AT THE FRONT WITH THE TWENTY-SEVENTH DIVISION
I reached my division on the first of October, 1918, after a tedious ten
days on the way. I traveled most of the way with Lieutenant Colonel
True, whom I met on the train coming out of Chaumont. I found that the
higher ranking officers invariably approached the chaplains not as
officers of inferior rank but as leaders of a different kind, much as a
prominent business man treats his minister in civil life. Colonel True
was a regular army man of long standing who was being transferred from
another division to the Twenty-Seventh. When we arrived at the Hotel
Richmond, the Y. M. C. A. hotel for officers in Paris, we found only one
room available with a double bed, and so for the first time in my life I
had the honor of sleeping with a Lieutenant Colonel. The honor was a
doubtful one as he had at the time a slight attack of "flu" brought on
from exposure and a touch of gas in the recent St. Mihiel drive. Colonel
True had received his promotion from a majority and his transfer before
the drive, but had not reported until he had gone through the whole
fight at the head of his battalion. I mention this not as a striking,
but strictly as a typical proceeding on the part of the average American
officer.
For a few days we were held at the Replacement Camp at Eu in
Normandy--an idyllic spot within sight of the English Channel,
surrounded by gentle hills. While there I made several trips to Treport,
a favorite summer resort on the Channel before the war. It is a quaint
little fishing village with a typical modern summer resort superimposed.
The old stone Norman cottages with their high roofs always had a touch
of decoration somewhere, in mosaic, paint or stained glass, different
from the plainer architecture of Central France. The modern part
consists of several beautiful hotels and a number of cheap restaurants
and curio shops. Of course, the hotels were all used by the British Army
as hospitals at this time. I visited Base Hospital 16, a Philadelphia
Unit, which was loaned to the British. I had a delightful talk with our
Red Cross Chaplain and made a tour of many of the wards. The patients
were almost all British with a few Americans from the August campaign in
Flanders. Among the rest I met about a dozen Jewish boys, English and
Australian, who were naturally delighted by the rare visit of a Jewish
Chaplain. The eight Jewish Chaplains in the British Expeditionary Forces
were attached to the various Army Headquarters, and so had to cover
impossible areas in their work. The nearest one to Treport was Rabbi
Geffen at Boulogne with whom I afterward came into communication, and
from whom I obtained a large number of the army prayer books arranged by
the Chief Rabbi of England for use in the British Forces.
Hospital visiting is dreary work, especially when there is action going
on from which one is separated. The work is exhausting physically,
walking up and down the long wards and stopping by bedsides. It is
especially a drain on the nerves and sympathies, to see so many sick and
mutilated boys--boys in age most of them, certainly boys in spirit--and
giving oneself as the need arises. And in a hospital so many men have
requests. They are helpless and it is always impossible to have enough
visitors and enough chaplains for them. I was glad to be useful at
Treport but gladder still when the word came through to release all
troops in the Second Corps Replacement Depot.
We were loaded on a train, the soldiers in box-cars of the familiar type
("40 men or 8 horses") with the little group of officers crowded
together in a single first-class coach. Broken windows, flat wheels and
no lights showing--we were beginning to feel that we were in the war
zone. From Eu to Peronne took from 4:30 A. M. to 9:30 P. M. with three
changes of trains and ten additional stops. We got only a short view of
the railroad station at Amiens, at that time almost completely
destroyed. Our division was then in the British area on the Somme
sector, and at the time of our arrival they had just come out of the
great victory at the Hindenburg Line.
Our first ruined city was Peronne, which will never leave my memory. The
feeling of a ruined town is absolutely indescribable, for how can one
imagine a town with neither houses nor people, where the very streets
have often been destroyed? This situation contradicts our very
definition of a town, for a town is made of streets, houses and people;
no imagination can quite grasp the reality of war and ruin without its
actual experience. And Peronne was much more striking than most cities
in the war zone; it had been fought through six different times, and
its originally stately public buildings showed only enough to impress us
with the ruin that had been wrought. Only one wall of one end of the
church was standing, with two fine Gothic arches, only one side of the
building on the square and so on through the whole town. We became
inured to the sight of ruined villages later on, but the first shock of
seeing Peronne will be indelible.
