"KILL OR BE KILLED"
Nothing human could halt those gray-green waves in the first impetus of
the German assault across the Marne. They gained the bridgeheads, and
were enabled to seek cover and spread out along the river banks. The
grim gray line, like an enormous, unclean caterpillar, crept steadily
across the stream. When enough men had gained the southern bank, the
assault was carried to the Franco-American lines.
Machine guns in countless numbers spat venomously from both sides.
Rifle-fire and rifle-grenade and hand-grenade explosions rolled together
in one tremendous cacophony. The appalling diapason of the big guns
thundered unceasingly.
Up the wooded slope swept the Hun waves. The furious fire of the
defenders, whatever it meant to individuals, made no appreciable impress
on the masses. They swept to and over the first line.
Then, indeed, did the Pennsylvanians rise to heroic heights. Gone was
most of the science and skill of warfare so painstakingly inculcated in
the men through months of training. Truly, it was "kill or be killed."
Hand-to-hand, often breast-to-breast, the contending forces struggled.
Men were locked in deadly embrace, from which the only escape was death
for one or both.
One lad, his rifle knocked from his hands, plunged at an antagonist with
blazing eyes and clenched fists in the manner of fighting most familiar
to American boys. They were in a little eddy of the terrible melee. The
American landed a terrific "punch" on the point of his opponent's chin,
just as a bullet from the rear struck home in his back. The rifle,
falling from the hands of the German, struck the outflung arms of the
Pennsylvanian. He seized it, even as he fell, plunged the bayonet
through the breast of his enemy, and, the lesson of the training camps
coming to the fore in his supreme moment, he gurgled out the ferocious
"yah!" which he had been taught to utter with each bayonet thrust.
The companies were split up into little groups. Back-to-back, they
fired, thrust, hewed and hacked at the swarming enemy. No group knew how
the others were doing. Many said afterwards they believed it was the end
of all things for them, but they were resolved to die fighting and to
take as many Huns with them as possible.
Then came the great tragedy for those gallant companies. Something went
wrong with the liaison service. It was such a thing as is always likely
to happen where two forces of men, speaking different languages, are
working in co-operation.
An officer suddenly woke to the fact that there were no French troops on
the flanks of his command. The same realization was forced home to each
of the four companies. The now famous "yielding defense" of the French
had operated and their forces had fallen back in the face of the
impetuous German onslaught. Four companies of Pennsylvanians alone faced
the army of the German Crown Prince.
In the midst of that Gehenna of fighting, no man has clearly fixed in
his mind just what happened to cause the separation of the line.
Certainly the French must have sent word that they were about to fall
back. Certainly the companies, as such, never received it. Possibly the
runners conveying the orders never got through. Maybe the message was
delivered to an officer who was killed before he could pass it on.
Whatever the reason, the French fell back, and there were left in that
fore-field of heroic endeavor only little milling, twisting groups, at
intervals of several thousand feet, where our valiant Pennsylvania lads
fought on still for very dear life.
The Boche hordes swept onward, pressing the French. The Americans were
surrounded. Captain Cousart and a handful of his men were severed
completely from the rest and taken prisoners. Lieutenant William R.
Dyer, of Carney's Point, N. J., and Lieutenant Bateman, of Wayne, Pa.,
at the other flank of Company L, and almost half a platoon met a similar
fate. Lieutenant Maurice J. McGuire was wounded.
Lieutenant James R. Schoch, of Philadelphia, was next in command of
Company L. Not far from him, Sergeant Frank Benjamin, also of
Philadelphia, was still on his feet and pumping his rifle at top speed.
From forty to fifty men of the company were within reach. The
lieutenant and the sergeant managed to consolidate them and pass the
word to fall back, fighting.
Part of the time they formed something like a circle, fighting outward
in every direction, but always edging back to where they knew the
support lines were. They literally fought their way through that part of
the Prussian army that had gotten between them and the regimental lines.
At times they fought from tree to tree, exactly as they had read of
Indians doing. When they were pressed so closely that they had to have
more room, they used their bayonets, and every time the Hun gave way
before the "cold steel."
Here and there they met, singly or in small groups, other men of the
company who had become separated. These joined the party, so that when,
after hours of this dauntless struggle, Lieutenant Schoch stood in front
of headquarters, saluted and said: "Sir, I have brought back what was
left of L Company," he had sixty-seven men in the little column.
During the day other men slipped from the shelter of the woods and
scurried into the company lines, but there were sad holes in the ranks
when the last one to appear came in.
Company M was having the same kind of trouble. A swirl in the fighting
opened a gap, and an avalanche of Germans plunged through, leaving
Captain Mackey and a dozen men utterly separated on one side. It was
impossible for them to rejoin the company, so they did from their
position what the men of Company L were doing, fought their way through
the Prussian-crowded woods to their own lines.
