OFF FOR CAMP MILLS

FUNERAL AT LUNÉVILLE. GROUP AT LEFT CENTER: GENERAL MENOHER, GENERAL LENIHAN, SECRETARY BAKER

OVERLOOKING BACCARAT

GENERAL PERSHING CONFERRING D. S. C.’S

FATHER DUFFY’S STORY

COLONEL DONOVAN IN FIGHTING TRIM AFTER ST. MIHIEL

FATHER DUFFY’S
STORY
A TALE OF HUMOR AND HEROISM, OF
LIFE AND DEATH WITH THE FIGHTING
SIXTY-NINTH
BY
FRANCIS P. DUFFY
CHAPLAIN, 165TH INFANTRY
WITH AN HISTORICAL APPENDIX BY
JOYCE KILMER
NEW

YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

Copyright, 1919,
By George H. Doran Company
Printed in the United States of America

TO THE MEMORY OF OUR DEAD
THIS BOOK
IS REVERENTLY DEDICATED

PREFACE

On one occasion, after having had to swallow an exceptionally large dose of complimentary eloquence, I stated that I was going to borrow a title for my book from my favorite philosopher, Mr. Dooley, and call it “Alone in Europe.”

The title that has been given it sounds almost as egoistic as that; but there will be found in these pages other names than my own. Indeed, objection may be made from a literary point of view that the book bristles with names. I could not write my story otherwise. I knew these men, and what they did, and my only regret is that I have undoubtedly overlooked some, especially amongst replacements, whose names and deeds should be mentioned. Battles are not fought by commanding officers alone, not even by chaplains unaided; and the men who do the fighting usually get little personal credit for their valor.

My chronicle claims no merit save that of being true. The only critics I had in mind while writing it were those who fought in France. If they say that the pictures are true, I am content. The diary style has been deliberately chosen because it permits the introduction of incidents, and also lends itself to the telling of a plain unvarnished tale.

Every Regiment in a combat division has a similar story, if any one of its members has the knowledge and patience to tell it. “The Irish 69th” had naturally its own special flavor of race with the buoyant spirits, the military élan, and the religious ardor that mark the race. No picture of the regiment would be complete that did not give a generous place to this phase of its life.

Happily, the Irish spirit has always managed to combine generous tolerance with its fervors. As a result, there are no more enthusiastic adherents of the Irish 69th than those of its members who did not share in the blood or the creed of the majority.

As for myself, I liked them all. I am a very Irish, very Catholic, very American person if anybody challenges my convictions. But normally, and let alone, I am just plain human. My appreciation of patriotism, or courage, or any other attractive human trait, is not limited in any degree by racial or religious or sectional prejudice. That was the spirit of our Army; may it always be the spirit of our Republic.

Joyce Kilmer was to have written this book. I took over the task after his death in battle. The manuscript he left had been hurriedly written, at intervals in a busy soldier existence, which interested him far more than literary work. I have taken the liberty of adding his work, incomplete though it is, to my own; because I feel that Kilmer would be glad at having his name associated with the story of the Regiment which had his absolute devotion; and because I cannot resist the temptation of associating with my own the name of one of the noblest specimens of humanity that has existed in our times.

I wish to thank Major Meaney, Major Bootz, Captain Allen, Lieutenants Harold Allen and Thomas C. P. Martin, Sergeant Major O’Connell and the Company Clerks for data for this book; Sergeant William Halligan, Privates John F. McLoughlin and Arthur Shea, Mr. Paul Shea, and Father John B. Kelly for assistance in preparing the manuscript for publication; and Sergeants T. C. Ranscht and R. L. Clarke for the maps that appear in this volume.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

FATHER DUFFY’S STORY

FATHER DUFFY’S STORY

CHAPTER I
PREPARATIONS AT HOME

RECTORY, CHURCH OF OUR SAVIOUR, BRONX

June, 1917

War with Germany was declared on April 6th, 1917. Immediately the National Guard Regiments, knowing that they would be the first to be called from civilian occupations, began campaigning for recruits. Ours was conducted with little noise or speech making. An Irish Regiment has its troubles in time of peace, but when the call to arms was sounding we knew that if they let us we could easily offer them an Irish Brigade for the service. We were more occupied with quality than with numbers. The one bit of publicity we indulged in was to send round our machine-gun trucks through the city streets with the placard, “Don’t join the 69th unless you want to be among the first to go to France.” That was the only kind of men we wanted—not impressionable youth who would volunteer under the stimulus of a brass band or a flood of patriotic oratory. The old-timers were told to bring in friends who had the right stuff in them. The Catholic Clergy were asked to send in good men from the Parish athletic clubs.

The response was immediate. Every night the big reception rooms were packed with men taking the physical tests. The medical staff had to be increased at once to meet the situation and officers and enlisted men were impressed into the service for taking the minor tests. These tests were rigid. Nobody was taken who fell below the standard in age, height, weight, sight or chest measurement—or who had liquor aboard or who had not a clean skin. Many of those who were turned down for underweight or imperfect feet were readily accepted in other Regiments which had more difficulty in getting men. And when we received contingents from those regiments later on I often had to listen to the humorous reproach, “Well, I got in in spite of the lot of you.”

Amongst the sturdiest and brightest of our recruits were two young men who had recently been Jesuit Novices. I amused one Jesuit friend and, I am afraid, shocked another by saying that they were exercising a traditional religious privilege of seeking a higher state of perfection by quitting the Jesuits and joining the 69th.

We came back from Texas less than a thousand strong. Of these we could count on 500 for a new war, which left us 1,500 to go to meet the number then fixed for an Infantry Regiment—2,002. We were not long in reaching that number. Lieutenant Colonel Reed telegraphed the War Department for permission, pending the proposed increase of a Regiment to 3,600, to establish a waiting list, but the application was refused. In the latter days we were turning away 300 a week, sending them to other Regiments.

Our 2,000 men were a picked lot. They came mainly from Irish County Societies and from Catholic Athletic Clubs. A number of these latter Irish bore distinctly German, French, Italian or Polish names. They were Irish by adoption, Irish by association or Irish by conviction. The 69th never attempted to set up any religious test. It was an institution offered to the Nation by a people grateful for liberty, and it always welcomed and made part of it any American citizen who desired to serve in it. But, naturally, men of Irish birth or blood were attracted by the traditions of the 69th, and many Catholics wanted to be with a regiment where they could be sure of being able to attend to their religious duties. About 5 percent of the 2,000 were Irish neither by race nor racial creed.

69TH REGIMENT ARMORY

July 20th, 1917

Frank Ward O’Malley of the New York Sun has written up in his inimitable style a little scene from life in an Irish regiment. The newcomers are not yet accustomed to the special church regulations relieving soldiers of the obligation of Friday abstinence. Last Friday the men came back from a hard morning’s drill to find on the table a generous meal of ham and cabbage. The old-timers from the Border pitched into this, to the scandal of many of the newer men who refused to eat it, thus leaving all the more for the graceless veterans. After dinner a number of them came to me to ask if it were true that it was all right. I said it was, because there was a dispensation for soldiers. “Dispensation,” said a Jewish boy, “what good is a dispensation for Friday to me. I can’t eat ham any day of the week. Say, Father, that waiter guy, with one turn of his wrist, bust two religions.”

POLO GROUNDS

July 25th, 1917

A great day for Ireland. Everybody aboard and up the river to 152nd Street and then to the Polo Grounds. Baseball Game as benefit for the 69th, between Giants and Cincinnatis, thanks to the generosity of our good friends, Harry Hempstead, John Whalen, Herbert Vreeland, and John J. McGraw. A fine game—plenty of people, plenty of fun, and best of all, plenty of money for the exchequer, which, after an ancient venerable custom, is going to have an ecclesiastical chancellor. Mr. Daniel M. Brady, the Godfather of the regiment, had procured the signature of President Wilson on a baseball which he auctioned off during the game. I asked him if he had arranged for a purchaser. “I have selected one,” he said. “Is he aware that he is going to buy it?” I asked. “He will be informed at the proper time,” said Mr. Brady with a smile. “How much is he going to pay for it?” “Well, I don’t consider $500.00 too much to pay for the privilege.” So after a certain number of bids, real or fictitious, the ball was knocked down at $500.00 to Mr. James Butler, who accepted the verdict smilingly and was allowed the privilege of handing the ball back to me. I am to auction it in Paris for the French Orphans’ Fund. So Mr. Brady says, though I wish I had his confidence that we shall ever get to Paris.

ARMORY

August 5th, 1917

Father John Kelly had me meet Joyce Kilmer this evening. Nothing of the long-haired variety about him—a sturdy fellow, manly, humorous, interesting. He was a little shame-faced at first, for he had told Father Kelly that he was going to join up with the 69th and he is now in the 7th. “I went to the Armory twice,” he said, “but failed to find the recruiting officer.” I told him that if we could not have him in the 69th the next best place was the 7th, but he still wants to return to his first love, so I shall be glad to arrange it. If he left the whole matter up to my decision he would stay home and look after his large family and let men with fewer responsibilities undertake this task, at least until such time as the country would have need of every man. But he is bound to do his share and do it at once, so there is no use taking off the fine edge of his enthusiasm. He is going about this thing in exactly the same spirit that led him to enter the Church. He sees what he considers a plain duty, and he is going ahead to perform it, calm and clear eyed and without the slightest regard to what the consequences may be.

I shall be glad to have him with us personally for the pleasure of his companionship, and also for the sake of the regiment to have a poet and historian who will confer upon us the gift of immortality. I compared him with the old lad that one lot of Greeks sent to another to stir them to victory by his songs; and he wagged a pair of vigorous protesting legs at me to show he was no cripple. So I tried him with a quotation from a poet that no poet could ever resist; and with some reservations about the words “Grey Bard” I managed to drive my compliment home:

For not to have been dipt in Lethe’s lake

Could make the son of Thetis not to die;

But that grey bard did him immortal make

With verses dipt in dews of Castaly.

ARMORY

August 18th, 1917

We are still full of excitement at our selection from among the National Guard Regiments of New York to represent our State in the selected 42nd or Rainbow Division which is to go abroad amongst the very first for active service. It is an undeniable compliment to the condition of the Regiment and we are pleased at that as well as at the prospects of carrying our battle-ringed standards to fly their colors on the fields of France. Our Regimental organization has been accepted intact—it is no composite Regiment that has been selected; it is the 69th New York. Our ranks however are to be swelled to the new total of 3,600 men by the transfer of enlisted men from the five other city Regiments of Infantry. We would have been glad to have done our own recruiting as we could easily have managed; but these are the orders. We shall give a royal Irish welcome to our new companions in arms. They are volunteers like ourselves and fellow townsmen, and after a little feeling out of one another’s qualities we shall be a united Regiment.

Already we have received the contingent from our old friends in the 7th—handed over to us with a large gesture of comradeship which that old Regiment knows so well how to make. The departing body of 320 men were escorted by the remaining officers and men, and passed through their guard of honor to our Armory floor. Our 2,000 lined the walls and many perched themselves on the iron beams overhead. They cheered and cheered and cheered till the blare of the bands was unheard in the joyous din—till hearts beat so full and fast that they seemed too big for the ribs that confined them, till tears of emotion came, and something mystical was born in every breast—the soul of a Regiment. Heaven be good to the enemy when these cheering lads go forward together into battle.

CAMP MILLS

September 1st, 1917

We are tenting tonight on the Hempstead Plains, where Colonel Duffy and the Old 69th encamped in 1898, when getting ready for service in the Spanish War. It is a huge regiment now—bigger, I think, than the whole Irish Brigade ever was in the Civil War.

We have received our new men transferred from the 12th, 14th, 23rd and 71st N. G. N. Y. Our band played them into Camp with the Regimental Air of “Garry Owen” mingled with the good-fellow strains of “Hail! Hail! the Gang’s All Here.”

All in all, the newcomers are a fine lot. A couple of our sister organizations have flipped the cards from the bottom of the pack in some instances and worked off on us some of their least desirables. On the other hand, all the Regiments have made up for that by allowing men anxious to come to us to change places with those who prefer to stick where they are. This gives us a large number of the men we want—those that feel their feet on their native heath in the 69th, and those that like its recruiting slogan, “If you don’t want to be amongst the first to go to France, don’t join the 69th.” For the rest, the Company Commanders and Surgeons know “Thirty-five distinct damnations,” or almost that many, by which an undesirable can be returned to civilian life to take his chances in the draft. Our recruiting office has been reëstablished at the Armory. We can get all the good men we want.

As he had put the matter in my hands Kilmer did not come over with the men from the 7th, but I had the matter of his transfer arranged after a short delay.

CAMP MILLS

September 26th, 1917

I do not know whether to take it as a mark of general interest in the Old Regiment or as the result of the spontaneous big-heartedness of a kindly and enthusiastic Irish artist—but John McCormack sang for us tonight. Sang in the open air with no stinting of voice or program. Our lads could have listened to him till morning; I never saw such an eager mob. They kept calling for their favorite McCormack songs and he, like the fine big Bouchal that he is, laughed at their sallies and gave them their hearts’ desire, until I closed the unique performance by reminding them (and him) that we had a financial interest in his voice because he was to sing for the benefit of our Trustees Fund at no distant date. While I write, the camp is buzzing around me with talk of the great tenor. A voice from the darkness sums it up. “I always knew he was a great singer. We got a lot of his records at home. But the records never learned me that he’s such a hell of a fine fellow.”

CAMP MILLS

Sunday

I mess with the Headquarters Company, and James Collintine, who has the job of looking after us, always welcomes Sunday morning because it gives a chance for a friendly chat between the two of us. James had been a deep-water sailor for a good many years since he first left his home in the Old Country, but has taken up with the Infantry because it gives more prospects for fighting service in this war. This morning he said, “Father Duffy, did ye iver hear of Father Hearrn of my parish in the County Longford?” “No, Jim, I never did.” “Well, he was the grandest man in all Ireland. There was eight hundhred min in Maynooth College where they study to be priests and he could lick ivery dam wan of thim. He was a fine big man, six foot two in his stockin’ feet. He used to come down the sthreet with a big stick in his hand, and if anybody gave anny throuble he’d knock you down just as quick as look at you. The whole parish loved him. Wanst there was a fight in the village green between the peelers and the people, and Father Hearrn was sent for to keep the peace and he came down the road bowling over the peelers as if they was nine pins. There niver was a nicer man within the four seas of Ireland.”

