A tortured area ... lit by flares and gun-flashes.

Forward of the hill, German stretcher-bearers moved openly, unmolested, at first. The Marines watched them curiously. The enemy, his works are always interesting. A sergeant said: “Hi! Look at those Fritzies yonder, right off the road, there—” A lieutenant got his glass on them; two big men, one with a yellow beard, wearing Red Cross brassards. They carried a loaded stretcher; it looked like a man lying with his knees drawn up, under a blanket. “Humph! Got him well covered—officer, probably.” One stumbled, or the wind blew, and an end of the blanket flapped back, disclosing unmistakably the blunt snout of a heavy Maxim.—“So that’s it, eh? Slover—Jennings—Heald—got a rifle, Cannon? Range 350—let ’em have it—we can play that game, too—” Thereafter it was hard on Red Cross men and wounded; hard, in fact, on everybody. Like reasonable people, the Americans were willing to learn from the Boche, from anybody who could teach them; and if the Boche played the game that way—they could meet him at it. “Schrechlichkeit—if he wants frightfulness, we can give it to him—” Later there was a letter, taken from a dead feldwebel in the Bois de Belleau—“The Americans are savages. They kill everything that moves....”

Late in the afternoon a great uproar arose to the right. There was more artillery up now, more machine-guns, more of everything. The 3d Battalion of the 6th Marines and the 3d Battalion of the 5th attacked the town called Bouresches and the wood known as Bois de Belleau. They attacked across the open, losing hideously. Platoons were shot down entire. The colonel commanding the 6th Regiment, farther forward than regimental commanders have any business being, was shot and evacuated. Lieutenant Robertson got into Bouresches, with twenty men out of some hundred who started, threw the Boche out, and held it. They gained a footing in the rocky ledges at the edge of the Bois de Belleau, suffering much from what was believed to be a machine-gun nest at this point. They tried to leave it and go on, with a containing force to watch it; they found that the whole wood was a machine-gun nest.

Night descended over a tortured area of wheat and woodland, lit by flares and gun-flashes, flailed by machine-guns, and in too many places pitiful with crying of wounded who had lain all the day untended in a merciless sun. Stretcher-bearers and combat patrols roamed over it in the dark. Water parties and ration parties groped back from forward positions over unknown trails. There were dog-fights all over the place, wild alarms, and hysterical outbreaks of rifle-fire. It was the same with the Boche; he knew the ground better, and he was determined to repossess it. His people filtered back through the American strong points, for the Marines did not hold a continuous line; isolated positions were connected by patrols and machine-guns laid for interlocking fire.

At the southern angle of Hill 142 the 49th Company put out a listening-post—one man down the slope a little way, to watch for visitors. In the night there was a trampling, a grunt, and one scream—“Boche!”—At once the hill blazed into action—weary men overspent, they fired into the dark until their pieces were hot. And after they found the listening-post fellow, bayoneted. And down the hill a little huddle of new dead. Not all the rifle-fire had gone astray.

Back in Brigade, officers bent over maps and framed orders for a stronger attack on the Bois de Belleau at dawn.... Brigade was writing also to Division: “... casualties severe ... figures on which to base call for replacements will be submitted as soon as possible....”

The hill blazed into action—not all the rifle-fire had gone astray.

II
REPLACEMENTS

At the crossroads beyond La Voie du Chatelle they met the War.