hang on to their reserve rations, for
Christ’s sake! Probably won’t eat again until after this is over. Move
out of here as soon as it’s dark. That’s all.”
“Two hundred and thirty-four men, sir, and seven officers, not counting
the galley force and the office force that we’re leaving behind,”
reported the second-in-command, falling in beside the captain as the
company moved off with the rest of the battalion in the gathering
darkness. They went in double file, dim shapes in the gloom, down the
muddy, tortuous road.
“The company’s in better shape than it ever has been,” replied the
captain thoughtfully. “St. Mihiel was a walk-over, but it was fine
training for them, and even our greenest replacements had a chance to
get over being gun-shy. And the non-coms are fine, too ... hope we don’t
lose too many of them. You and I have come all the way from Belleau Wood
together, John—I’m no calamity-howler—but there’s something about this
dam’ Champagne country that gets you——”
“Too many men died here, I reckon,” said the lieutenant. “You feel ’em
somehow, in the dark.... Something creepy about those flares, isn’t
there?”
The road here was screened on the side toward the enemy by coarse mats
of camouflage material erected on tall poles. Through this screen the
German flares, ceaselessly ascending, shone with cold, greenish
whiteness, so that men saw their comrades’ faces weirdly drawn and pale
under their helmets. The files talked as they went——
“I’ve seen the time I’d have called those things pretty—but now—reckon
hell’s lit with the same kind of glims!” ... “Remember the flare that
went up in our faces the night we made the relief in Bellew Woods?
Seemed to me like everybody in the world was lookin’ at me.” “Bois de
Belleau! mighty few in the battalion now that remember them days,
sonny....” “Listen to that dam’ Heine machine-gun over yonder ... like a
typewriter, ain’t it?” “Useter run a typewriter myself, back befo’ Texas
declared war on Germany—in a nice dry office it was, an’ this time o’
night I’d be down on the drug-store corner lookin’ ’em over.—” “Somebody
shoot that bum, talkin’ about lookin’ ’em over!” “Hey! Th’ angels’ll be
lookin’ him over, this time to-morrow night, they will!” “Yes, they
will! I’ll live to spit on the grave of the man that said that!”—“My
word! Don’t these 1917 model gyrines talk rough, Mac!” marvelled one old
non-com to another.
[Illustration:
Those sawed-off shotguns they gave us at St. Mihiel.
]
The road passed into the desolation and wound north, kilometre after
kilometre. Presently the camouflage ended and the battalion felt
exceedingly naked without its shelter. Then a slope to the left screened
the way, the crest of it sharply outlined as the flares ascended. Beyond
that crest the machine-guns sounded very near; now and again the air was
filled with the whispering rush of their bullets, passing high toward
some chance target in the rear. The upper air was populous with shells
passing, and the sky flickered with gun-flashes, but the road along
which the battalion went enjoyed for the time an uneasy immunity. The
rests were all too short; the sweating files swore at their heavy packs;
the going was very hard. Presently the road ceased to be a road—merely a
broken way across an interminable waste of shell-holes, made passable
after a fashion by the hasty work of French engineers, toiling behind
the assault of the infantry.
The battalion skirted stupendous craters of exploded mines—“Good Gawd!
you could lose my daddy’s house, an’ his barn, too, in that there hole!
’Taint no small barn, either!” The stars had come out, and shone very
far off and strangely calm. The dark was foul with all the reek of an
old battle-field. “After midnight,” conjectured the files. “Are we ever
goin’ to get across this accursed place?”
The files plodded on each side of the tumbled track, and as they neared
Somme-Py a pitiful stream of traffic grew and passed between them, the
tide of French wounded ebbing to the rear. They were the débris of the
attacks that had spent themselves through the day—walking wounded,
drifting back like shadows in stained blue uniforms, men who staggered
and leaned against each other and spoke in low, racked voices to the
passing files; and broken men who were borne in stretchers, moaning—“Ah,
Jesu!...” “Doucement, doucement!!...” Farther back the ambulances would
be waiting for them.... The battalion went on in close-mouthed silence.