A soldier of Company K came to my tent one afternoon last week and stood at the entrance fumbling his hat in his hand like an Irish tenant of the old days that had not the rent to pay the landlord. “What’s the matter, Tom?” “I took a dhrop too much, and Captain Hurley got very mad about it and brought me up before Major Moynahan. I wouldn’t mind if they’d fine me and be through with it, for I know I deserve it. But the Major and the Captain say that they’re not going to stand anything like this, and that they won’t lave me go to the war. And sure, Father Duffy, if I couldn’t go to the war it’d kill me.” The smile that came to my lips at this very Irish way of putting it was suppressed when I thought of the number of men born in the country who were worried sick lest the Draft should catch them and send them to the war. I assured Tom that I would use my powers of persuasion with the Captain and the Major to give him his heart’s desire, if he would take the pledge. But we shall keep him worried by a suspended sentence until we get him safely away from the temptations of New York.

I have found an old friend in Camp in the person of Mike Donaldson of Company I. Mike was an altar boy of mine in Haverstraw not long after I was ordained. We both left there, I to teach metaphysics and Mike for a career in the prize-ring, in which he became much more widely and favorably known to his fellow citizens than I can ever hope to be. One of his titles to fame is that he was sparring partner to Stanley Ketchell. He has brought me a set of battered boxing gloves which he presented to me with a very moving speech as relics of that departed hero. I do not know exactly what he expects me to do with the relics but I rather feel after his speech of presentation that it would be considered appropriate if I suspend them reverently from the rafter of my chapel like the ex voto offerings of ships that one sees in seaport shrines.

I have become a marrying Parson. Love and fighting seem to go together—they are the two staples of romance. I have had a large number of marriages to perform. In most cases the parties enter my church tent from the rear and are quietly married before the simple altar. We have had a few weddings however on the grand scale. Michael Mulhern of the Band had arranged for a quiet wedding with a very sweet little girl named Peggy O’Brien. This afternoon at four o’clock when I was ready to slip over with the young couple and their witnesses to my canvas church I saw the band forming. “What is this formation for, Michael. You don’t have to be in it, do you?” “Ah, Father,” said Michael, with a blush, “the boys heard somehow what was going to happen and they’re going to serenade us.” We had to parade over to church behind the band playing a wedding march, with 10,000 soldiers and visitors following curiously in the rear. So Michael and his bride were united in matrimony before a vast throng that cheered them, and showered them with rice that soldiers brought over from the kitchens, many of the lads battling with the groom for the privilege of kissing the bride.

October 15th, 1917

We will soon be off to the war and I have been looking over the Regiment, studying its possibilities.

About the enlisted men I have not a single doubt. If this collection of hand-picked volunteers cannot give a good account of themselves in battle, America should keep out of war. The men will fight no matter who leads them. But fighting and winning are not always the same thing, and the winning depends much on the officers—their military knowledge, ability as instructors and powers of leadership. The Non-coms are a fine lot. The First Sergeants as I run over the list are a remarkable body of good old-time soldiers. Starting with Company A, we have John O’Leary, John O’Neill, William Hatton, Tom Sullivan, William Bailey, Joseph Blake, John Burke, Jerome O’Neill, Patrick McMeniman, Tim Sullivan, Eugene Gannon, John Kenny; with Denis O’Shea, A. McBride, J. Comiskey, and W. W. Lokker, for H. Q. M. G. Supply and Medical. All of these men have been tried out in the eight months of Border service and we are sure of them. Under Colonel Haskell the hard driven Company Commanders had to break their Sergeants in, or break them—life was too strenuous for favoritism. In fact, except for recruits, it is surprisingly Haskell’s regiment that is going to the front; Haskell’s, that is, with the reservation that his work was done on the basis of Colonel Conley’s selection and promotion in the more difficult period of peace service. When we were selected for immediate over-seas service the authorities were free to make what changes they would, and they left the regiment intact except for the transfer of one Major and one Captain. The M. G. Company was vacant by resignation. All other officers remained at their posts, though we have been assigned a large number of newly created Lieutenants to correspond with the new tables of organization for a regiment of three thousand six hundred.

Francis P. Duffy
Chaplain 165^th Inf.
69^th N.Y.

We like our new Colonel, though he was a total stranger to us before the day he came to command us. He is a West Pointer, and went into railroading after some years in the army as a Lieutenant; but he has loyally reverted to the army whenever there was a real call to arms. In 1898 if I had achieved my desire to go out as Chaplain of the 1st D. C. I would have had him as one of my Majors. He came into this conflict as organizer and commander of trains, a work for which his experience fitted him. He is a man of middle height with a strong body and an attractive face, healthily ruddy, strongly featured, with a halo of thick grey hair above. He is a man of ideas, of ideas formed by contact with life and business. He is a tireless worker, and demands the same unflinching service from every man under him. He has confidence in his men, especially the tried soldiers, and he has a strong liking for the Regiment and its traditions. The Regiment will do good work under the leadership of Colonel Charles Hine.

Lieutenant Colonel Reed I like better and better every day I am with him. I did not take to him at first and I think he was largely to blame. He kept himself too much aloof. The fault, however, was partly ours. He came to us at a time when we felt suspicious that it was the intention to destroy our character as an Irish organization, and we owed too much to the men who had created the Regiment and made its reputation with their blood to submit tamely to such a scheme as that. Colonel Reed was not used to being where he was not wanted, and his attitude was the result of this decent feeling. When the task of forming a war strength regiment fell to him he took hold and worked with single-minded vigor, and he then found that everybody was anxious to work with him loyally. He discovered, what I could have told him, that one thing the Sixty-ninth admires is a good soldier. And Reed is a good soldier, keen, active, and aggressive. He learned at once to love the regiment and is as enthusiastic as myself in his regard for it. We spend a great deal of our free time together, for we have much in common.

The senior Major, Timothy J. Moynahan, is the ideal of the Irish soldier, as he comes down to us in history and in fiction. He inherits from Patrick Sarsfield’s cavaliers, from the regiments of Dillon and Burke at Fontenoy, from the Connaught Rangers at Fuentes d’Onoro. A soldier born—trim, erect, handsome, active in his movements, commanding and crisp in his orders. And a soldier bred—he lives for the military game, devotes his life to his work as military instructor in colleges, and to the old 69th. He is ready with a toast or a speech or a neatly phrased compliment, and equally ready to take up the gage of battle, if anyone should throw it down. A vivid interesting character in our drab modern life. He has one fault—a flaring Irish temper when military discipline is violated or high ideals belittled. A fault, yes, but I feel there will be tense moments of life for anybody with Tim Moynahan when the time comes for a death grapple with the Germans. Phil Sheridan would have delighted in him.

Major Stacom is my parishioner and I am his recruit. He acquired his interest in soldiering as a boy at St. Francis Xavier College under the stalwart old soldier, afterwards the hero of Santiago—Captain Drum. He came to the Regiment as a boy out of college, an enlisted man, and the Irish lads, after guying the handsome youngster in his college clothes, learned to love and admire him for his knowledge and ability. When he became Captain of Company B he recruited it by his personal efforts, and on the Border he had one of the best companies in the Regiment. Colonel Haskell picked him from the Company Commanders as the first man to nominate for a Majority. He rules by reason and kindliness, and evokes the best co-operation of all under him—officers or men.

Major William J. Donovan, who commands the first Battalion was transferred to us from the Brigade Staff, but he is no stranger to us. On the Border when he was Captain of Troop I of the 1st Cavalry he was the best known man of his rank in the New York Division. It was almost certain that Donovan would be appointed our Colonel after the efforts to get Colonel Haskell had failed, as he was our next choice, and General O’Ryan knew that there were no politics about it, but a sincere desire to find the best military leader. General O’Ryan esteems Donovan as highly as we do. When we were selected to put the green in the Rainbow all the vacancies were to be filled by transfer, not by promotion. Donovan was a Major on the Staff of our Brigade. Everybody knew that he could get higher rank by staying with the 27th Division but he preferred to join in with us. He would rather fight with the 69th than with any other Regiment, especially now that it is to be the first in the fray, and he would rather be Major than Colonel, for in battles as now conducted it is Majors who command in the actual fighting.

Donovan is a man in the middle thirties, very attractive in face and manner, an athlete who always keeps himself in perfect condition. As a football player at Niagara and Columbia, he gained the sobriquet of “Wild Bill.” But that is tribute gained by his prowess rather than his demeanor. He is cool, untiring, strenuous, a man that always uses his head. He is preparing his men for the fatigues of open warfare by all kinds of wearying stunts. They too call him “Wild Bill” with malicious unction, after he has led them over a cross country run for four miles. But they admire him all the same, for he is the freshest man in the crowd when the run is over. He is a lawyer by profession, and a successful one, I am told. I like him for his agreeable disposition, his fine character, his alert and eager intelligence. But I certainly would not want to be in his Battalion.

Major George Lawrence of the Sanitary Detachment is one of the best acquisitions of our Border experience. When Major Maguire had to leave us, we all reached out for Lawrence, who was attached to the 12th, but was doing duty at the hospital there. He is well educated, a product of St. Francis Xavier and Pennsylvania, a competent physician and surgeon, a famous athlete in football and basketball in his day, and an athlete still; and one of the most devoted and most reliable men that God has made for the healing of wounds of mind or body. When I think of what we shall have to go through it makes me feel good to see George Lawrence around.

Captain Walter E. Powers of Headquarters Company is an old soldier though still a young man. He entered the Regular Army out of high school, out of short trousers, I tell him. He was Regimental Sergeant Major of the 7th Cavalry when Haskell was Adjutant of that famous Regiment. And when Haskell became Colonel he pulled Powers out of the Pershing Expedition and made him Adjutant of the 69th; and he was the best Adjutant on the Border. Latterly he has begun to pine for a Company and Colonel Hine gave him the Headquarters Company, the duties of which are so varied and so new that it will take a soldier-lawyer like Powers to organize it. He has the keenest dryest humor of any man I know. If he had not run away to be a soldier he would have made a successful lawyer or journalist.

Captain George McAdie of Company A is a Scotchman. We tell him that is the worst thing we know about him, which is our way of saying that we do not know anything bad about him. Personally I am very fond of our Scottish cousins, because I have known many real Scotchmen and not merely jokes about them. The jokes never give you a suspicion that Scotland idolizes Robert Burns, and produces fighting men as fine as there are in the world. George is my kind of Scot—like a volcano, rugged to outward view, but glowing with fire beneath. A good soldier and a true friend—you like him when you know him a while, and you find something new to like in him the longer you know him. If his health be as strong as his spirit he will do great things in the 69th.

Captain Thomas Reilley of Company B is an imposing being. He stands six feet three or so and fills the eye with seeing any way you look at him. He is also a college athlete, a football player of renown, of Columbia and New York Universities. A lawyer of real power and ability, he has not given himself time yet to reach his full stride in his profession. Since his college days he has been too much in demand for other services for which his endowments and instincts fit him—athlete, soldier, with a short course in political life, characteristically as an independent. He writes well and talks well—too well, sometimes, for the Irish in him makes him indifferent to the effects of what he has to say. It makes him indifferent to all other sorts of danger too; so with his great physical and mental powers and his capacity for organization he will render invaluable service to the work of the Regiment.

Captain William Kennedy of Company C is also an athlete, with the build of a runner, clean-cut, trim, alert. Brisk is the word that describes him, for the trait is mental as well as physical. He is a Company drill master in the best sense of the word. I have never seen anybody who could get more snap out of a body of men with less nagging, whether it was a parade or a policing detail than Bill Kennedy. I expect to see Company C the smartest Company in the Regiment.

Captain James A. McKenna of Company D is a lawyer—Harvard and Fordham produced him. He is a fellow of great ability, ambitious, energetic and enduring. He will go far in any line he may choose, and as a soldier he will score a high mark. He has fine ideals and fine sentiments which he chooses to conceal under a playfully aggressive or business-like demeanor. But his enthusiasms, patriotic, religious, personal, are the true fundaments of him, and everybody feels it. He lets himself out most in his affection for his men who reciprocate his devotion. Company D under Jim McKenna will play a big part in our annals of war.

Alexander E. Anderson of Company E is a 69th man by heredity. His uncle, Colonel Duffy, commanded the Regiment in 1898. His cousin, Major John Duffy, was in the Regiment when Anderson was old enough to join it—and he joined it as a private just as soon as they would let him. He is a soldier through and through. His family and his business are near to him, but the 69th is first in his thoughts. He has gone through all the stages from private to captain without any family favoritism and today he stands out as the keenest Captain in the Regiment. He went to an Officer’s Training School two years ago and graduated with a hundred percent. Sometimes they call him the 100 percent soldier, a title which grates on him exceedingly, for he hates such labels of praise, whether meant or not. Colonel Hine has asked me for the names of three Captains who might be recommended for Majors in emergency. I told him I would name only one, and after that one, half a dozen or more. “Oh,” he said, “you mean Anderson. That is what the Battalion Commanders all say.”

Captain Michael Kelly is an old soldier, though not an old man. He can wear military medals on dress-suit occasions which puzzle even the experts. A County Clare man by birth, he was drawn by fighting instincts as a youth into the British Army, since there was no Irish Army organized, and fought through the Boer War and Burmese campaigns. In New York he is second in command of the aqueduct police and a Captain of the 69th, succeeding Captain P. J. Maguire, who gave up his beloved Company F with satisfaction only because it fell to his trusted Lieutenant. Captain Kelly is a soldier first, last and all the time. His spear knoweth no brother. He visits infractions of military discipline with sternness and vigor. His Company stands in awe of him, and boasts of him to others. They are well looked after. If I have anything to distribute I have to keep an eye on him and Anderson, the two tyrants amongst Company Commanders. Give them their way and everything would go to Companies E and F, with a humorous growl between the two as to who gets the most of the spoils.

The Irish-American A. C. gave us Captain James Archer, as it and kindred organizations have given us many of our best soldiers. There are few young fellows around New York who have not heard of Jimmy Archer, and many a one has watched with delight his fleet limbs carrying his graceful figure and shining head around the track to victory. He has the cleanness and fineness of the amateur track athlete—very distinctly a man and a gentleman. He has won his way through every step upward in the Regiment and has fairly won his race to the Captain’s bars.

