I
The dawn came very reluctantly through the clouds, bringing no sun with it, although the drizzle stopped. The battalion rose from its soggy blankets, kneading stiffened muscles to restore circulation, and gathered in disconsolate shivering groups around the galleys. These had come up in the night, and from them, standing under the dripping pines, came a promising smell of hot coffee. Something hot was the main consideration in life just now. But the fires were feeble, and something hot was long in coming. The cooks swore because dry wood couldn’t be found, and wet wood couldn’t be risked, because it would draw shell-fire. The men swore at the weather and the slowness of the kitchen force, and the war in general, and they all growled together.
“Quite right—entirely fitting and proper!” said the second-in-command of the 49th Company, coming up to where his captain gloomed beside the galley. “We wouldn’t know what to do with Marines who didn’t growl. But, El Capitan, if you’ll go over to that ditch yonder, you’ll find some Frog artillerymen with a lovely cooking-fire. They gave me hot coffee with much rum in it. A great people, the Frogs—” But the captain was already gone, and the second-in-command, who was a lean first lieutenant in a mouse-colored raincoat, had to run to catch up with him.
They returned in time to see their company and the other companies of the battalion lining up for chow. This matter being disposed of, the men cast incurious eyes about them.
The French artillerymen called the place “the Wood of the Seven Pigeons.” There were no pigeons here now. Only hidden batteries of 105s, with their blue-clad attendants huddled in shelters around them. The wood was a sparse growth of scrubby pines that persisted somehow on the long slope of one of the low hills of Suippes, in the sinister Champagne country. Many of the pines were blackened and torn by shell-fire, and the chalky soil was pockmarked with shell craters from Boche counter-battery work, searching for the French guns camouflaged there. Trenches zigzagged through the pines, old and new, with belts of rusty wire. There were graves.
North from the edge of the pines the battalion looked out on desolation where the once grassy, rolling slopes of the Champagne stretched away like a great white sea that had been dead and accursed through all time. Near at hand was Souain, a town of the dead, a shattered skeleton of a place, with shells breaking over it. Beyond and northward was Somme-Py, nearly blotted out by four years of war. From there to the horizon, east and west and north and south, was all a stricken land. The rich topsoil that formerly made the Champagne one of the fat provinces of France was gone, blown away and buried under by four years of incessant shell-fire. Areas that had been forested showed only blackened, branchless stumps, upthrust through the churned earth. What was left was naked, leprous chalk. It was a wilderness of craters, large and small, wherein no yard of earth lay untouched. Interminable mazes of trench work threaded this waste, discernible from a distance by the belts of rusty wire entanglements that stood before them. Of the great national highway that had once marched across the Champagne between rows of stately poplars, no vestige remained.
The second-in-command, peering from the pines with other officers of the battalion, could see nothing that moved in all the desolation. Men were there, thousands of them, but they were burrowed like animals in the earth. North of Somme-Py, even then, Gouraud’s hard-fighting Frenchmen were blasting their way through the lines that led up to the last strongholds of the Boche toward Blanc Mont Ridge, and over this mangled terrain could be seen the smoke and fury of bursting shrapnel shell and high explosive. The sustained roar of artillery and the infernal clattering of machine-guns and musketry beat upon the ears of the watchers. Through glasses one could make out bits of blue and bits of green-gray, flung casually about between the trenches. These, the only touches of color in the waste, were the unburied bodies of French and German dead.
“So this, Slover, is the Champagne,” said the second-in-command to one of his non-coms who stood beside him. The sergeant spat. “It looks like hell, sir!” he said.
The lieutenant strolled over to where a French staff captain stood with a knot of officers in the edge of the pines, pointing out features of this extended field, made memorable by bitter fighting.
“Since 1914 we have fought hard here,” he was saying. “Oh, the French know this Champagne well, and the Boche knows it too. Yonder”—he pointed to the southwest—“is the Butte de Souain, where our Foreign Legion met in the first year that Guard Division that the Prussians call the ‘Cockchafers.’ They took the Butte, but most of the Legion are lying there now. And yonder”—the Frenchman extended his arm with a gesture that had something of the salute in it—“stands the Mountain of Rheims. If you look—the air is clearing a little—you can perhaps see the towers of Rheims itself.”