Very little talking now, no laughing at all.... “El Capitan, regardez—we
be sober-minded men approaching—what we approach—” said the
second-in-command, hitching the sling of his musette bag well out of the
way of his gas-mask. “I have always,” replied that stolid veteran, “held
that war was a serious business.” ... “This is Somme-Py. Can’t those
bums ahead set a better pace?”
The column went quickly through the town, into which shells were
falling, stumbling over the débris of ruined walls and houses. There was
a very busy French dressing-station there, under the relic of a church.
It was too dark to see, but each man caught the sound and the smell of
it. They cleared the town and went on to a crossroads. French guides
were to have met the battalion there, for the line was just ahead, but
the guides were late. There was a nerve-racking halt. The next battalion
in column closed up; a machine-gun outfit, with its solemn, blasé mules,
jammed into the rifle companies.
The 49th was the leading company, just behind the Battalion Headquarters
group, and the second-in-command went up to where the major and his
satellites were halted.
“Crossroads are always a dam’ bad business, Coxy,” the major was
observing to his adjutant. “Just askin’ for it here—no tellin’ how late
our Frog friends will be—get the men moved into that ditch off the road
yonder—Ah! thought so!”
A high, swift whine that grew to a shrieking roar, and a five-inch shell
crashed down some fifty yards to the right of the crowded road.
Everybody except the mules were flat on the ground before it landed, but
wicked splinters of steel sung across the road, and a machine-gunner,
squatting by his cart, collapsed and rolled toward the edge of the road,
swearing and clutching at his thigh. The men moved swiftly and without
disorder to the ditch, which was a deep communication-trench paralleling
the road. Another shell came as they moved, falling to the left, and
then another, closer, this time between the road and the trench. A mule
or two reared and plunged, stricken; a Marine whose head had been unduly
high slumped silently down the side of the trench with most of his head
gone. “Damn! Jimmie stopped somethin’ the size of a stove-lid!” “Fool
oughta kept his head down!” “Some very hard men you have in your
company, El Capitan,” commented the second-in-command, a few feet away,
crouching by the side of the captain. “Now, I may stop one, but nobody’s
goin’ to get to say that about me, I’ll bet!” “Nor me, John!”... “Face
it when it comes, but no use lookin’ for it!”
More shells came, landing along the road, between the road and the
trench, and one or two of them in the trench itself. Cries and groans
came from the head of the column; stretcher-bearers hurried in that
direction; the battalion lay close and waited. Then the shelling
stopped. Up forward the major drew a long breath. “Just harassin’ fire
on these crossroads. I was afraid we were spotted. Now, those guides—” A
little group of Frenchmen arrived panting at the head of the column and
the men were quickly on the move again. “If Brother Boche had kept
flingin’ them seabags around here, he’d a-hurt somebody. Where do we go
from here?”
Said the major, coming to the head of the 49th with a French
guide—“Francis, we’re takin’ the regimental front—division’s putting
four battalions in the line. The 6th will be on our left; infantry
brigade on the right. Let me know how your sector looks—my P. C. will
be—I’d better send a runner with you. Here’s your guide.”
That company moved off, and the other companies, going into position in
the battered Prussian trench, facing the formidable Essen work. The
French riflemen they found there were hanging on in the very teeth of
the enemy. Their position had been hastily constructed a few days before
by the hard-pressed Boche and was a mere selection from the abundant
shell craters, connected by shallow digging. The Marines stumbled and
slipped through its windings. It was cluttered up with dead men, for it
had been strongly held and dearly won. The 49th took over the part
allotted to it from some ten platoons of Frenchmen, eight or ten men to
a platoon, in command of a first lieutenant. It was what was left of a
full battalion.
Courteous and suave, although he swayed on his feet from weariness and
his eyelids drooped from loss of sleep, the Frenchman summed up the
situation for the Marine captain. “We hold this fire trench. In your
sector are four communication trenches running to the Essen work, which
is about a hundred metres distant. We hold most of the boyau on the
extreme right; the others we have barricaded. You cannot take this Essen
trench by frontal assault!”—“Why can’t we?” growled the American.
[Illustration:
The shells began to drop into the trench.
]
“When it is light you will see, M. le Capitaine! You can only get
forward by bombing your way in the boyaux. They are too strong in
machine-guns, the Boche. Now I take my men and go. Seven days and nights
we have been on our feet ... those of us who are left are very tired....
