INTO THE LINE--THE FIRST AMERICAN SHOT IN THE WAR
A damp, chill, morning mist made the dawn even greyer as our battery
train slid into a loading platform almost under the walls of a large
manufacturing plant engaged in producing war materials.
In spite of the fact that the section chiefs reported that not a man had
been injured, and not so much as a leg broken in the crowded horse cars,
every man in the battery now declared the absence of any doubt but the
air raid had been directly aimed at Battery A.
"There might be a spy in this here very outfit," said 'Texas' Tinsdale,
the battery alarmist. "Else how could them German aviators have known
that Battery A was on the road last night? They knew we was on the way
to the front and they tried to get us."
"Hire a hall," shouted the gruffy top sergeant. "We've got two hours to
unload. A lot of you fireside veterans get busy. Gun crews get to work
on the flats and drivers unload horses. No chow until we're ready to
move out."
The sign on a station lamp-post told us the name of the town. It was
Jarville. But it jarred nothing in our memories. None of us had ever
heard of it before. I asked the captain where we were.
"Just about thirty miles behind the front," he replied. "We are moving
up to our last billets as soon as we unload and feed."
The horses had made the ride wearing their harness, some of which had
become entangled and broken in transit. A number of saddles had slipped
from backs and were down behind forelegs.
"We're learning something every minute," the captain exclaimed.
"American army regulations call for the removal of all harness from the
horses before they are put into the cars, but the French have learned
that that is a dangerous practice over here.
"You can't unload unharnessed horses and get them hitched to the guns as
quick as you can harnessed horses. The idea is this. We're pretty close
behind the lines. A German air party might make this unloading platform
a visit at any time and if any of them are in the air and happen to see
us unloading, they'd sure call on us.
"The French have learned that the only way to make the best of such a
situation, if it should arise, is to have the horses already harnessed
so that they can be run out of the cars quickly, hitched to the guns in
a jiffy and hurried away. If the horses are in the cars unharnessed, and
all of the harness is being carried in other cars, confusion is
increased and there is a greater prospect of your losing your train,
horses, guns and everything from an incendiary bomb, not to mention low
flying machine work."
His explanation revealed a promising attitude that I found in almost all
American soldiers of all ranks that I had encountered up to that time in
France. The foundation of the attitude was a willingness to admit
ignorance of new conditions and an eagerness to possess themselves of
all knowledge that the French and British had acquired through bitter
and costly experience.
Further than that, the American inclination pushed the soldier students
to look beyond even those then accepted standards. The tendency was to
improve beyond the French and British, to apply new American principles
of time or labour-saving to simple operation, to save man-power and
horseflesh by sane safety appliances, to increase efficiency, speed,
accuracy--in a word, their aim was to make themselves the best fighting
men in the Allied cause.
One instance of this is worthy of recounting. I came upon the young
Russian who was the battery saddler. He was a citizen of the United
States whose uniform he wore, but he was such a new citizen, that he
hardly spoke English. I found him handling a small piece of galvanised
iron and a horse shoe. He appeared to be trying to fit the rumpled piece
of metal into the shoe.
In his broken English he explained that he was trying to fashion a light
metal plate that could be easily placed between a horse's shoe and the
hoof, to protect the frog of the foot from nails picked up on the road.
With all soldiers wearing hobnailed boots, the roads were full of those
sharp bits of metal which had caused serious losses of horseflesh
through lameness and blood poisoning.
* * * * *
The unloading had continued under the eyes of smiling French girls in
bloomers who were just departing from their work on the early morning
shift in the munition factory beside the station. These were the first
American soldiers they had seen and they were free to pass comment upon
our appearance. So were the men of Battery A, who overlooked the oiled,
grimed faces and hands of the bloomered beauties, and announced the
general verdict that "they sure were fat little devils."
The unloading completed, a scanty snack consisting of two unbuttered
slices of white bread with a hunk of cold meat and maybe the bite of an
onion, had been put away by the time the horses' nose bags were empty.
With a French guide in the lead, we moved off the platform, rattled
along under a railroad viaduct, and down the main street of Jarville,
which was large enough to boast street car tracks and a shell-damaged
cathedral spire.