The headquarters of the division were then located at the Bois de Buire,
about ten miles out, though for almost a half day we could find nobody
to give us exact directions. At last Lieutenant Colonel H. S.
Sternberger, the division quartermaster, put in an appearance and
offered to take me and Lieutenant Colonel True up to headquarters in his
car. The rest of our party had all wandered off by then in the direction
of their various units. Colonel Sternberger was the highest ranking
officer at the time among the thousand Jews in the Twenty-Seventh
Division. Lieutenant Colonel Morris Liebman of the 106th Infantry, also
a Jew, had been killed in action in Flanders six weeks before, a loss
which was very deeply felt in his regiment. Colonel Sternberger was one
of the popular staff officers of the division owing to his indefatigable
labors for the welfare of the boys. His great efforts at the expense of
much personal risk and of serious damage to his health were directed to
get the food up to the front on time. While I was with the division,
Colonel Sternberger proved both a staunch personal friend and an active
ally in my work.
It took more than a day to become acquainted with the camouflaged
offices in the woods. Small huts, with semicircular iron roofs covered
with branches, were scattered about among the trees. Some of them had
signs, Division Adjutant, Commanding General, and the rest; others were
billets. I invariably lost my way when I went to lunch and wandered for
some minutes before finding "home." "Home" was a hut exactly like the
rest, where the French mission and the gas officer had their offices
during the day and where six of us slept at night. I fell heir to the
cot of one of the interpreters then home on leave, Georges Levy, who
afterward became one of my best friends. My baggage had disappeared on
the trip, so that I had only my hand bag with the little it could hold.
My first need, naturally, was for blankets to cover the cot. I collected
these from various places, official and otherwise, until the end of the
month found me plentifully provided. I must admit that the first cool
nights in the woods forced me to sleep in my clothes. Naturally, my
first task was to wire for my baggage, but it had completely vanished
and did not return for four long months. Everybody lost his possessions
at some time during the war; I was unique only in losing them at the
outset and not seeing them until the whole need for them was over.
The boys had just come out of the line, worn out, with terrible losses,
but after a great victory such as occurs only a few times in any war.
They had broken the Hindenburg Line, that triple row of trenches and
barbed wire, with its concrete pill-boxes, its enfilading fire from
machine guns, its intricate and tremendous system of defenses. I crossed
the line many times during the month that followed and never failed to
marvel that human beings could ever have forced it. The famous tunnel
of the St. Quentin Canal was in our sector, too, as well as part of the
canal itself. The villages about us were destroyed so completely that no
single roof or complete wall was standing for a shelter and the men had
to live in the cellars.
One wall always bore the name of the former village in large letters,
which became still larger and more striking in the territory near the
Hindenburg Line, so long occupied by the Germans. I used to repay the
generous Tommies for their rides on the constant stream of trucks (we
called them "lorries," like the English) by translating the numerous
German signs at railroad crossings and the like, about which they always
had much curiosity.
One could travel anywhere on main roads by waiting until a truck came
along and then hailing it. If the seat was occupied there was usually
some room in the rear, and the British drivers were always glad to take
one on and equally glad to air their views on the war. When one came to
a cross road, he jumped off, hailed the M. P. (Military Police) for
directions and took the next truck which was going in the proper
direction. In that way I have often traveled on a dozen trucks in a day,
with stop-overs and occasional walks of a few miles to fill in the gaps.
Between a map, a compass and the M. P.'s, we always managed to circulate
and eventually find our way home again.
We saw the heavy guns lumbering on their way to the front, the
aeroplanes humming overhead like a swarm of dragon-flies. Day and night
we could hear the rumble of guns like distant thunder, while at night
the flashes showed low on the horizon like heat lightning. Our salvage
depot was at Tincourt at the foot of the hill, and when I went over
there Corporal Klein and Sergeant Friedlander were quick to repair gaps
in my equipment. One night I witnessed the division musical comedy (the
"Broadway Boys") in an old barn at Templeux le Fosse, where we walked in
the dark, found the place up an alley and witnessed a really excellent
performance with costumes, scenery and real orchestra. In the middle of
an act, an announcement would be made that all men of the third
battalion, 108th Infantry, should report back at once, and a group of
fellows would rise and file out for the five-mile hike back in the
darkness: they were to move up to the front before morning.
