Well-known before the war as Chief of the Insular Bureau, possessing characteristics that were bound to attract attention, he had had command of the 26th from its organization. He went about much among his men. They all knew his tall figure. They and the line officers were bitter over losing him. If there had been a vote of the soldiers of the division on the question of recalling him, it would have been almost unanimous in his favor. The staff seemed to think that he was too kind to officers of a type which other division commanders relieved; that the success of the division had been due to the fine material in the ranks, which needed better direction; and finally that his long service had broken him down to a point where he had lost his grip on his organization. In answer, his friends said that he had made the division out of the nucleus of many National Guard units and replacements. He had given it its original spirit of corps, and kept up its spirits under handicaps which would have demoralized many divisions.
In the first two days the 26th had suffered 2,000 casualties. On the 27th they were sent into one of those ambitious attacks which look well on paper. To the right of Hill 360, which of course was on the rim, was a valley, and beyond that on higher ground the Moirey Wood, continuing the rim. Relying on veteran experience to carry out this daring maneuver, they were to swing around Hill 360, and into the valley, and take Moirey Wood. Such encircling movements had been carried out before; but their success had been dependent upon the relative strength of the positions to be encircled and of the forces occupying them, not to mention the volume of all kinds of fire on the flanks of the attack. This attack invited the reception that it met no less than a man who jumps into a rattlesnake's nest. The German army might be staggering to defeat, but east of the Meuse the German units were not yet in the mood to turn their backs to the heights, and retire to the plain. With a wonderful accuracy and system they poured the intensest concentration of artillery fire that even the bowl had known. All the guns on all the heights which could swing around upon any part of the bowl seemed to have only one target for shells of all calibers, mixed with gas, which is so hard on men who are clambering over slippery ground in violent physical effort. Units could not see one another from the smoke of the bursts, tearing gaps in the line, which was at the same time ripped by machine-gun fire from the pill-boxes. Every step forward meant more machine-gun fire in flank, and more of it in rear, without any diminution of the volume in front. It was not in human flesh to "go through"; and there was nothing more to be said on the subject.
At the same time, on the other side of the Crépion road the 26th had sought to drive through Belleu Wood and over the ridge. If both attacks had succeeded, and could have held the ground gained, we might have won the battle; but we could not have held it under the artillery concentrations which the Germans were able to deliver, unless each man had a shell-proof pill-box of the weight of a trench helmet—an invention which would have ended the war before we ceased to be neutral.
We were not in full possession of Belleu Wood yet. Conditions there were indeed "mixed." Yankees and Germans were dug in in fox-holes in the northern edges, at points where either could watch the other. Back of the Germans were their trenches on the crest, and their interlocking pill-boxes; at their command always the infernal concentrations of artillery fire which could be brought down on a few minutes' notice. They still had the higher ground; they could slip back for rest into their bomb-proofs and camps in the valley. Many of our fox-holes were full of icy cold water, where the men had to lie—and did lie; for to show their heads was to receive a blast of fire. But the Yankees, all the while nagging the enemy by sniping and shell-fire, held on here and across the road under the same conditions. It was out of the question for warm food to reach the outposts, who received their rations by tossing biscuits from one fox-hole to another.
On their military maps the French gave Belleau Wood, which the Marines had taken in the Château-Thierry campaign, the name of the Marine Wood. Belleu Wood or Ormont Wood might either be called the "Yankee" Wood, though the 29th might ask that one be called the "Blue and Grey" Wood, or Grande Montagne the "Blue and Grey" mountain. After having repulsed counter-attacks on previous days, depleted as it was in numbers, the 29th supported the attack of the 26th through Belleu Wood in an attack through Wavrille Wood, where it met irresistible fire of the same kind as the 26th had against Hill 360 and Moirey Wood.
The 29th's three weeks' service in the hell's torment of the bowl was now over. In its place came the 79th, National Army, which was also from both sides of Mason and Dixon's line, north and south mingling in its ranks. We know the 79th of old for its rush down the Montfaucon valley and over the slopes in the first stage of the battle. The isolation of units in slippery ravines and woods, and the depth of the shelled area, required two nights for relief. The 29th's 5,636 casualties were balanced on the bloody ledger of its record by 2,300 prisoners. This was a remarkable showing; testimony of harvest won by bold reactions against counter-attacks, of charges which made a combing sweep in their sturdy rushes, even when they had to yield some of the ground won. Man to man the Blue and Greys had given the enemy better than he sent; but not in other respects. They could not answer his artillery shell for shell, or even one shell to three.
My glimpses of the battle east of the Meuse among the Verdun hills recalled the days of the Verdun battle, while the French were stalling, with powerful artillery support, on the muddy crests and slopes and in the slippery ravines. When they re-took Douaumont and Vaux, they had a cloud of shell-bursts rolling in front of the charge. We were going relatively naked to the charge. This had been our fortune in most of our attacks in the Meuse-Argonne, as our part in driving in our man-power to hasten the end of the war. There was something pitiful about our divisional artillery in the bowl, trying to answer the smashing fire of the outnumbering guns with their long-range fire from the heights. The artillery of the 29th for three weeks kept its shifts going night and day, while the veteran artillerists of the 26th had problems in arranging patterns of barrages to cover the infiltrating attacks which put new wrinkles in their experience.
Of the 29th's wounded, thirty-five per cent were gassed. The whole area of the bowl was continually gassed. Sickness was inevitable from lack of drinking water, warm food, and proper care. While the Germans could slip back to billets on the reverse slopes, and to shell-proof shelters, let it be repeated that our men had to remain all the time under the nerve-racking shell-fire in the open, and under soaking rains that made every hole they dug on the lower levels a well. Some of the woods which they occupied were shelled until they could see from end to end through the remaining limbless poles of the trunks. The desolation of Delville and Trônes woods in the Somme battle were reproduced; but the 26th and the 29th were there to attack, and they kept on attacking. The fire they drew was a mighty factor in the success of our thrusts in the main battle against the whale-back. It should be enough for any soldier to say that he served east of the Meuse. The 79th and the 26th, which remained in to the death, were to sweep over the rim into the plain, as we shall see.