Lieutenant William B. Brown, of Moscow, Pa., near Scranton, senior
officer remaining with the bulk of the company, became commander, but
his responsibility was short-lived. He, too, was surrounded and made
prisoner.
Lieutenant Thomas B. W. Fales, of Philadelphia, now became commander of
the little band, as the only officer left with the main body of the
company. Lieutenants Edward Hitzeroth, also of Philadelphia, and Walter
L. Swarts, of Scranton, had disappeared, prisoners in the hands of the
Germans, and Lieutenant Martin Wheeler, of Moscow, Pa., also had been
separated with a few men.
There were thirty-five men in Lieutenant Fales' command. He rallied and
re-formed them and they began the backward fight to the support line.
They made it in the face of almost insurmountable odds and, what is
more, they arrived with half a dozen prisoners. Enough men of the
company had been picked up on the way to make up for casualties suffered
during the running fight.
Lieutenant Wheeler, who had been cut off with part of a platoon early in
the rush, ordered his men to lie down in the trenches, where they were
better able to stand off the Germans. He himself took a rifle from the
hands of a dead man and a supply of ammunition and clambered out of the
trench. Absolutely alone, he scouted along through the woods until he
found a route that was relatively free from the German advance.
Then he went back for his men, formed them and led them by the selected
route, fighting as they went against such of the enemy as sought to
deter them. All of this Lieutenant Wheeler performed while suffering
intense pain from a wound of the hand, inflicted early in the
engagement. After reaching the regimental lines, he had first-aid
treatment for the wound and continued in the battle.
Lieutenant W. M. R. Crosman found a wounded corporal who was unable to
walk. He remained with the corporal and they became entirely isolated
from all other Americans. They were given up for lost until the next
night, when a message arrived that a patrol from another American unit
on another part of the battle front, miles away, had brought in the
lieutenant and the corporal, both utterly exhausted and almost
unbalanced from their experience.
The lieutenant had dressed the corporal's wound roughly and then had
started to lead him in. They became lost and wandered about for hours.
At times the lieutenant carried the corporal on his back, when the
wounded man became unable to walk. Again they were forced to take
shelter in a thicket, when parties of Germans approached, and to lie, in
imminent fear of death, until the enemy groups had passed on. Finally
they heard voices speaking in English and came on the American patrol.
A message came back to the regimental lines from the beleaguered,
hard-pressed M Company for ammunition. Supply Sergeant Charles McFadden,
3d, of Philadelphia, set out with a detail to carry the ammunition
forward. They were trapped in a little hamlet by the advancing Germans.
McFadden sent his men back on the run, as they were badly outnumbered,
but himself remained behind to destroy the ammunition to prevent its
falling into the hands of the Germans.
He saw men approaching him in the French uniform and believed he was
safe, until they opened fire on him with rifles and machine guns--by no
means the first instance in which the Germans made such use of uniforms
other than their own. Sergeant McFadden saw it was hopeless to try
longer to blow up his ammunition and fled. He ran into a machine gun
manned by three Germans. He took them at an angle and before they could
swing the gun around to bear on him, he was upon them. Two shots from
his rifle and a swift lunge with the bayonet and the machine gun crew
was out of the way forever.
The Germans were coming on, however, and to reach his own lines,
McFadden had to run almost a mile up a steep hill. A bullet passed
through his sleeve, another through his gas mask, one through his
canteen, four dented his steel helmet and another shot the stock off his
rifle, but he himself was untouched. He had taken off his outer shirt
because of the heat. As he came up the hill toward his own lines, his
comrades, not recognizing him in that wildly running figure, opened fire
on him. He dropped to the ground, ripped off his undershirt and waving
it as a flag of truce, made his panting way into the lines.
The two companies of the 110th were passing through almost exactly
similar experiences. Company B was surrounded and split. After a fight
of twenty-four hours, during which it was necessary time after time to
charge the Huns with bayonets and rally the group repeatedly to keep it
from disintegrating, Captain Fish, whose home is in New Brighton, with
Lieutenant Claude W. Smith, of New Castle, and Lieutenant Gilmore
Hayman, of Berwyn, fought their way back with one hundred and
twenty-three men. They brought with them several prisoners, and carried
twenty-six of their own wounded.
The rest of the company, surrounded in the woods, also made a running
fight of it, but was scattered badly and drifted back to the regimental
lines in little groups, leaving many comrades behind, dead, wounded and
prisoners.
The same kind of thing befell Company C, of which a little more than
half returned, Captain Truxal, of Meyersdale, Pa., and Lieutenants
Wilbur Schell and Samuel S. Crouse were surrounded by greatly superior
forces and taken prisoner with a group of their men.
Corporal Alvey C. Martz, of Glencoe, Somerset County, with a patrol of
six men, was out in advance of the company stringing barbed wire right
along the river bank, when the German bombardment began. They dropped
into shell holes. At the point where they lay, the wire remained intact
and the Hun flood passed around them. When the hail of shells passed on
in advance of the charging German lines, they arose, to find themselves
completely cut off from their comrades.