My chief effort during those few hurried days was to get into touch with
the various units so that I could be of some definite service to them
when they went into action. Unfortunately, almost every time I arranged
for a service and appeared to hold it the "outfit" would already be on
the move. The best service I held was at the village of Buire, where
about forty boys gathered together under the trees among the ruined
houses. They were a deeply devotional group, told me about their holyday
services conducted by a British army chaplain at Doulens, about their
fallen comrades for whom they wanted to repeat the memorial prayers, and
about their own narrow escapes for which they were eager to offer
thanks. They had the deep spiritual consciousness which comes to most
men in moments of great peril.
I managed to reach most of the infantry regiments, however, by hiking
down from the woods and sometimes catching a ride. Everywhere was
action. It was the breathing space between our two great battles of the
war. Every unit was hoping and expecting a long rest. But that hope
could not be fulfilled. The intensity of the drive against the entire
German line was beginning to tell and every possible unit was needed in
the line to push ahead. So the rest of the Twenty-Seventh Division was
brief indeed. Every regiment was starting for the front with no
replacements after the terrific slaughter of two weeks before, with very
little new equipment and practically no rest. And the front was now
further away than it had been. The success of the allied forces meant
longer marches for our tired troops.
All the villages were devastated in this area. It was the section
between Peronne and the old Hindenburg Line. Not until we came to the
German side of the Hindenburg Line did we find the villages in any sort
of repair. The men lived in cellars without roofs, in rooms without
walls or sometimes in barracks which were constructed by either of the
opposing armies during the long years of the struggle. Of course, many
shelters existed such as our "elephant huts" in the woods or the perfect
honeycomb of dugouts in the sides of the quarry at Templeux le Gerard.
One day I "lorried" up to the division cemeteries near the old
battlefield, which were being laid out by a group of chaplains with a
large detail of enlisted men. I saw the occasional Jewish graves marked
with the Star of David and later was able to complete the list and have
all Jewish graves in our division similarly marked. I got to know the
country about Bellicourt and Bony, where our heaviest fighting had
taken place. I heard the story of the eight British tanks, lying
helpless at the top of the long ridge near Bony, where they had run upon
a mine field. I got to know the "Ausies," always the best friends and
great admiration of our soldiers, with their dashing courage and
reckless heroism, and the "Tommies," those steady, matter-of-fact
workmen at the business of war, whom our boys could never quite
understand.
Finally our headquarters moved forward, too. I jumped out of a colonel's
car one dark night and hunted for an hour and a half among the hills
before I found the chalk quarry where they now were hidden from prying
air scouts. At last, finding the quarry, I met a boy I knew, who took me
to the dugout where the senior chaplain was sleeping. I crawled into a
vacant bunk, made myself at home and left the next morning for good. The
quarry did not appeal to me when wet; one was too likely to slide from
the top to the bottom and stay there; and I had no desire to test its
advantages when dry. The next time I came back to headquarters they were
in the village of Joncourt, beyond the Hindenburg Line, in territory
which we had released from the Germans. The chief attraction of Joncourt
was an occasional roof--of course, there were no windows. The cemetery
had been used as a "strong point" by the retreating Germans, who had
scattered the bodies about and used the little vaults as pill-boxes in
which to mount machine guns. And our message center was located in a
German dugout fully fifty feet underground; evidently plenty of
precautions had been taken against allied air raids. In fact, from this
point on every house in every village had a conspicuous sign, telling
of the _Fliegerschutz_ for a certain number of men in its cellar. In
addition, the placard told the number of officers, men and horses which
could be accommodated with billets on the premises. Evidently, the
Germans in laying out their permanently occupied territory, went about
it in their usual business-like fashion.