A long grayish hill lay against the gray sky at the horizon, and over it a good glass showed, very far and faint, the spires of the great cathedral, with a cloud of shell-fire hanging over them.
“All this terrain, as far as Rheims, is dominated by Blanc Mont Ridge yonder to the north. As long as the Boche holds Blanc Mont, he can throw his shells into Rheims; he can dominate the whole Champagne Sector, as far as the Marne. Indeed, they say that the Kaiser watched from Blanc Mont the battle that he launched here in July. And the Boche means to hang on there. So far, we have failed to dislodge him. I expect”—he broke off and smiled gravely on the circle of officers—“you will see some very hard fighting in the next few days, gentlemen!”
It was the last day of September, and as the forenoon went by an intermittent drizzle sent the battalion to such miserable shelters as the men could improvise. Company commanders and seconds-in-command went up toward ruined Somme-Py for reconnoissance, and returned to profane the prospect to their platoon leaders.
“I do not like this place,” declared the captain of the 49th Company to his juniors. “It looks like it was just built for calamities to happen in.”
“Yep, and all the division is around here for calamities to happen to.... A sight more of us will go in than will ever come out of it!”
Meantime it was wet and cold in the dripping shelters. Winter clothing had not been issued, and the battalion shivered and was not cheerful.
“Wish to God we could go up an’ get this fight over with!”
“Yes, an’ then go back somewhere for the winter. Let some of these here noble National Army outfits we’ve been hearin’ about do some of the fightin’! There’s us, and there’s the 1st Division, and the 32d—Hell! we ain’t hogs! Let some of them other fellows have the glory——”
“Gawd help the Boche when we meets him this time! Somebody’s got to pay for keepin’ us out in this wet an’ cold.”
French grenadier—Blanc Mont.
“Hear your young men talk, El Capitan? They’re goin’ to take it out on the Boche—they will, too. Don’t you take any more of this than your rank entitles you to! I’m gettin’ wet.”
The second-in-command and the captain were huddled under a small sheet of corrugated iron, stolen by an enterprising orderly from the French gunners. The captain was very large, and the other very lean, and they were both about the same length. They fitted under the sheet by a sort of dovetailing process that made it complicated for either to move. A second-in-command is sort of an understudy to the company commander. In some of the outfits the captain does everything, and his understudy can only mope around and wait for his senior to become a casualty. In others, it is the junior who gets things done, and the captain is just a figurehead. In the 49th, however, the relation was at its happiest. The big captain and his lieutenant functioned together as smoothly as parts of a sweet-running engine, and there was between them the undemonstrative affection of men who have faced much peril together.
“As for me,” rejoined the captain, drawing up one soaked knee and putting the other out in the wet, “I want to get wounded in this fight. A bon blighty, in the arm or the leg, I think. Something that will keep me in a nice dry hospital until spring. I don’t like cold weather. Now who is pushin’? It’s nothin’ to me, John, if your side leaks—keep off o’ mine!”
So the last day of September, 1918, passed, with the racket up forward unabated. So much of war is just lying around waiting in more or less discomfort. And herein lies the excellence of veterans. They swear and growl horribly under discomfort and exposure—far more than green troops; but privations do not sap their spirit or undermine that intangible thing called morale. Rather do sufferings nourish in the men a cold, mounting anger, that swells to sullen ardor when at last the infantry comes to grips with the enemy, and then it goes hard indeed with him who stands in the way.
On the front, a few kilometres from where the battalion lay and listened to the guns, Gouraud’s attack was coming to a head around the heights north of Somme-Py and the strong trench systems that guarded the way to Blanc Mont Ridge. Three magnificent French divisions, one of Chasseurs, a colonial division, and a line division with a Verdun history, shattered themselves in fruitless attacks on the Essen Trench and the Essen Hook, a switch line of that system. Beyond the Essen line the Blanc Mont position loomed impregnable. Late on the 1st of October, a gray, bleak day, the battalion got its battle orders, and took over a mangled front line from certain weary Frenchmen.
