Then he went back for his men, formed them and led them by the selected route, fighting as they went against such of the enemy as sought to deter them. All of this Lieutenant Wheeler performed while suffering intense pain from a wound of the hand, inflicted early in the engagement. After reaching the regimental lines, he had first-aid treatment for the wound and continued in the battle.
Lieutenant W. M. R. Crosman found a wounded corporal who was unable to walk. He remained with the corporal and they became entirely isolated from all other Americans. They were given up for lost until the next night, when a message arrived that a patrol from another American unit on another part of the battle front, miles away, had brought in the lieutenant and the corporal, both utterly exhausted and almost unbalanced from their experience.
The lieutenant had dressed the corporal's wound roughly and then had started to lead him in. They became lost and wandered about for hours. At times the lieutenant carried the corporal on his back, when the wounded man became unable to walk. Again they were forced to take shelter in a thicket, when parties of Germans approached, and to lie, in imminent fear of death, until the enemy groups had passed on. Finally they heard voices speaking in English and came on the American patrol.
A message came back to the regimental lines from the beleaguered, hard-pressed M Company for ammunition. Supply Sergeant Charles McFadden, 3d, of Philadelphia, set out with a detail to carry the ammunition forward. They were trapped in a little hamlet by the advancing Germans. McFadden sent his men back on the run, as they were badly outnumbered, but himself remained behind to destroy the ammunition to prevent its falling into the hands of the Germans.
He saw men approaching him in the French uniform and believed he was safe, until they opened fire on him with rifles and machine guns—by no means the first instance in which the Germans made such use of uniforms other than their own. Sergeant McFadden saw it was hopeless to try longer to blow up his ammunition and fled. He ran into a machine gun manned by three Germans. He took them at an angle and before they could swing the gun around to bear on him, he was upon them. Two shots from his rifle and a swift lunge with the bayonet and the machine gun crew was out of the way forever.
The Germans were coming on, however, and to reach his own lines, McFadden had to run almost a mile up a steep hill. A bullet passed through his sleeve, another through his gas mask, one through his canteen, four dented his steel helmet and another shot the stock off his rifle, but he himself was untouched. He had taken off his outer shirt because of the heat. As he came up the hill toward his own lines, his comrades, not recognizing him in that wildly running figure, opened fire on him. He dropped to the ground, ripped off his undershirt and waving it as a flag of truce, made his panting way into the lines.
The two companies of the 110th were passing through almost exactly similar experiences. Company B was surrounded and split. After a fight of twenty-four hours, during which it was necessary time after time to charge the Huns with bayonets and rally the group repeatedly to keep it from disintegrating, Captain Fish, whose home is in New Brighton, with Lieutenant Claude W. Smith, of New Castle, and Lieutenant Gilmore Hayman, of Berwyn, fought their way back with one hundred and twenty-three men. They brought with them several prisoners, and carried twenty-six of their own wounded.
The rest of the company, surrounded in the woods, also made a running fight of it, but was scattered badly and drifted back to the regimental lines in little groups, leaving many comrades behind, dead, wounded and prisoners.
The same kind of thing befell Company C, of which a little more than half returned, Captain Truxal, of Meyersdale, Pa., and Lieutenants Wilbur Schell and Samuel S. Crouse were surrounded by greatly superior forces and taken prisoner with a group of their men.
Corporal Alvey C. Martz, of Glencoe, Somerset County, with a patrol of six men, was out in advance of the company stringing barbed wire right along the river bank, when the German bombardment began. They dropped into shell holes. At the point where they lay, the wire remained intact and the Hun flood passed around them. When the hail of shells passed on in advance of the charging German lines, they arose, to find themselves completely cut off from their comrades.