But between my glimpses of these various headquarters, I was at the
front with the troops going into the trenches and had had a glimpse of
war. My first experience under fire was in some woods near Maretz, where
I spent part of the night with one battalion, as they paused before
going into the trenches. I finished the night on the floor of a house in
the village, having grown accustomed enough to the sound of the shells
to sleep in spite of it. Like most people I had wondered how one feels
under fire, and experienced a queer sensation when I first heard the
long whine of a distant shell culminating in a sudden explosion. Now I
realized that I was under fire, too. But I speedily found that one feels
more curiosity than fear under long-distance fire; real fear comes
chiefly when the shells begin to land really near by. I was to
experience that, too, a little later. In fact, I found out soon that
every soldier is frightened; a good soldier is simply one who does his
duty in spite of fear.
Then a report came in that Chaplain John Ward, of the 108th Infantry,
had been seriously wounded and I was sent to take his place with the
unit. In a push the chaplain works with the wounded; after it, with the
dead. Of many sad duties at the front, his is perhaps the saddest of
all. My first station was with the third battalion headquarters and aid
post in a big white house set back in a little park in the tiny village
of Escaufourt, a mile or so behind the lines. Captain Merrill was in
command of the battalion and one could see how the work and
responsibility wore on him day by day, reducing the round, cheerful
soldier for the time almost to a whispering, tottering old man. But his
spirit held him to the task; he slept for only a few minutes at a time,
and then was back at work again. A conscientious man can have no more
exacting duty than this, to care for the lives of a thousand men.
We were under constant fire there, though not under observation, but the
little ambulances ran up to the gate of the chateau for the wounded, who
had to walk or be carried in and out from the house to the gate. We ate
upstairs in the stately dining room at times, though we usually ate and
always slept in the crowded cellar where the major and his staff were
housed. There eight or nine of us would sit on our brick seats and sleep
with our backs against the wall, being awakened from time to time by a
messenger coming in or by the ringing of the field telephone in the
corner. The telephone operator was always testing one or another
connection, day and night, for the emergency when it would be needed.
One night companies H and I of the 108th Infantry were almost completely
wiped out by gas. They were in low lying trenches by the side of the
canal under a constant fire of gas shells, while the damp weather kept
the dangerous fumes near the ground. They had no orders to evacuate to a
safer post and no human being can live forever in a gas mask, so one
after another the men yielded to temptation, took off their masks for
momentary relief, and inhaled the gas-laden air. All evening and night
they kept coming in by twos and threes to our aid post, the stronger
ones walking, the rest on stretchers. Their clothing reeked of the
sickeningly sweet odor. The room was soon full of it, so that we had to
blow out the candles and open the door for a few minutes to avoid being
gassed ourselves. There were three ambulances running that night to the
Main Dressing Station, and I made it my task to meet each car, notify
the doctor and bring the gassed and wounded men out to the ambulance.
Most of them were blinded for the time being by the effect of the gas.
No light was possible, as that would have drawn fire at once. Every ten
minutes through the night our village was shelled, and in walking the
forty or fifty yards through the park to the gate, I had to make two
detours with my blinded men to avoid fresh shell-holes made that very
afternoon. I admit feeling an occasional touch of panic as I led the big
helpless fellows around those fresh shell holes and helped them into the
ambulances. The final touch came when a youngster of perhaps seventeen
entered the aid post alone, walking painfully. "What outfit are you
from, sonny?" was my natural greeting. "I am the last man left in
Company H," was the proud reply.
This was the sort of fatal blunder which seemed to occur once in every
command before the lesson was learned that gas-filled trenches need no
defending, and that troops, safely withdrawn a hundred yards or more,
can be moved forward again quickly enough the moment the gas lifts. The
English had had the same lesson more than once until they learned it
thoroughly; so had the Germans; now our armies, with their examples
before us, had to learn it again through the suffering of our own
soldiers. Our division was not the only one in which the same or a
similar blunder cost the men so dearly, for I have read the same
incident of more than one unit on other parts of the American line, and
have had them verified by officers who were present at those other
catastrophes. In the art of war the instruction of the generals costs
the lives of the soldiers.
We had the peculiar experience of seeing the village which we had
entered in good condition crumbling about us under the enemy fire. Even
the windows were intact when we reached it; the Germans were just out,
and our artillery had been outstripped completely in the forward rush.