The remaining townsfolk had lived with the glare and rumble of the front
for three years now and the passage back and forth of men and horses and
guns hardly elicited as much attention as the occasional promenade of a
policeman in Evanston, Illinois. But these were different men that rode
through those streets that day.
This was the first battery of American artillery that had passed that
way. This was an occasion and the townspeople responded to it. Children,
women and old men chirped "vivas," kissed hands, bared heads and waved
hats and aprons from curb and shop door and windows overhead.
There was no cheering, but there were smiles and tears and "God bless
you's." It was not a vociferous greeting, but a heart-felt one. They
offered all there was left of an emotion that still ran deep and strong
within but that outwardly had been benumbed by three years of nerve-rack
and war-weariness.
Onward into the zone of war we rode. On through successive battered
villages, past houses without roofs, windows with shattered panes, stone
walls with gaping shell holes through them, churches without steeples,
our battery moved toward the last billeting place before entering the
line.
This was the ancient town of Saint-Nicolas-du-Port on the banks of the
river Meurthe. Into the Place de la Republic of the town the battery
swung with a clamorous advance guard of schoolchildren and street
gamins.
The top sergeant who had preceded the battery into the town, galloped up
to the captain upon our entry and presented him with a sheaf of yellow
paper slips, which bore the addresses of houses and barns and the
complements of men and horses to be quartered in each. This was the
billeting schedule provided by the French major of the town. The guns
were parked, the horses picketed and the potato peelers started on their
endless task. The absence of fuel for the mess fires demanded immediate
correction.
It was a few minutes past noon when the captain and I entered the office
of the French Town Major. It was vacant. The officers were at
_dejeuner_, we learned from an old woman who was sweeping the
commandant's rooms. Where?--Ah, she knew not. We accosted the first
French officer we met on the street.
"Where does the Town Major eat?" the Captain inquired in his best
Indianapolis French. After the customary exchange of salutes,
introductions, handshakes and greetings, the Frenchman informed us that
Monsieur Le Commandant favoured the _pommard_, that Madame Larue served
at the Hotel de la Fountaine.
We hurried to that place, and there in a little back room behind a
plate-cluttered table with a red and white checkered table cloth, we
found the Major. The Major said he spoke the English with the fluency.
He demonstrated his delusion when we asked for wood.
"Wood! Ah, but it is impossible that it is wood you ask of me. Have I
not this morning early seen with my own eyes the wood ordered?"
"But there is no wood," replied the Captain. "I must have wood for the
fires. It is past noon and my men have not eaten."
"Ah, but I am telling you there is wood," replied the Major. "I saw your
supply officer pay for the wood. By now I believe it has been delivered
for you in the Place de la Republique."
"But it hasn't," remonstrated the Captain, "and the fires have not yet
been started, and----"
"But it is on the way, probably," said the Major. "Maybe it will be
there soon. Maybe it is there now."
The Captain took another tack.
"Where was the wood bought?" he asked.
"From the wood merchant beyond the river," replied the Major. "But it is
already on the way, and----"
"How do you go to the wood merchant?" insisted the Captain. "We have got
to have the wood toot sweet."
"Ah! _tout de suite_--_tout de suite_--_tout de suite_," repeated the
Major in tones of exasperation. "With you Americans it is always _tout
de suite_. Here----"
He took my notebook and drew a plan of streets indicating the way to the
place of the wood merchant. In spite of his remark and the undesired
intrusion of business upon his _dejeuner_, the Major's manner was as
friendly as could be expected from a Town Major. We left on the run.
The wood merchant was a big man, elderly and fat. His face was red and
he had bushy grey eyebrows. He wore a smock of blue cloth that came to
his knees. He remonstrated that it was useless for us to buy wood from
him because wood had already been bought for us. He spoke only French.
The Captain dismissed all further argument by a direct frontal attack on
the subject.
"_Avez-vous de bois?_" asked the Captain.
"_Oui_," the merchant nodded.
"_Avez-vous de chevaux?_" the Captain asked.
"_Oui_," the merchant nodded again.
"_Avez-vous de voiture?_" the Captain asked.
"_Oui_,"--another nod.