Gathering the platoon leaders and non-coms around them, the captain and the second-in-command of the 49th Company spread a large map on the ground, weighting its corners with their pistols.
“You give the dope, John,” ordered the captain, who was not a man of words, and his junior spoke somewhat in this manner:
“Here, you birds, look at this map. The Frogs have driven the Boche a kilometre and a half north of Somme-Py. You see it here—the town you watched them shell this morning. They have gotten into the Prussian trench—this blue line with the wire in front of it. It’s just a fire trench, mostly shell-holes linked up. Behind it, quite close, is the Essen trench, which is evidently a hum-dinger! Concrete pill-boxes and deep dugouts and all that sort of thing—regular fort. The Frogs say it can’t be taken from the front—they’ve tried. We’re goin’ to take it. On the other side of that is the Elbe trench, and a little to the left the Essen Hook, and in the centre the Bois de Vipre—same kind o’ stuff, they say. We’re to take them. You see them all on the map.... Next, away up in this corner of the map, is the Blanc Mont place. Whoever is left when we get that far will take that, too.... Questions?... Yes, Tom, we ought to get to use those sawed-off shotguns they gave us at St. Mihiel—though when we get past the Essen system, we’ll be in the open, mostly.... The old Deuxième Division is goin’ in to-night—it’s goin’ to be some party!”
“Gunnery sergeants send details from each platoon for bandoleers—ammunition-dump is around Battalion Headquarters somewhere,” added the captain. “We get a few rifle-grenades, and some shotgun-shells. And make the men hang on to their reserve rations, for Christ’s sake! Probably won’t eat again until after this is over. Move out of here as soon as it’s dark. That’s all.”
“Two hundred and thirty-four men, sir, and seven officers, not counting the galley force and the office force that we’re leaving behind,” reported the second-in-command, falling in beside the captain as the company moved off with the rest of the battalion in the gathering darkness. They went in double file, dim shapes in the gloom, down the muddy, tortuous road.
“The company’s in better shape than it ever has been,” replied the captain thoughtfully. “St. Mihiel was a walk-over, but it was fine training for them, and even our greenest replacements had a chance to get over being gun-shy. And the non-coms are fine, too ... hope we don’t lose too many of them. You and I have come all the way from Belleau Wood together, John—I’m no calamity-howler—but there’s something about this dam’ Champagne country that gets you——”
“Too many men died here, I reckon,” said the lieutenant. “You feel ’em somehow, in the dark.... Something creepy about those flares, isn’t there?”
The road here was screened on the side toward the enemy by coarse mats of camouflage material erected on tall poles. Through this screen the German flares, ceaselessly ascending, shone with cold, greenish whiteness, so that men saw their comrades’ faces weirdly drawn and pale under their helmets. The files talked as they went——
“I’ve seen the time I’d have called those things pretty—but now—reckon hell’s lit with the same kind of glims!” ... “Remember the flare that went up in our faces the night we made the relief in Bellew Woods? Seemed to me like everybody in the world was lookin’ at me.” “Bois de Belleau! mighty few in the battalion now that remember them days, sonny....” “Listen to that dam’ Heine machine-gun over yonder ... like a typewriter, ain’t it?” “Useter run a typewriter myself, back befo’ Texas declared war on Germany—in a nice dry office it was, an’ this time o’ night I’d be down on the drug-store corner lookin’ ’em over.—” “Somebody shoot that bum, talkin’ about lookin’ ’em over!” “Hey! Th’ angels’ll be lookin’ him over, this time to-morrow night, they will!” “Yes, they will! I’ll live to spit on the grave of the man that said that!”—“My word! Don’t these 1917 model gyrines talk rough, Mac!” marvelled one old non-com to another.
Those sawed-off shotguns they gave us at St. Mihiel.
