Part 49

And what said Ritchings concerning himself? Why, merely this, that he “recognized as every right-thinking man would that he had a moral obligation to return to the Cardiff police force for the reason that the ratepayers had been contributing during his absence to the support of his dependents at home.”

Well, Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Ritchings, here’s hats off to you!

WHAT GILLES BROUGHT IN

Driving His Automobile over a Shell-Swept Road a French Lad Braved Death to Deliver the Dead

It was during the dreadful few days when the Germans came closest to Paris, a French writer tells us. Gilles Thurmand—sixteen years old, whose mother kept the _Côte d’Or_—had got hold of an old motor-car which had been smashed up in the first days of the rush to the front, had tinkered with it until it ran again, and then had driven it out to see what he could pick up. He went in the direction of Givres, for he heard that there were a good many wounded along the roads, and the French were yielding. He had come as far as a little coppice, where he slowed down at the sight of a couple of French uniforms. The Germans began suddenly to shell the part of the road over which he had just driven. He did not pay much attention to this at the time, for he was so engrossed with the French officers, of whom there were three standing, and a fourth badly wounded. They had been cut off from their regiment, and were left in this little patch of wood either to be killed by one of the enemy’s shells, or to be taken prisoner. “Get in,” Gilles told them, “and we’ll make a run for it. I’m game if you are.” He was extremely proud of having to do with so many officers at once, and besides, he thought, it might be the means of getting him admitted into the Army. Just as they were lifting the wounded man onto the floor of the vehicle, which was about the size of a Ford limousine, Gilles’ sharp eyes spied another blue coat through the trees at a little distance away, and he ran over to the man, who wore the uniform of a captain. He was squatting over something in the denser underbrush, and raised up hastily as Gilles came toward him.

“Let me get you out of this,” said Gilles, “along with these others.”

“Yes, come with us,” said Major Hervé, the senior officer of the party, limping toward them to find out the cause of the delay. The strange officer responded rather thickly that he couldn’t—that he had his duty to perform, and would prefer to remain at his post. The major, finding that arguing with him was of no avail, commanded him rather shortly to follow the rest, and when he still demurred, ordered the other three to bring him. They did so, gently enough, believing him to be a little unbalanced by shell-fire. Then they all climbed into the crazy vehicle, shut the door, and Gilles, mounting to the front seat, set out to drive them through a quarter of a mile of fire and brimstone, which was as near to hell as anything he had ever imagined.

Shells whizzed past, and bullets hailed upon the roof. Once or twice Gilles heard a faint cry in the back of the motor, and he knew some one was hit, but he bent doggedly to his wheel, and didn’t once look round, for fear, as he phrased it, that he would “lack courage to go on again.” Though a bomb ripped off the fender and nearly capsized the car, Gilles himself was not touched, and presently he drove into a silence as deafening as the noise had been. It was the outskirts of a camp, and there were a few simple little everyday noises like the rattling of dishes and the chopping of wood. But it was like the cemetery of Père La Chaise to Gilles. He could not hear a sound. Two or three Frenchmen in khaki came running toward him as he slid off the box and opened the rear door. Three dead bodies tumbled out. The two left inside were those of the last-found officer and the badly wounded man. They, too, were dead. How had they been killed? Not by shell fire, certainly. Examination proved that they had died by pistol shots. Gilles, taken into custody, his teeth chattering with fear, pointed out the officer who had forcibly been made a member of their party. The man was searched. There were found upon him a spare telephone receiver and a map of the district, together with other evidence proving him a German spy. He had probably been directing the German fire at the moment when Gilles had so inopportunely come upon him. His great reluctance to join the party was explained. During their wild ride he had apparently found time to put a bullet through the head of each of his unsuspecting captors. Whether one of them or he himself had caused his own death, could not be discovered.

[Illustration:

“Tell Her Not to Worry”

“Dear Father, guard our gallant men Within whose hearts is love enshrined, And bring them safely home again To those they cannot leave behind!”

Arthur Guiterman.]

THE ROCK OF THE MARNE

The Story of Col. U. G. McAlexander and the Heroic 38th Infantry, Defender’s of the Surmelin Valley, the “Gateway to Paris”

By CAPTAIN J. W. WOOLRIDGE, U. S. Infantry

When two divisions of German shock troops pile up on a regiment of American fighting men, one does not need to be gifted in imagination to see war in all its ramifications and vicissitudes.