It is well that you be watchful in this place, but do not stir up the
Boche yonder. They shoot with minenwerfers when you frighten them. Such
a one finished my pauvre capitaine and six men with him. Bon chance, mon
capitaine! Bon jour!”
“Cheerful bird, wasn’t he?” remarked the captain. “Wonder if that thing
I stepped on just outside his hole was his captain? John, before it gets
good daylight, don’t you want to take a look-see at this Essen Trench?
Take whoever you want and see how the land lies.”
The Essen Trench had been very active when the companies were being
posted; staccato bursts of machine-gun fire had ripped across the
intervening dark, and Springfields had answered. There had been some
bombing around traverses in the boyaux. But when, in the creeping
grayness of the dawn, the lieutenant from the 49th ventured across to it
with his orderly and a sergeant, he found the Boche retiring. Filing
quickly through the communication trenches, the battalion occupied it
without difficulty, and, looking around them, were very glad they hadn’t
had to take it by storm.
[Illustration:
A flare during shelling in the front-line trenches.
]
And the captain understood why the French lieutenant had said it
couldn’t be stormed. The French had tried the evening before to cross
the scant distance and get into it. Most of those who had charged lay as
the Boche Maxims had cut them down. In one place, between two boyaux
that formed with the opposed lines a rough square of perhaps one hundred
yards, he counted eighty-three dead Frenchmen. Lying very thick near the
lip of their own trench, the bodies formed a sort of wedge, thinning
toward the point as they had been decimated, and that point was one
great bearded Frenchman, his body all a mass of bloody rags, who lay
with his eyes fiercely open to the enemy and his outthrust bayonet
almost in the emplacement where the Boche guns had been.
The company, which had learned its own bitter lesson in frontal attacks
on machine-guns, gave passing tribute. “Them Frogs, they eat
machine-guns up. Fightin’ sons o’ guns, they are. Wonder if any chow is
comin’ up to-day?” They made themselves comfortable among the dead and
waited the next move with equanimity.
“Two hundred and thirty-one men, sir,” reported the second-in-command,
sliding into the shallow dugout where the captain was holed up. “Mighty
lucky so far. I’m goin’ to sleep. There’s some shellin’, especially
toward the left, but most of the outfit is pretty well under cover.”
II
Gouraud’s battle roared on to the left with swelling tumult. The
Americans, in their sector, passed the day in ominous quiet. They
wondered what the delay was, speculated on the strategy of attack—which
is a matter always sealed from the men who deliver the attack—and wore
through to the evening of October 2. At dark, food came up in marmite
cans—beef and potatoes and a little coffee. “Put ours on that mess-tin
there,” directed the second-in-command, as his orderly slid in with his
and the captain’s rations. The captain sat up in his corner a little
later. “What th’ hell, John?”—sniff—sniff! “Has that dead Boche on the
other side of you begun to announce hisself? Phew!” The
second-in-command rose from the letter he was writing by the stub of a
candle and sniffed busily—sniff—snnnn—“Damnation! Captain, it’s our
supper!” With averted face he presented the grayish chunks of beef that
reposed on the mess-tin. “Urggg—throw it out!” He disappeared up the
crumbled steps to the entrance of the hole.
A few minutes later he slid down again, followed in a shower of dust and
clods by a battalion runner. “All the beef was bad, El Capitan! What the
young men are saying about the battalion supply would make your hair
curl!—And here’s our attack orders.”
There was a brief pencilled order from the major, and maps. The two
officers bent over them eagerly. “Runner!—Platoon commanders report
right away—” ... “What do you make of it, John? Looks like General
Lejeune was goin’ to split his division and reunite it on the field....
Hmmm! Ain’t that the stunt you claim only Robert E. Lee and Napoleon
could get away with?... All here? Get around—the map’s about oriented——”
“Here we are, in the Essen Trench—seems that the Marines move down to
the left to here—and the 9th and 23rd move to the right—to here. These
pencil lines show the direction of attack—then we jump off, angling a
little to the right, compass bearing—and the infantry outfits point
about as much to the left. That brings us together up here about three
kilometres, and we go on straight, a little west of north from there, to
Blanc Mont——
[Illustration:
In the Essen trench—a runner.
