The long desired orders for relief finally arrived. We marched out on Sunday morning, August 11th. I had planned with Colonel McCoy to have my Sunday Service a memorial one for the brave lads we were leaving behind. He had me set up my altar in an open field just south of the forest on our line of march to the rear. The men, fully equipped for the march, came down the road, turned into the field, stripped their packs and formed a hollow square around the altar. After Mass I preached on the text, “Greater love than this no man hath than that he lay down his life for his friends.” When the service was over the regiment took the road again and began its march, with the band in advance and the regimental wagon train in the rear.
As we passed through Beuvardes General Menoher and officers of his staff were in front of Division Headquarters. Colonel McCoy passed the order down the ranks, the band struck up the regimental air of “Garry Owen” and the regiment passed in review, heads up and chests out and stepping out with a martial gait as if they were parading at Camp Mills and not returning from a battlefield where half their numbers had been lost.
Two days later they marched through Château Thierry in similar fashion. Colonel McCoy came to mess with a smile of pride on his face telling us he had encountered an old friend, a regular army officer who had said to him, “What is that outfit that passed here a little while ago? It’s the finest looking lot of infantry I have seen in France.” “That is the 165th Infantry, more widely known to fame as the 69th New York, and I am proud to say that I command it.”
I have been playing truant for a few days. I had been suffering with a great sense of fatigue. Nothing particular the matter, but I felt as if I were running on four flat tires and one cylinder. Two of the War Correspondents, Herbert Corey and Lincoln Eyre, came along and insisted on bringing me down to their place in Château Thierry; and General Lenihan brought me in in his car. Corey cooked supper—a regular cordon bleu affair—and Lincoln Eyre gave me a hot bath and, like Kipling’s soldier, “God, I needed it so.” Then they bundled me into Tom Johnson’s bed, and as I dropped asleep I thought, and will continue to think, that they are the finest fellows in the world. They were ordered out next morning and I went with them for a couple of days to Bossuet’s old episcopal city of Meaux, where I had a fine time gossiping with Major Morgan, Bozeman Bulger and Arthur Delaney of the Censor’s Bureau and Ray Callahan, Arthur Ruhl and Herbert Bailey, a delightful young Englishman who writes for the Daily Mail.
I rejoined the regiment at Saulchery—somebody says that sounds like a name for a decadent cocktail—and found myself housed in a large and pleasant villa, the garden of which looked out upon vineyards and fields down to the banks of the Marne. It was one of the pleasantest places we had been in in France. The weather was perfect, and the men enjoyed the camping out in their shelter tents, especially since the river was handy for a swim. The whole thing made us feel more like campers than soldiers. And by the time we had gotten well rested up and most of the cooties washed off, we had forgotten the hard days that were past and saw only the bright side of life once more.
We were there from August 12th to 17th, on which latter date we entrained at Château Thierry to go to our new training area. This was down in the Neufchateau district, and to get to it by the railroad we were using we went south until we got to the vicinity of Langres, where we had spent our last two months before going into the trench sector. Regimental headquarters was at Goncourt and the regiment was accommodated in barracks and billets in that and two close lying villages. The towns had been used for some time by American troops and had unusual facilities for bathing, etc. The warm reception given to us by the townspeople was a tribute to the good conduct of the 23rd Infantry which had been billetted there for a considerable period before occupying the front lines.
After a couple of days’ rest the men were started on a schedule of training which was laid out for four weeks. Target ranges were prepared by the engineers and everything looked like a long stay. The training was necessary not so much for the old-timers as for the replacements who had been sent in to take the places of the men we had lost. We received five hundred from the 81st Division. We had known cases where our replacements had to go into line without anything like proper training. The night we left Epieds to advance into action at the Ourcq we received new men, some of whom knew very little about a rifle and had never once put on a gas mask; and the Captains took them out by night and drilled them for an hour with the gas masks in order to give the poor fellows some sort of a chance for their lives if exposed to danger of gas.
The second day that I was in Goncourt Colonel McCoy came to see me with Major Lawrence and Major Donovan to lay down the law. They had decided that I was to go to the hospital at Vittel, where Major Donovan’s brother was one of the doctors, “for alterations and repairs.” General Menoher, with his usual kindness, sent over his car to take me there, and Father George Carpentier was brought over from the Sanitary Train to fill my place. I told him “Your name is French but it has the advantage of being the one French name that is best known and most admired by our bunch of pugilists.”
I have had a nice lazy week of it at Vittel, which was a French watering place before the war, the hotels and parks now being given over to American soldiers. I hear a great deal of talk about a coming offensive in which the American Army is to take the leading part. I had gotten an inkling of it before from a French source, with strictest injunctions to secrecy. But here in Vittel I find it discussed by private soldiers on the park benches and by the old lady who sells newspapers. If it is a secret, all the world seems to know it. We have taken every step to make the Germans aware of it except that of putting paid advertisements in the Berlin newspapers. The fact is, these things cannot be kept secret. Here in Vittel they are cleaning out all the hospitals of wounded and that means that a big battle is expected somewhere in this vicinity within a short time. Then up along the line ammunition and supply trains are busy establishing dumps, and the drivers are naturally talking about it in the cafés, so that everybody knows that the Americans are planning something big and the place where it is going to happen.