The road passed into the desolation and wound north, kilometre after kilometre. Presently the camouflage ended and the battalion felt exceedingly naked without its shelter. Then a slope to the left screened the way, the crest of it sharply outlined as the flares ascended. Beyond that crest the machine-guns sounded very near; now and again the air was filled with the whispering rush of their bullets, passing high toward some chance target in the rear. The upper air was populous with shells passing, and the sky flickered with gun-flashes, but the road along which the battalion went enjoyed for the time an uneasy immunity. The rests were all too short; the sweating files swore at their heavy packs; the going was very hard. Presently the road ceased to be a road—merely a broken way across an interminable waste of shell-holes, made passable after a fashion by the hasty work of French engineers, toiling behind the assault of the infantry.
The battalion skirted stupendous craters of exploded mines—“Good Gawd! you could lose my daddy’s house, an’ his barn, too, in that there hole! ’Taint no small barn, either!” The stars had come out, and shone very far off and strangely calm. The dark was foul with all the reek of an old battle-field. “After midnight,” conjectured the files. “Are we ever goin’ to get across this accursed place?”
The files plodded on each side of the tumbled track, and as they neared Somme-Py a pitiful stream of traffic grew and passed between them, the tide of French wounded ebbing to the rear. They were the débris of the attacks that had spent themselves through the day—walking wounded, drifting back like shadows in stained blue uniforms, men who staggered and leaned against each other and spoke in low, racked voices to the passing files; and broken men who were borne in stretchers, moaning—“Ah, Jesu!...” “Doucement, doucement!!...” Farther back the ambulances would be waiting for them.... The battalion went on in close-mouthed silence. Very little talking now, no laughing at all.... “El Capitan, regardez—we be sober-minded men approaching—what we approach—” said the second-in-command, hitching the sling of his musette bag well out of the way of his gas-mask. “I have always,” replied that stolid veteran, “held that war was a serious business.” ... “This is Somme-Py. Can’t those bums ahead set a better pace?”
The column went quickly through the town, into which shells were falling, stumbling over the débris of ruined walls and houses. There was a very busy French dressing-station there, under the relic of a church. It was too dark to see, but each man caught the sound and the smell of it. They cleared the town and went on to a crossroads. French guides were to have met the battalion there, for the line was just ahead, but the guides were late. There was a nerve-racking halt. The next battalion in column closed up; a machine-gun outfit, with its solemn, blasé mules, jammed into the rifle companies.
The 49th was the leading company, just behind the Battalion Headquarters group, and the second-in-command went up to where the major and his satellites were halted.
“Crossroads are always a dam’ bad business, Coxy,” the major was observing to his adjutant. “Just askin’ for it here—no tellin’ how late our Frog friends will be—get the men moved into that ditch off the road yonder—Ah! thought so!”
A high, swift whine that grew to a shrieking roar, and a five-inch shell crashed down some fifty yards to the right of the crowded road. Everybody except the mules were flat on the ground before it landed, but wicked splinters of steel sung across the road, and a machine-gunner, squatting by his cart, collapsed and rolled toward the edge of the road, swearing and clutching at his thigh. The men moved swiftly and without disorder to the ditch, which was a deep communication-trench paralleling the road. Another shell came as they moved, falling to the left, and then another, closer, this time between the road and the trench. A mule or two reared and plunged, stricken; a Marine whose head had been unduly high slumped silently down the side of the trench with most of his head gone. “Damn! Jimmie stopped somethin’ the size of a stove-lid!” “Fool oughta kept his head down!” “Some very hard men you have in your company, El Capitan,” commented the second-in-command, a few feet away, crouching by the side of the captain. “Now, I may stop one, but nobody’s goin’ to get to say that about me, I’ll bet!” “Nor me, John!”... “Face it when it comes, but no use lookin’ for it!”