"All right then," continued the Captain, and then emphasising each word
by the sudden production of another stiff finger on his extended hand,
he said, "_Du bois--des chevaux--une voiture_--de whole damn
business--and toot sweet."
In some remarkable fashion the kindly wood merchant gathered that the
Captain wanted wood piled in a wagon, drawn by a horse and wanted it in
a hurry. _Tout de suite_, pronounced "toot sweet" by our soldiers, was a
term calling for speed, that was among the first acquired by our men in
France.
The old man shrugged his shoulders, elevated his hand, palm outward, and
signified with an expression of his face that it was useless to argue
further for the benefit of these Americans. He turned and gave the
necessary loading orders to his working force.
That working force consisted of two French girls, each about eighteen
years of age. They wore long baggy bloomers of brown corduroy, tight at
the ankles where they flopped about in folds over clumsy wooden shoes.
They wore blouses of the same material and tam o'shanter hats to match,
called _berets_.
Each one of them had a cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth.
One stood on the ground and tossed up the thirty or forty-pound logs to
her sister who stood above on top of the wagon. The latter caught them
in her extended arms and placed them in a pile. To the best of my
recollection, neither one of the girls missed a puff.
While the loading proceeded, the wood merchant, speaking slowly in
French, made us understand the following:
"Many peculiar things happen in the war, Monsieur," he said. "Your
country, the America, is the land of wonders. Listen, my name is Helois.
Ten days ago there came to me one of the washerwomen who clean the
clothes on the banks of the Meurthe, and she said to me:
"'Ah, Monsieur, the wood merchant. You are the sly fox. I have your
secret.' And I say to her that I know not of what she speaks.
"'You boast in the town that your two sons are at the front,' she said,
'but I know that one at least of them is not.' And I was dumbfounded. I
say to her, 'Woman, it is a lie you tell me. Both of my boys are with
their regiments, in the trenches even now, if by the grace of the good
God they still live.'
"'No,' she say to me, 'one of your sons hides in the hotel of Madame
Larue. How do I know this secret, Monsieur the wood merchant? I know
because this day have I washed the shirt, with his name on it, at the
river bank. His name, Helois,--the Lieutenant Helois--was stamped on the
collar and the shirt came from the hotel, La Fontaine.'
"I tell her that it is a mistake--that it is the great injustice to me
she speaks, and that night I dressed in my best clothes to penetrate
this mystery--to meet this man who disgracefully used the name of my
son--to expose this impostor who would bring shame to the name of
Helois, the wood merchant, whose two sons have been fighting for France
these three long years.
"And so, Monsieur, I meet this man at the hotel. She was right. His name
was Helois. Here is his card. The Lieutenant Louis F. Helois, and he is
a lieutenant in the United States Army."
"So it was a mistake," replied the Captain, handing the card back to the
wood merchant, whose lobster red features bore an enigmatical smile.
"No,--not the mistake, the truth," replied the wood merchant. "Not my
son--but my grandson--the son of my son--the son of my third son who
went to America years ago. And now he comes back in the uniform of
liberty to fight again for France. Ah, _Messieurs les Officiers_--the
sons of France return from the ends of the world to fight her cause."
While the wood merchant was telling us that the American grandson had
only stopped three days in the town and then had moved up to service at
the front, the air was shattered by a loud report. It was the snap of
the whip in the hands of the young French amazon, standing high on the
load of wood. We escorted the fuel proudly to the Place de la
Republique. Soon the fires were burning briskly and the smell of onions
and coffee and hot chow was on the air.
The stoves were pitched at the bottom of a stone monument in the centre
of the square. Bags of potatoes and onions and burlap covered quarters
of beef and other pieces of mess sergeants paraphernalia were piled on
the steps of the monument, which was covered with the green and black
scars from dampness and age.
The plinth supported a stone shaft fifteen feet in height, which touched
the lower branches of the trees. The monument was topped with a huge
cross of stone on which was the sculptured figure of the Christ.
Little Sykoff, the battery mess sergeant, stood over the stove at the
bottom of the monument. He held in his hand a frying pan, which he shook
back and forth over the fire to prevent the sizzling chips in the pan
from burning. His eyes lowered from an inspection of the monument and
met mine. He smiled.
