Quiet French villages along the road, stone houses like gray ghosts under the pale moon, and all lights hooded against Boche planes. Long, empty stretches of road. Shadowy columns of French infantry, overtaken and passed. Horse-drawn batteries of 75s on the move. Swift staff cars that dashed by, hooting. Then, long files of horsemen, cloaked and helmeted, with a ghostly glint of lanceheads over them—French cavalry. Presently, dawn, with low clouds piling up in the rosy sky. And along the road, wherever there were groves, more cavalry was seen, at ease under the trees. Horses were picketed, lances and sabres stuck into the ground, and cooking-fires alight.
The Marines had not met the French horse before. They now looked approvingly upon them. Men and horses were alike big and well-conditioned. All morning the camions passed through a country packed with troops and guns, wherever there was cover from the sky. Something big was in the air.
It was mid-forenoon when the train stopped, and the battalion climbed out on cramped legs. “Fall in on the right of the road.... Platoon commanders, report.... Keep fifty yards’ distance between platoons.... Squads right.... March!” and the companies moved off stiffly, on empty stomachs. The little dark Annamites watched the files pass with incurious eyes. They had taken many men up to battle.
II
Company by company, the 1st Battalion passed on, and behind them the other battalions of the 5th Marines took the road and, after them, the 6th. “None of the wagons, or the galleys—don’t see the machine-gun outfits, either,” observed the lieutenant of the 49th Company, looking back from the crest of the first low hill. Here the battalion was halted, having marched for half an hour, to tighten slings and settle equipment for the real business of hiking. “They may get up to-night, chow an’ all—wonder how far we came, an’ where we’re goin’. No, sergeant—can’t send for water here—my canteen’s empty, too. All I know about it is that we seem to be in a hurry.”
Prussians from Von Boehn’s divisions in and around the Bois de Belleau.
A page from Captain Thomason’s sketch-book.
The dust of the ride had settled thick, like fine gray masks, on the men’s faces, and one knew that it was just as thick in their throats! Of course the canteens, filled at Croutte, were finished. The files swore through cracked lips.
The battalion moved off again, and the major up forward set a pace all disproportionate to his short legs. When the first halt came, the usual ten-minute rest out of the hour was cut to five. “Aw hell! forced march!” “An’ the lootenant has forgot everything but ‘close up! close up!’— Listen at him——”
The camions had set them down in a gently rolling country, unwooded, and fat with ripening wheat. Far across it, to the north, blue with distance, stood a great forest, and toward this forest the battalion marched, talkative, as men are in the first hour of the hike, before the slings of the pack begin to cut into your shoulders.... “Look at them poppies in the wheat.”—“They ain’t as red as the poppies were the mornin’ of the 6th of June, when we went up to Hill 142—” “Yep! Beginnin’ to fade some. It’s gettin’ late in the season.” “Hi—I’m beginnin’ to fade some myself—this guerre is wearin’ on a man ... remember how they looked in the wheat that mornin’, just before we hit the Maxim guns?—red as blood—” “Pore old Jerry Finnegan picked one and stuck it in the buckle of his helmet—I seen it in his tin hat after he was killed, there behin’ the Hill.... I’ll always think about poppies an’ blood together, as long as I live—” This last from little Tritt, the lieutenant’s orderly.