Captain James G. Finn of Company H is a Spanish War veteran, though he looks so young that he has to carry around his service record and the family Bible to prove it. Not that anybody would call Jim a liar. Not after taking one look at him. He is a broad-shouldered, big-chested fellow, one that the eye will pick out of a crowd, even in a congested crowd, for he stands above the heads of ordinary mortals. A football player, of course—Dartmouth College. A big honest manly man and a devoted soldier. Jim Finn thinks that Company H is the best bunch of fighting men that ever shouldered a rifle, and Company H knows that their big Captain is the finest man in the American Army. There are two hundred and fifty of them, and the Captain has thews like the son of Anak, so I don’t intend to start anything by contradicting either of them. Anyway, I more than half agree with them.

Captain Richard J. Ryan of Company I is a new comer and, like a boy in a new town, he has his way to make. If I be not “mistook in my jedgments” he will make it. He hails from Watertown, New York, and from the 1st New York Infantry, but that does not complete his military history. He fought in the Boer War, I suspect from the same reason that prompted Kelly—because that was the only war there was, and a man must do the best with the opportunities he has. He is all wrapped up in his Company. He does not seem to care a hang what anybody higher up is thinking about him. He has his job and he wants to see it done right. That is a good sign. A soldier by natural instinct and preference, a Captain devoted to his men—that goes with the 69th. I am for him.

Captain John Patrick Hurley of Company K, is an argument for the continued existence of the Irish as a people. He has everything that everybody loves in the Irish, as found even the reluctant tributes of their hereditary foes. He has a lean, clean handsome face and figure, and a spirit that responds to ideals patriotic, religious, racial, human, as eagerly and naturally as a bird soaring into its native air. He is perfectly willing to die for what he believes in. He would find that much easier than to live in a world of the cheap and commonplace. He always reminds me of the Easter-week patriots of Dublin, Patrick Pearse and Plunkett and MacDonagh. Like myself, and I may say all of us, he is in this war as a volunteer because he feels that it is a war against the tyranny of the strong, and a fight for the oppressed peoples of the earth. He is an able, practical man withal; an engineer, graduate of Cornell. He rules his company as their military commander, and the tribute of affection and loyalty they pay him is not lessened by the knowledge they have that breaches of discipline will meet with no mercy.

Captain Merle-Smith of Company L came to us on the Border from Squadron A, and the intervening year of intimacy has not changed the judgment I uttered the first time I saw him: “If I had to pick out one man to spend a year with me on a voyage to Central Africa, there is the man I would select.” A big fellow—he and Reilly and Finn are our prize specimens—and big, like them, all the way through; and with the astonishing simplicity—in the old theological sense of the word as contrasted with duplicity—that one so often finds in big men. A college athlete (Princeton) and a lawyer, the contests of the campus and the bar have only whetted his appetite for more intense battles. From the time he joined us he has felt that the best opening for real soldier work is in this regiment. He is a 69th man by conviction, and he is as fond of his valiant Kerrymen in Company L as they are of him. I found no one in the recruiting period more zealous in increasing the numbers of the regiment and maintaining at the same time its characteristic flavor than Captain Van Santvoordt Merle-Smith.

Captain William Doyle commanded Company M when we were called out, but since Captain Powers took the Headquarters Company he has been made Adjutant. It was a good choice. Captain Doyle is a college man (St. Francis Xavier) and an engineer by profession, and has been a National Guardsman for more years than one would guess. His training fits him for his new job. His mind is quick on the trigger, though the speed and accuracy with which it shoots a retort is rendered deceptive by his slightly humorous drawl in delivery. He is not one of the big fellows, but the big fellows think twice before taking him on.

Martin Meaney, Captain of Company M, was a Sergeant of Company G when we were in Texas. I wanted Colonel Haskell to make him a Second Lieutenant, but Martin hadn’t left the County Clare soon enough to satisfy the technicality of having his final citizen papers. He could fight for the United States, but he could not be an officer. He came of age as a citizen during the summer and went to Plattsburg, and the people in charge there made him not a Second Lieutenant but a Captain. Colonel Haskell, who is Adjutant at Camp Upton, found the chance to send him back to us as a Captain, and we were very glad to get him. For we know Martin Meaney; and everyone who knows Martin Meaney likes him and trusts him. He is a fine, manly upstanding young Irishman devoted to high ideals, practical and efficient withal. Granted the justice of my cause there is no man in the world I would so much rely on to stick to me to the end as Martin Meaney. It makes us all feel better to have him along with us in our adventure of war.

The vacancy in the Machine Gun Company was filled by the appointment of Captain Kenneth Seibert, an old guardsman of the Iowa National Guard. He has the position of Johnny-come-lately with us yet, but he knows the game and he will be a veteran of ours by the time we get to our first battle. His whole organization is practically new, but he is very keen about it, and is an excellent manager, so we feel that he will soon have it in shape.

Captain John Mangan of the Supply Company is the salt of the earth. I like Jack Mangan so much that I always talk that way about him, and incidentally I waste his time and mine by holding him for a chat whenever we meet. He came to us before we went to the Border. His friends were in another regiment, but all that was nice and Irish about him made him want to be with the 69th. He is a Columbia man and a contractor. Colonel Haskell got his eye on him, when, as a Second Lieutenant, he was put in charge of a detail of offenders who had to do some special work. Under Mangan their work was not mere pottering around. They did things. While we were on the big hike Mangan was left behind with a detail of cripples to build mess shacks. They were built, created is a better word, but we were doomed never to use them, as we got orders during the hike to proceed to another station. I said to Haskell: “Don’t forget to compliment Lieutenant Mangan on his work, for he has done wonders, and it looks now to have been all in vain.” Haskell answered with assumed grimness: “Lieutenant Mangan will not be Lieutenant Mangan long.” He was Captain Mangan, R. S. O. (Regimental Supply Officer) as soon as the formalities could be arranged; and in a short time he was the best supply officer on the Border, as his training as a contractor gave him experience in handling men and materials.

Everybody likes Mangan—half-rebellious prisoners and soldering details and grasping civilians and grouchy division quartermasters. For “he has a way wid him.” At bottom it is humor and justness, with appreciation of the other fellow’s difficulties and states of mind. With his fairness and balance, he carries such an atmosphere of geniality and joy of life that everybody begins to feel a new interest in the game and a new willingness to play a decent part in it.

So far as I can see it now, our Captains average higher than our Lieutenants, though time will have to show if I am right. But at present I can point my finger to half a dozen Captains at least who could easily fill the job of Major, without being so certain of finding an equal number of Lieutenants who could make as good Captains as the men they replace. Probably all that this proves is that the Captains have the advantage of experience in their positions, and that their juniors, when equal opportunity is given them, will develop to be just as good. Amongst the Lieutenants the first to my mind is John Prout, a fine young Tipperary man of the stamp of Hurley and Meaney. Others in line are Samuel A. Smith, John Poore and William McKenna, the four Burns brothers (all good, but Jim in my judgment the best), also William Burns, Richard Allen, Clifford, Kelley, Kinney, Joseph McNamara, Crimmins, Carroll, Andrew Lawrence, John Green, Thomas C. Martin, with Rowley, Grose, Baker, Joseph O’Donohue, James Mangan, O’Brien, Philbin, Cavanaugh, Reune Martin, who came to us while in the Armory. Of the newcomers sent to us here at Camp Mills four of the old regular army men stand out: Lieutenants Michael J. Walsh, Henry A. Bootz, Patrick Dowling and Francis McNamara. Our Medical Department consists of Major Lawrence with Doctors Houghton, Lyttle, Martin, Kilcourse, Levine, Patton, Bamford, Austin Lawrence and Landrigan.

October 25th, 1917

We are the best cared for Regiment that ever went to war. Mr. Daniel M. Brady, who was chairman of the Committee for employment, appointed by Justice Victor J. Dowling of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick, when we came back from the Border, has reorganized and increased that body and our Board of Trustees now consists of Morgan J. O’Brien, chairman, Daniel M. Brady, John J. Whalen, Joseph P. Grace, Victor J. Dowling, John D. Ryan, George McDonald, Nicholas F. Brady, John E. O’Keefe, Louis D. Conley, and Bryan Kennedy. They have raised ample funds from private subscriptions and from the generous benefits offered through the kindly generosity of the New York Baseball Club and of Mr. John McCormack. They have given $10,000.00 in cash to the Company and Regimental Funds, and $1,600 for the Chaplain’s Fund “for religion and divilment.” All sorts of sporting goods, including two complete sets of uniforms of Giants and Cubs, equip us fully for the sort of strenuous life which we most enjoy.

The Women’s Auxiliary is also formed, Mrs. Hennings being the President, for looking after the families of soldiers while they are away, and sending gifts abroad.

Some of our wealthy friends in the Board of Trustees have also held dinners to which have been invited the principal officers of Regiment, Brigade, and Division. It has helped us to get acquainted with our chief superiors. I was particularly glad to have the opportunity of getting a more intimate knowledge of General Mann and his Chief of Staff, Colonel Douglas McArthur—a brilliant youthful-looking soldier for whom I had already formed a high esteem and admiration from casual meeting. He has been very helpful in furthering my plans to have a large body of priests from Brooklyn and New York give the men of the whole Division an opportunity of receiving the sacraments before going abroad.

MONTREAL

October 28th, 1917

Orders at last. They came in for the 1st Battalion October 25th. They slipped out quietly by night. I went with them to Montreal, travelling with Companies B and D. The men were in gleeful spirits, glad to have the wait over and to be off on the Long Trail. Edward Connelly and I sat up chatting most of the night. One remark of his struck me. His father was Captain of Company B in the 69th during the Civil War. “Some people say to me, ‘With your two boys I don’t see how you can afford to go to war.’ With my two boys I can’t see how I can afford not to go to war.”

The two soldiers who appealed to me most aboard the train were Supply Sergeant Billy McLaughlin and Lieutenant Bootz. They stayed up all night to look after our needs, and they showed a combination of efficiency and cheerfulness—a very model of soldierly spirit.

I saw them all onto the Tunisia on their way to Liverpool. God speed them.

CHAPTER II
IN TRAINING ABROAD

BREST

November 13th, 1917

We moved out of Camp Mills on the night of October 29th and took trains at the nearby station—off at last for foreign service. Parts of Companies L and M were left to guard the camp. We found at Hoboken that we were to sail on a fine ship—the converted German liner Amerika which had been re-christened with the change of the penultimate letter. Our trip was uneventful. The seas were calm, and sailing on the America was like taking a trip on the end of a dock—you had to look over the side to realize that she was in motion. No submarines, though we were on constant watch for them. “What are you doing here?” asked one of the ship’s officers of big Jim Hillery, who stood watch. “Looking for something Oi don’t want to foind,” answered Jim with a grin.

We did not know where our journey was to end but finally on November 12th we made port in the beautiful harbor of Brest, where we have been idling all week because we have been the first convoy to put in here, and no preparations have been made to land us and our equipment, and afford transportation to our destination.

November 15th, 1917

This morning I told Colonel Hine that I wanted a day in town to get some necessaries for my church work, and permission was readily granted. I inquired the way to the nearest church, timing my visit to get in around the dinner hour, so as to get an invitation for a meal. As I rang the bell of the rectory, the door opened and a poor woman with two children came out carrying a basket into which the housekeeper had put food. I said to myself: Where charity exists, hospitality ought to flourish. I waited in the customary bare ecclesiastical parlor for the Curé, and at last he came, a stout middle-aged man, walking with a limp. I presented myself, very tall and quite imposing in my long army overcoat, and told him I came in search of altar breads. He immediately proposed to take me to a convent some distance away where my wishes might be satisfied. As I followed him along the cobbled streets I said to myself, “I had thought these Bretons were a kind of Irish, but they lack the noblest of the traditions of the Celtic race, or this old gentleman would have asked me to dinner.” It was only later that I found that my tremendous presence had embarrassed him and he had therefore decided to bring me to somebody whom nothing would embarrass. One need not say that this was a woman—the Mother Superior of an institution which was school, orphanage and pension in one.

She was of a type not unusual in heads of religious communities—cultivated, balanced, perfectly serene. After supplying my needs she asked gently, “Monsieur has dined?” “No, Monsieur has not dined.” “Perhaps Monsieur would accept the humble hospitality of the convent.” “Monsieur is a soldier, and soldiers have but one obligation—never to refuse a meal when they can get it.” She smiled and brought me to the dining room, where I met the old chaplain and two equally elderly professors from some college, who pumped me about America and myself and Wilson and myself and Roosevelt and myself until the meal was over. Then I sallied forth with my stout Curé who evidently had absorbed, as he sat silent through the meal, all the information I had been giving out, particularly about myself. For he brought me into forty stores and stopped on the street at least a hundred people (and he knew everybody in town) to introduce proudly his prize specimen of an American priest in uniform. The introduction invariably took this form:

“Monsieur is an American.” “He is an officer.” “Monsieur, though one would not know it, is a priest. He has a large parish in the City of New York. He has been a Professor in the Seminary—of Philosophy, mind you. Monsieur has a parish with three vicaires. He receives from the noble government of the United States a stipend of ten thousand francs a year. That is what this great country gives their Chaplains. He is a Chaplain. He has crosses on his collar. Also on his shoulders. If I were taller I could see them. I saw them when he was sitting down.”

And at the end, and always with a little break in his voice as he fumbled with the button of my tunic, “M. L’Aumonier wears the tricolor of our country with the badge of the Sacred Heart, which was pinned there by the great Cardinal of New York.” And this was the man that I thought at first to be cold and unfriendly.

I had to break away finally to get back to my ship as evening was beginning to gather. I started for the dock, interested all the way to observe the Celtic types of the passers-by and giving them names drawn from my Irish acquaintance, as Tim Murphy or Mrs. O’Shaughnessy. Feeling that I was not making for the dock from which I left, I turned to a knot of boys, introducing myself as a priest and telling them that I wanted to get back to the American transports. They jumped to help me as eagerly as my own altar boys at home would do. One alert black-eyed lad of fourteen took command of the party, the rest of them trailing along and endeavoring to give advice and support. But from the beginning this one youngster was in undoubted command of the situation. I tried once or twice to ask where he was bringing me, but received only a brief “Suivez-moi, Monsieur.” Our journey ended in an alley where the calls of my guide brought out two fishermen who needed only red night-caps and knives in their teeth to bring up associations of Stevenson’s pirate-mutineers. But they were ready to ferry me over to my ship for a compensation, a compensation which became quite moderate when my Mentor explained their obligation as Catholics and as Frenchmen to a priest and an ally.