I admit that to those of us who participated the picture as a whole is blurred by proximity while spots are multicolored and accentuated into sheets of concentrated lightning.

The historian of the future will view the battle from afar and do much better, particularly as he will not be hampered by individual facts. Therefore we shall tell you the story and not the history of the 38th’s recent unpleasantness.

The scene is laid in that erstwhile heavenly little valley of the Surmelin which finds its resting place on the banks of the River Marne. The semi-mountainous ridges that flank this little valley are wooded with what the French call trees; they are tangled with shrubs and second growths that make for ideal machine-gun nests, as we shall see.

Down in the bosom of the valley meanders the Surmelin river, so called we presume because the French do not know our word “crick.” It is heavily foliaged creek; its value we first recognized in its production of trout through the agency of the festive “OF” grenade tossed into its tiny pools.

This valley is a series of golden wheat fields and garden patches. Not fields as you know them but as the French crofter laboriously cultivates by hand to the limits of one man’s activities—small, though profuse, spots of shining cereal decorated resplendently with carmine red poppies. * * * * *

The maps show this valley to be the gateway to Paris—that is, from the farthest point of the second German drive to the Marne. Would you call it the 38th’s good fortune to be given this gateway to defend? Anyway, the fates so decreed and we were rushed by the fastest means possible from our training billets, with French beds five feet high, at Arc, Cour le Vecque, and Comprey, to stem the tide and thereby block the way to Paris.

The 38th had made some marches before and has since, but none of us will forget when we pulled into the woods back of St. Eugene that last day of our trek. We had revised the tables of field equipment on the way so that when we got there we didn’t bother to spread our blankets. We simply laid down and hoped in a maudlin, disconnected way one of the shells the Germans welcomed us with would make a direct hit and end it all.

The Colonel was right there ahead of us. Nobody ever knows how he does it but he is always ahead of us and we have gotten used to a confident feeling of knowing it’s all right to go anywhere the Colonel is ahead. He warned us about aeroplane observation and gas shells and said, “Be ready for orders to move up!”

Our position was taken without delay on the south bank of the Marne, which is about fifty yards wide and which at that time separated us from the enemy. The Colonel gave orders directly opposite to the “live and let live” principle. “Don’t let anything alive show itself on the other side except those you go over and get for information!”

So we gave them some lessons in rifle fire.

* * * * *

With the French opposite them the Germans had an insulting and cocky way of strolling about their business in plain view at a few hundred yards. The French custom of running themselves ragged trying to hit the enemy with a hand grenade did not appeal to us, so we became, in the German opinion, disgustingly belligerent with our rifles.

Their movements soon after our advent became surreptitious and reptilian. So at night we paddled over in various nondescript flotillas, dug them out of their holes or chased their patrols around a bit—and sometimes got chased back again somewhat the worse for wear. They sprinkled us with H. E.’s and gas and we likewise sprinkled them. It was a great game and we thrived on it.

One dark night a patrol of theirs came over right at the point of a sentry post of ours. As they reached for the bank with a boat-hook a Yank accommodatingly took hold and pulled them in. He said, “Come on over, Fritz. We are waiting for you,” and our men proceeded to pacify one boat load of misdirected Huns.

That sort of thing was our daily, or rather nightly, ration, until prisoners and intelligence officers began to tell a new story. The Boche were preparing for another grand offensive and this time their objective was Paris with no stops.

The French on our right were generous with their warnings and made feverish arrangements for something or other—we thought at the time it was for battle. Aeroplanes and scouts verified this rumor and it looked like business. So the whole thing so far as our sector was concerned—the Gateway to Paris, the Valley of the Surmelin—was put up to the Colonel, U. G. McAlexander, who at once proceeded to make hay while the making was good.

“Rowe, you hold the front line with two companies of your battalion, don’t you?”

“Yes, sir, with two companies in their immediate support,” answered Major Rowe, commander of the 2nd Battalion.