]
“Essen Hook and Bois de Vipre are the first objectives—Blanc Mont final
objective.... That means we pass to the flank of the Hook and join up
behind the Viper Woods—we’ll get some flanking fire, but we will cut
both positions off from the rear, and we won’t get near as many men shot
up as we would in frontal attack. Might be worse——”
“That’s all we know about the division orders— For the battalion, the
major says the 5th Regiment will follow the 6th in support at the
jump-off, and the zero hour will be communicated later—some time in the
morning, I reckon. That’s all.”
The morning of October 3 [1918] came gray and misty. From midnight until
dawn the front had been quiet at that point—comparatively. Then all the
French and American guns opened with one world-shaking crash. From the
Essen Trench the ground fell away gently, then rose in a long slope,
along which could be made out the zigzags of the German trenches. The
Bois de Vipre was a bluish mangled wood, two kilometres north. Peering
from their shelters, the battalion saw all this ground swept by a
hurricane of shell-fire. Red and green flames broke in orderly rows
where the 75s showered down on the Boche lines; great black clouds
leaped up where the larger shells fell roaring. The hillside and the
wood were all veiled in low-hanging smoke, and the flashes came redly
through the cloud. Far off, Blanc Mont way, a lucky shell found and
exploded a great ammunition-dump—the battalion felt the long tremor from
the shock of it come to them through the earth and watched, minutes
after the high crimson flare of the explosion, a broad column of smoke
that shot straight up from it, hundreds of feet, and hung in air,
spreading out at the top like some unearthly tree.
The men crowed and chortled in the trench. “Boy, ain’t Heinie gettin’ it
now!” “Hear that shell gurglin’ as she goes?—That’s gas.” “Listen to
them 75s. You know, I never see one of them little guns that I don’t
want to go up and kiss it. Remember that counter-attack they smeared in
front of us at Soissons?”
The heavens seemed roofed over with long, keening noises—sounds like the
sharp ripping of silk, magnified, running in swift arcs from horizon to
horizon. These were the quickfiring 75s, the clear-cut bark of the
discharges merging into a crashing roar. Other sounds came with them,
deeper in key, the whine growing to a rumble—these were the heavier
shells—105s, 155s, 210s. Almost, one expected to look up and see them,
like swift, deadly birds, some small, some enormous, all terrible.
Gas-shells could be distinguished from the high explosive by the throaty
gurgle of the liquid in them. “Move down the trench to the left,” came
the order.
The battalion moved, filing around the traverses with judicious
intervals between men, so that the Boche shells might not include too
many in their radius of death. For Heinie was beginning to shoot back.
He had the range of his vacated trench perfectly, and, holding the high
ground, he could see what he was shooting at. Shells began to crash down
among the companies, whole squads were blotted out, and men choked and
coughed as the reek of the high explosive caught at their windpipes.
[Illustration:
The morning of October 3d came gray and misty—a patrol.
]
“Lordy, ain’t we ever goin’ to get outa this dam’ place an’ get at
’em—?” A shell with a driving-band loose came with a banshee scream, and
men and pieces of men were blown into the air. “That was in the first
platoon,” said the second-in-command, shaking the dirt off his gas-mask.
“Something ought to be done about that gunner, El Capitan!” Another
landed in the opposite lip of the trench where the two officers
crouched, half-burying them both. “My God, cap’n! You killed?” “Hell,
no! Are you?”
[Illustration:
“Lordy, ain’t we ever goin’ to get outa this dam’ place an’ get at
’em—?”
]
“Far enough to the left,” the major sent word. “We will wait here. The
6th leads—we’re the last battalion in support to-day.”
Coming from the maze of trenches in the rear, the assault regiment began
to pass through the 5th, battalion following battalion at 500-yard
distances. A number of French “baby” tanks started with the assaulting
waves, but it was an evil place for tanks. Tank traps, trenches so wide
that the little fellows went nose-down into them and stuck, and direct
fire from Boche artillery stopped the most of them. Wave after wave, the
6th went forward. For a moment the sun shone through the murk, near the
horizon—a smouldering red sun, banded like Saturn, and all the bayonets
gleamed like blood. Then the cloud closed again.