I was about to embark in their fishing smack when a French marine came along the dock and said that under no circumstances could a boat cross the harbor after sunset. My fishermen argued; I argued; even my irresistible young guide stated the case; but to no avail. Finally I said to the youngster, “Why waste my time with this creature of a marine. Lead me to the person the most important in Brest, the Mayor, the Governor, the Master of the Port, the Commander of the Fleet. From such a one I shall receive permission.” The youth gave me a quick look and I think he would have winked if my face were not so sternly set with the importance I had assumed. He led me off to the office of the Harbormaster. It was closed. I could find no person except the janitor who was sweeping the front steps. I was so put out at the prospect of not getting back from my leave on time that I had to talk to some person, so I told the janitor my worries. He insinuated that something might be arranged. I had traveled in Europe before and had learned how things get themselves arranged. So I produced from my pocket a nice shiny two-franc piece; and in a moment I discovered that I had purchased for thirty-five cents in real money the freedom of the Port of Brest. My janitor descended upon the faithful marine with brandished broom and bellowed objurgations that such a creature should block the way of this eminent American Officer who wished to return to his ship.

I stood in the prow of the smack as we made our way across the dark and rainy harbor and I felt for the first time the touch of romance as one gets it in books. I thought back over the day, and I had the feeling that my adventures had begun, and had begun with a blessing.

NAIVES EN BLOIS

Nov. 27th, 1917

Naives in Blooey we call it, with a strong hoot on the last word. If Thomas Cook and Son ever managed a personally conducted party as we have been handled and then landed it in a place like this, that long established firm would have to close up business forthwith. Guy Empey and all the rest of them had prepared us for the “Hommes 40; Chevaux 8” box-cars, but description never made anybody realize discomforts. Anyway, we went through it and we would have been rather disappointed if they had brought us on our three-day trip across France in American plush-seat coaches (by the way we growled about them when we went to the Border). A year from now if we are alive we shall be listening with an unconcealed grin of superiority to some poor fish of a recruit who gabbles over the hardships he has undergone in the side-door Pullmans.

We are forgetting our recent experiences already in the meanness of these God-forsaken villages. We are in six of them—each the worst in the opinion of the Companies there. Naives will do for a description of Vacon, Broussey, Villeroi, Bovée or Sauvoy. A group of 40 houses along the slopes of a crinkled plain. The farmers all live together in villages, as is the custom in France. And many features of the custom are excellent. They have a church, school, community wash houses with water supply, good roads with a common radiating point and the pleasures of society, such as it is.

The main drawback is that the house on the village street is still a farm house. The dung heap occupies a place of pride outside the front door; and the loftier it stands and the louder it raises its penetrating voice, the more it proclaims the worth and greatness of its possessor. The house is half residence and half stable with a big farm loft over-topping both. The soldiers occupy the loft. I censored a letter yesterday in which one of our lads said: “There are three classes of inhabitants in the houses—first, residents; second, cattle; third, soldiers.” Over my head are some boys from Company B who got in ahead of us with the First Battalion, coming by way of England and then via Havre, after a long and tedious trip. They are Arthur Viens, Tom Blackburn and Jim Lannon of my own parish with Gilbert, Gilgar, Weick, and Healey. Their life is typical of the rest. Up in the morning early and over to Sergeant Gilhooley’s wayside inn for breakfast. Then cut green wood for fire, or drill along the muddy roads or dig in the muddier hillsides for a target range—this all day with a halt for noon meal. Supper at 4:00 o’clock; and already the sun has dropped out of the gloomy heavens, if indeed it has ever shown itself at all. Then—then nothing. They cannot light lanterns—we have landed right bang up behind the front lines the first jump; we can hear the heavy guns booming north along the St. Mihiel lines; and the aeroplanes might take a notion to bomb the town some night if lights stood out. No fire—dangerous to light even a cigarette in a hay loft. There are a couple of wine shops in town but they are too small to accommodate the men. If they had a large lighted place where they could have the good cheer of wine and chat evenings it would be a blessing. They are not fond enough of “Pinard” to do themselves harm with it and I think the pious inn keepers see that it is well baptized before selling it. Good old Senator Parker of the Y. M. C. A. has been right on the job with tents for the men—of course without any curse of “rum” in them—but the cold weather makes it difficult to render them habitable.

So most of the men spread their blankets in the straw and go to bed at six o’clock—a good habit in the minds of old-fashioned folks. The squad overhead have another good old-fashioned habit. From the stable below I can hear them say their beads in common before settling down to sleep. “Father” Pat Heaney of Company D got them into the way of it on the boat. Good lads!

In comparison with them my fittings are palatial. I have a large square low-ceilinged room with stone floor, and French windows with big wooden shutters to enclose the light. The walls are concealed by the big presses or Armoires so dear to the housewives of Lorraine. The one old lady who occupies this house has lived here for all of her 70 years (a German officer occupied the high canopied bed in 1870) and she has never let any single possession she ever had get away from her. They are all in the Armoires, old hats, bits of silk, newspapers—everything. She is very pious and very pleased to have M. l’Aumonier, but she wouldn’t give me a bit of shelf room or a quarter inch of candle or a handful of petit bois to start a fire in the wretched fireplace, without cash down.

“Monsieur is a Curé.”

“Yes, Madame.”

My landlady has been quizzing me about the Regiment, my parish and myself. She doesn’t understand this volunteer business. If we didn’t have to come, why are we here? is her matter of fact attitude. She was evidently not satisfied with what she could learn from me herself, so one day she called to her aid a crony of hers, a woman of 50 with a fighting face and straggly hair whom I had dubbed “the sthreeler,” because no English word described her so adequately. I had already heard the Sthreeler’s opinion of the women in Paris—all of them. It would have done the hussies good to hear what she thought of them. Now she turned her interrogatory sword point at me; no parrying about her methods—just slash and slash again.

“Monsieur has three vicaires.” “Yes, Madame.”

“Then why has M. l’Aumonier come over here? Why not send one of the Vicaires and stay at home in his parish?”

“But none of the vicaires was aumonier of the Regiment; but myself, M. le Curé.

“Oh, perhaps the Germans destroyed your parish as they did that of our present curé.”

“No, the Germans have not got to New York yet so my parish is still safe.”

“Ah, then, I have it. No doubt the Government pays you more as aumonier than the church does as curé.”

This was said with such an evident desire to justify her good opinion of me as a rational being in spite of apparent foolishness, that I said: “That is precisely the reason”; and we turned with zest to the unfailing topic of the Parisiennes with their jewels and paint and high heels. Not having her courage, I did not venture to ask the sthreeler if she did not really envy them.

They are going in strong for education in the A. E. F. and we have lost temporarily the services of many of our best officers. Lieutenant Colonel Reed has gone off to school and also the three Majors and half the Captains. I hope they are getting something out of their schooling for nobody here is learning anything except how to lead the life of a tramp. The men have no place to drill or to shoot or to manœuvre. I hear we are moving soon to fresh fields further south—Heaven grant it, for we waste time here.

GRAND

December 23rd, 1917

I think it was Horace who said something to the effect that far-faring men change the skies above them but not the hearts within them. That occurs to me when I see our lads along the streets of this ancient Roman town. It is old, old, old. You have to go down steps to get to the floor of the 700-year-old Gothic nave of the church because the detritus of years has gradually raised the level of the square; and the tower of the church, a huge square donjon with walls seven feet thick slitted for defensive bowmen, is twice as old as the nave. And it has the ruins of an amphitheatre and a well preserved mosaic pavement that date back to the third century, when the Caesars had a big camp here to keep the Gauls in order. I shan’t say that the men are not interested in these antiquities. They are an intelligent lot, and unsated by sight-seeing, and they give more attention to what they see than most tourists would. When I worked the history of the place into my Sunday sermon I could see that everybody was wide awake to what I had to say.

But in their hearts they are still in good little old New York. The quips and slang of New York play houses are heard on the streets where Caesar’s legionaries chaffed each other in Low Latin. Under the fifteen centuries old tower Phil Brady maintains the worth of Flushing because Major Lawrence hails from there. Paul Haerting and Dryer exchange repartee outside the shrine of St. Libaire, Virgin and Martyr, after their soldiers orisons at his tomb. Charles Dietrich and Jim Gormley interrupt my broodings over the past in the ruins of the amphitheater to ask me news about our parish in the Bronx.

The 2nd and 3rd Battalions are not in such an antique setting, but in two villages along the bare hillsides to the south of us. It is a good walk to get to them; but I have my reward. When I get to the 2nd Battalion, if the men are busy, I drop in on Phil Gargan for a cup of coffee. I am always reminded of my visits to Ireland by the hospitality I encounter—so warm and generous and bustling and overwhelming. I get my coffee, too much of it, and too sweet, and hot beyond human endurance, and food enough offered with it to feed a platoon. And I am warm with a glow that no steaming drink could ever produce of itself. It is the same wherever I go. For instance if my steps lead me to the 3rd Battalion Pat Boland spices his coffee with native wit; or if my taste inclines me to tea I look up Pat Rogan who could dig up a cup of tea in the middle of a polar expedition.

While I am on the question of eating—always an interesting topic to a soldier—let me say a word for French inns. I came to Grand with Regimental Sergeant Major Steinert, ahead of the Regiment in charge of a billetting detail, and thus made the acquaintance of the establishment of Madame Gerard at the Sign of the Golden Boar. I have seen a M. Gerard but, as in all well regulated families, he is a person with no claim to figure in a story. I am in love for the first time, and with Madame Gerard. Capable and human and merry, used to men and their queer irrational unfeminine ways, and quite able to handle them, hundreds at a time. A joke, a reprimand, and ever and always the final argument of a good meal—easy as easy. She reigns in her big kitchen, with its fireplace where the wood is carefully managed but still gives heat enough to put life and savor into the hanging pots and the sizzling turnspits. Odors of Araby the blest! And she serves her meals with the air of a beneficent old Grande Dame of the age when hospitality was a test of greatness. Private or General—it makes no difference to her. The same food and the same price and the same frank motherly humor—and they all respond with feelings that are common to all. I sit before the kitchen fire while she is at work, and talk about the war and religion and our poor soldiers so far from their mothers, and the cost of food and the fun you can get out of life, and when I get back to my cold room I go to bed thinking of how much I have learned, and that I can see at last how France has been able to stand this war for three and a half years.

The Colonel’s mess is at the Curé’s house. It too is a pleasant place to be, for the Colonel lays aside his official air of severity when he comes to the table, and is his genial, lovable self. The Curé dines with us—a stalwart mountaineer who keeps a young boar in his back yard as a family pet. One would have thought him afraid of nothing. But courage comes by habit; and I found that the Curé had his weak side. His years had not accustomed him to the freaks of a drunken man—a testimonial to his parishioners. We had a cook, an old Irishman, who could give a new flavor to nectar on Olympus; that is, if he didn’t drink too much of it first. But he would, trust Paddy for that, even if threatened with Vulcan’s fate of being pitched out headfirst for his offense.

One day Tom Heaney and Billy Hearn came running for me. Paddy on the rampage! The aged bonne in hysterics. The Curé at his wits’ end. Come! I went. I found Paddy red-eyed and excited, and things in a mess. I curtly ordered him into a chair, and sent for Doc. Houghton, our mess officer, to do justice. Meanwhile I studied a map on the wall, with my back turned to the offender, and the following one-sided dialogue ensued—like a telephone scene at a play.

“It’s that’s making me mad.” A pause,

“I don’t like you anyway.” A pause.

“You’re no good of a priest. If I was dying I wouldn’t”—(reconsidering)—“I hope to God when I’m dying I won’t have to put up with the likes of you.” A long pause.

“I’ve long had me opinion of you. I’ll tell it to you if you like.”

A pause—with me saying to myself “Now you’ll get the truth.”

“I’ll tell it to you. I’ve been wanting to do it time and times.... You smoke cigarettes with the Officers, that’s what you do.” A sigh of relief, and the thought “I could have said more than that myself.”

Then in bursts Colonel Hine and Paddy was hustled away for punishment. But I know what will happen. We shall eat army food au naturel for a week or so; and some noon the meal will be so good that we shall all eat more than is good for men with work still to do, and nobody shall ask a question about it, for everybody will know that Paddy, God bless him! is back on the job once more. Of course I have a special liking for him because when he was in a mood to denounce me he let me off so light.

GRAND

December 25th, 1917

If there is one day in all the year that wanderers from home cannot afford to forget it is Christmas. The Company Commanders have had their Mess Sergeants scouring the countryside for eatables.

It was my business to give them a religious celebration that they would remember for many a year and that they would write about enthusiastically to the folks at home, who would be worrying about the lonesome existence of their boys in France. The French military authorities and the Bishop of the diocese had united in prohibiting Midnight Masses on account of the lights. But General Lenihan, the Mayor, and the Curé decided that we were too far from the front to worry about that, and it was arranged tout de suite. I knew that confessions and communions would be literally by the thousands, so with the aid of Joyce Kilmer and Frank Driscoll, ex-Jesuit-novice, I got up a scheme for confessions of simple sins in English and French, and set my French confrères to work; the Curé, a priest-sergeant in charge of a wood cutting detail, a brancardier, and another priest who was an officer of the artillery—all on the qui vive about the task. Christmas Eve found us all busy until midnight. I asked one of the men how he liked the idea of going to confession to a priest who cannot speak English. “Fine, Father,” he said with a grin, “All he could do was give me a penance, but you’d have given me hell.” Luckily the church was vastly larger than the present needs of the town, for everybody, soldiers and civilians, came. General Lenihan and Colonel Hine and the Brigade and the Regimental Staffs occupied seats in the sanctuary which was also crowded with soldiers. The local choir sang the Mass and I preached. Our lads sang the old hymns, “The Snow Lay on the Ground,” “The Little Town of Bethlehem,” and all, French and Americans, joined in the ancient and hallowed strains of the Adeste Fideles until the vaults resounded with Venite Adoremus Dominum. It took four priests a long time to give Communion to the throng of pious soldiers and I went to bed at 2:00 A. M. happy with the thought that, exiles though we are, we celebrated the old feast in high and holy fashion.

Christmas afternoon we had general services in the big market shed. The band played the old Christmas airs and everybody joined in, until the square was ringing with our pious songs.

Everybody had a big Christmas dinner. The Quartermaster had sent the substantial basis for it and for extra trimmings the Captains bought up everything the country afforded. They had ample funds to do it, thanks to our Board of Trustees, who had supplied us lavishly with funds. The boxes sent through the Women’s Auxiliary have not yet reached us. It is just as well, for we depart tomorrow on a four-day hike over snowy roads and the less we have to carry the better.

