French grenadier—Blanc Mont.
“Hear your young men talk, El Capitan? They’re goin’ to take it out on the Boche—they will, too. Don’t you take any more of this than your rank entitles you to! I’m gettin’ wet.”
The second-in-command and the captain were huddled under a small sheet of corrugated iron, stolen by an enterprising orderly from the French gunners. The captain was very large, and the other very lean, and they were both about the same length. They fitted under the sheet by a sort of dovetailing process that made it complicated for either to move. A second-in-command is sort of an understudy to the company commander. In some of the outfits the captain does everything, and his understudy can only mope around and wait for his senior to become a casualty. In others, it is the junior who gets things done, and the captain is just a figurehead. In the 49th, however, the relation was at its happiest. The big captain and his lieutenant functioned together as smoothly as parts of a sweet-running engine, and there was between them the undemonstrative affection of men who have faced much peril together.
“As for me,” rejoined the captain, drawing up one soaked knee and putting the other out in the wet, “I want to get wounded in this fight. A bon blighty, in the arm or the leg, I think. Something that will keep me in a nice dry hospital until spring. I don’t like cold weather. Now who is pushin’? It’s nothin’ to me, John, if your side leaks—keep off o’ mine!”
So the last day of September, 1918, passed, with the racket up forward unabated. So much of war is just lying around waiting in more or less discomfort. And herein lies the excellence of veterans. They swear and growl horribly under discomfort and exposure—far more than green troops; but privations do not sap their spirit or undermine that intangible thing called morale. Rather do sufferings nourish in the men a cold, mounting anger, that swells to sullen ardor when at last the infantry comes to grips with the enemy, and then it goes hard indeed with him who stands in the way.
On the front, a few kilometres from where the battalion lay and listened to the guns, Gouraud’s attack was coming to a head around the heights north of Somme-Py and the strong trench systems that guarded the way to Blanc Mont Ridge. Three magnificent French divisions, one of Chasseurs, a colonial division, and a line division with a Verdun history, shattered themselves in fruitless attacks on the Essen Trench and the Essen Hook, a switch line of that system. Beyond the Essen line the Blanc Mont position loomed impregnable. Late on the 1st of October, a gray, bleak day, the battalion got its battle orders, and took over a mangled front line from certain weary Frenchmen.
Gathering the platoon leaders and non-coms around them, the captain and the second-in-command of the 49th Company spread a large map on the ground, weighting its corners with their pistols.
“You give the dope, John,” ordered the captain, who was not a man of words, and his junior spoke somewhat in this manner:
“Here, you birds, look at this map. The Frogs have driven the Boche a kilometre and a half north of Somme-Py. You see it here—the town you watched them shell this morning. They have gotten into the Prussian trench—this blue line with the wire in front of it. It’s just a fire trench, mostly shell-holes linked up. Behind it, quite close, is the Essen trench, which is evidently a hum-dinger! Concrete pill-boxes and deep dugouts and all that sort of thing—regular fort. The Frogs say it can’t be taken from the front—they’ve tried. We’re goin’ to take it. On the other side of that is the Elbe trench, and a little to the left the Essen Hook, and in the centre the Bois de Vipre—same kind o’ stuff, they say. We’re to take them. You see them all on the map.... Next, away up in this corner of the map, is the Blanc Mont place. Whoever is left when we get that far will take that, too.... Questions?... Yes, Tom, we ought to get to use those sawed-off shotguns they gave us at St. Mihiel—though when we get past the Essen system, we’ll be in the open, mostly.... The old Deuxième Division is goin’ in to-night—it’s goin’ to be some party!”
“Gunnery sergeants send details from each platoon for bandoleers—ammunition-dump is around Battalion Headquarters somewhere,” added the captain. “We get a few rifle-grenades, and some shotgun-shells. And make the men hang on to their reserve rations, for Christ’s sake! Probably won’t eat again until after this is over. Move out of here as soon as it’s dark. That’s all.”