"Mr. Gibbons," he said, "if that brother of mine, who runs the
photograph gallery out on Paulina and Madison Streets in Chicago, could
only see me now, he sure would tell the Rabbi. Can you beat it--a Jew
here frying ham in the shadow of the Cross."
It was rather hard to beat--and so was the ham. We made this concession
as we sat on the plinth of the monument and polished our mess kits with
bread. And such bread--it was the regulation United States army issue
bread--white, firm and chuck full of nourishment--bread that seemed like
cake to the French youngsters who tasted it and who returned with open
mouths and outstretched hands for more of the "good white bread."
After the meal, those members of Battery A not detailed for immediate
duty denied themselves none of the joys that a new town, in a strange
land, holds for a soldier.
Saint-Nicolas-du-Port boasts a remarkable cathedral of mediaeval
architecture, of enormous dimensions. It was crumbling with age, but
still housed the holy. Time and the elements had left the traces of
their rough usage upon the edifice.
Half of the statues on the broad facade of the cathedral had been
broken, and now the niches afforded domiciles for families of pigeons.
On the ground, in a careless pile, to one side of the frontal arch, was
an ignominious pile of miscellaneous arms and legs and heads of
sculptured figures, resting there in anything but saintly dignity. Two
of our young artillerymen were standing in front of the cathedral
surveying it.
"Certainly is in need of repairs," said one of them. "I'll bet they
haven't done no bricklaying or plumbing on this place since before the
Civil War."
"That ain't hardly the right way to treat old Saints," replied his
companion, referring to the pile of broken statuary. "Seems like they
ought to cement the arms and legs and heads back on those old boys and
old girls and put them back on their pedestals. I guess, though, there
ain't nobody living to identify the pieces, so they could get the right
arms and heads on the right bodies."
Our battery had among its drivers an old timer who might have been
called a historian. His opinion held weight in the organisation. He
professed to be able to read American ball scores and war news out of
French newspapers, a number of which he always carried. Later that day,
I heard him lecturing the cathedral critics on their lack of
appreciation of art and history.
"New things ain't art," he told them; "things has got to be old before
they are artistic. Nobody'd look at the Venus dee Milo if she had all
her arms on. You never hear nobody admiring a modern up-to-date castle
with electric lighting and bath tubs in it. It simply ain't art.
"Now, this cathedral is art. This country around here is just full of
history. Here's where whole book stores of it was written. Why, say,
there was batteries of artillery rolling through this country a million
years ago. It was right around here that Napoleon joined forces with
Julius Caesar to fight the Crusaders. This here is sacred ground."
In the evening, a number of the battery, located the _buvette_ that
carried across its curtained front the gold lettered sign _bar
Parisian_. It was a find. Some thirty American artillerymen crowded
around the tables.
Cigarette smoke filled the low-ceilinged room with blue layers, through
which the lamp light shone. In one corner stood a mechanical piano which
swallowed big copper sous and gave out discord's metallic melody. It was
of an American make and the best number on its printed programme was
"Aren't you Coming Back to Old Virginia, Molly?" Sous followed sous into
this howitzer of harmony and it knew no rest that night. Everybody
joined in and helped it out on the choruses.
Things were going fine when the door opened at about nine thirty, and
there stood two members of the American Provost Guard. They carried with
them two orders. One instructed Madame, the proprietress, to dispense no
more red ink or beer to American soldiers that night, and the other was
a direction to all Americans around the table to get back to their
billets for the night.
The bunch left with reluctance but without a grumble. It was warm and
comfortable within the _bar Parisian_ and Madame's smiles and red wine
and beer and Camembert cheese composed the Broadway of many recent
dreams. But they left without complaint.
They made their rollicking departure, returning Madame's parting smiles,
gallantly lifting their steel helmets and showering her with vociferous
"bong swore's." And--well it simply must be told. She kissed the last
one out out the door and, turning, wiped away a tear with the corner of
her apron. Madame had seen youth on the way to the front before.
