ESPERANCE FARM
October 28th, 1918
Our rear Headquarters are in two buildings on the main road that parallels the river Aire. In one of them is the Supply Company and the band. Solicitude for the welfare of bandsmen is the sole tribute that the army pays to art. In a neighboring building is an Ambulance Company and our Company Clerks, who have been ordered to be left in the rear because records are never properly made out if the Company Clerk becomes a casualty. I often make use of a returning ambulance to come back to Captain Kinney’s Hotel for a decent sleep and a good breakfast. Across the road in the field a number of the men have made little dugouts for themselves, as the buildings are overcrowded.
Shell fire does not come back this far except occasionally, but the nights are often made hideous by enemy bombing planes. Aeroplanes carrying machine guns are futile things, but a plane at night dropping bombs is absolutely the most demoralizing thing in war. It is a matter of psychology. The man in front discharging his rifle has the hunter’s exhilaration. Even shells can be dodged if not too numerous, and after a man has dropped on his face or jumped into a doorway and has escaped, there is the satisfaction that a hare must have when it eludes the dogs and pants contentedly in its hole. But when one lies at night and hears the deep buzz of a plane overhead, and most especially when the buzz ceases and he knows that the plane is gliding and making ready to drop something, the one feeling that comes is that if that fellow overhead pulls the lever at the right spot, a very very wrong spot, it means sudden and absolute destruction. There is no way of getting away from it. One simply lies and cowers.
Last night we heard the crunching roar six times repeated in the field just across the road. Flannery and I got up and pulled on our shoes to go over and see what happened. Mules had been hit and two of our men slightly wounded. The bombs made holes in the soft earth, ten feet deep and nearly twelve in diameter, and one of them had fallen at the feet of two of our lads and had not exploded. I was particularly anxious about a lot of nice youngsters whom I had picked out after St. Mihiel for the Band—John Kyle, Robert Emmett Mitchell, Howard Casey, Pat Campion, Will Maroney, Will King, George Forms, John Killoran, Denis Glynn, Will Howard,—all lads that had volunteered before they were eighteen. I found them unharmed and rather enjoying the show.
Lieutenant Bernard Byrne, who is not long with us and whose experience in warfare has not been of great duration, was ordered from the Supply Company a couple of days ago to duty with Company G. His first night in line he took out a patrol which he handled admirably and came back with two prisoners. A very good start indeed.
Everybody has slept in his clothes for weeks. It would not be true to say that we never take them off, because that is part of the morning, though not of the evening ritual. Every morning officers and men, refined or roughneck, strip to the waist for the process of “Reading his shirt.” Not to put too fine a touch to it, we are all crawling with lice. Holmes has a boy who is at the interesting age of four, and his wife writes to him the usual domestic stories about his bright ways and sayings. “You ask her if that kid can read his shirt. Tell her I said that his old man can do it.” Mrs. Holmes sent word back to Father Duffy that while the youthful prodigy had not all the accomplishments of a soldier he could hike with any of us. I did not get the message for weeks afterwards, as my brother Chaplain was very much run down and Major Lawrence and I shipped him off, despite his protests, to the hospital. I do not need to worry about Father Hanley. As long as Ambrose Sutcliff’s Goulash Wagon can supply him with an occasional meal, he will keep going any place I put him—though that is not the right way to phrase it, for I always have to keep him pulled back from the places where he thinks he ought to be. I think I will take both my Chaplains home with me to the Bronx as curates. A Catholic church with a Methodist annex would be a novelty. Back in the peaceful days, a Jew friend of mine whom I was showing over my combination church and school said to me, with the quick business sense of his race, “You use this building for Church on Sunday and for school five days in the week. The only day it’s idle is Saturday. What you ought to do is to hire a good smart young Rabbi and run a synagogue on the Sabbath. I’ll bet you’ll make money at it.”
The two weeks that elapsed between October 16th and November 1st were the dreariest, draggiest days we spent in the war. The men lay out on the bare hillsides in little pits they had dug for themselves, the bottoms of which were turned into mud by frequent rains. They had one blanket apiece, and were without overcoats, underwear or socks, in the unpleasant climate of a French Autumn. They were dirty, lousy, thirsty, often hungry; and nearly every last man was sick.