LONGEAU

January 1st, 1918

I cannot tell just what hard fates this New Year may have in store for us, but I am sure that no matter how trying they may be they will not make us forget the closing days of 1917. We left our villages in the Vosges the morning after Christmas Day. From the outset it was evident that we were going to be up against a hard task. It snowed on Christmas, and the roads we were to take were mean country roads over the foothills of the Vosges Mountains. New mules were sent to us on Christmas Eve. They were not shod for winter weather, and many of them were absolutely unbroken to harness, the harness provided moreover being French and ill-fitting. To get it on the mules big Jim Hillery had to throw them first on the stable floor.

It was everybody’s hike, and everybody’s purgatory; but to my mind it was in a special way the epic of the supply company and the detachments left to help them. Nobody ever makes any comment when supplies are on hand on time. In modern city life we get into the way of taking this for granted, as if food were heaven-sent like manna, and we give little thought to the planning and labor it has taken to provide us. On a hike the Infantry will get through—there is never any doubt of that. They may be foot-sore, hungry, broken-backed, frozen, half dead, but they will get through. The problem is to get the mules through; and it is an impossible one very often without human intelligence and human labor. On this hike the marching men carried no reserve rations, an inexcusable oversight. No village could feed them even if there was money to pay for the food; and the men could not eat till the Company wagons arrived with the rations and field ranges.

The situation for Captain Mangan’s braves looked desperate from the start. A mile out of town the wagons were all across the road, as the lead teams were not trained to answer the reins. The battle was on. Captain Mangan with Lieutenant Kinney, a Past Grand Master when it comes to wagon trains, organized their forces. They had experienced helpers—Sergeant Ferdinando, a former circus man, Sergeant Bob Goss and Regimental Supply Sergeant Joe Flannery, who will be looking for new wars to go to when he is four score and ten. It would be impossible to relate in detail the struggles of the next four days; but that train got through from day to day only by the fighting spirit of soldiers who seldom have to fire a rifle. Again and again they came to hills where every wagon was stalled. The best teams had to be unhitched and attached to each wagon separately until the hill was won. Over and over the toil-worn men would have to cover the same ground till the work was done, and in tough places they had to spend their failing strength tugging on a rope or pushing a wheel. Wagoners sat on their boxes with hands and feet freezing and never uttered a complaint. The wagons were full of food but no man asked for a mite of it—they were willing to wait till the companies ahead would get their share.

The old time men who had learned their business on the Border were naturally the best. Harry Horgan, ex-cowboy, could get anything out of mules that mules could do. Jim Regan, old 1898 man, had his four new mules christened and pulling in answer to their names before a greenhorn could gather up the reins. Larkin and young Heffernan and Barney Lowe and Tim Coffee were always first out and first in, but always found time to come back and take the lines for some novice to get his wagon through a hard place. Al Richford, Ed Menrose, Gene Mortenson, Willie Fagan, Arthur Nulty, Wagoner Joe Seagriff and good old Pat Prendergast did heroic work. “Father” James McMahon made me prouder of my own title. Slender Jimmy Benson got every ounce of power out of his team without ever forgetting he belonged to the Holy Name Society. Sergeant Lacey, Maynooth man and company clerk, proved himself a good man in every Irish sense of the word. Hillery and Tumulty, horseshoers; Charles Henning of the commissary, and Joe Healy, cook, made themselves mule-skinners once more, and worked with energies that never flagged.

Lieutenant Henry Bootz came along at the rear of the Infantry column to pick up stragglers. The tiredest and most dispirited got new strength from his strong heart. “I think I’m going to die,” said one broken lad of eighteen. “You can’t die without my permission,” laughed the big Lieutenant. “And I don’t intend to give it. I’ll take your pack, but you’ll have to hike.” And hike he did for seven miles farther that day, and all the way for two days more. The first day Bootz threatened to tie stragglers to the wagons. The remaining days he took all that could move without an ambulance and tied the wagons to them. And they had to pull.

Captain Mangan, the most resourceful of commanders, was working in his own way to relieve the strain. One day he took possession of a passing car and got to the H. Q. of a French Division where the kindly disposed French Officers were easily persuaded to send camions to carry provisions ahead, to be stored for the troops at the terminus of the day’s march. Horses were rented from the farmers, or, if they were stiff about it, abruptly commandeered. That wagon train had to get through.

It got through; but sometimes it was midnight or after before it got through; and meanwhile the line companies had their own sufferings and sacrifices. They hiked with full packs on ill-made and snow-covered roads over hilly country. At the end of the march they found themselves in villages (four or five of them to the regiment), billetted in barns, usually without fire, fuel or food. They huddled together for the body warmth, and sought refuge from cold and hunger in sleep. When the wagons came in, their food supplies were fresh meat and fresh vegetables, all frozen through and needing so much time to cook that many of the men refused to rise in the night to eat it. Breakfast was the one real meal; at midday the mess call blew, but there was nothing to eat.

When they got up in the morning their shoes were frozen stiff and they had to burn paper and straw in them before they could get them on. Men hiked with frozen feet, with shoes so broken that their feet were in the snow; many could be seen in wooden sabots or with their feet wrapped in burlap. Hands got so cold and frost-bitten that the rifles almost dropped from their fingers. Soldiers fell in the snow and arose and staggered on and dropped again. The strong helped the weak by encouragement, by sharp biting words when sympathy would only increase weakness, and by the practical help of sharing their burdens. They got through on spirit. The tasks were impossible for mere flesh and blood, but what flesh and blood cannot do, spirit can make them do. It was like a battle. We had losses as in a battle—men who were carried to hospitals because they had kept going long after their normal powers were expended. It was a terrible experience. But one thing we all feel now—we have not the slightest doubt that men who have shown the endurance that these men have shown will give a good account of themselves in any kind of battle they are put into.

LONGEAU

January 10th, 1918

The Regiment is in five villages south of the old Fortress town of Langres in the Haute Marne; Headquarters and Supply in Longeau, 1st Battalion in Percey, 2nd in Cohons, the 3rd in Baissey and the Machine Gun Company in Brennes. They are pleasant prosperous little places (inhabited by cultivateurs with a sprinkling of bourgeois) the red roofs clustering picturesquely along the lower slopes of the rolling country. None of them is more than an hour’s walk from our center at Longeau. The men are mostly in the usual hayloft billets, though some companies have Adrian barracks where they sleep on board floors. Apart from sore feet from that abominable hike, and the suffering from cold due to the difficulty of procuring fuel, we are fairly comfortable.

The officers are living in comparative luxury. I am established with a nice sweet elderly lady. I reach the house through a court that runs back of a saloon—which leaves me open to comments from the ungodly. The house is a model of neatness, as Madame is a childless widow, and after the manner of such, has espoused herself to her home. She is very devout, and glad to have M. l’Aumonier in the house, but I am a sore trial to her, as I have a constant run of callers, all of them wearing muddy hobnailed brogans. She says nothing to me, but I can hear her at all hours of the day lecturing little Mac about doors and windows and sawdust and dirt. I never hear him say anything in reply, except “Oui, Madame,” but somehow he seems to understand her voluble French and they get along very well together. I notice that our lads always strike up a quick acquaintance with the motherly French women. They work together, cooking at the fireplaces or washing clothes in the community fountain, keeping up some sort of friendly gossip and laughing all the while, though I never can understand how they manage it, for the villagers never learn any English and the soldiers have not more than forty words of French. After all a language is only a makeshift for expressing ourselves. “Qu’est-ce que c’est”—“Kesky,” and pointing supplies the nouns, gestures the verbs, and facial expressions the adjectives.

LONGEAU

January 21st, 1918

Last night the church bells rang at midnight; and waking, I said: “Bombers overhead!” A minute later I heard the cry Fire! Fire! and the bugles raising the same alarm. It was a big stable at the south end of the town—we had gasoline stored in it and some soldier was careless. The street was thronged in an instant with running soldiers and civilians. The village firemen or pompiers came running up at a plowman gait—looked the fire over—and went back to put on their proper uniforms. One old lad came all the way from Percey in a gendarme’s chapeau. He could not properly try to put out a fire in that headgear, so he went all the way back and arrived at last, puffing but satisfied, in the big pompier nickel-plated helmet. Their big pump was pulled up to Longeau, and the hose was laid with the proper amount of ceremony and shouting, and the stream finally put on the blazing shed. The remainder of the population displayed little of the proverbial French excitability. They looked on with the air of men who can enjoy a good spectacle, happy in the thought that the rich American Government would have to pay for it.

The soldiers were happy too at having a chance to fight something. Colonel Barker gave orders in his quiet way, which Captains Anderson and Mangan put into execution. The fountain ran out and bucket lines were formed. I am afraid that some of the contents instead of getting to the fire was dumped on the gaudy uniforms of the funny old pompiers, who insisted upon running around giving orders that nobody could understand. This is the second French fire we have witnessed and the general verdict is that our moving picture people have missed the funniest unstudied episode left in the world by not putting a French village fire department on the screen. It was a good show in every way—but incidentally the building was a total loss.

LONGEAU

January 25th, 1918

I walked over to Cohons today and dropped in on Company H. Instead of having to make my visit through the scattered billets that line the entrance to the valley I found what looked like the whole Company along the roadside in vehemently gesticulating groups. I hurried to find what the trouble might be. “What’s the matter here,” I asked. Val Dowling, the supply Sergeant, picked a uniform out of a pile and held it up. “Look at the damn thing? Excuse me, Father, but you’ll say as bad when you look at it. They want us to wear this.” He held it out as if it had contagion in it, and I saw it was a British tunic, brass buttons and all. I disappointed my audience—I didn’t swear out loud. “Got nice shiny buttons,” I said. “What’s the matter with it?” What was the matter with it? Did I know it was a British uniform? Frank McGlynn of Manhattan and Bill McGorry of Long Island City were as hot as Bill Fleming or Pat Travers or Chris O’Keefe or William Smythe. “They look a little betther this way,” said John Thornton, holding up one with the buttons clipped off. “That’s all right,” I said, “but don’t get yourselves into trouble destroying government property.” “Throuble,” said Martin Higgins. “What the blazes do they mane by insultin’ min fightin’ for thim like this. I’d stand hangin’ rather than put wan of thim rags on me back.”

I went home in a black mood, all the blacker because I did not want to say what I felt before the men; and when I got to mess I found Lawrence, Anderson and Mangan and young McKenna as sore as myself. We all exploded together, and Colonel Barker, at first mildly interested, seemed to get worried. “Well,” he said, “at least they wouldn’t object if they had to wear English shoes, would they?” “No,” I said. “They’d have the satisfaction of stamping on them.” The laugh at my poor joke ended the discussion, but I waited after supper to talk with Colonel Barker. I didn’t want him worried about us, and he naturally couldn’t know; but I felt he could appreciate our attitude from his own very strong anti-German feelings. “Colonel,” I said. “We do not want you to feel that you have a regiment of divided loyalty or dubious reliability on your hands. We are all volunteers for this war. If you put our fellows in line alongside a bunch of Tommies, they would only fight the harder to show the English who are the better men, though I would not guarantee that there would not be an occasional row in a rest camp if we were billeted with them. There are soldiers with us who left Ireland to avoid service in the British Army. But as soon as we got into the war, these men, though not yet citizens, volunteered to fight under the Stars and Stripes.

“We have our racial feelings, but these do not affect our loyalty to the United States. You can understand it. There were times during the past two years when if England had not restrained her John Bull tendencies on the sea we might have gotten into a series of difficulties that would have led to a war with her. In that case Germany would have been the Ally. You are a soldier, and you would have fought, suppressing your own dislike for that Ally. But supposing in the course of the war we were short of tin hats and they asked you to put on one of those Boche helmets?”

The Colonel whacked the table, stung to sudden anger at the picture. Then he laughed, “You have a convincing way of putting things, Father. I’ll see that they clothe my men hereafter in American uniforms.”

And though, as I found later, many of the offensive uniforms had been torn to ribbons by the men, nobody ever made any inquiry about “destruction of government property.”

PERCEY

February 2nd, 1918

I usually manage to get to two different towns for my Church services Sunday mornings. General Lenihan always picks me up in his machine and goes with me to my early service, at which he acts as acolyte for the Mass, a duty which he performs with the correctness of a seminarian, enhanced by his fine soldierly face and bearing and his crown of white hair. The men are deeply impressed by it, and there are few letters that go home that do not speak of it. He brought me back from Cohons this morning and dropped me off at Percey, where I had a later Mass. These French villagers are different from our own home folks in that they want long services; they seem to feel that their locality is made little of, if they do not have everything that city churches can boast, and I sometimes think, a few extras that local tradition calls for. It is hard on me, for I am a Low Church kind of Catholic myself; and besides “soldier’s orisons” are traditionally short ones. The only consolation I have here in Percey is that the old septuagenarian who leads the service for the people sings in such a way that I can render thanks to Heaven that at last it has been given to my ears to hear raised in that sacred place the one voice I have ever heard that is worse than my own.

I called on Donovan this evening and found him sitting in a big, chilly chamber in the old chateau in front of a fire that refused to burn. He had had a hard day and was still busy with orders for the comfort of men and animals. “Father,” he said, “I have just been thinking that what novelists call romance is only what men’s memories hold of the past, with all actual realization of the discomforts left out, and only the dangers past and difficulties conquered remaining in imagination. What difference is there between us and the fellow who has landed at the Chateau in Stanley Weyman or Robert Stevenson’s interesting stories; who has come in after a hard ride and is giving orders for the baiting of his horse or the feeding of his retinue, as he sits, with his jackboots pulled down, before the unwilling fire and snuffs the candle to get sufficient light to read his orders for the next day’s march.” I get much comfort from the Major’s monologue. It supplies an excellent romantic philosophy with which to face the sordid discomforts which are the most trying part of war.

BAISSEY

February 8th, 1918

Over today and dined at Hurley’s mess. Pat Dowling told of a rather mysterious thing that happened to him while he was a Sergeant in the regular army. He was sent from one post to another, a distance of two hundred miles, with a sealed letter which he delivered to the Commanding Officer, who opened it, read it, and said: “Sergeant, you will return to your own post immediately.” “I have often wondered,” said Pat, “what could have been in that letter.” “I can tell you,” said Tom Martin, in his quiet way. “Well, what was in it?” “That letter read, ‘If you like the looks of this man, keep him.’”