Under the constant pounding of back area fire, designed to prevent
ammunition and supplies coming up to the line unmolested, our little
village lost windows, roofs and walls, disintegrating steadily into a
heap of ruins.
One evening we were assigned the task of evacuating some old French
peasants who had clung to their little homes through all the
world-shaking catastrophe. At last they had to leave, as the danger to
them was too direct and, in addition, they constituted a hidden menace
to our troops in case even one of them had been left behind as a spy. I
went with a party of Australians and a few of our men to the houses in
the outskirts of the town, where the greatest danger existed. I remember
the utterly disconsolate attitude of two old men and a little old woman
in one of them, when they were told they had to leave. They seemed numb
in the midst of all the rush and roar of warfare. Their little
possessions were there, they were of the peasant type and had probably
never been out of the district in their lives. The advance of the enemy
in 1914 had been accompanied by no fighting near their homes, and now
the allied victory, the one hope of their country, was the one thing
that bore destruction to their little village and tore them away from
the spot where they were rooted.
One evening I joined a ration party going forward and visited the lines
and advanced headquarters at St. Souplet, hearing the peculiar whistle
of a sniper's bullet pass me as I made my way back after dusk. One of
the boys carrying a heavy bag of hardtack had a sore shoulder, not quite
well from a previous wound. So I shouldered his bag for a decidedly
weary mile of skulking along a sunken road and hurrying across the
occasional open spaces. When we came to his unit I was glad to turn the
bag over to him; I felt no pleasure in such lumpy burden, and would far
rather have worn out my shoulder with something more appreciated by the
boys than hardtack,--the one thing which nobody enjoyed but which was
eaten only because they were desperately hungry. On the night of October
16th we all moved over, preparatory to the push across the Selle River.
We installed ourselves in the large building at the cross roads, where
the aid post was stationed. I joined a group of sleepers on the cellar
floor, picking my way in the darkness to find a vacant spot. My trench
coat on the plank floor made a really luxurious bed.
The next morning, October 17th, I was awakened at 5:20 by the barrage;
the boys were going over; the battle of the Selle River had began. By
six o'clock the wounded began to flow in, at first by twos and threes,
then in a steady stream. They came walking wearily along or were carried
on the shoulders of German prisoners or occasionally by our own men. As
we were at the crossroads, we got most of the wounded, English, German
and American, as well as a great deal of the shelling with which back
areas are always deluged during an attack. In this case, our post was
just behind the lines at first, but it became a back area within a very
few days owing to the dash and brilliancy of our tired troops when the
orders came to go over the top. They stormed the heights across the
stream after wading it in the first rush, and then went on across the
hills and fields.
Our attack was a part of the campaign of the British Third Army and a
small element in the great "push" going on at that time over the entire
front. Our task with that of the Thirtieth Division on our right was to
cross the Selle River and advance toward the Sambre Canal. On our left
were British troops, while we were supported by Australian artillery and
the British Air Service. In our first great battle, that of the
Hindenburg Line, the "Ausies" had acted as the second wave, coming up
just in time to save some of the hard pressed units of our Division and
to complete the success of our assault. So we knew them well enough and
were glad indeed to have their excellent artillery to put over the
barrage for our second attack.
The Australians and, in fact, all the British Colonial troops, had much
more in common with the American soldiers than had the British troops
themselves. They were like our men, young, hardy, dashing. They were
all volunteers. They had a type of discipline of their own, which
included saluting their own officers when they wanted to and never
saluting British officers under any circumstances. I took a natural
pride in hearing of their commanding officer, Lieutenant General Sir
John Monash, who held the highest rank of any Jew in the war. It was no
little honor to be the commander of those magnificent troops from
Australia.
