“When it is light you will see, M. le Capitaine! You can only get forward by bombing your way in the boyaux. They are too strong in machine-guns, the Boche. Now I take my men and go. Seven days and nights we have been on our feet ... those of us who are left are very tired.... It is well that you be watchful in this place, but do not stir up the Boche yonder. They shoot with minenwerfers when you frighten them. Such a one finished my pauvre capitaine and six men with him. Bon chance, mon capitaine! Bon jour!”
“Cheerful bird, wasn’t he?” remarked the captain. “Wonder if that thing I stepped on just outside his hole was his captain? John, before it gets good daylight, don’t you want to take a look-see at this Essen Trench? Take whoever you want and see how the land lies.”
The Essen Trench had been very active when the companies were being posted; staccato bursts of machine-gun fire had ripped across the intervening dark, and Springfields had answered. There had been some bombing around traverses in the boyaux. But when, in the creeping grayness of the dawn, the lieutenant from the 49th ventured across to it with his orderly and a sergeant, he found the Boche retiring. Filing quickly through the communication trenches, the battalion occupied it without difficulty, and, looking around them, were very glad they hadn’t had to take it by storm.
A flare during shelling in the front-line trenches.
And the captain understood why the French lieutenant had said it couldn’t be stormed. The French had tried the evening before to cross the scant distance and get into it. Most of those who had charged lay as the Boche Maxims had cut them down. In one place, between two boyaux that formed with the opposed lines a rough square of perhaps one hundred yards, he counted eighty-three dead Frenchmen. Lying very thick near the lip of their own trench, the bodies formed a sort of wedge, thinning toward the point as they had been decimated, and that point was one great bearded Frenchman, his body all a mass of bloody rags, who lay with his eyes fiercely open to the enemy and his outthrust bayonet almost in the emplacement where the Boche guns had been.
The company, which had learned its own bitter lesson in frontal attacks on machine-guns, gave passing tribute. “Them Frogs, they eat machine-guns up. Fightin’ sons o’ guns, they are. Wonder if any chow is comin’ up to-day?” They made themselves comfortable among the dead and waited the next move with equanimity.
“Two hundred and thirty-one men, sir,” reported the second-in-command, sliding into the shallow dugout where the captain was holed up. “Mighty lucky so far. I’m goin’ to sleep. There’s some shellin’, especially toward the left, but most of the outfit is pretty well under cover.”
II
Gouraud’s battle roared on to the left with swelling tumult. The Americans, in their sector, passed the day in ominous quiet. They wondered what the delay was, speculated on the strategy of attack—which is a matter always sealed from the men who deliver the attack—and wore through to the evening of October 2. At dark, food came up in marmite cans—beef and potatoes and a little coffee. “Put ours on that mess-tin there,” directed the second-in-command, as his orderly slid in with his and the captain’s rations. The captain sat up in his corner a little later. “What th’ hell, John?”—sniff—sniff! “Has that dead Boche on the other side of you begun to announce hisself? Phew!” The second-in-command rose from the letter he was writing by the stub of a candle and sniffed busily—sniff—snnnn—“Damnation! Captain, it’s our supper!” With averted face he presented the grayish chunks of beef that reposed on the mess-tin. “Urggg—throw it out!” He disappeared up the crumbled steps to the entrance of the hole.