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.
HALLOWE’EN
We are out of the line tonight with the exception of Reilley’s 3rd Battalion, which is to lie out there in their shelter pits under our barrage and whatever the Germans may send back in reply until the 2nd Division goes through them tomorrow. Twelve months ago we had scarcely left our native shores, a wonderful year in the lives of all of us, and the last one for many a poor fellow now sleeping in the soil of France. A lot of the officers are crowded together in Kinney’s quarters at the Esperance Farm. The room is hot and close, as shelter-halves and blankets screen every nook through which light might pass to give information of human habitation to a passing bomber. Everybody feels tired, dirty and discouraged.
I said to them, “You are the glummest bunch of Irish that I ever saw on a Hallowe’en. Johnnie Fechheimer, you are the best Harp in this bunch; start them singing. Frank Smith, warm us up with some coffee, since there’s nothing better to be had.” So Pete Savarese soon had the coffee boiling and the two Ganymedes, Bob Dillon and Charlie Lowe, ministered to our needs. Pretty soon they were all singing—Major Anderson, Kinney, Mangan, Fechheimer, McDermott, Flynn, McCarthy, O’Donohue, Joe McNamara, Smith, John Schwinn, even Flannery, Scanlon, and myself. Joe McNamara, who is as good a youth as they make them, and who has done great service during the past three weeks with his signal men, sang a song that was just on the verge of being naughty, with his handsome blue eyes twinkling provokingly at me. Dan Flynn knows all the old songs that our mothers used to sing, “Ben Bolt,” “You’ll Remember Me,” and all that sort of thing. Fechheimer and McNamara supplied the modern element in the concert. But no matter what it was, everybody joined in, including the men in the loft upstairs and in the shelter tents outside, especially when it came to songs in praise of Good Little Old New York; and truck drivers and ambulance men and passing officers along the road got first-hand information that the New York Irish 69th had come through their three long weeks of fighting and hardship with their tails still erect.
THE BATTLE OF THE ARGONNE
We had no doubt of the success of the 2nd Division. Artillery was lined up hub to hub on all the roads around Exermont, Fleville and Sommerance and the machine guns of both divisions were to give them a sustained preparatory barrage. I may add incidentally that the thorough preparations for their attack were the best justification for our failure to reach the last objective. We heard the artillery hammering away through the early morning and it was soon evident that the sturdy infantry and marines of the 2nd Division had carried the battle line well towards the north.