The billets were comfortable. Some were better than others. Picket line
details slept in their blankets in the hay over the stables. Gun crews
drew beds and pallets on the floor in occupied houses. In these homes
there was always that hour before retirement for the night when the old
men and remaining women of the French household and their several
military guests billeted in the place, would gather about the fireplace
in the kitchen and regale one another with stories, recounted by the
murder of French and English languages and a wealth of pantomime.
Louise, the eighteen-year-old daughter of the town-crier--he who daily
beat the drum in front of the Hotel de Ville and read lengthy
bulletins, was interested in the workings of Gunner Black's colt
automatic. Gunner Black, most anxious to show her, demonstrated the
action of the pistol but, forgetting that inevitable shell in the
chamber, shot himself in the arm.
It was only an incident. The noise scared Louise, but not the wound. She
had seen too many Americans get shot in the moving pictures.
The captain and I were quartered in the house of the Cure of the
cathedral. The old housekeeper of the place made the captain blush when
she remarked her surprise that there were such young captains in the
American army. Her name was Madame Dupont, and she was more than pleased
to learn from the captain that that had been the maiden name of his
mother.
The captain's room had the interior dimensions and heavy decorations of
the mystic inner sanctum of some secret grand lodge. Religious paintings
and symbols hung from the walls, which were papered in dark red to match
the heavy plush hangings over the ever closed windows.
Two doors in the blank wall swung open revealing a hermetically sealed
recess in which a bed just fitted. This arrangement, quite common in
France, indicated that the device now popular in two-room sleeping
apartments in America, must have been suggested by the sleeping customs
of mediaeval times.
Early the next morning, our battery pulled out for the front. We were
bound for the line. We took the roads out of Saint Nicolas to the east,
making our way toward that part of the front that was known as the
Luneville sector. Our way lay through the towns of Dombasle,
Sommerviller, Maixe, Einville, Valhey, Serres, to the remains of the
ruined village of Hoeville.
The sector runs almost along the border between France and old Lorraine,
occupied by the Germans since 1870. Even the names of the old French
towns beyond the border had been changed to German in the effort of the
Prussians to Germanise the stolen province.
It was in this section during the few days just prior to the outbreak of
the war that France made unwise demonstration of her disinclination
toward hostilities with Germany. Every soldier in France was under arms,
as was every soldier in Europe. France had military patrols along her
borders. In the French chamber of deputies, the socialists had rushed
through a measure which was calculated to convince the German people
that France had no intentions or desire of menacing German territory. By
that measure every French soldier was withdrawn from the Franco-German
border to a line ten miles inside of France. The German appreciation of
this evidence of peacefulness was manifested when the enemy, at the
outbreak of the war, moved across the border and occupied that ten-mile
strip of France.
France had succeeded in driving the enemy back again in that part of
Lorraine, but only at the cost of many lives and the destruction of many
French towns and villages. Since the close of the fighting season of
1914, there had been little or no progress on either side at this point.
The opposing lines here had been stationary for almost three years and
it was known on both sides as a quiet sector.
The country side was of a rolling character, but very damp. At that
season of the year when our first American fighting men reached the
Western front, that part of the line that they occupied was particularly
muddy and miserable.
Before nine o'clock that morning as we rode on to the front, the
horse-drawn traffic, including our battery, was forced to take the side
of the road numerous times to permit the passage of long trains of motor
trucks loaded down with American infantrymen, bound in the same
direction.
Most of the motor vehicles were of the omnibus type. A number of them
were worthy old double-deckers that had seen long years of peaceful
service on the boulevards of Paris before the war. Slats of wood ran
lengthwise across the windows of the lower seating compartment and
through these apertures young, sun-burned, American faces topped with
steel helmets, peered forth.
Some of our men reposed languidly on the rear steps of the busses or on
the tops. Most of the bus-loads were singing rollicking choruses. The
men were in good spirits. They had been cheered in every village they
had passed through on the way from their training area.
"Howdy, bowleg," was the greeting shouted by one of these motoring
mockers, who looked down on our saddled steeds, "better get a hustle on
them hayburners. We're going to be in Berlin by the time you get where
the front used to be."
"Yes, you will," replied one of the mounted artillerymen, with a
negative inflection. "You'll get a hell of a long ways without us. If
you doughboys start anything without the artillery, you'll see Berlin
through the bars of a prisoner's cage."
