The column went quickly through the town, into which shells were falling, stumbling over the débris of ruined walls and houses. There was a very busy French dressing-station there, under the relic of a church. It was too dark to see, but each man caught the sound and the smell of it. They cleared the town and went on to a crossroads. French guides were to have met the battalion there, for the line was just ahead, but the guides were late. There was a nerve-racking halt. The next battalion in column closed up; a machine-gun outfit, with its solemn, blasé mules, jammed into the rifle companies.
The 49th was the leading company, just behind the Battalion Headquarters group, and the second-in-command went up to where the major and his satellites were halted.
“Crossroads are always a dam’ bad business, Coxy,” the major was observing to his adjutant. “Just askin’ for it here—no tellin’ how late our Frog friends will be—get the men moved into that ditch off the road yonder—Ah! thought so!”
A high, swift whine that grew to a shrieking roar, and a five-inch shell crashed down some fifty yards to the right of the crowded road. Everybody except the mules were flat on the ground before it landed, but wicked splinters of steel sung across the road, and a machine-gunner, squatting by his cart, collapsed and rolled toward the edge of the road, swearing and clutching at his thigh. The men moved swiftly and without disorder to the ditch, which was a deep communication-trench paralleling the road. Another shell came as they moved, falling to the left, and then another, closer, this time between the road and the trench. A mule or two reared and plunged, stricken; a Marine whose head had been unduly high slumped silently down the side of the trench with most of his head gone. “Damn! Jimmie stopped somethin’ the size of a stove-lid!” “Fool oughta kept his head down!” “Some very hard men you have in your company, El Capitan,” commented the second-in-command, a few feet away, crouching by the side of the captain. “Now, I may stop one, but nobody’s goin’ to get to say that about me, I’ll bet!” “Nor me, John!”... “Face it when it comes, but no use lookin’ for it!”
More shells came, landing along the road, between the road and the trench, and one or two of them in the trench itself. Cries and groans came from the head of the column; stretcher-bearers hurried in that direction; the battalion lay close and waited. Then the shelling stopped. Up forward the major drew a long breath. “Just harassin’ fire on these crossroads. I was afraid we were spotted. Now, those guides—” A little group of Frenchmen arrived panting at the head of the column and the men were quickly on the move again. “If Brother Boche had kept flingin’ them seabags around here, he’d a-hurt somebody. Where do we go from here?”
Said the major, coming to the head of the 49th with a French guide—“Francis, we’re takin’ the regimental front—division’s putting four battalions in the line. The 6th will be on our left; infantry brigade on the right. Let me know how your sector looks—my P. C. will be—I’d better send a runner with you. Here’s your guide.”
That company moved off, and the other companies, going into position in the battered Prussian trench, facing the formidable Essen work. The French riflemen they found there were hanging on in the very teeth of the enemy. Their position had been hastily constructed a few days before by the hard-pressed Boche and was a mere selection from the abundant shell craters, connected by shallow digging. The Marines stumbled and slipped through its windings. It was cluttered up with dead men, for it had been strongly held and dearly won. The 49th took over the part allotted to it from some ten platoons of Frenchmen, eight or ten men to a platoon, in command of a first lieutenant. It was what was left of a full battalion.
Courteous and suave, although he swayed on his feet from weariness and his eyelids drooped from loss of sleep, the Frenchman summed up the situation for the Marine captain. “We hold this fire trench. In your sector are four communication trenches running to the Essen work, which is about a hundred metres distant. We hold most of the boyau on the extreme right; the others we have barricaded. You cannot take this Essen trench by frontal assault!”—“Why can’t we?” growled the American.
The shells began to drop into the trench.