LONGEAU

February 10th, 1918

The Regiment has made huge progress in military matters during the past month. I go over to Cohons and the new French Chauchat automatics are barking merrily at the hill that climbs from the road. At Percey I see our erstwhile baseball artists learning an English overhead bowling delivery for hurling hand grenades at a pit, where they explode noisily and harmlessly. At Baissey Major Moynahan walks me up the steep hill to show me his beautiful system of trenches, though I see no reflection of his enthusiasm in the faces of Jerry Sheehan or Jim Sullivan—they had the hard job of helping to dig them. West of the town against the steep base of the highest hill Lieutenants O’Brien and Cunningham with the 37 mm. or one-pound cannon, and Lieutenants Walsh and Keveny with the Stokes mortars are destroying the fair face of nature. Vociferous young Lieutenants are urging the men to put snap into their bayonet lunges at stuffed mannikins.

I had a little clash of my own with some of these enthusiastic youngsters early in the game. In the British school of the bayonet they teach that the men ought to be made to curse while doing these exercises. I see neither grace nor sense in it. If a man swears in the heat of a battle I don’t even say that God will forgive it; I don’t believe He would notice it. But this organized blasphemy is an offense. And it is a farce—a bit of Cockney Drill Sergeant blugginess to conceal their lack of better qualities. If they used more brains in their fighting and less blood and guts they would be further on than they are. Our fellows will do more in battle by keeping their heads and using the natural cool courage they have than by working themselves up into a fictitious rage to hide their fears.

Latterly we have had the excellent services of a Battalion of French Infantry to help us in our training. They have been through the whole bloody business and wear that surest proof of prowess, the Fourragère. I asked some of the old timers amongst them how much use they had made of the bayonet. They all said that they had never seen a case when one line of bayonets met another. Sometimes they were used in jumping into a trench, but generally when it came to bayonets one side was running away.

The “Y” is on the job and has some sort of place in each town. With me is Percy Atkins, a good man with only one fault—he is working himself to death in spite of my trying to boss him into taking care of himself.

We have suffered a real pang in the transfer of Colonel Hine to the Railway Service. It gives a foretaste of what we are to be up against in this war. There is evidently to be no regard for feelings or established relations of dependency or intimacy, but just put men in where they will be considered to fit best. I was ready for that after the battles began, but it is starting already. First Reed, now Hine. I shall miss Colonel Hine very much—a courteous gentleman, a thorough soldier, a good friend. He was a railroad man for many years and they say he is needed there. God prosper him always wherever he goes.

His successor was picked by General Pershing from his own staff: Colonel John W. Barker, a West Pointer, who had seen much service and had been on duty in France since the beginning of the war. He is a manly man, strong of face, silent of speech, and courteous of manner. We have learned to like him already—we always like a good soldier. We are also beginning to get some real training, as the weather is more favorable and our officers are getting back from school.

CHAPTER III
THE LUNÉVILLE SECTOR

ARBRE HAUT

March 1st, 1918

The trenches at last! We have all read descriptions of them and so had our preconceived notions. The novelty is that we are in a thick woods. You go out from Lunéville (where we have been having the unwonted joys of city life for a week or so) along the flat valley of the Vesouze to Croix-Mare, and east to Camp New York, where some Adrian barracks, floating like Noah’s Arks in a sea of mud, house the battalion in reserve; then up a good military road through the Forest of Parroy to Arbre Haut, where a deep dugout forty feet underground shelters the Colonel and his headquarters. A mile further on, at Rouge Bouquet, one arrives at a Battalion Post of Command dugout now occupied by Major Donovan, Lieutenants Ames, Irving, Lacey and Captain Mercier, an energetic, capable and agreeable officer of the French Mission. Duck-board paths lead in various directions through peaceful looking woods to a sinuous line of trenches which were, when we arrived in them, in considerable need of repair. Company D, under Captain McKenna, had the honor of being first in the lines. They were followed by Companies B and A, Company C being in support. Off duty the men live in mean little dugouts thinly roofed, poorly floored, wet and cold. But they are happy at being on the front at last, and look on the discomforts as part of the game. Their only kick is that it is too quiet. Their main sport is going out on patrols by night or day to scout through “No Man’s Land,” to cut wires, and stir things up generally. With our artillery throwing over shells from the rear and our impatient infantry prodding the enemy, this sector will not be long a quiet one.

CROIX-MARE

March 10th, 1918

We have had our first big blow, and we are still reeling under the pain and sorrow of it. Our 1st Battalion left the trenches with few casualties to pay for their ten days of continuous work at trench and wire mending and night patrols. Arthur Trayer and John Lyons of Company D were the first to gain their wound chevrons. On March 5th the 2nd Battalion began to move company by company from Camp New York. I spent the afternoon before with each unit attending to their spiritual needs, and ending the day with a satisfactory feeling of having left nothing undone. I was with Company E on March 6th and will always retain a recollection of certain youngsters who stayed for a little friendly personal chat after confession, like Arthur Hegney, Eddie Kelly, Steve Navin, Arthur Christfully, George Adkins, Phil Finn; while Steve Derrig and Michael Ahearn with Bailey, Halligan and McKiernan were rounding up the bunch to keep me going.

The Company went out in the early morning of March 7th to relieve Company A, and soon had the position taken over. About 4 P. M. the enemy began a terrific shelling with heavy minenwerfers on the position at Rocroi. The big awkward wabbling aerial torpedoes began coming over, each making a tremendous hole where it hit and sending up clouds of earth and showers of stone. Lieutenant Norman, an old Regular Army man, was in charge of the platoon, and after seeing that his guards and outposts were in position, ordered the rest of the men into the dugouts. While he was in the smaller one a torpedo struck it fair and destroyed it, burying the two signal men from Headquarters Company, Arthur Hegney and Edward Kearney. The Lieutenant barely managed to extricate himself from the debris and set himself to look after the rest of his men. He was inspecting the larger dugout alongside when another huge shell came over, buried itself in the very top of the cave and exploded, rending the earth from the supporting beams and filling the whole living space and entrance with rocks and clay, burying the Lieutenant and twenty-four men.

Major Donovan of the 1st Battalion was at the Battalion P. C. with Major Stacom when the bombardment began. As there were six positions to defend and the shelling might mean an attack anywhere along the whole line, the Battalion Commander’s duty was to remain at the middle of the web with his reserves at hand to control the whole situation. So Major Donovan requested that as he had no general responsibilities for the situation he might be permitted to go down to Rocroi and see what he could do there. Stacom was unwilling to have anybody else run a risk that he was not permitted to share himself, but he gave his consent.

Major Donovan found the men in line contending with a desperate condition. The trenches were in places levelled by the bombardment and though the enemy were no longer hurling their big torpedoes they kept up a violent artillery attack on the position. The only answer that we could make to this was from the trench mortars which were kept going steadily by Lieutenants Walsh and F. McNamara, Corporal Cudmore, William Murphy, Wisner, Young, Harvey, P. Garvey, Herbert Shannon, F. Garvey, DeNair, Robertson and the one pounders under Lieutenant Cunningham, Sergeants J. J. Ryan and Willermin. One of their guns was blown clean out of its position.

Corporal Helmer with Privates Raymond, McKenzie, Cohen, McCormack, O’Meara and Smeltzer were saved from the dugout and immediately began to work for the rescue of the others, aided by 1st Sergeant Bailey, Sergeants William Kelly and Andrew Callahan, Corporals Bernard Kelly and William Halligan with John Cronin, Thomas Murray, James Joyce and John Cowie. They knew that many of their comrades were dead already but the voices could still be heard as the yet standing timbers kept the earth from filling the whole grade. The rescuers were aided by Lieutenant Buck and three sergeants of Company A, who had remained until the newly arrived company had learned its way about the sector. These were Sergeants William Moore, Daniel O’Connell and Spencer Rossel. Sergeant Abram Blaustein also hastened up with the pioneer section, Mackay, Taggart, Schwartz, Adair, Heins, Quinn, LaClair, Dunn, Gillman and the rest.

Major Donovan found them working like mad in an entirely exposed position to liberate the men underneath. A real soldier’s first thought will always be the holding of his position, so the Major quickly saw to it that the defense was properly organized. Little Eddie Kelly, a seventeen-year-old boy, was one of the coolest men in sight, and he flushed with pleasure when told that he was to have a place of honor and danger on guard. The work of rescue was kept going with desperate energy, although there was but little hope that any more could be saved, as the softened earth kept slipping down, and it was impossible to make a firm passage-way. The Engineers were also sent for and worked through the night to get out bodies for burial but with only partial success. Meanwhile the defenders of the trench had to stand a continuous shelling in which little Kelly was killed, Stephen Navin and Stephen Derrig were seriously wounded, and Sergeant Kahn, Corporal Smeltzer and Privates Bowler and Dougherty slightly.

The French military authorities conferred a number of Croix de Guerre, giving a Corps citation to Corporal Helmer for working to save his comrades after having been buried himself, “giving a very fine example of conscience, devotion and courage.” Division citations went to Major Donovan, “superior officer who has shown brilliant military qualities notably on the 7th and 8th of March, 1918, by giving during the course of a violent bombardment an example of bravery, activity and remarkable presence of mind”; and to Private James Quigley, who “carried two wounded men to first aid station under a violent bombardment and worked all night trying to remove his comrades buried under a destroyed dugout.” Regimental citations were given to Lieutenant John Norman, Lieutenants Oscar Buck and W. Arthur Cunningham, Sergeant William Bailey and Carl Kahn of Company E, Sergeants William J. Moore, Daniel O’Connell and Spencer T. Rossell of Company A, Sergeants Blaustein and Private Charles Jones of H. Q. Company.

The bodies of Eddie Kelly and Oscar Ammon of Company F, who was also killed during that night, with those that could be gotten from the dugout were buried in Croix-Mare in a plot selected for the purpose near a roadside Calvary which, from the trees surrounding it, was called the “Croix de L’Arbre Vert” or “Green Tree Cross.” The others we left where they fell. Over the ruined dugout we erected a marble tablet with the inscription, “Here on the field of honor rest”—and their names.

Company E held those broken trenches with their dead lying there all of that week and Company L during the week following. Following is a full list of the dead: Lieutenant John Norman, Corporal Edward Sullivan, George Adkins, Michael Ahearn, Patrick Britt, Arthur Christfully, William Drain, William Ellinger, Philip S. Finn, Michael Galvin, John J. Haspel, Edward J. Kelly, James B. Kennedy, Peter Laffey, John J. Le Gall, Charles T. Luginsland, Frank Meagher, William A. Moylan, William H. Sage and Robert Snyder of Company E; Arthur V. Hegney and Edward J. Kearney of Headquarters Company and Oscar Ammon of Company F.

ARBRE HAUT

March 12th, 1918

We have given up hope of getting our dead out of Rocroi—it would be a task for the Engineers, and it would probably mean the loss of many more lives to accomplish it. Joyce Kilmer’s fine instincts have given us a juster view of the propriety of letting them rest where they fell. So I went out today to read the services of the dead and bless their tomb. Company L is in that position now, and they too have been subjected to a fierce attack in which Lieutenant Booth was wounded. He and Lieutenant Baker and Corporal Lawrence Spencer are in for a Croix de Guerre for courage in action. Today there was a lot of sniping going on, so Sergeant John Donoghue and Sergeant Bill Sheahan wanted to go out to the position with me. They are two of the finest lads that Ireland has given us, full of faith and loyalty, and they had it in mind, I know, to stand each side of me and shield me from harm with their bodies. Val Roesel, Bert Landzert and Martin Coneys also insisted that they would make good acolytes for me. But I selected the littlest one in the crowd, Johnny McSherry; and little Jack trotted along the trench in front of me with his head erect while I had to bend my long back to keep my head out of harm’s way. We came on Larry Spencer in an outpost position contemplating his tin hat with a smile of satisfaction. It had a deep dent in it where a bullet had hit it and then deflected—a fine souvenir.

We finished our services at the grave and returned. I lingered a while with Spencer, a youth of remarkable elevation of character—it is a good thing for a Chaplain to have somebody to look up to. Back in the woods I met two new Lieutenants, Bernard Shanley and Edward Sheffler. Shanley is from the Old Sod. Sheffler is a Chicagoan of Polish descent, a most likable youth. I gave them a good start on their careers as warriors by hearing their confessions.

That reminded me that I had some neglected parishioners in Company I, so I went over their set of trenches. Around the P. C. it looks like pictures of the houses of wattles and clay that represent the architecture of Early Britain. Met Harry Adikes and Ed Battersby and found them easy victims when I talked confession. Where do the Irish get such names? Ask Wilton Wharton what his ancestors were and he will say “Irish”; so will Bob Cousens and Bill Cuffe, Eddie Willett, Jim Peel or Jim Vail. Charlie Cooper is half way to being Irish now, and he will be all Irish if he gets a girl I know. I know how Charlie Garret is Irish,—for he comes from my neighborhood, and if it were the custom to adopt the mother’s name in a family he would be Charles Ryan. The same custom would let anybody know without his telling it, as he does with his chest out, that George Van Pelt is Irish too. I saw one swarthy fellow with MIKE KELLEY in black letters on his gas mask, but on asking him I found that he was Irish only by abbreviation, as he was christened Michael Keleshian. Tommy O’Brien made himself my guide and acolyte for my holy errand; and he first took me on a tour amongst the supply sergeants and cooks for he wanted us both well looked after. So when we had gotten Eddie Joyce, Pat Rogan, Michael O’Brien, Tom Loftus and Joe Callahan in proper Christian condition for war or hospitality, we sallied forth around the trenches.

Religion in the trenches has no aid from pealing organ or stained glass windows, but it is a real and vital thing at that. The ancestors of most of us kept their religious life burning brightly as they stole to the proscribed Mass in a secluded glen, or told their beads by a turf fire; and I find that religion thrives today in a trench with the diapason of bursting shells for an organ. I had a word or two for every man and they were glad to get it; and the consolations of the old faith for those that were looking for it. It makes a man feel better about the world and God, and the kind of people he has put into it to know in conditions like these such men as Bill Beyer, Fordham College Man; Pat Carroll, Chauffeur; Tom Brennan, Patrick Collins, whom I am just beginning to know and to like; Bill Dynan, whom I have known and liked for a long time; manly Pat Hackett and athletic Pat Flynn, solid non-coms like Ford, Hennessey, McDermott, Murphy, Denis Hogan, Michael Jordan, Hugh McFadden, not to mention the old Roman 1st Sergeant Patrick McMinaman. It was the vogue at one time to say with an air of contempt that religion is a woman’s affair. I would like to have such people come up here—if they dared: and say the same thing to the soldiers of this Company or of this Regiment—if they dared.