More shells came, landing along the road, between the road and the trench, and one or two of them in the trench itself. Cries and groans came from the head of the column; stretcher-bearers hurried in that direction; the battalion lay close and waited. Then the shelling stopped. Up forward the major drew a long breath. “Just harassin’ fire on these crossroads. I was afraid we were spotted. Now, those guides—” A little group of Frenchmen arrived panting at the head of the column and the men were quickly on the move again. “If Brother Boche had kept flingin’ them seabags around here, he’d a-hurt somebody. Where do we go from here?”
Said the major, coming to the head of the 49th with a French guide—“Francis, we’re takin’ the regimental front—division’s putting four battalions in the line. The 6th will be on our left; infantry brigade on the right. Let me know how your sector looks—my P. C. will be—I’d better send a runner with you. Here’s your guide.”
That company moved off, and the other companies, going into position in the battered Prussian trench, facing the formidable Essen work. The French riflemen they found there were hanging on in the very teeth of the enemy. Their position had been hastily constructed a few days before by the hard-pressed Boche and was a mere selection from the abundant shell craters, connected by shallow digging. The Marines stumbled and slipped through its windings. It was cluttered up with dead men, for it had been strongly held and dearly won. The 49th took over the part allotted to it from some ten platoons of Frenchmen, eight or ten men to a platoon, in command of a first lieutenant. It was what was left of a full battalion.
Courteous and suave, although he swayed on his feet from weariness and his eyelids drooped from loss of sleep, the Frenchman summed up the situation for the Marine captain. “We hold this fire trench. In your sector are four communication trenches running to the Essen work, which is about a hundred metres distant. We hold most of the boyau on the extreme right; the others we have barricaded. You cannot take this Essen trench by frontal assault!”—“Why can’t we?” growled the American.
The shells began to drop into the trench.
“When it is light you will see, M. le Capitaine! You can only get forward by bombing your way in the boyaux. They are too strong in machine-guns, the Boche. Now I take my men and go. Seven days and nights we have been on our feet ... those of us who are left are very tired.... It is well that you be watchful in this place, but do not stir up the Boche yonder. They shoot with minenwerfers when you frighten them. Such a one finished my pauvre capitaine and six men with him. Bon chance, mon capitaine! Bon jour!”
“Cheerful bird, wasn’t he?” remarked the captain. “Wonder if that thing I stepped on just outside his hole was his captain? John, before it gets good daylight, don’t you want to take a look-see at this Essen Trench? Take whoever you want and see how the land lies.”
The Essen Trench had been very active when the companies were being posted; staccato bursts of machine-gun fire had ripped across the intervening dark, and Springfields had answered. There had been some bombing around traverses in the boyaux. But when, in the creeping grayness of the dawn, the lieutenant from the 49th ventured across to it with his orderly and a sergeant, he found the Boche retiring. Filing quickly through the communication trenches, the battalion occupied it without difficulty, and, looking around them, were very glad they hadn’t had to take it by storm.
A flare during shelling in the front-line trenches.
And the captain understood why the French lieutenant had said it couldn’t be stormed. The French had tried the evening before to cross the scant distance and get into it. Most of those who had charged lay as the Boche Maxims had cut them down. In one place, between two boyaux that formed with the opposed lines a rough square of perhaps one hundred yards, he counted eighty-three dead Frenchmen. Lying very thick near the lip of their own trench, the bodies formed a sort of wedge, thinning toward the point as they had been decimated, and that point was one great bearded Frenchman, his body all a mass of bloody rags, who lay with his eyes fiercely open to the enemy and his outthrust bayonet almost in the emplacement where the Boche guns had been.
The company, which had learned its own bitter lesson in frontal attacks on machine-guns, gave passing tribute. “Them Frogs, they eat machine-guns up. Fightin’ sons o’ guns, they are. Wonder if any chow is comin’ up to-day?” They made themselves comfortable among the dead and waited the next move with equanimity.
“Two hundred and thirty-one men, sir,” reported the second-in-command, sliding into the shallow dugout where the captain was holed up. “Mighty lucky so far. I’m goin’ to sleep. There’s some shellin’, especially toward the left, but most of the outfit is pretty well under cover.”