The Pennsylvanians had the double satisfaction now of knowing their own artillery brigade was mingling its fire with that of the other American and French batteries. On August 8th, Brigadier-General William G. Price, of Chester, rode up to regimental headquarters of the 109th Infantry and greeted his friends among the officers. He informed them that his brigade was immediately behind and that he was hunting division headquarters to report for action. A guide was assigned him and the General left in his motor car. Word soon spread through the infantry regiments that all the Pennsylvania gunners at last were in the fight.
The weather turned wet again, varying from a drizzle to a heavy downpour, but never quite ceasing.
The penetration of Fismette went slowly but steadily on, in the face of strong resistance, the Germans reacting viciously at every point of contact. Here, as elsewhere along the front between Soissons and Rheims, the action consisted of a series of sharp local engagements, with considerable hand-to-hand fighting, in which American bayonets played an important role.
Amid the fever of battle and not knowing what moment may prove their last, men move as if in a trance. Hours and days pass undistinguished and unrecorded. With the fundamental scheme of existence shattered and with friends of years and chums of months of campaigning killed between sunrise and sunset, it is no wonder that men's minds become abnormal and their acts superhuman.
In quiet, peaceful homes it is impossible to understand this psychology. One may comprehend the mental shock sustained when a relative or neighbor or close friend falls victim to accident or disease, but that feeling is but distantly related to the effect upon the soldier when he realizes that a dozen, possibly half a hundred, of his comrades and close associates of weeks of work and recreation have been wiped out of existence in an hour—men with whom he had talked daily, possibly was talking at the time of dissolution.
The same experience is repeated day after day with deep effect upon his mental, as well as his physical, state of being. Even in civil life, one learns that loss of sleep in time acts like a drug. After twenty-four or thirty-six hours without sleep, it becomes increasingly easy to do without further, until the limit of human endurance is reached and the victim collapses. Also, infrequent food and drink may be borne at increasingly long intervals. The condition is not infrequently described, accurately enough, as being "too hungry to eat," or "too tired to rest." Inevitably the reaction comes, and the longer the relief is postponed, the worse is the reaction. For this reason, the first day in repose for soldiers after a long campaign is usually worse than the campaign itself.
But while the deprivation of sleep, food and drink continues, it is undeniable that, though the physical being may support the loss with decreasing discomfort up to the point of collapse, the effect upon the senses is almost that of an opiate. Men lose their sense of proportion. Everything ordinarily of prime importance recedes into the background. The soldier is imbued with but one overmastering aspiration—to go on and on and on.
It is no wonder that, in such case, he feels that his own fate is a small matter, as it is liable to be sealed at any moment, in the same way as that of his comrades; no wonder that he faces death with the same indifference as a man at home faces a summer shower.
This, then, is the state to which our Pennsylvania soldiers had now been reduced, and in consequence their deeds of personal heroism began to multiply. This was the period when individual men achieved most frequently the great glory of the service—citation and decoration for bravery in action. They had overstepped, individually and collectively, all the bounds of personal fear of death or injury.
The Germans hurled one fresh regiment after another into the inferno which was Fismette, in a determined effort to dislodge that pitiful handful of Americans which had found lodgment on its river edge. Five times fresh, vigorous forces, with hardly a lull, were hurled at the position. All the time the guns kept up an incessant cannonade, both of Fismette and Fismes and the back reaches of the Allied front, while the attacking forces were strongly supported by airplanes, artillery and machine guns.