"Lucky pups--the artillery--nothing to do but ride," was the passing
shout of another taunter, perched high on a bus. This was an
unanswerable revision of an old taunt that the artillery used to shout
to passing infantry in the days when a foot soldier was really a foot
soldier. Then the easy-riding mounted troops, when passing an infantry
column on the road, would say, "Pretty soft for the doughboys--nothing
to do but walk."
"Times certainly have changed," one of our battery drivers felt it
necessary to remark to me in defence of his branch of the service. "But
there ain't no spark plugs or carburetors to get out of order on our
mounts.
"However, we do have our troubles. That runaway wheeler in No. 2 section
broke away from the picket line last night and Kemball and I were
detailed to hunt all over town for him.
"You know that dark, winding, narrow street, that winds down the hill
back of the cathedral. Well, it was about midnight and blacker than the
ace of spades, when Kemball and I pushed along there in the dark,
looking for that onery animal.
"Suddenly, we heard a sharp clatter on the cobblestones half a block up
the hill. It was coming our way full speed. 'Here he comes now,' said
Kemball, 'and he's galloping like hell. Jump into a doorway or he'll
climb all over us.'
"We waited there pressed against the wall in the dark as the galloping
came up to us and passed. What dy'e s'pose it was? It wasn't that
runaway horse at all. Just a couple of them French kids chasing one
another in wooden shoes."
The road to the front was a populous one. We passed numerous groups of
supply wagons carrying food and fodder up to the front lines. Other
wagons were returning empty and here and there came an ambulance with
bulgy blankets outlining the figures of stretcher cases, piled two high
and two wide. Occasionally a Y. M. C. A. runabout loaded down with
coffee pots and candy tins and driven by helmeted wearers of the Red
Triangle, would pass us carrying its store of extras to the boys up
front.
We passed through villages where manufacturing plants were still in
operation and, nearer the front, the roads lay through smaller hamlets,
shell torn and deserted, save for sentries who stood guard in wooden
coops at intersections. Civilians became fewer and fewer, although there
was not a village that did not have one or two women or children or old
men unfit for uniform.
Finally the road mounted a rolling hill and here it was bordered by
roadside screens consisting of stretched chicken wire to which whisps of
straw and grass and bits of green dyed cloth had been attached. Our men
riding behind the screen peered through apertures in it and saw the
distant hills forward, from which German glasses could have observed all
passage along that road had it not been for the screen.
So we moved into position. It was late in the night of October 22nd,
1917, that our batteries of artillery and companies of infantry moved
through the darkness on the last lap of their trip to the front. The
roads were sticky and gummy. A light rain was falling. The guns boomed
in front of us, but not with any continued intensity. Through streets
paved with slippery cobbles and bordered with the bare skeletons of
shell-wrecked houses, our American squads marched four abreast. Their
passing in the darkness was accompanied by the sound of the unhastened
tread of many hobnailed boots.
At times, the rays of a cautiously flashed electric light would reveal
our infantrymen with packs on back and rifles slung over their
shoulders. A stiff wind whipped the rain into their faces and tugged the
bottoms of their flapping, wet overcoats.
Notwithstanding the fact that they had made it on foot a number of miles
from the place where they had disembarked from the motor trucks, the men
marched along to the soft singing of songs, which were ordered
discontinued as the marching columns got closer to the communicating
trenches which led into the front line.
In the march were machine gun carts hauled by American mules and rolling
kitchens, which at times dropped on the darkened road swirls of glowing
red embers that had to be hurriedly stamped out. Anxious American staff
officers consulted their wrist watches frequently in evidence of the
concern they felt as to whether the various moving units were reaching
designated points upon the scheduled minute.
It was after midnight that our men reached the front line. It was the
morning of October 23rd, 1917, that American infantrymen and Bavarian
regiments of _Landwehr_ and _Landsturm_ faced one another for the first
time in front line positions on the European front.
Less than eight hundred yards of slate and drab-coloured soft ground,
blotched with rust-red expanses of wire entanglements, separated the
hostile lines.