Meanwhile we were busy at the first aid post. I found myself the only
person at hand who could speak any German, so I took charge of the door,
with a group of prisoners to carry the wounded in and out and load them
in the ambulances. As soon as my dozen or so prisoners were tired out I
would send them on to the "cage" and pick up new men from the constant
stream flowing in from the front. Our opponents here were chiefly
Wurtembergers, young boys of about twenty, although one regiment of
Prussian marines was among them. Among the first prisoners were two
German physicians who offered to assist ours in the work. They worked
all day, one in our aid post, the other in that of the 107th Infantry,
side by side with our surgeons and doing excellent work for Americans
and Germans alike. They picked their own assistants from among their
captured medical corpsmen, and were strictly professional in their
attitude throughout. One of them was Dr. Beckhard, a Jew from Stuttgart,
with whom I had a few snatches of conversation and whom I should
certainly like to meet again under more congenial circumstances. I was
amused in the midst of it all when the doctor noticed his brother, an
artilleryman, coming in as one of the endless file of stretcher
bearers, carrying wounded in gray or olive drab. The doctor asked me
whether he might take his brother as one of his assistants for the day.
"Is he any good?" I asked. "Oh, yes," was the answer, "as good as any
medical orderly." So I gave permission and the two, together with a real
medical orderly and another young prisoner as interpreter, ran one room
of the first aid post in their own way. I kept an American soldier on
guard there chiefly to be prepared for any eventualities; as a matter of
fact the German surgeons treated American wounded and American surgeons
treated German wounded with the same impartial spirit. The two
physicians joined the other prisoners at the end of the day bearing
letters of appreciation written by Captain Miller, the surgeon in charge
of our post.
About a year later when communication with Germany was opened again, I
found that this chance meeting at the front proved an odd means of
communication with my German cousins. When Dr. Beckhard returned to
Stuttgart he lectured on his experiences at the front, mentioning among
other things that he had met an American Rabbi by the name of Levinger.
Some distant relatives of mine living in the city heard the talk and
wrote to a nearer branch of the family living in another part of
Wurtemberg, so that shortly after the actual experience they knew of my
being in the army and serving at the front.
Only the small Ford ambulances could come as near the front as our post,
while the larger ones came only to the Advanced Dressing Station at
Busigny. These smaller ambulances were unable to accommodate the
constant stream of gassed and wounded men coming from the lines. Those
who had minor wounds, especially in the arms, had to be directed along
the proper road according to that ironical term, "walking wounded."
Cases which in civil life would be carried to an ambulance, given full
treatment, and then driven gently to the nearest hospital, were here
given emergency dressings and told, "The Advanced Dressing Station is
two miles down that road, boys. Walk slow and don't miss the sign
telling where to turn to the left." Other more serious cases for whom
there was no room in ambulances, at the moment were carried on
stretchers by prisoners. I would assemble three or four such cases, take
a revolver left by some wounded officer or non-com, and give it to a
"walking wounded" with instructions to "see that they get safely to the
next point." Naturally, these boys with minor wounds of their own were
safe guardians to see that the German prisoners did their duty. I can
still see their grins as they assured me: "Those fellows are sure going
to stick on the job, sir. I'll say they will!" The attitude of the
slightly wounded men was often full of grim humor. I remember one
Australian carried in on a stretcher who called me to his side with
their customary "Here, Yank," and when I responded handed me very
gravely a Mills bomb which he had used to overawe his captive bearers,
apparently threatening to blow them up with himself should they prove
insubordinate.
A constant worry of mine were the weapons which the wounded men dropped
in front or within the aid post. Knowing that all army supplies would
be reissued to them on release from the hospital, the soldiers did not
care to carry heavy rifles or even revolvers and bombs back with them.
The result was a pile of weapons at just the point where my prisoner
stretcher-bearers could have easy access to them. I kept an M. P. busy
much of the time removing these to a place of comparative safety.
Behind the aid post we found a shed which served as temporary morgue for
the men who died before we could give them emergency treatment and rush
them off in the ambulances. The extreme tension of the actual fight and
the tremendous pressure of administering to the living calloused the
heart for the moment to these horrible necessities, which come back to
memory in later days with the full measure of ghastly detail.
The chaplain is the handy man at the front, one of the few who is not
limited by special duties or confined to a particular spot. He works
forward or backward as the need exists. He ladles out hot chocolate with
the Red Cross, carries a stretcher with the Medical Corps, ties up a
bandage when that is needed, and prays for Jew and Christian alike. I
ministered to a number of Jewish and Christian soldiers who were dying,
leading the Jews in the traditional confession of faith, and reading a
psalm for the Protestants. One of the surgeons came to me and said,
"Captain Connor here is dying, and Chaplain Hoffman our priest is at
Battalion Headquarters acting as interpreter to examine some prisoners.
