The 151st Field Artillery Brigade

by Richard M. Russell

The next quota of men come into camp; we have graduated; they are the rookies; we are the soldiers; we laugh; they look puzzled.

Then came the winter, and what a winter! Arthur Mometer said it was zero hour all the time. Of course he did not know. He was a Rookie, but somehow it didn’t make it any warmer nor the snow less deep. We shovelled snow and froze doing it, we had exercises and we froze doing that, we drilled with the same result. Live horses took the place of those ever-to-be-remembered wooden monstrosities. We groomed them and they bit us. We exercised them and they kicked us. But we got hard and we got health and we became soldiers. Individuality was superseded by discipline.

About this time a touch of war and Hun Hellishness was brought home to us. William S. McNair, Colonel of the 6th Field Artillery was promoted in France and ordered to America to command our Brigade. Accordingly he left France on the U. S. S. “Antilles”. At about 6.45 in the morning of October 17th a German submarine succeeded in torpedoing his boat. She sank immediately with the loss of about 65 lives. The General was in the water for some three quarters of an hour, when he was taken into a life boat. Six hours later one of the convoy, the Morgan yacht “Corsair” returned from trying to find the submarine and took aboard all the survivors. They returned to France and two weeks later the General again sailed for home on the transport “Tenadores”. The “Tenadores” has since been sunk by a mine, but happily for the Brigade it was not on this voyage.

Christmas came and with it the joy of home for a few, but the majority of the men must stay in camp. It was all part of the great task we had undertaken. We accepted it as such. Transportation was not available to move our now vast army to its homes. We made merry, or rather, we did better than that; we pretended to make merry. We sang the songs we had rehearsed for the occasion. It was a holiday. There were no drills. We had time to think. We can be honest now. Our thoughts were not those of the schoolboy on his holiday with his plans for stockings and Christmas tree, dinner and stomach ache. They were far-away thoughts of things, once commonplace and taken for granted, now suddenly and forever dearer than life itself; things which in fact made life worth while. Home, loved, of course, but so much a part of us that we had grown to accept it as a matter of right. But strangely enough our thoughts carried us farther. We found that we were longing for the little individual problems of our daily routine in the past,—problems that had once perplexed and annoyed us we now craved as a hungry man craves food.

Months slipped by, and with them the winter. Spring rumors of France took the place of winter rumors, but the warm weather and a few guns found us ready for the real work of artillerymen. Reveille was an hour earlier and retreat an hour later. But we were up hours before reveille with a call to stables followed by boots and saddles. We hitched the horses to the guns in the darkness, that we might get all the daylight on the range. A runaway was not an unusual diversion. But as we had become fit, so did the horses. Every day saw men and horses in better condition and better trained. Team work and order was taking the place of individual endeavor and chaos. A machine with intelligence was in the making, and results were beginning to assert themselves. Each cog was finding its place and taking hold with a will. A sharp command in the crisp air put the works instantly in motion, where a month before explanations, demonstrations, repeated attempts and failures had only succeeded in getting parts of our engine to function. Now the gears were adjusted, we needed but to limber them up and oil the parts. An occasional “Well Done” would take the place of continuous reprimand. We became proud of ourselves and our organization. A healthy spirit of rivalry stalked abroad. We were the best section in the best battery, and of course our regiment was the best in the Brigade, if not in the army! Officers were proud of their men, and the men were proud of the officers. Each began to know the other, his powers and his limitations. Sympathy took the place of misunderstanding and surliness.

Colonel Geo. M. Brooke

So on the range, the officers acquired the theoretical elements of artillery firing. They learnt to figure their data with accuracy and to convey it to their batteries in terse and comprehensive commands. The men in their turn were seeing the purpose of the monotonous daily drills of the six months past and the value of team work. They acquired an intimate knowledge of the pieces they were serving; the delicacy of the mechanism and the consequent necessity for accurate laying. They responded with alacrity to the orders of their superiors, and the guns responded to the slightest touch of the crews. All were alert, smart, prompt,—officers and men alike, fascinated with the possibilities of the game they were rapidly learning to play. Even the details, after months of labor, became proficient at the wig wag, semaphore, buzzer, map-making and sketching; in short, all of those things which we discovered later, played such an important part in winning the war.

So when the government inspectors began to look us over and rumors flew faster, we were not found wanting. The wheels were oiled and the spirit was there.

But here I am rudely stopped by the adjutant of the 301st who says we can’t leave Devens without a Horse Show. Of course he is right. It can’t be done, although it does seem tough after having oiled the wheels to such perfection. However what must be done shall be done gracefully; so thought Captain Page at the second hurdle where he decided to make the rest of the trip on his ear.