There was no moon. A few cloud-veiled stars only seemed to accentuate
the blackness of the night. There, in the darkness and the mud, on the
slippery firing step of trench walls and in damp, foul-smelling dugouts,
young red-blooded Americans tingled for the first time with the thrill
that they had trained so long and travelled so far to experience.
Through unfortunate management of the Press arrangements in connection
with this great historical event, American correspondents accredited by
the War Department to our forces, were prevented from accompanying our
men into the front that night. Good fortune, however, favoured me as
one of the two sole exceptions to this circumstance. Raymond G. Carroll,
correspondent of the Philadelphia _Public Ledger_, and myself,
representing the Chicago _Tribune_ and its associated papers, were the
only two newspaper men who went into the line with the men that night.
For enjoying this unusual opportunity, we were both arrested several
days later, not, however, until after we had obtained the first-hand
story of the great event.
A mean drizzle of rain was falling that night, but it felt cool on the
pink American cheeks that were hot with excitement. The very wetness of
the air impregnated all it touched with the momentousness of the hour.
Spirits were high and the mud was deep, but we who were there had the
feeling that history was chiselling that night's date into her book of
ages.
Occasionally a shell wheezed over through the soggy atmosphere, seeming
to leave an unseen arc in the darkness above. It would terminate with a
sullen thump in some spongy, water-soaked mound behind us. Then an
answering missive of steel would whine away into the populated
invisibility in front of us.
French comrades, in half English and half French, gushed their
congratulations, and shook us by the hand. Some of us were even hugged
and kissed on both cheeks. Our men took the places of French platoons
that were sent back to rest billets. But other French platoons remained
shoulder to shoulder with our men in the front line. The presence of our
troops there was in continuation of their training for the purpose of
providing a nucleus for the construction of later contingents. Both our
infantry and our artillery acted in conjunction with the French infantry
and artillery and the sector remained under French command.
Our men were eager to ask questions and the French were ever ready to
respond. They first told us about the difference in the sound of shells.
Now that one that started with a bark in back of us and whined over our
heads is a _depart_. It is an Allied shell on its way to the Germans.
Now, this one, that whines over first and ends with a distant grunt,
like a strong wallop on a wet carpet, is an _arrivee_. It has arrived
from Germany. In the dugouts, our men smoked dozens of cigarettes,
lighting fresh ones from the half-consumed butts. It is the appetite
that comes with the progressive realisation of a long deferred hope. It
is the tension that comes from at last arriving at an object and then
finding nothing to do, now that you are there. It is the nervousness
that nerveless youth suffers in inactivity.
The men sloshed back and forth through the mud along the narrow confines
of the trench. The order is against much movement, but immobility is
unbearable. Wet slickers rustle against one another in the narrow
traverses, and equipment, principally the French and English gas masks,
hanging at either hip become entangled in the darkness.
At times a steel helmet falls from some unaccustomed head and, hitting
perhaps a projecting rock in the trench wall, gives forth a clang which
is followed by curses from its clumsy owner and an admonition of quiet
from some young lieutenant.
"Olson, keep your damn fool head down below the top of that trench or
you'll get it blown off." The sergeant is talking, and Olson, who
brought from Minnesota a keen desire to see No Man's Land even at the
risk of his life, is forced to repress the yearning.
"Two men over in B Company just got holes drilled through their beans
for doing the same thing," continued the sergeant. "There's nothing you
can see out there anyhow. It's all darkness."
Either consciously or unconsciously, the sergeant was lying, for the
purpose of saving Olson and others from a fool's fate. There was not a
single casualty in any American unit on the line that first night.
"Where is the telephone dugout?" a young lieutenant asked his French
colleague. "I want to speak to the battalion commander."
"But you must not speak English over the telephone," replied the
Frenchman, "the Germans will hear you with the instruments they use to
tap the underground circuit."
"But I was going to use our American code," said the front line novice;
"if the Germans tap in they won't be able to figure out what it means."
"Ah, no, my friend," replied the Frenchman, smiling. "They won't know
what the message means, but your voice and language will mean to them
that Americans are occupying the sector in front of them, and we want to
give them that information in another way, _n'est ce pas?_"
Undoubtedly there was some concern in the German trenches just over the
way with regard to what was taking place in our lines. Relief periods
are ticklish intervals for the side making them. It is quite possible
that some intimation of our presence may have been given.
