My Colored Battalion

by Warner A. Ross

As I just said, I was sent into the lines ahead of the Regiment to study the sector, learn about the enemy opposite and about conditions in general. When we arrived within hearing of the big guns and a little later when our trucks came within range just north of St. Die, I was all interest and all attention, for at last I was getting into the sort of place I had been reading and thinking and wondering about since 1914, and had been working and training for every minute since I entered the training camp at Fort Sheridan, May 10th, 1917. It’s hard work getting ready to be killed in a modern war.

The Regular Army Fifth Division, already experienced in the line, was then holding this sector. For several days I was busy at regimental headquarters located in what was left of the village of Denipere. Then with the assistance of guides, I started out to thoroughly cover and learn the sector. This was by no means a small task: it meant many miles of walking and hard climbing for many days, to say nothing of thrills and mental exercise. Our boys had turned a quiet sector into a very lively one and a few days before the Fifth Division moved out they reduced and were partly successful in holding the Chapelle salient. Taken all in all it was somewhat exciting for a novice exploring the very first lines.

There were three battalion fronts or sectors in the front our regiment was to occupy. Each of the three battalions had two companies in front, one in support and one in reserve. The companies were shifted every nine or ten days. French artillery would be behind us. Ours was in training near Bordeaux. The center battalion sector was called C. R. Fontinelle. I soon learned that it got most of the enemy’s fire and raids because of the nature of the terrain, meaning lay of the land. This would be held by our Second Battalion, but I had little idea then that I would soon command it.

The entire front in France was divided into battalion sectors or centers of resistance, called C. R.’s. The battalion was the infantry fighting unit in this war. When in the line, it had everything attached to it to make it a complete organization in itself—machine gun companies, engineer troops, one pounder and Stokes mortar outfits, supply equipment, medical personnel and so on. Regimental and brigade fronts varied in size and in the way they were held. Often a regiment had but one battalion in front, sometimes two and rarely three, as in our portion of the St. Die sector.

There were three lines or systems of defense in this sector. First, the front or first line system of works and trenches, combat groups, dugouts, communicating ways, machine gun implacements, trench mortars, wire and, well, it would take a long time to even name them all. An entire evening easily could be spent telling about any one little phase of the thing. From two to three miles farther back in this sector was the secondary lines or system with trenches, wire and everything, all ready for occupancy. A little to the rear was most of the light artillery. Several miles farther back was the third line system and the heavy artillery. The front line system was most interesting and by far the most dangerous. There was this about it, too: In case of enemy attack they held. In other words, their occupants stayed and fought to the last man. Those were standing orders and at that time in my eyes it added a sort of awful fascination to the front line trenches and men.

One of the things that impressed me during my first days in the line was the extent, the magnitude of the works, the prodigious amount of labor that had been required to excavate and build these positions while under fire, the cutting and tunneling in many places through solid rock, also the military knowledge that had been brought to bear in the locating and construction of combat groups, observation posts, fields of fire and the like and the amount of system and pluck and energy required to hold them. But one awful, ugly, discouraging word, from a world standpoint, seemed written all over the enterprise—Waste—waste of life, waste of time, waste of governments’ money, waste of all those things misguided humanity loves and fights for. What a shocking, what a saddening lesson from the standpoint of waste alone!

Then as I became accustomed and somewhat hardened to the idea of appalling and foolish waste, another thing began to appeal to me more strongly. The beauty of the scenery and the invigorating air and sunshine of the mountains. It was summer, radiant, glowing, glorious summer. All nature vibrating and tingling with life and kindness. The sky so bright, the air so crisp, so bracing; the trees so green and fresh. The flowers, the grass, even the weeds and the very moss on the rocks seemed charged and melodious with joy.

Little rivulets, cold and sparkling, leaped over great boulders through shaded ravines and joined the hilarious stream away below which farther on, where the big ravine had widened, calmly wound its way amid the ruins of the quaint village called Denipere and out through the wide valley beyond. And what a panorama that valley was from the road on a mountainside north of the town, especially at evening with the parting kiss of a great red sun glowing on the winding river between its green banks and its clumps of willows, and glistening on the tile roofs of the remaining white stone houses, the various colored fields and the patches of wood, the white roads and their rows of tall trees, the hills and shaded depressions, and the gorgeous background of mountains in the distance. It looked different each time I viewed it, but always there was the peaceful glow and glory of God’s handiwork. Here, indeed, was La Belle France.

Many a time, at first, I used to forget myself, lost in buoyant meditation, as I gazed over that enchanting valley or walked along the stately mountain roads enveloped in dense foliage, or as I traveled down some secluded pathway or lover’s lane beside a rippling brook, inhaling deeply the pungent odor of growing things and cool damp earth. Then, with a start, I would come back to the realization that those screaming shells, those metallic cracks, those weird, jarring blasts were meant to mangle and kill! That an enemy bent on destruction was only a mile or so away; that those glittering airplanes buzzing high above were on missions of hate and murder; that those little mounds I saw everywhere with wooden crosses at one end were the graves of fine young men who had been mangled and slain by their fellow beings. All the surroundings so inspiring, so beautiful; all nature so smiling and so harmonious, and poor, deluded, vain man so out of harmony. Somewhere, somehow, something was wrong—terribly, damnably wrong.

Then down in the very front lines in the edge of the “abomination of desolation” called no-man’s land, I watched those fine young men of our Fifth Division, standing silently by their automatics or rifles, gazing with ashen faces and staring eyes over that torn dreaded expanse that separated them from a cunning and deadly foe, and gradually my feelings changed from happiness due to health, the mountain air and the charms of nature, to feelings of depression and sadness, and hatred toward those who advocate and perpetuate in their blind vanity and self-righteous greed those principles and policies that lead to strife, to heart-ache and to war.