My Colored Battalion

by Warner A. Ross

By nine thirty-five all platoons assigned to the first line, but two, were represented on the line of our objectives. As prearranged this word reached me through runners. The two outfits had been delayed by machine gun nests, but they soon came up. By ten o’clock liaison was fully established, combat groups had been located and were digging in, machine guns and trench mortars were being placed, and in other ways we were getting ready to withstand counter attacks as well as artillery fire, which, if we held, soon would include more gas. I had sent two platoons of the support company to help protect our right flank, which was the eastern edge of the wood.

So I wrote a message, put it into the small aluminum shell on the leg of a pigeon. The man released him and we watched him rise and circle, then head southward with word for the Commanding General fifteen miles back at Division Headquarters in Marbache that Bois Frehaut was ours—all objectives reached, were holding and would continue to hold.

Then I took my staff and Artillery Liaison officers and my runners and went back to a prearranged locality in the edge of the wood and established my permanent headquarters or P. C. in an open shell hole. A few men set to work with spades and picks to shape it up and give it a little level floor space.

A Bosch airplane appeared over the edge of the wood flying low and saw us. He circled a few times and dropped out some signals. In just four minutes by my watch we heard two big shells, one just behind the other, coming right at us. After a few months’ experience you get so you can tell from the sound just about where a shell is going to hit. One of these struck twenty-five yards beyond us, the other almost the same distance to our left. In less than a minute we heard two more coming the same route. One struck twenty yards short, the other not quite so short, but a little to the right. They had the range. The guns were five and a half or six miles away.

After the sixth shot had just missed I ordered everybody out of the hole. They occupied others a short distance away. The airplane, so low that the men were shooting at it with their rifles, noted this scattering, but he evidently noted, too, that I had remained, so the firing continued. I felt a sort of pride about sticking to my headquarters. The thirty-sixth shell fired at it struck right near the edge and covered me up. Oh, yes, I was given energetic assistance in getting out. We cleaned out the hole and resumed business. Now that the airplane had signaled “a hit” and gone, it was as safe as any other place in that locality.

People said it seemed miraculous that with so many big shells fired at it and hitting on all sides in such a small area, each one had failed to hit directly in that big hole. But I was not conceited enough to think that the Huns were firing shells that curved by magic for my special benefit. I had estimated during the “Death March” just before dawn that I had one chance in three of coming through that operation alive and one in twelve of escaping serious wounds or gassing. I believed in God all right, but I did not think then and do not now believe that He was down there taking an active part in that horrible orgy of suffering and destruction. I felt that if anything other than vain humanity was fighting on or with either side it must be his Satanic Majesty. I was not trying to palm off on God the things that be Caesar’s. However—well, that calls for another lecture. But don’t any of you get an idea that I’m trying to belittle true religion. I think it’s the greatest thing by far in the world or accessible to the world today.

This little digression about something besides the battle, I suppose, is the result of a habit I got into in the front lines of thinking when things were unusually dangerous and there was nothing to do but let it work for the time being, of something pleasant and wholly unassociated with the nasty business in hand.

I remember how Lieutenant Stuart, my Battalion Scout Officer (he was half Indian) when we had finished discussing the details of a patrolling expedition he was going to lead in a few minutes—and it took a lot of nerve to prowl around no-man’s land in the dead of night—would pause, then with a broad smile and chuckling, a little, would tell me some trifling story, usually about something that occurred when he was a small child away back in Arizona. Then, still grinning and chuckling, he’d get up and say: “Well, Major, it’s time to pull out. The boys are waiting. See you as soon as I get back.” I never felt right sure he’d come back.

My Adjutant, too, when we’d be waiting for some terrible thing to happen during the night, expecting an assault, shells dropping promiscuously and perhaps a bombing plane buzzing overhead, used to tell some of the most outlandish stories of his experiences while a regular in Hawaii or the Philippines or some place. I suppose all men exposed to real danger had some way of “kidding” themselves along under most any conditions. If they didn’t have they were in a bad way.

Soon after I was resurrected from the shell hole a runner from the right front company (by the way, he was sighted in Division orders and should have had a medal for the way he got to me) stumbled in exhausted, with a note from Green (who, under machine gun fire, had climbed a tree to get a better view) advising me that the enemy was preparing in force to rush our right flank. Two platoons, one from the support, the other from the Reserve Company, and my two remaining reserve machine guns had barely time to reach the spot to which they were ordered when the assault started. By flanking our would-be flankers as they came over a ridge, they saved the day. Several attacks against our front failed to succeed because of well directed fire.