There was considerable conversation and movement among our men that
night. Jimmy found it frequently necessary to call the attention of
Johnny to some new thing he had discovered. And of a consequence, much
natural, but needless, chattering resulted.
I believe the Germans did become nervous because they made repeated
attacks on the enveloping darkness with numbers of star shells. These
aerial beauties of night warfare released from their exploding
encasements high in the air, hung from white silk parachutes above the
American amateurs.
The numerous company and battery jesters did not refrain from imitative
expressions of "Ahs" and "Ohs" and "Ain't it bootiful?" as their
laughing upturned faces were illuminated in the white light.
That night one rocket went up shortly before morning. It had a different
effect from its predecessors. It reared itself from the darkness
somewhere on the left. Its flight was noiseless as it mounted higher and
higher on its fiery staff. Then it burst in a shower of green balls of
fire.
That meant business. One green rocket was the signal that the Germans
were sending over gas shells. It was an alarm that meant the donning of
gas masks. On they went quickly. It was the first time this equipment
had been adjusted under emergency conditions, yet the men appeared to
have mastered the contrivances.
Then the word was passed along the trenches and through the dugouts for
the removal of the masks. It had not been a French signal. The green
rocket had been sent up by the Germans. The enemy was using green
rockets that night as a signal of their own. There had been no gas
shells. It was a false alarm.
"The best kind of practice in the world," said one of our battalion
commanders; "it's just the stuff we're here for. I hope the Germans
happen to do that every night a new bunch of our men get in these
trenches."
While the infantry were experiencing these initial thrills in the front
line, our gunners were struggling in the mud of the black gun pits to
get their pieces into position in the quickest possible time, and
achieve the honour of firing that first American shot in the war.
Each battery worked feverishly in intense competition with every other
battery. Battery A of the 6th Field, to which I had attached myself,
lost in the race for the honour. Another battery in the same regiment
accomplished the achievement.
That was Battery C of the 6th Field Artillery. I am reproducing,
herewith, for what I believe is the first time, the exact firing data on
that shot and the officers and men who took part in it.
* * * * *
By almost superhuman work through the entire previous day and night,
details of men from Battery C had pulled one cannon by ropes across a
muddy, almost impassable, meadow. So anxious were they to get off the
first shot that they did not stop for meals.
They managed to drag the piece into an old abandoned French gun pit. The
historical position of that gun was one kilometre due east of the town
of Bathelemont and three hundred metres northeast of the
Bauzemont-Bathelemont road. The position was located two miles from the
old international boundary line between France and German-Lorraine. The
position was one and one-half kilometres back of the French first line,
then occupied by Americans.
The first shot was fired at 6:5:10 A. M., October 23rd, 1917. Those who
participated in the firing of the shot were as follows:
Lieutenant F. M. Mitchell, U.S.R., acted as platoon chief.
Corporal Robert Braley laid the piece.
Sergeant Elward Warthen loaded the piece.
Sergeant Frank Grabowski prepared the fuse for cutting.
Private Louis Varady prepared the fuse for cutting.
Private John J. Wodarczak prepared the fuse for cutting.
Corporal Osborne W. De Varila prepared the fuse for cutting.
Sergeant Lonnie Domonick cut the fuse.
Captain Idus R. McLendon gave the command to fire.
Sergeant Alex L. Arch fired first shot.
The missile fired was a 75 millimetre or 3-inch high-explosive shell.
The target was a German battery of 150 millimetre or 6-inch guns located
two kilometres back of the German first line trenches, and one kilometre
in back of the boundary line between France and German-Lorraine. The
position of that enemy battery on the map was in a field 100 metres west
of the town which the French still call Xanrey, but which the Germans
have called Schenris since they took it from France in 1870. Near that
spot--and damn near--fell the first American shell fired in the great
war.
* * * * *
NOTE: It is peculiar to note that I am writing this chapter at Atlantic
City, October 23rd, 1918, just one year to the day after the event. That
shot surely started something.