Captain Bootz, an old-time regular army man and therefore not sympathetic with imaginary ills, made the following report on Anderson’s battalion as early as October 17th. “Checked up strength of battalion shows 405 men for active combat, including liaison detail. Of this number about 35% are suffering various illnesses, especially rheumatism, colds and fevers. The Company commanders state that these men are not receiving medical treatment, which should be given to them without fail or conditions will be worse in the next day or so. Some men are doubled up and should really be in the hospital. I cannot allow these men to leave, as it would set a precedent for many others to follow, and this would deplete our fighting strength so much more. First aid men attached to companies have no medical supplies other than bandages. A lack of proper clothing, such as overcoats, heavy underwear and socks, brings on a great many of these maladies. The majority of the men have summer underwear, if any, and no overcoat and only one blanket; and this is entirely inadequate to keep a soldier in fit physical condition for field service in the climate that is found this time of year in France. I deem it my duty that this be brought to the attention of higher authorities so that they may be rightly informed as to the actual conditions we are living in, and that means be found to have the defect remedied immediately.”
As the days went on, conditions got no better. Hundreds and hundreds of men had to be evacuated as too weak to be of any military value; and nothing but the need of man-power kept our doctors from sending half the regiment to the hospital. The only relief from monotony was an occasional night patrol, or the prospects which were held out to us of a fresh order to attack. In spite of the bloody nose we had already received, our men wished for the order to try again. Patrols and observation posts reported a lessening of the enemy’s strength, and our fellows felt certain that if the tanks would do their share they could get through. They had met their first repulse. If they had been in the war as long as the British or French, they would have learned to take it philosophically as part of the give and take of the game. But it was their first one, and they were burning with the desire to get back at the enemy.
On the 21st our brigade relieved the 84th, our 2nd Battalion taking over the front line on the north edge of the Cote de Chatillon. The next day orders were out for a new attack in which the 165th were to work around the eastern end of Landres et Saint George. Everybody was on the qui vive for a new battle but the thing dragged from day to day until the 26th, when word came that we were to be taken out of the line and that the Second Division was to make the attack. Our men were sorely disappointed and grieved about it, but the decision was a proper one. With the artillery support that has been gathering in our rear I have no doubt that our fellows could have broken through, but we have become too weak in man power to exploit an initial victory in a way that should be done to make the most of it. Three weeks in line under such conditions do not fit men for the hardships of a sustained advance. During this period we lost killed, in Company H, William Murray and P. Nicholson; and in Company M, Davidson and Patrick Ames, a soldier who never knew fear.
October 28th, 1918.
I went in to see General Menoher about my concerns as Division Chaplain. After my business was done he said that he had received orders to send me back to the States to make a speaking tour for the Welfare Funds. He kept talking about these orders long enough to get me worried, although as I watched his face closely I thought I could detect a humorous and reassuring twinkle in his pleasant eyes. Finally, after having been kept on the griddle for five minutes, I ventured the question, “May I ask, General, what reply you made to these orders?” Then he laughed in his genial way. “I told them that you had better work to do here than there and that I was not going to let you go.” I certainly do like that man.
Our land battles during these days are being conducted mainly at night as fights between patrols, the war in the day time being mainly in the air. On October 16th a German plane which had been separated from its escadrille came wabbling over the heads of Major Lawrence’s group and landed in a field alongside them, the occupants being made prisoners. Two days later I had the good luck to witness from the same spot a unique spectacle. There had been an air fight in which ours got the better of it. A German plane was evidently in a bad way. As we watched it we saw a dark object drop from it, and while we held our breath in sympathetic terror for a human being dropping to destruction, a parachute opened above him—the first instance of the kind we have seen in this war. Captain Bootz, who was under him at the time, said that he managed it by climbing out on the tail of his plane and dropping off it from the rear. The great difficulty about using a parachute for aviators has been that the on-moving plane hits the ropes before they can drop clear. Most of the air fights have been the result of the determination of the Germans to get our balloons. They brought down four of them one afternoon, much to our disgust.
There is a stock story about the rookie who is persuaded by his fellows that his tin hat is guaranteed by the government to turn the direct hit of a German 77. When Colonel Dravo and the rest of us start to tell how an inch of planking turned a German 77, we shall be greeted with smiles of incredulity, but the thing actually happened. Dravo has a pleasant little Chalet out on the hill 263, beautifully situated in the forest and affording an excellent place of repose for weary American officers if the Germans who were kind enough to build it would only leave their work alone. But the hill is shelled by day and shelled and bombed by night, in a picky sort of a way. A small portion of the shack is boarded off for a kitchen and in it sleep, or rather slept, for they don’t like the place any more, the force of our Headquarters mess: Sergeant Denis Donovan, Jimmy Dayton, Tex Blake, McWalter, and John McLaughlin in superimposed bunks, so that the lads above were only a couple of feet below the roof. A shell hit just above them, the explosion ruining the roof and pitching them all to the floor; but every particle of iron in it spread itself into the air outside of the building. Luckily for them it must have been one of those long-nosed devils that explode on contact and cause much greater destruction than those that plow out the ordinary shell hole. The first time I saw the roads barely scratched where they hit I thought the German powder was becoming inferior. I know better now.