Then things happened fast. Another German came into view straining to tear the fallen gunner off the firing mechanism. Slover shot him. There was another, and another. Then the bush boiled like an ant-heap, and a feldwebel sprang out with a grenade, which he did not get to throw. It went off, just the same, and the Marines from the other end of the tree came with bayonets.... Presently they went on.... “There’s a squad of them bastards to do orderly duty for the corp’ral an’ little Tritt,” said the sergeant. “Spread out more, you birds.”
Fighting from tree to tree in the woods south of Soissons.
A chaut-chaut automatic rifle in action.
Afterward, sweating and panting, the freckled one who had started back with prisoners caught up with the lieutenant. “Lootenant, sir!” he gasped, wiping certain stains from his bayonet with his sleeve. “Them damn Heinies tried to run on me, an’ I jest natcherly had to shoot ’em up a few—” and he looked guilelessly into the officer’s eyes. “Why you—Hell! ... fall in behind me, then, an’ come along. Need another orderly.”
He pondered absently on the matter of frightfulness as he picked his way along. There were, in effect, very few prisoners taken in the woods that morning. It was close-up, savage work. “But speakin’ of frightfulness, one of these nineteen-year-olds, with never a hair to his face—” A spitting gust of machine-gun bullets put an end to extraneous musings.
Later, working to the left of his company, he was caught up in a fighting swirl of Senegalese and went with them into an evil place of barbed wire and machine-guns. These wild black Mohammedans from West Africa were enjoying themselves. Killing, which is at best an acquired taste with the civilized races, was only too palpably their mission in life. Their eyes rolled, and their splendid white teeth flashed in their heads, but here all resemblance to a happy Southern darky stopped. They were deadly. Each platoon swept its front like a hunting-pack, moving swiftly and surely together. The lieutenant felt a thrill of professional admiration as he went with them.
The hidden guns that fired on them were located with uncanny skill; they worked their automatic rifles forward on each flank until the doomed emplacement was under a scissors fire; then they took up the matter with the bayonet, and slew with lion-like leaps and lunges and a shrill barbaric yapping. They took no prisoners. It was plain that they did not rely on rifle-fire or understand the powers of that arm—to them a rifle was merely something to stick a bayonet on—but with the bayonet they were terrible, and the skill of their rifle grenadiers and automatic-rifle men always carried them to close quarters without too great loss.
They carried also a broad-bladed knife, razor-sharp, which disembowelled a man at a stroke. The slim bayonet of the French breaks off short when the weight of a body pulls down and sidewise on it; and then the knives come out. With reason the Boche feared them worse than anything living, and the lieutenant saw in those woods unwounded fighting Germans who flung down their rifles when the Senegalese rushed, and covered their faces, and stood screaming against the death they could not look upon. And—in a lull, a long, grinning sergeant, with a cruel aquiline face, approached him and offered a brace of human ears, nicely fresh, strung upon a thong. “B’jour, Americain! Voilà! Beaucoup souvenir ici—bon! Désirez-vous? Bon——!”
Later, on the last objective, there was a dignified Boche major of infantry, who came at discretion out of a deep dugout, and spoke in careful English: “Und I peg of you, Herr leutnant, to put me under trusty guard of your Americans true-and-tried! Ja! These black savages, of the art of war most ignorant, they would kill us prave Germans in cold plood!... The Herr General Mangin, that”—here a poignant string of gutturals—“I tell you, Herr leutnant, der very name of Mangin, it is equal to fünf divisions on unser front!”
