Our men went through Grimpettes Wood "like a knife through butter" as one officer expressed it later. It was man against man, rifle and bayonet against machine gun and one-pounder, and the best men won. Some prisoners were sent back, but the burial squads laid away more than 400 German bodies in Grimpettes. The American loss in cleaning up the wood was hardly a tithe of that. It was a heroic and gallant bit of work, typical of the dash and spirit of our men.
After the first attack on Grimpettes Wood had failed, First Sergeant William G. Meighan, of Waynesburg, Pa., Company K, 110th Infantry, in the lead of his company, was left behind when the recall was sounded. He had flung himself into a shell-hole, in the bottom of which water had collected. The machine gun fire of the Germans was low enough to "cut the daisies," as the men remarked. Therefore, there was no possibility of crawling back to the lines. The water in the hole in which he had sought shelter attracted all the gas in the vicinity, for Fritz was mixing gas shells with his shrapnel and high explosives.
The German machine gunners had seen the few Americans who remained on the field, hiding in shell holes, and they kept their machine guns spraying over those nests. Other men had to don their gas masks when the gas shells came over, but none had to undergo what Sergeant Meighan did.
It is impossible to talk intelligibly or to smoke inside a gas mask. A stiff clamp is fixed over the nose and every breath must be taken through the mouth. Soldiers adjust their masks only when certain that gas is about. They dread gas more than anything else the German has to offer, more than any other single thing in the whole category of horrors with which the Kaiser distinguished this war from all other wars in the world's history. Yet the discomfort of the gas mask, improved as the present model is over the device that first intervened between England's doughty men and a terrible death is such that it is donned only in dire necessity. Soldiers hate the gas mask intolerably, but they hate gas even more.
So Sergeant Meighan, hearing the peculiar sound by which soldiers identify a gas shell from all others, slipped on his mask. It never is easy to adjust, and he got a taste of the poison before his mask was secure—just enough to make him feel rather faint and ill. He knew that if his mask slipped to one side, if only enough to give him one breath of the outer air, he would suffer torture, probably die. He knew that if he wriggled out of his hole in the ground, however inconspicuous he made himself, he would be cut to ribbons by machine gun bullets. So he simply dug a little deeper and waited.
If this seems like a trifling thing, just try one of the gas respirators in use in the army. If one is not available, try holding your nose and breathing only through your mouth. When you have discovered how unpleasant this can be, try to imagine every breath through the mouth is impregnated with the chemicals that neutralize the gas, thus adding to the difficulty of breathing, yet insuring a continuance of life.
And remember that Sergeant Meighan did that for fifteen hours. And then ask yourself if "hero" is an abused word when applied to a man like that.
Furthermore, when in a later attack on the wood, Company K reached the point where Sergeant Meighan was concealed, he discovered in a flash that the last officer of the first wave had fallen before his shelter was reached. Being next in rank, he promptly signaled to the men that he would assume command, and led them in a gallant assault on the enemy position.
There were other men in the 109th and 110th regiments who displayed a marked spirit of gallantry and sacrifice, which by no means was confined to enlisted men. Lieutenant Richard Stockton Bullitt, of Torresdale, an officer of Company K, 110th, was struck in the thigh by a machine gun bullet in one of the first attacks.
He was unable to walk, but saw, about a hundred yards away, an automatic rifle, which was out of commission because the corporal in charge of the rifle squad had been killed and the other men could not operate the gun. Lieutenant Bullitt, member of an old and distinguished Philadelphia family, crawled to the rifle, dragging his wounded leg. He took command and continued firing the rifle.