The last outpost was an interesting one. It did not exist when I was in these parts with the 2nd Battalion, as our friends on the other side had not yet built it for us. But recently they have sent over one of their G. I. cans (that, dear reader, means galvanized iron can, which are as big as a barrel, and which tells the story of what a minenwerfer torpedo shell looks like when it is coming toward you) and the G. I. Can made a hole like the excavation of a small cottage. In it I found four or five of Company I snugly settled down and very content at being that much closer to the enemy. Here I met for the first time Ed. Shanahan, a fine big fellow who ought to make good with us, and Charlie Stone, whose mother was the last to say good-bye to me as we left Camp Mills. Mess came up while we were there and we did justice to it sitting on clumps of soft earth which had been rolled into round snowballs by the explosion—and chatting about New York.

ST. PATRICK’S DAY IN THE TRENCHES

Sunday, March 17th 1918

What a day this would have been for us if we were back in New York! Up the Avenue to St. Patrick’s Cathedral in the morning, and the big organ booming out the old Irish airs and the venerable old Cardinal uttering words of blessing and encouragement. And in the afternoon out on parade with the Irish Societies with the band playing Garry Owen and Let Erin Remember and O’Donnell Aboo, as we pass through the cheering crowds. And how they would shout in this year of Grace 1918 if we could be suddenly transported to New York’s Avenue of triumph. But I am glad we are not there. For more than seventy years the old Regiment has marched up the Avenue in Church parade on St. Patrick’s Day. But never, thank God, when the country was at war. Other New Yorkers may see the Spring sweeping through the Carolinas or stealing timidly up the cliffs of the Hudson or along the dented shores of Long Island; but there is only one place in the world where the old Irish Regiment has any right to celebrate it, and that is on the battle line.

The 3rd Battalion is in the trenches, so I went up yesterday and spent the night with Major Moynahan, who gave me a true Irish welcome. He and Leslie have made good Irishmen out of Lieutenants Rerat and Jackson and we had a pleasant party.

We had not a Cathedral for our St. Patrick’s day Mass but Lieutenant Austin Lawrence had Jim McCormack and George Daly of the Medicos pick out a spot for me among the trees to conceal my bright vestments from observation and the men who were free slipped up the boyaus from the nearby trenches for the services.

Later in the morning I said Mass back at Camp New York for the 2nd Battalion in a grove of young birch trees on the hill slope, the men being scattered singly over the slope and holding very still when the bugler sounded the alert for an enemy aeroplane over head. I described former St. Patrick days to them and told them they were better here. New York would talk more of them, think more of them than if they were back there. Every man in the town would be saying he wished he were here and every man worth his salt would mean it. The leading men of our country had called us to fight for human liberty and the rights of small nations, and if we rallied to that noble cause we would establish a claim on our own country and on humanity in favor of the dear land from which so many of us had sprung, and which all of us loved.

In the afternoon we had a fine concert under the trees. Sergeants Frye and Tom Donahoe played for Tommy McCardle’s funny songs, and for John Mullin’s serious ones. McManus and Quinn played the fife for Irish dances, and Lieutenant Prout, by special request, recited John Locke’s poem, “Oh Ireland, I Bid You the Top of the Morning.”

In the middle of the concert I read Joyce Kilmer’s noble poem, “Rouge Bouquet.” The last lines of each verse are written to respond to the notes of “Taps,” the bugle call for the end of the day which is also blown ere the last sods are dropped on the graves of the dead. Sergeant Patrick Stokes stood near me with his horn and blew the tender plaintive notes before I read the words; and then from the deep woods where Egan was stationed came a repetition of the notes “like horns from elfland faintly blowing.” Before I had finished tears had started in many an eye especially amongst the lads of Company E. I had known it was going to be a sad moment for all, and had directed the band to follow me up with a medley of rollicking Irish airs; just as in military funerals the band leads the march to the grave in solemn cadence and departs playing a lively tune. It is the only spirit for warriors with battles yet to fight. We can pay tribute to our dead but we must not lament for them overmuch.

CROIX-MARE

March 18th, 1918

I buried a soldier of the 117th Signal Battalion in Croix-Mare today with unusual honors. Private Wilkerson had been killed in action and as he was a Catholic Major Garrett had asked me to perform the ceremony. The French were most kind in participating, but that is no new thing. Colonel Dussauge always has his Chasseurs take part with us in funerals, though it is a distraction to me to see them trying to accommodate their short choppy gait (“like soldiers in the Movies” according to Bandsman McGregor) to the air of a Dead March. I said to the Colonel: “There is one thing your men can’t do.” “What is that?” “Walk to a funeral march.” “Thank you for the compliment, Monsieur l’Aumonier.” The Curé, too, always came to our funerals. And we had a fine grizzled old Oblate Division Chaplain who has been in all the French wars from Madagascar to Tonquin. The Government tried to put him out of France when the law against Religious was passed, but he refused to go, saying he would live his life in France if he had to live it in jail. I met a number of these religious in the army, most of them returned from exile to offer their lives in defense of their country. If the French Government puts them out after the war is over they will deserve the scorn and enmity of mankind as a rotten set of ingrates.

At the grave we found we had other spectators. I saw General Menoher and General Lenihan with a short spare-built civilian whom I took for a reporter. He had a French gas mask with a long tape, which hung down between his legs like a Highlander’s sporran. There were Moving Picture cameras too, which seemed to spell a Presence. I whispered to the old Curé that his picture would be put on the screen in every town in America, at which he was, I could see, somewhat shocked and altogether pleased. After the ceremony a number of the Signal Battalion took advantage of the opportunity to go to confession; and I was standing by the side of a truck performing my pious duties when General Lenihan approached with the slim reporter. They did not intrude, so I missed my chance of making the acquaintance of the energetic Newton W. Baker, Secretary of War of the United States.

LUNÉVILLE

March 21st, 1918

For the past twelve days volunteers from the 1st Battalion have been preparing, under command of Lieutenants Henry A. Bootz and Raymond H. Newton, for a coup de main in connection with the 41st Battalion of Chasseurs. They have been training with the French at Croix-Mare and I find it interesting to watch them. They go through all sorts of athletic stunts to get into perfect condition, study the ground through maps on the blackboard showing just what each man’s position is to be, and then work out the whole thing over a ground which is very much like the Ouvrage Blanc, where the raid will take place.

Last Saturday afternoon, after I had been hearing confessions amongst them, four or five of the Irish lads waited to see me. I went for a walk with them around an old moat and as we stood looking at a stone tablet that commemorated the victory of some Duke of Lorraine over a Duke of Burgundy four hundred years ago, Billy Elwood put the question, “Father, do you think we’ll be afraid?” “Not you,” I said, “not a bit of it. You may feel rather tight across the chest for the five minutes before you tear into it, but when you get going you’ll forget even that, because your blood will be up.” “I believe you,” he said. “Of course you know none of us are afraid and we are all anxious to have a try at it, but it’s our first time in a thing of this sort and the only worry we have is that something might go wrong inside of us and spoil the good name of the Irish.”

Before the raid started there was an amusing little interlude. Corporal Bob Foster of Company D had a little Irish flag given to him by Sergeant Evers of the Band, and the lads were determined that that flag would go over the top in the first organized attack made by the regiment. A young officer, not of our Division, who had been sent as an observer, saw the flag stuck at the top of Foster’s rifle and felt it his duty to protest against it. After a short parley Bootz demanded, “What are you here for, anyway.” “I’m an observer,” was the response. “Then climb a tree and observe, and let me run this raid.”

Our artillery was busy bombarding the position that was to be the object of assault and at 7:35 P. M. the men went out through our wires under cover of darkness and took up their position near the chicanes (passages) in the enemy wire, which had been reconnoitered the night before. Our artillery laid down a barrage at 7:50 for a space of three minutes upon which the front line advanced and got possession of the German trenches without opposition, as the Germans had evacuated them during the heavy bombardment of the past two days. They were just in time in reaching shelter for the German artillery began to shell their own abandoned line most vigorously. The trouble about this attack was that our own artillery preparation had been too good. The Germans could not help inferring that this point was to be made the object of an assault, so they drew back and waited until the infantry had reached the position. Then they turned on them the full force of artillery and machine gun fire from positions further back, leaving to the assaulters the choice between getting back to their own lines, or attacking an unknown and well defended position in the dark. The French Officer in charge gave the order to retire. During this period Edward Maher of Company B must have been killed because no word of him was ever received. Corporal William Elwood and Joseph Miller of Company C were fatally wounded. Badly wounded were Sergeants John F. Scully, Fred Almendinger and Martin Gill of Company A and Patrick Grogan of Company D. After getting back to the French trenches Bootz and Newton repeatedly led parties back over the shell-swept area to search for Maher, and to see if the Germans had reoccupied their trenches. On this mission Thomas P. Minogue of Company B was killed. Lieutenant Newton carried in one French soldier and Private Plant carried in another. Lieutenant Bootz, with Corporal Joseph Pettit of Company C, helped Sergeant Scully to the lines, and going out again, they found Joe Miller, his right leg amputated by a shell. Miller was a big man but Bootz swung him up on his back and with Pettit assisting, carried him back into the lines.

The following officers and men taking part in this coup de main were decorated by the French authorities on March 22nd at Croix-Mare: Division Citations, First Lieutenant Henry A. Bootz, Second Lieutenant Raymond H. Newton, Private Marlow Plant; Regimental Citations: Company A, Joseph C. Pettit, Frank J. Fisher, Privates George McCarthy, Bernard McOwen, Michael Morley, Sergeant John Scully; Company B, Sergeants Spiros Thomas, Christian Biorndall, Corporal William F. Judge, Privates Frank Brandreth, Vincent J. Eckas, Daniel J. Finnegan; Company C, Sergeant Eugene A. McNiff, Corporal Herman E. Hillig, Privates Bernard Barry, Michael Cooney, James Barry, John J. Brawley, Joseph A. Miller; Company D, Sergeant Thomas M. O’Malley, Corporal Thomas H. Brown, Privates Denis O’Connor, Patrick Grogan, John Cahill, Harry H. DeVoe.

Of the wounded, Elwood died shortly after being brought to the Hospital at Lunéville and Joe Miller succumbed the next day after sufferings borne with a fortitude that begot the admiration of nurses and doctors used to dealing with courageous men. The others are wounded badly enough but they will recover. Almendinger, who describes himself as “half Boche and half County Kilkenny,” was going off to the operating ward to have his wounded eye removed when I saw him the second time. “Never mind about that, Fred,” I said, “Uncle Sam will look after you.” “I’m not thinking about Uncle Sam at all. There’s a girl back in New York who doesn’t care whether I have one eye or two, so I should worry.”

THE GAS ATTACK

March 20th and 21st, 1918

But meanwhile there had been other happenings in the sector which quite overshadowed the 1st Battalion raid.

Company K went into the line in the Rouge Bouquet Sector on March 12th, 1918, relieving Company H. The Company Headquarters were at Chaussailles, and the two platoons in the front line were: on the right, at Changarnier (C. R. 1), one platoon; in the center at C. R. 2 a half platoon; and on the left at Chevert (C. R. 3) a half platoon.

There were no casualties for the first eight days except that John Ring received a bullet in the arm. Our patrols did not come into contact with the Boches (who apparently never left their lines) and except a few minenwerfer and some shelling with 77’s the sector was quiet, the weather was fine, and every one spoke of the tour at the front as a picnic.

About 5:30 on the evening of the 20th the Boches suddenly began to bombard the entire company sector, from a line not far from their own trenches to a line several hundred yards in the rear of Company Headquarters, with mustard gas shells and shrapnel, the heaviest bombardment being in the vicinity of C. R. 2, where Sergeant Frank Doughney was in command, of C. R. 3, where Lieutenant Bill Crane was in command, and at the first aid station, where Lieutenant Patten and his group were quartered, together with the fourth platoon under Lieutenant Levi. This bombardment lasted about three hours.

The groups stationed at the outposts were caught on their way in, the two groups under Corporals Caulfield and Joe Farrell being led by Corporal Farrell into an incomplete dugout about 300 yards in front of our lines, the other two going directly in.

The second platoon, under Lieutenant Dowling in Changarnier, were not so heavily shelled and being on higher ground, were not gassed so badly as the others.

In C. R. 2, Harry McCoun was struck by a shell which carried away his left hand. He held up the stump and shouted, “Well, boys, there goes my left wing.” Sergeant Jack Ross and Private Ted Van Yorx led him under heavy fire back to the first aid station, where Doctor Patten tore off his mask to operate on him (for which he earned the Croix de Guerre), but McCoun died the next morning.

In C. R. 3, Lieutenant Crane walked from one post to the other in the midst of the heaviest bombardment in order to encourage the men. In the midst of this bombardment, several of the runners, including particularly Privates Ed Rooney and Ray Staber, distinguished themselves by their courage and coolness in carrying messages between Company headquarters and the front line.

The men were prompt in putting on their masks as soon as the presence of gas was recognized, but it was found impossible to keep them on indefinitely and at the same time keep up the defense of the sector. Immediately after the bombardment, the entire company area reeked with the odor of mustard-gas and this condition lasted for several days. It had been raining heavily the night before, and there was no breeze whatever.

By about midnight some of the men were sick as a result of the gas, and as the night wore on, one after another they began to feel its effects on their eyes, to cry, and gradually to go blind, so that by dawn a considerable number from the front line had been led all the way back and were sitting by the Lunéville road, completely blinded, and waiting their turn at an ambulance, and the third platoon were unable to furnish enough men to man all their posts and were compelled to ask for replacements.

Meanwhile, about ten o’clock at night, the first and fourth platoons had been ordered to leave their reserve positions and march back to the Lunéville road and down the cross-road on the other side where they lay down in the mud and slept till morning. In the morning they filtered down to replace the casualties in the other two platoons.

About three o’clock in the morning Lieutenant (Doctor) Martin came down in the midst of the gas to relieve Lieutenant Patten, who had been blinded and taken to the hospital. Lieutenant Martin was himself affected by the gas and went blind on the following morning.

