As he was giving me the plans and maps I heard a whoop from the train outside. I ran to the door and found that, for some reason, best known to himself, the French engineer had started up again and my battalion was rapidly disappearing down the track. I started on the dead run after them. Fortunately some of the officers saw what was happening, and by force of arms succeeded in persuading the engineer to stop the train.
That night we detrained a couple of days' march from Chaumont-en-Vexin, where division headquarters were to be. We hiked through a beautiful peaceful country, the most lovely we had yet seen in France, billeting for the night in a little town where a whole company of mine slept in an old château. At Chaumont we stayed for some few days, maneuvering while the division was being fully assembled.
From Chaumont we marched north for four days to the Montdidier sector. I never shall forget this march. Spring was on the land, the trees were budding, wild flowers covered the ground, the birds were singing. Our dusty brown column wound up hill and down, through patches of woods and little villages. By us, all day, toward the south streamed the French refugees from villages threatened, or already taken, by the Hun. Heavy home-made wagons trundled past, drawn by every kind of animal, and piled high with hay and farm produce, furniture, and odds and ends of household belongings. Tramping beside them or riding on them were women and children, most of them dazed and with a haunted look in their faces. Sometimes the wagons would be halted and their occupants squatted by the road, cooking a scanty meal from what they had with them.
To us in this country, thanks to Providence, not to our own forethought or character, this description is only so many words. Unless one has seen it, it is impossible to visualize the battered village, the column of refugees that starts at each great battle and streams ceaselessly toward Paris and southern France, the apple orchards and gardens torn beyond recognition, the desolation and destruction seemingly impossible of reparation.
Nothing would have been better for our countrymen and women than for each and every one of them to have spent some time in the war zone. When I think of men of the type of Bryan and Ford, when I think of their self-satisfied lives of ease, when I think of what they did to permit disaster and death to threaten this country, it makes me wonder more than ever at the long-suffering kindness of humanity which permits such as they still to enjoy the benefits of citizenship in this great land which they have so signally failed to serve.
When we took over the Montdidier sector it was not, nor did it ever become, the type found in the parts of the front where warfare had been going on without movement for more than three years. Trenches were shallow and scanty, and dugouts were almost lacking. Indeed, from this time on, with one exception, the division never held an established sector. The line at Montdidier had been established shortly after the break-through by the Germans, by a French territorial division which was marching north, expecting to relieve some friendly troops in front of it. They suddenly encountered, head on, the German columns that were marching south. Both sides deployed, went into position, and dug in where they were. The First Division took over from these troops.
The first morning we were in the Montdidier sector the Huns shelled us heavily. Immediately after they raided a part of our front line held by a platoon of D Company, commanded by Lieutenant Dabney, a very good fellow from Louisville, Ky. The Germans were repulsed with loss. We suffered no casualties ourselves except from the German bombardment. The next evening we picked up the body of the German sergeant commanding the party, whom we had killed.
We staged a very successful raid ourselves at about this time. The raiding party was composed of eighty-five men of D Company, under the command of Lieutenant Freml. The section of German trenches selected as the objective of the operation lay in a little wood about one hundred yards from our front line. Our patrols had reported that this part of the German line was particularly heavily held. In the first light of the half dawn the raiding party worked up into position, passing by through the mist like black shadows. At the agreed time our artillery came down with both the heavies and the 75's, and the patch of woods was enveloped in clouds of smoke through which the bursts of the H. E. showed like flashes of lightning. In ten minutes the guns lifted and formed a box barrage, and the raiding party went over. So rapid was the whole maneuver that the German defensive barrage did not come down until after the raiding party had reached the enemy trenches.
The enemy trenches were found, as had been expected, full of Germans. Most of them were in dugouts or funk holes, and did not make a severe resistance. "Come out of there," the man in charge of the particular detail for that part of the trench would call down the dugout. If the Huns came out, they were taken prisoner. If they did not, a couple of incendiary grenades were thrown down the dugout and our men moved on.
We captured, in all, thirty-three prisoners, of whom one was an officer, and probably killed and wounded as many more. Our losses were one killed and five slightly wounded. Unfortunately the one man killed was Lieutenant Freml, the raid leader, who fell in a hand-to-hand combat. Freml was an old Regular Army sergeant and had fought in the Philippine Islands. After this war he was planning to return and establish a chicken farm. He always kept his head no matter what the circumstances were and his solutions for situations that arose were always practical. His men were devoted to him and would follow him anywhere.