A few minutes later he slid down again, followed in a shower of dust and clods by a battalion runner. “All the beef was bad, El Capitan! What the young men are saying about the battalion supply would make your hair curl!—And here’s our attack orders.”
There was a brief pencilled order from the major, and maps. The two officers bent over them eagerly. “Runner!—Platoon commanders report right away—” ... “What do you make of it, John? Looks like General Lejeune was goin’ to split his division and reunite it on the field.... Hmmm! Ain’t that the stunt you claim only Robert E. Lee and Napoleon could get away with?... All here? Get around—the map’s about oriented——”
“Here we are, in the Essen Trench—seems that the Marines move down to the left to here—and the 9th and 23rd move to the right—to here. These pencil lines show the direction of attack—then we jump off, angling a little to the right, compass bearing—and the infantry outfits point about as much to the left. That brings us together up here about three kilometres, and we go on straight, a little west of north from there, to Blanc Mont——
In the Essen trench—a runner.
“Essen Hook and Bois de Vipre are the first objectives—Blanc Mont final objective.... That means we pass to the flank of the Hook and join up behind the Viper Woods—we’ll get some flanking fire, but we will cut both positions off from the rear, and we won’t get near as many men shot up as we would in frontal attack. Might be worse——”
“That’s all we know about the division orders— For the battalion, the major says the 5th Regiment will follow the 6th in support at the jump-off, and the zero hour will be communicated later—some time in the morning, I reckon. That’s all.”
The morning of October 3 [1918] came gray and misty. From midnight until dawn the front had been quiet at that point—comparatively. Then all the French and American guns opened with one world-shaking crash. From the Essen Trench the ground fell away gently, then rose in a long slope, along which could be made out the zigzags of the German trenches. The Bois de Vipre was a bluish mangled wood, two kilometres north. Peering from their shelters, the battalion saw all this ground swept by a hurricane of shell-fire. Red and green flames broke in orderly rows where the 75s showered down on the Boche lines; great black clouds leaped up where the larger shells fell roaring. The hillside and the wood were all veiled in low-hanging smoke, and the flashes came redly through the cloud. Far off, Blanc Mont way, a lucky shell found and exploded a great ammunition-dump—the battalion felt the long tremor from the shock of it come to them through the earth and watched, minutes after the high crimson flare of the explosion, a broad column of smoke that shot straight up from it, hundreds of feet, and hung in air, spreading out at the top like some unearthly tree.
The men crowed and chortled in the trench. “Boy, ain’t Heinie gettin’ it now!” “Hear that shell gurglin’ as she goes?—That’s gas.” “Listen to them 75s. You know, I never see one of them little guns that I don’t want to go up and kiss it. Remember that counter-attack they smeared in front of us at Soissons?”
The heavens seemed roofed over with long, keening noises—sounds like the sharp ripping of silk, magnified, running in swift arcs from horizon to horizon. These were the quickfiring 75s, the clear-cut bark of the discharges merging into a crashing roar. Other sounds came with them, deeper in key, the whine growing to a rumble—these were the heavier shells—105s, 155s, 210s. Almost, one expected to look up and see them, like swift, deadly birds, some small, some enormous, all terrible. Gas-shells could be distinguished from the high explosive by the throaty gurgle of the liquid in them. “Move down the trench to the left,” came the order.