By dawn, the men were going blind one after another, and being ordered to the hospital. Often, by the time they got to the ambulance, the man leading was himself blind and both got into the ambulance together. Not a man lost his head or lay down on the job and not a man left for the hospital until he was stone blind, or ordered to go by an officer, and a number of men were blinded while on post, while others stuck it out for so long that it was finally necessary to carry them on stretchers to the dressing station; and this although all had been instructed that mustard gas was one of the most deadly gases and that it caused blindness which lasted for months and was in many cases permanent.

By ten o’clock in the morning fully two-thirds of the company had been blinded, and about this time Lieutenants Crane, Dowling and Levi, and Captain Hurley one after the other went blind and were led back, followed later by Lieutenant Burns.

Throughout the day the men continued to go blind, until by seven o’clock only about thirty were left, almost all of whom were in the front line, under command of Lieutenant Tom Martin, and they were so few that it was necessary for them to go on post for four hours at a stretch, with two hours off, and some of them, including Tom Hickey, Barney Furey, John McLoughlin, Pat McConnell and Jerry O’Connor were on post for as long as six hours at a time.

At seven o’clock Lieutenant Hunt Warner, with Lieutenant Zipp, appeared with reinforcements, consisting of forty men from Company M. Lieutenant Warner was put in command at Chevert with Sergeant Embrie of Company K, as second in command; Sergeant Von Glahn of Company M, was put in command at C. R. 2, where the gas was at that time especially heavy; and Lieutenant Zipp was put in command at Changarnier, with Corporal Joe Farrell, who knew the sector thoroughly and spent the night going from one post to another, as second in command, Lieutenant Tom Martin at Changarnier being in command of the whole company sector.

That evening about dusk the men in the front line heard an explosion in the rear and looked back in time to see the battalion ammunition dump go up in a blaze of glory, on seeing which all broke into applause and loud cheers. It was thought that the Boches might be so foolish as to think the evening propitious for a raid, and all posts were manned and all were ready to give him a warm reception, but he failed to show up.

At seven next morning the French appeared and the relief was completed by about nine o’clock, when the survivors set out for Lunéville, where they were taken in hand by Lieutenant Arnold, who ordered them all, much against their protest, to a hospital where they were surprised to find that they were casualties, their injuries consisting principally of burns on the body, which had just begun to show up, and which kept most of them in the hospital for at least a month.

On their arrival at the hospital they found there some of the French troops who had relieved them on that morning and who had already become casualties because of the gas which lingered in the area.

The men killed, besides McCoun, were Salvatore Moresea, whose body was found by the French in No Man’s Land the day after the Company was relieved, Carl Braun, of Headquarters Company, hit by bullet, with Robert Allen, Walter Bigger, and Lawrence Gavin, who died in the hospital within a day or two as a result of the effect of the gas on their lungs. About four hundred of our men were put out of action in this gas attack including practically all of K Company, many of M, and some from Headquarters, Supply and Medical.

The event had one consoling feature, and that was the superb conduct of the men. They had been told most awful stories of the effect of gas. When they found that their whole position was saturated with it, they felt that their chances to live through it were slender, and that they would surely be blind for a long time. And yet not a single man quit his post until ordered. There was no disorder or panic; the men of Company K were forced to quit their position, but they quit it one by one, and every man was a subject for a hospital long before he left. And the Company M men coming up to take over the position, and seeing the blinded and tortured soldiers going back, had courage in equal measure. Soldiers that will stand up to it as these had done under the terrors and sufferings of that night can be relied on for anything that men can be called on to do.

LUNÉVILLE

March 23rd, 1918

We are quitting this sector and going back to the Langres area to rest up a bit and study out the lessons we have learned. Most of the companies have started already. The Germans are shelling this city today for the first time in over three years. It is an interesting experience to be in a shelled city, and, so far as I can see the results, not a particularly dangerous one.

ST. BOINGT

Palm Sunday, 1918

This has been an ideal Spring day. I said Mass in the village church for the “4th Battalion” (Headquarters, Machine Gun, Sanitary and Supply Companies). Later in the morning Major Lawrence and I dropped in to the High Mass. I was interested in the palms. When I was a lad we used cedar, before the days when ships from the Spanish Main brought their cargoes of broad palmetto leaves, which we carry in our hands on Palm Sunday and wear in our hats through Holy Week. Here they use anything fresh, young and growing, that the country and the season afford. The people pluck small branches from the trees on their way to Mass, the preference being for willow shoots with their shiny yellow green bark and furry buds. There is a fine old-world countryside flavor to this custom of plucking these offerings to the Lord from one’s own trees or along familiar lanes, that we never get from our boughten palms.

This I felt especially when I saw what they were doing with them. When the procession began, everybody arose and followed the crossbearer out of the church portals into the mellow spring morning. Around the church they went, their ranks now swelled by a crowd of our own soldiers. Our route lay through the graves of the village dead. At each grave a lone figure or a small group would detach themselves and kneel in prayer while they stuck their fresh young twigs in the soil around it. We too found a place for our offerings and prayers when we came to a recently made mound with a Croix de Guerre and bronze palm embossed upon its stone—a French soldier, “Mort pour la Patrie.” We borrowed pussy willows from the people and pulled branches of green box, and covered that grave with them while we made our soldier’s orisons for the man that was sleeping there, and for our own fine lads that we had left behind in the dugout at Rocroi and under the Green Tree Cross at Croix-Mare.

After Mass I started off across the fields to visit the 2nd Battalion at Essey la Cote. A wonderful spring day—fresh and sweet and clear. From the hill one could see the dull red tiles of twenty villages clustering along the slopes of the rolling landscape. Faint sounds of distant church bells came to my ears; and nearer, clearer notes from overhead such as I had never heard before. Skylarks! It was the final touch to make it a perfect morning.

I dropped down to the road which led to the nestling village, and met a band of children romping out. Here too was spring. They gathered round me, not at all shy, for they were bubbling with excitement and anxious to talk. The American soldiers—they were so—big-and so young—and so nice—and so devout (they filled the church at three Masses)—and so rich (they gave money like nobody had ever seen before, and the Commandant had put a twenty franc note on the collection plate). “Good Old Bill Stacom,” I mused, “we are both far away from our little parish in the Bronx, but he has not forgotten my teachings on the first duty of the laity.”

I dined with Captain Jim Finn and his happy family of bright young Lieutenants—Sherman Platt and Becker and Otto and Flynn, clean cut active youngsters who enjoy their work and are delighted at serving with the old Regiment. I spent the afternoon amongst the men. They too were enjoying the day lazily, cleaning up equipment in chatty groups or propped against sunny walls, or wandering through the fields. They have heard of the big German Drive in the north and they know that we have been halted and are to be sent in somewhere. They are somewhat disappointed at not getting back to Longeau and Baissey and Cohons and Percey once more, but if there is anything big happening they don’t want to miss it. That’s what we are here for.

Billy Kaas offered to be my guide to the hilltop, from which the whole countryside can be seen for miles around. The spot is interesting for other reasons. It marks the high water level of the German invasion of Lorraine in 1914, and now it marks the furthest backward step we are to make on this journey. I feel prophetic twitchings that it will be a long long time before we are allowed to pitch our tents in that part of France over there which has not known invasion by the enemy. The news from the North is grave, and our side will need every soldier it has if the Germans are to be held off. And that is a job that will take a lot of doing. Well, as the men say, “that’s what we are here for.”

ST. REMY AUX BOIS

March 27th, 1918

Dropped over in the morning to call on the First Battalion. I found them in the field, where Donovan had had them lined up for a cross country run. I prudently kept out of his way until he was off with his wild youngsters, and then I looked up George McAdie, who had a stay-at-home duty. Reilley and Kennedy and McKenna were cavorting cross country with the rest. Good enough for them—athletics is a big part of their lives. But George and I are philosophers. So while Donovan led his gang across brooks and barbwire fences and over hills and through woods, George and I sat discussing the most interesting beings in the world; soldier men—their loyalty, courage, humor, their fits of laziness and sulkiness. He pointed out to me a dark Celt who had been discontented with the mean drudgery of a soldier’s life and was hard to manage. Different methods had been tried to jack him up. All failed until the Captain gave him a chance to go over in the Lunéville raid. At last he found something the lad was eager about. He went through the training with cheerfulness, distinguished himself under fire for his cool alacrity, and is now playing the game like a veteran.

Finally the harriers got back, the Major the freshest man amongst them. “Oh, Father,” he said, “why didn’t you get here earlier? You missed a fine time.” “My Guardian Angel was taking good care of me, William,” I said, “and saw to it that I got here late.”

In the afternoon the band came over and we had a band concert in the church square and afterwards a vaudeville show given by the men. The Major was asked to say something and he smilingly passed the buck to me. I got square by telling the story of a Major who had been shot at by a German sniper while visiting one of his companies in the trenches. He made a big fuss about it with the Captain, who in turn bawled out an old sergeant for allowing such things to happen. The sergeant went himself to settle the Heinie that was raising all the trouble. Finally he got sight of his man, took careful aim and fired. As he saw his shot reach home, he muttered, “Take that, confound you, for missing the Major.”

BACCARAT

Easter Sunday Night

Yesterday we were at Xaffévillers, Magnières and St. Pierremont. For my Easter celebration I picked Magnières, as the whole 2nd Battalion was there and two companies of the 1st in St. Pierremont, only ten minutes away. For confessions I set up shop in the street at the crossways, and I had a busy day of it. There was always a long file waiting, but when nobody has much to tell the task is soon sped.

I stayed with Stacom. It is always a pleasure to be with Stacom and his officers. He has a way of kindly mastery that begets affectionate loyalty. A man likes Stacom even when he is getting a call down from him. At supper with Doc Houghton, Joe O’Donohue, Arthur Martin, McDermott, Fechheimer, Landrigan, Ewing Philbin, Billy Burns Guggenheim, and Joe McNamara. A man might search the list of all his acquaintances and not find a set of men so congenial and happily disposed.

I looked up the Curé, an alert slender youngish man with a keen intelligent face, a soldier just back that day en permission to keep the old feast with his own people. The Germans had held him as a hostage in 1914 and had thrice threatened to shoot him, though he had looked after their wounded. If thoroughness was their motto they would have been wiser to do it, I reflected as I talked with him; for he was a man that would count wherever he went, and he certainly had no use for Germans. “Too big a man for this place. We won’t be able to keep him long,” said Stacom’s landlady, a pleasant thoughtful woman, whose son of seventeen was just back for the holidays from some college where he is beginning his studies for the priesthood.

The village church was a ruin. Both sides had used it to fight from and both sides had helped to wreck it. The roof was gone and most of the side walls. The central tower over the entrance still stood, though the wooden beams above had burned, and the two big bells had dropped clean through onto the floor. The Curé used a meeting-room in the town hall for his services, but that would not do for my congregation. The church faced a long paved square, so I decided to set up my altar in the entrance and have the men hear Mass in the square. The church steps served excellently for Communion. It is one of the things I wish I had a picture of—my first Easter service in France; the old ruined church for a background, the simple altar in the doorway, and in front that sea of devout young faces paying their homage to the Risen Savior. My text lay around me—the desecrated temple, the soldier priest by my side, the uniforms we wore, the hope of triumph over evil that the Feast inspired, the motive that brought us here to put an end to this terrible business of destruction, and make peace prevail in the world. Here more than a thousand soldiers were present, and the great majority crowded forward at Communion time to receive the Bread of Life.

I hiked it into Baccarat with the Battalion. At a point on the road the separated elements of the Regiment met and swung in behind each other. Colonel Barker stopped his horse on a bank above the road and watched his men go by, with feelings of pride in their fine appearance and the knowledge of how cheerfully they had given up their prospects of a rest and were going back into the lines again. With his usual kind courtesy, he wanted to have me ride, but for once I preferred to hike, as I was having a good time.

Arriving in Baccarat I ran into Captain Jack Mangan,—always a joyous encounter. We found a hotel and something to eat; met there Major Wheeler, Ordnance Officer of Division, a Southerner of the finest type. I tried to start a row between him and Mangan. I always like to hear these supply people fight—they battle with each other with such genial vigor. When they began to swap compliments I left them, to look up the Y. M. C. A. to see if there were religious services in town that I could announce to my Protestant fellows.

CHAPTER IV
THE BACCARAT SECTOR

BACCARAT

March, 1918

To speak in guide-book fashion, Baccarat is a town of 15,000 people situated in the wide, flat valley of the Meurthe River. It possesses a well-known glass factory and a rather elegant parish church, whose elegance is just now slightly marred by two clean shell-shots, one through its square tower and the other through the octagonal spire. The most extensive ruins, dating from the German capture of the town in 1914, are those of the blocks on both sides of the street between the church and the river. They were caused, not by shell fire, but by deliberate arson, for some actions of the townspeople, real or fancied. A few broken walls are standing with all the chimneys still intact, sticking up amongst them like totem poles. Charlie Brooks, making believe that the ruins were caused by shell fire, said to me “In case of bombardment, I know the safest place to get. Sit right up on top of a chimney and let them shoot away.”

West of the river the hill rises steeply and is crowned by the picturesque old walled village of Deneuvre, dating certainly from the early Middle Ages, and, local antiquarians say, from Roman times. Here are established our regimental headquarters, with the four special companies, and the whole of the third battalion, or what is left of it, as Company K consists of Lieutenant Howard Arnold, Sergeant Embree, Company Clerk Michael Costello and two privates, who were absent on other duties when the Company was gassed; and Company M is reduced to half its strength. The first battalion is very comfortably situated in the Haxo Barracks at the north end of Baccarat, the 2nd Battalion being at present at Neufmaisons, ten kilometers out toward the front lines. The regiment was selected as division reserve on account of the depleted strength of our 3rd Battalion.

BACCARAT

April 2, 1918

At last we have located the gassed members of our 3rd Battalion in the hospitals at Vittel and Contrexéville; and today, as Lieutenant Knowles had the kindly thought of bringing their pay to them, Donovan, Mangan and myself took advantage of the opportunity to go and see them. The hospitals were formerly hotels in these summer resorts and serve excellently for their present purpose. Many of the men are still in bed, lying with wet cloths over their poor eyes, and many of them have been terribly burned about the body, especially those whose duties called upon them to make exertions which used perspiration. Among these is John McGuire of the Supply Company and many of the sanitary detachment, such as Sergeant Lokker, Ed. McSherry, James Butler, Michael Corbett and John J. Tierney, who have been recommended for the Croix de Guerre for courage and devotion in saving the wounded. Sergeant Russell, with Corporals Beall and Brochon of the Headquarters Company are also suffering for their zeal in maintaining liaison.