When an attack is well launched it is the strategy of the defenders to
concentrate their artillery fire on the support waves that follow the
assault troops, leaving the latter to be dealt with by machine-gun and
rifle fire. So the battalion, following on in its turn, was not happy.
“Wish to Gawd we wuz up forward,” growled the files. “’Nothin’ up there
but machine-guns. This here shellin’ gets a man’s goat. Them bums in the
6th allus did have all the luck!...” “Lootenant, ain’t we ever gonna get
a chance at them Boches? This bein’ killed without a chance to kill back
is hell—that’s what it is!”
The battalion was out of the trench now, and going forward, regulating
its pace on the battalion ahead. All at once there was a snapping and
crackling in the air—a corporal spun round and collapsed limply, while
his blouse turned red under his gas-mask—the man beside him stumbled and
went down, swearing through grayish lips at a shattered knee—the men
flattened and all faces turned toward the flank.
“Machine-guns on the left!”—“Hell! It’s that Essen Hook we’ve got to
pass—thank God, it’s long range! Come on, you birds.” And the battalion
went on, enduring grimly. Finally, when well past its front, which ran
diagonally to the line of advance, the 17th Company, that had the left,
turned savagely on the Essen Hook and got a foothold in its rear. A
one-pounder from the regimental headquarters company was rushed up to
assist them, and the men yelled with delight as the vicious little
cannon got in direct hits on the Boche emplacements. Hopelessly cut off,
the large body of Germans in this formidable work surrendered after a
few sharp and bloody minutes, and the 17th, sending back its prisoners,
rejoined the battalion.
[Illustration:
Others lay on the ground over which the battalion passed.
]
Prisoners began to stream back from the front of the attack, telling of
the success of the 6th. Wounded came with them, some walking, some
carried on improvised stretchers by the Boche “kamarads.” Most of them
were grinning. “Goin’ fine up there, boys, goin’ fine!” “Lookit,
fellers! Got a bon blighty—We’ll give ’em your regards in Paris!”
Others of the 6th lay on the ground over which the battalion passed.
Some lay quietly, like men who rested after labor. Others were mangled
and twisted into attitudes grotesque and horrible as the fury of the
exploding shells had flung them. There were dead Germans, too. Up
forward rifle-fire and machine-guns gave tongue, and all the Boche guns
raged together. “Reckon the 6th is gettin’ to Blanc Mont now.” The
second-in-command looked at his watch. Inconceivably, it was noon.
For a while now the battalion halted, keeping its distance from the unit
ahead. The men lay on their rifles and expressed unreasonable yearnings
for food. “Eat? Eat? Hell! Shock troops ain’t supposed to eat!” Officers
cast anxious glances toward the utterly exposed left. The French attack
had failed to keep abreast of the American.
The left company, the 17th, was in a cover of scrubby trees. The other
companies were likewise concealed. Only the 49th lay perforce in the
open, on a bleak, shell-pocked slope. A high-flying Boche plane spotted
its platoon columns, asprawl eighty or a hundred yards apart on the
chalky ground. “No good,” said the second-in-command, cocking his head
gander-wise in his flat helmet, “is goin’ to come of that dam’
thing—guess all our noble aviators have gone home to lunch.” The plane,
high and small and shining in the sky, circled slowly above them. Far
back of the Boche lines there was a railroad gun that took a wireless
from the wheeling vulture. “Listen,” said the captain, “listen to th——”
[Illustration:
“Oh, Lordy! They’ve got us bracketed!”
]
There were lots of shells passing over—the long, tearing whine of the
75s, the coarser voices of the Boche 77s replying, and heavy stuff, but
most of it was breaking behind or in front of the battalion. Into this
roof of sound came a deeper note—a far-off rumble that mounted to an
enormous shattering roar, like a freight train on a down-grade. The
company flattened against the ground like partridges, and the world
shook and reeled under them as a nine-inch shell crashed into the earth
fifty yards ahead, exploding with a cataclysmic detonation that rocked
their senses. An appalling geyser of black smoke and torn earth leaped
skyward, jagged splinters of steel whined away, and stones and clods
showered down. Before the smoke had lifted from the monstrous crater the
devastating rumble came again, and the second shell roared down fifty
yards to the rear.