“Sergeant, you heard what the colonel said. But if you think she’d be safer—I’d suggest volunteers. And by the way, sergeant, I want a piece of tenderloin—the T-bone part——”
Occasional wounded Frenchmen drifted back.
The cow was duly secured in the wood, men risking their lives thereby. The Boche shelled methodically for two hours, and the Marines were reduced to a fearful state of nerves—“Is that dam’ heifer gonna live forever?—” Two or three kilometres away fighting was going on. The lieutenant, with his glass, picked up far, running figures on the slope of a hill. You caught a flicker, points of light on the gray-green fields—bayonets. Occasional wounded Frenchmen wandered back, weary, bearded men, very dirty. They looked with dull eyes at the Americans—“Très mauvais, là-bas! Beaucoup Boche, là—” The Marines were not especially interested. Their regiment had been a year in France, training. Now they, too, were dirty and tired and very hungry. The war would get along ... it always had.
A week ago, Memorial Day, there had been no drills. The 2d Division, up from a tour in the quiet Verdun trenches, rested pleasantly around Bourmont. Rumors of an attack by the 1st Division, at Cantigny, filtered in. Cantigny was a town up toward Montdidier. Notions of geography were the vaguest—but it was in the north, where all the heavy fighting was. It appeared that the 2d was going up to relieve the 1st.... “Sure! we’ll relieve ’em. But if they wanted a fight, why didn’t they let us know in the first place?—We’d a-showed ’em what shock troops can do!”
The division set out in camions; in the neighborhood of Meaux they were turned around and sent out the Paris-Metz road, along which the civilian population from the country between the Chemin des Dames and the Marne, together with the débris of a French army, was coming back. No man who saw that road those first days of June ever forgot it. A stream of old men and children and old and young women turned out of their homes between two sunrises, with what they could carry in their hands. You saw an ancient in a linen smock and sabots, trundling a wheelbarrow, whereon rode a woman as old as himself, with a feather-bed and a selection of copper pots and a string of garlic. There were families in amazing horse-drawn vehicles, models of the Third Empire, and horses about as old, clutching unreasonable selections of household effects—onyx clocks and bird-cages and rabbits—what you like. Women carrying babies. Children—solemn little boys in black pinafores, and curly-headed, high-nosed little girls, trudging hand-in-hand. People of elegance and refinement on inadequate shoes. Broad-faced peasants. Inhabitants of a thousand peaceful little villages and farms, untouched by the war since 1914. Now the Boche was out again, and those quiet places, that had drowsed in obscurity while generations lived and worked and died, were presently to be known to all the world—names like Bouresches, and Belleau, and Fismes, and Vierzy, and Fismettes. They walked with their faces much on their shoulders, these people, and there was horror in their eyes. The Marines took notice of another side of war.... “Hard on poor folks, war is.” “You said it!”—“Say—think about my folks, an’ your folks, out on the road like that!...” “Yeh. I’m thinkin’ about it. An’ when we meet that Boche, I’m gonna do something about it—Look—right nice-lookin’ girl, yonder!”
There were French soldiers in the rout, too. Nearly all were wounded, or in the last stages of exhaustion. They did not appear to be first-line troops; they were old, bearded fellows of forty and forty-five, territorials; or mean, unpleasant-looking Algerians, such troops as are put in to hold a quiet sector. Seven or eight divisions of them had been in the line between Soissons and Rheims, which was, until 27 May, a quiet sector. On that day forty-odd divisions, a tidal wave of fighting Germans, with the greatest artillery concentration the Boche ever effected, was flung upon them, and they were swept away, as a levee goes before a flood. They had fought; they had come back, fighting, thirty-five miles in three days; and the Boche, though slowed up, was still advancing. They were holding him along the Marne, and at Château-Thierry a machine-gun battalion of the American 3d Division was piling up his dead in heaps around the bridgeheads, but to the northwest he was still coming. And to the northwest the 2d Division was gathering. During the 2d, the 3d, and the 4th of June it grouped itself, first the 4th Brigade of Marines, with some guns, and then the regular infantrymen of the 9th and 23d. Already, around Hautevesnes, there had been a brush with advancing Germans, and the Germans were given a new experience: rifle-fire that begins to kill at 800 yards; they found it very interesting. This was 5 June; the battalion near Marigny, on the left of the Marine Brigade, had a feeling that they were going in to-morrow.... The men thought lazily on events, and lounged in the wheat, and watched that clump of trees—and at last an agonized bellow came on the echo of a bursting shell—“Well—she’s stopped one! Thought she musta dug in—Le’s go get it——”
Presently there was lots of steak, and later a bitter lesson was repeated—mustn’t build cooking-fires with green wood, where the Boche can see the smoke. But everybody lay down on full bellies. Before dark the last French were falling back. Some time during the night Brigade sent battle orders to the 1st Battalion of the 5th Marines, and at dawn they were in a wood near Champillon. Nearly every man had steaks in his mess-pan, and there was hope for cooking them for breakfast. Instead....
Sketches from Captain Thomason’s note-book.