"We've got to fight boys, so we might as well start it ourselves," said
Martz, and his matter-of-fact manner had a strong steadying effect on
his men.
Remember that it was the first time any of the youths had been face to
face with the Germans. It was the first time they had ever been called
on to fight for their lives. Less than a year before they had been quiet
civilians, going about their peaceful trades. Martz had lived with his
parents on a mountain farm in a remote part of Pennsylvania, six miles
from the nearest railway. Add to this the fact that they had learned in
their brief soldiering career to lean heavily upon their officers for
initiative, instructions and advice, and what these men did attains epic
proportions.
They came out of their shell holes shooting. No crafty concealment, no
game of hide and seek with the Hun for them. Lest their firing might not
attract enough attention, they let out lusty yells. Groups of Germans
before them, apparently believing they were being attacked from the
flank by a strong force, fled. The seven men gained the shelter of the
woods. For two hours they worked their way through the forest, fighting
desperately when necessary, and hunting anxiously for the place where
they knew their company had been. It was not there.
When, at last, they glimpsed American uniforms through the trees they
thought they had come up with the company. But it was only Sergeant
Robert A. Floto, of Meyersdale, Pa., of their own company, with half a
dozen men.
Corporal Martz relinquished command of the party to Sergeant Floto. A
little farther on they met another American, who joined the party. He
was "mad all through" and on the verge of tears from anxiety and
exasperation at his own helplessness.
"There were seven of us cut off from the company," he told them, "and we
ran slap-bang into all the Boche in the world. I was several feet behind
the other guys and the Fritzes didn't see me. It came so sudden, the
boys didn't have a chance to do anything. When I took a peek through the
trees, about a million Germans were around, and my gang was just being
led back toward the river by two Hun officers. I figured I couldn't do
anybody any good by firing into that mob, so I came away to look for
help."
"Guess we'd better see what we can do for those fellows," remarked Martz
in the same cool, almost disinterested manner he had used before.
Everybody wanted to go, but Martz insisted it was a job for only two
men. As a companion he picked John J. Mullen, of Philadelphia. Mullen
was not a former Guardsman. He was a selected man, sent from Camp Meade
several months before with a draft to fill the ranks of the
Twenty-eighth Division. But he had proved himself in many a training
camp to be, as his comrades put it, "a regular fellow."
So Corporal Martz and Mullen, surrounded by a goodly part of the Crown
Prince's crack troops, 3,000 miles from home, in a country they never
had seen before, cut loose from the little group of their comrades,
turned their backs on the American lines and hiked out through the woods
toward Hunland to succor their fellows in distress.
The little prisoner convoy was not making great speed and the two
Americans soon overtook them. The first torrent of the German advance
had now passed far to their rear. The two Americans circled around
through the woods and lay in ambush for the party. The prisoners,
because of the narrowness of the paths through the woods, were marching
in single file, one German officer in the lead, the other bringing up
the rear.
"You take the one in front and I'll take that bird on the end," said
Martz to Mullen. Martz was something of a sharpshooter. Once he had gone
to camp with the West Virginia National Guard, just over the state line
from his home, and came back with a medal as a marksman, although he was
only substituting for a man who was unable to attend the camp.
They drew careful bead. Out of the corner of his eye Mullen could watch
Martz, at the same time he sighted on his German officer. Martz nodded
his head and the two rifles cracked simultaneously. Both officers
dropped dead. The prisoners looked about them, stunned with surprise.
Martz and Mullen stepped out of the woods. There was no time for thanks
or congratulations. They hurried back the way they had come. The
released men had no trouble arming themselves with rifles and ammunition
from the dead lying in the woods.
They soon overtook Sergeant Floto and his men. The party was now of more
formidable size and as the Germans by this time were broken up into
rather small groups, the Americans no longer felt the necessity of
skulking through the woods, but started out as a belligerent force, not
hunting fight, but moving not a step to avoid one.
A few hours later they joined another group of survivors, under Captain
Charles L. McLain, of Indiana, Pa., who took command. He vetoed the
daring rush through the Hun-infested woods by daylight and ordered that
the party lie concealed during the day and proceed to the American lines
after nightfall.
"We need a rear guard to protect us against surprise," said Captain
McLain, and after what had gone before it seemed but natural that
Corporal Martz and Private Mullen should be selected for the job when
they promptly volunteered. With little further adventure the party
arrived in the regimental lines after about thirty-six hours of almost
continuous contact with the Germans.
In each regiment the survivors of this first real battle of the troops
of the Pennsylvania Division were formed into one company for the time
being, until replacement drafts arrived to make up for the heavy losses.
This, then, is the tale of what happened when, as so many soldier
letters have related, these four companies were "cut to pieces," and
this is why L and M companies, of the 109th, and B and C companies, of
the 110th, figured so largely in the casualties for a time.