CHAPTER VI
Blasting the Enemy Out
THE cheer which greeted Major Sweeney’s speech was of itself a pledge. The first of the men in the second wave were arriving by that time at that point where Company C, a little frazzled, but with renewed determination, had rallied those of its men who had come through the first attack uninjured. The new arrivals gave fresh energy and impetus to those who thus far had borne the brunt of the original contact, and again they made ready to resume the big push.
The sun had come out for the first time in more than a week, and those who were aware of it, who were cheered and strengthened by its genial glow, believed that they saw in the incident something significant of success for the attack that had been so auspiciously launched.
Undoubtedly, from the first trend that the battle had taken, the Germans had been caught unawares, and there was little doubt, either, that the onslaught, coming as it did upon the fourth anniversary of their undisputed possession of the St. Mihiel salient, contributed further toward disorganizing the enemy and completely breaking down his much-vaunted discipline and morale. The wisdom of American generalship dictated that he should not be given a moment’s rest in which to recover.
By re-formed platoons and companies, the vacancies filled in by the new arrivals, officers and men began to move forward again to hasten the Hun in his precipitate retreat.
They had not gone many more yards, picking their way from knoll to knoll, when they began to sense something of the real horror of warfare as the Germans waged it. Sticking out here and there above the surface of the ground like grim and ghastly monuments were battered heaps of stone and mortar—all that remained of houses which once had stood there. This site had been a village once!
But what ruin had been wrought there! What scenes of carnage, of brutality and outright murder had been enacted here upon this spot that the Americans were now traversing? How many innocent noncombatants—aged men and women, defenseless little children—had had their lives snuffed out, or were tortured to death, or were driven like haunted wild beasts before that relentless, pitiless advance of the Boches four years before?
Tom Walton, asking himself these things, horrified by the thoughts and the terrible picture they conjured, even as he threw himself forward with the rest could not help comparing this barren desolation of what once had been a thriving, happy, harmless community, with the peace and quiet of his own country, even though it was at war, and with the content and safety which he and his kin always had known there. To Tom the wretched scene about him was like a terrible nightmare, and yet he knew that it was in fact all too tragic reality.
Unquestionably the day—not Der Tag, of which the Germans had so brutally and boastfully spoken for four long years—but a far different day, the Day of Retribution, was now near at hand. It could not come too swiftly or severely to avenge the horrors which German invasion, Hun brutality and Boche atrocity had inflicted upon the people and the land of Belgium and eastern France.