What can we do?" So I borrowed the surgeon's rosary and held the cross
to the lips of the dying Catholic. This incident, so impossible in
civil life, is really expected among soldiers,--it has been repeated so
many times and in so many different ways.
We were constantly under heavy shell fire, as our place at the cross
roads was not only convenient of access, but was also the only route for
bringing supplies and ammunition to our part of the front. Once as I was
in the middle of the road with several prisoners loading stretchers on
an ambulance, a shell burst in a pool about twenty feet away, covering
us with a shower of mud. My prisoners, who had a wholesome respect for
their own artillery, could hardly be prevented from dropping the
stretcher. However, we were too near the explosion to be hurt, as the
fragments flew over our heads, killing one boy and wounding four others
across the street. One of the wounded was an American runner from the
front, who was enjoying a hasty bite at the army field kitchen around
the corner. He came over in a hurry to have his cheek tied up and then
went calmly back to the field kitchen to finish his interrupted lunch.
The man who was killed was standing about seventy-five feet from the
spot of the explosion beside the motor-cycle which he drove, waiting for
his commanding officer to come and use the side-car. He pitched forward
as though falling to avoid the explosion, just as we would have done if
we had not been holding a stretcher. When he did not rise, Father Kelley
and I went over to him and found that a fatal bit of metal had struck
him in the head just below his steel helmet.
And so the work went on. The next day we heard of some wounded who had
not yet been brought in from Bandival Farm. Chaplain Burgh of the 107th
Infantry and I gathered together a few volunteers of our ambulance men
and several prisoners to go out and carry them in. It was about a mile
and a half out across the battlefield under intermittent shell fire. I
placed my captured Luger revolver, which one of the boys had brought me
the day before, in a conspicuous position with the handle projecting
from my front pocket. I had had the thing unloaded as soon as I got it
because I preferred not to run any unnecessary risks. Being a
non-combatant both by orders and inclination, I was afraid it might go
off. But my prisoners did not know that and so I had no difficulty in
silencing their muttered protests against such a hard and dangerous
hike. Working prisoners under fire like this was strictly against
international law, but that sort of a provision we violated frankly and
cheerfully. On the way back with our wounded across the muddy and
shell-pitted fields, we passed German machine gun emplacements with the
dead gunners still beside the guns, Americans lying with their faces
toward the enemy, and constant heaps of supplies of all kinds strewn
about. One of our stretchers was put down for a moment's rest near such
a scattered group of German knapsacks. One of the prisoners asked if he
might help himself, and when I nodded all four made a wild dash for the
supplies and each man came back carrying an army overcoat and a bag of
emergency rations, the little sweetish crackers which they carried
instead of our hard tack.
On the third day of the attack I joined two men of the Intelligence
Department in walking out to the front line, then over five miles from
the village. It was a hard hike through the mud and about the shell
holes. Finally we found our friends dug in (for the fourth time that
day) on a little ridge. Each time their temporary trenches had been
completed orders had come either for a short retreat or a further
advance, and now by the middle of the afternoon the boys were digging
another at the place where they were to stay till the next morning.
Across the ravine in a little wood the Germans were hanging on for the
time being until their artillery could be saved. I visited the 108th
Infantry in reserve and emptied my musette bag of the sacks of Bull
Durham which I had brought along from the Red Cross. Then the boys
wanted matches, which I had forgotten, and their gratitude was lost in
their disgust.
I found Captain Merrill with his staff inspecting two captured German
77's, on which they had just placed the name of their unit. By that
time, after three consecutive battles without replacements, our units
were so depleted that a regiment had only 250 rifles in the line instead
of the original 3,000. Captain Merrill's battalion consisted on that day
of 87 riflemen. Just as we finished our inspection of the guns the enemy
artillery started "strafing" again, so we jumped into a shell-hole which
had been hollowed out into convenient form and finished our conversation
there. I then visited some of the 107th Infantry in the front line rifle
pits, one hundred yards or so ahead, and turned back again toward the
village.
