_SEICHEPREY_
The head-lines that told the story of the battle of Seicheprey brought
me a sensation entirely apart from the thrill of anxiety and pride
with which we all read of the heavy attack, the loss of ground, the
desperate fighting, the recapture of the village, and the gallantry of
American troops in the most extensive assault yet directed against our
lines on the western front. It was the name of the village that gripped
me; gripped me with the memory of things that I shall never forget, of
kaleidoscopic days that were eternities of supreme emotion.
It was about Seicheprey that our first division permanently in the
line, our first division to be made fully responsible for a sector on
the western front, experienced its first general gas attack and its
first general raids. It was here that the American soldier established
in fact what in his own soul he had never doubted, his ability to meet
and defeat the finest shock troops of imperial Germany, and under
conditions and in an event chosen by the German command to demonstrate
America's military inferiority.
There will be a thousand greater occasions for American arms in this
war than that which fell on Friday, the first of March, 1918, and than
those which immediately preceded and followed it. But in the chronicles
of this conflict those days will remain as the days which first sent
back from the flaming front to every officer and every man in the ranks
the triumphant message, "We have met the enemy, and they are ours."
_It was the moment when the American army was baptized by fire into the
sacrificial comradeship of democracy's international Calvary._
The village nestles among the hills in the shadow of Mount Sec,
Mount Sec before which and on which so many thousands of gallant
Frenchmen have laid down their lives, and within which now mass the
German batteries that overlook the immediate plain where our forces
lie intrenched. It rests, or did rest, well within our first line, a
kilometer beyond the last battery of "75's," and at the same distance
from the great camouflaged military road that the papers have announced
was the objective of the recent attack. One catches occasional glimpses
of it as he approaches it through the deep connecting trench, a picture
of desolation framed with crumbling walls. From it the trenches lead
on again, but not far, for Seicheprey is close to the German barbed
wire. The officers and the men who hold it are constantly on the alert.
German guns always command it, and perhaps a dozen times a day drop
shells into it. No men are billeted there beyond the capacity of the
bomb-proofs. These shelters, aside from the direct hits of high-power
shells, give practically complete protection.
There are no villagers in Seicheprey; those who lived there and who
tilled the fields round about are gone. It is a community without a
woman, and from morning until night it does not hear the small voice of
a child. It is a city of ruin, a place of most melancholy memories.
Seicheprey is holy ground; lying midway between Toul and Metz, it is
in the heart of the salient that next to Verdun has witnessed the
bloodiest fighting on the French front. It is an honor and a high trust
for an army just to be there. It stands before one of the two gateways
to the heart of France. It has seen the tide of war surge back and
forth many times among its houses and up and down its street. Again and
again it has been captured and surrendered and recaptured.
Out from it, or hard by, twenty thousand glorious Frenchmen have been
buried by the hands of their comrades or the shells of their foe. I
have seen the war planes high above it, German planes with shrapnel
bursts about them, hurrying home from observation-trips behind our
lines, and the silver planes of France in hot pursuit. From a blackened
hill behind it I saw an air duel above the German lines, and a German
flyer brought down in smoke and flames. I have seen our wounded
carried out from it, German wounded brought into it; and stumbling
through its single street I have watched the passing of our first
prisoners of war. From it I have watched the chill winds of February
driving through the shredded orchard trees on the hillside that dips
into the open field where the poison gas has found so many victims and
where it lies in ambush in the noisome shell-holes. Beyond the field is
what was once a forest; the shattered tree-trunks now remind one of the
broken columns in a cemetery.
I have seen Seicheprey under a barrage. Crouching in an abandoned
trench by the side of a runner from battalion headquarters, to which we
were returning and scarce one hundred yards away, I witnessed through
terror-widened eyes that most appalling sight of modern warfare. Once I
looked down from the summit of the Canadian Rockies upon a cloudburst
in the Bow River Valley. Once in Oregon among the dunes of the Columbia
I turned my pony's head away from an approaching storm, and flung
myself headlong upon my face while with the sound of a hundred mountain
torrents and in inky darkness the swirling tempest of sand swept over
me. But this was a cloudburst of steel, an avalanche of iron; the
pouring upward of the earth in sudden geysers, choked with trees and
rocks and the fragments of houses; a continuous, mighty thunder in
which were mingled the throaty roar of multiple discharges, the moan
of the shells through the air, and the shock of the explosions at
contact with the objective. It was an overwhelming noise filling all
spaces.
Seicheprey! It was then a jagged scar. It must be now, after this fresh
surge of the human flood, an open wound. There I saw heaven touch hell.
There I beheld the soldiers of my country writing a new page in the
book of her glory.
Seicheprey taught me the sacredness of comradeship. From a parapet
near by one early afternoon I looked across the intervening 170 yards
to the German lines. The snow was falling. Strangely out of place in
No Man's Land were scores of crosses marking the graves of French
soldiers. When the crosses were placed there, they were behind the men
who reared them, but after the final adjustment of the lines they were
found between the hostile trenches. Peaceful and white was the battle
graveyard. Now the men who made it and who tended it for so many weary
months are gone. Soldiers in khaki fill the trenches behind it, and the
dugouts echo the words of an unknown tongue; but in another springtime,
when the flowers bloom redder because of their long, rich watering,
in the dark night the hands of the stealthy American patrol will
straighten the crosses as tenderly as would the hands that put them
there.
Seicheprey! I found a French gas-mask out from Seicheprey. It has
sacred ground upon it, the soil of France. And where the face of its
wearer pressed into it there are blood-spots. During the raid on the
first of March our allies came down from the right, and dropped in
behind our lines at a distance of five hundred yards. There in the
open they lay, a reserve against a possible breaking through of the
enemy. The enemy did not break through; but there a few hours later,
after the raiders had been hurled back, terribly punished, I found this
mask. I shall keep it as a token of the unity of free peoples which
in the providence of God and in His time will make the world safe for
democracy.
I shall hope that in the great peace I may lead my children down the
street of Seicheprey restored and tell of the glory that I saw there.