I was just losing my way among the hills with approaching twilight, when
I met an Australian artillery train on their way back for supplies, and
climbed on a limber to ride into town. It was a wild ride, with the
rough roads and the drivers' habit of trotting over the spots where
shell-holes showed that danger might linger. I held on in quite
unmilitary fashion and wondered if the horse behind would be careful
when I fell. But they brought me in safely and added one more means of
locomotion to the dozens which I had utilized at various times:
ammunition "lorries," ambulances, side-cars and even a railway
locomotive--everything in fact except a tank.
The next day we breathed more freely again. Our tired boys, reduced in
numbers, weakened in physical resistance, but going forward day after
day as their orders came, were at last to go out of the lines. Their job
was done; they had reached the Sambre Canal; and though we did not know
it, they were not to go into battle again. I lorried back to Joncourt,
the temporary division headquarters, for the night, changed my clothes,
slept in a borrowed cot, read a very heartening pile of home letters
which had accumulated for some weeks, and returned to St. Souplet the
next day for the burial detail. It was the 21st of October; while the
division as a whole marched back to the railhead, five chaplains with a
detail of a hundred and fifty men stayed behind for the sad work that
remained to be done.
At this time I stopped off at the 108th Infantry for a few minutes, as
they halted for a meal after coming out of the lines, and had my
orderly, David Lefkowitz, detached from his unit to serve with me for my
entire remaining period with the division. I had become acquainted with
him during my first few days in the division and found that he would be
interested to work with me as orderly and assistant. The order
assigning him to this special work was made out before we left the woods
at Buire. But our various units were so depleted at the time that I
arranged to leave him with his "outfit" for the battle. It was a serious
deprivation to me, as Lefkowitz had been through the earlier battle at
the Hindenburg Line and could have given me much assistance and advice
in the front line work. Now that the fighting was over, he left his
company to go with me and enjoy the comparative luxury of division
headquarters until he rejoined his company to sail home from France. He
was one of the many Jewish soldiers who welcomed the presence of a
chaplain and gladly cooeperated in every possible way to make my work
successful.
Chaplain Francis A. Kelley, in charge of our burial work, laid out the
cemetery on a hill overlooking the village and the battlefield. The rest
of us searched the field with details of men, brought in the bodies on
limbers, searched and identified them as well as possible. In doubtful
cases the final identification was made at the cemetery, where men from
every regiment were working and where most soldiers would have some one
to recognize them. In addition, we buried German dead on the field,
marking the graves and keeping a record of their location for the Graves
Registration Service. A hundred and fifty-two men were buried there at
St. Souplet, the last cemetery of the Twenty-Seventh Division in their
battle grounds of France. The last body of all, found after the work had
been finished and the men released from duty, was buried by us chaplains
and the surgeon, who went out under the leadership of Father Kelley and
dug the grave ourselves. Every evening the six of us gathered about our
grate fire and relaxed from the grim business of the day. If we had
allowed ourselves to dwell on it, we would have been incapable of
carrying on the work: it was so ghastly, so full of pathetic and
horrible details. We sang, played checkers, argued on religion. Imagine
us singing the "Darktown Strutters' Ball," or discussing the fundamental
principles of Judaism and Christianity for several hours! The five of us
were all of different creeds, too--Catholic, Baptist, Christian,
Christian Scientist and Jew. Our cooeperation and our congeniality were
typical of the spirit of the service throughout.
On the last day we held our burial service. We gathered together at the
cemetery with a large flag spread out in the middle of the plot. I read
a brief Jewish service, followed by Chaplains Bagby and Stewart in the
Protestant and Father Kelley in the Catholic burial service, and at the
end the bugle sounded "taps" for all those men of different faiths lying
there together. We could see and hear the shells bursting beyond the
hill, probably a hostile scout had caught sight of us at work. Above
floated a British aeroplane. Some English soldiers working on their
burial plot nearby stopped their digging and listened to our service.
And so we said farewell to our lost comrades and to the war at the same
time.