“Very well,” said the Colonel. “Thicken the lines by moving one company up. This will give you three company fronts on our sector and your remaining company will entrench themselves in echelon formation, so,” indicating on map with pencil marks the exact position he wished them in. “They will act in close support on the extreme right and also as a right flank rearguard. The weak point on this line is on our right. I don’t believe the French will hold and I shall arrange my regiment to meet that contingency.”

This was a direct statement as usual; no equivocation in the Colonel’s remarks. But we were all greatly surprised, as everybody else had complete confidence in the gallantry of the French division on our right. It was our first introduction to the depth of the man in his preparation for battle. But for his judgment on their instability this would be a requiem, not a story.

The regiment was arranged on advanced and original principles of “formation in depth.” The 2nd Battalion, Major Rowe, as above; then the 1st Battalion, Major Keeley, and the 3rd, Major Lough. The Colonel looked us over individually and collectively, took a rifle to a point near the river in broad daylight, sniped a while as though to challenge the enemy, and said, “Let ’em come.”

* * * * *

The evening of July 14th (1918) came with a darkness you could feel. French crickets cricked in a language we could not understand. Night birds winged their uncertain way in pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness. Frogs croaked and walked—not hopped—after the manner of no other frogs on earth. The Y.M.C.A.—God bless them!—sent chocolates and cigarettes down to the men in the very front lines. The rolling kitchens steamed up in preparation of the boys’ one hot meal per day to be delivered by carrying parties to the front. Company commanders made the usual night reconnaissance of their positions, chatted with the lieutenants and again learned that a plebiscite of the men would produce a reiteration of the Colonel’s “Let ’em come.”

Our artillery lugged over the usual intermittent harrassing fire, but the murmuring pines and whispering hemlocks went A.W.O.L.[1] so far as looking out for the Germans was concerned. For all the noise they made you could hear your eyelashes meet. Their quiet finally became ominous and there was a general stiffening of our cerebral vertebra.

At exactly 12 o’clock it happened.

All the demons of hell and its ally, Germany, were unleashed in a fierce uproar that transcended all bombardments of the past. It thundered and rained shells, H.E.’s shrapnel and gas. They swept our sector as with a giant scythe, and as far back as their guns would reach.

For hours that seemed weeks we huddled in our tiny splinter proofs or open slit trenches in the horrible confusion of it all, but we lovingly patted our, as yet, cold steel and awaited the second shock we knew would come—the shock of bodies, material bodies that we could see, feel and fight—something tangible, so that we could release our mad lust to kill this great snake that was slowly coiling around us, this furious beast that was volcanically tearing at our vitals.

God, what hallucinations under a pounding like that!

Yes, we wanted them to come. We wanted anything to come that we could see, feel, and fight. We wanted to fight, I tell you. Not to lie there on the rocking ground with hell crashing and the devils snatching at our guts, our eyes, our lungs.

What was that in our lungs?

Yes, Damn them, Gas!

They are not satisfied to drench us at long distances with all the steel they can crowd into space but the dirty, ghoulish, primeval Hun racks his warped and tortured brain for a method more becoming the slime and filth of his rotten being.

Well, so be it. We fight him back with his weapons, so on with the gas masks, it’s only a bluff. He can’t come himself in his poison—and he’s coming, he’s coming! It became a song in our hearts—“He’s Coming! He’s Coming!”

* * * * *

We began to brighten perceptibly. Instead of the earth rocking it became the gentle tossing of a languorous, moonlit sea. We leaned our heads in genuine affection against the dirt sides of our little slit trench and began to marvel at its motherly shelter. How they could churn up the whole world and never drop one in! Of course they could not drop one in. They had no brain, the swine.

If a chemist could run them through a Pasteur filter, he would get a trace of intellectual process about the mental grade of the Pithecanthropus erectus!

That’s it. He is shooting away his fireworks in the vain hope of something. Wonder what it is. Anyway, he shot it away for eight hours on our support and reserve lines, but at about 4 o’clock on the morning of the 15th he lifted his general bombardment on the front line and started a rolling barrage, one hundred meters in three minutes.

Behind it, almost hugging it, they came!

God, weren’t we glad to see the grayness of them!

This was more like. Something we could see, feel and fight. And when we say they came we mean two divisions of them.

“When two divisions of German shock troops pile up on a regiment of American fighting men”—Do you remember what we told you!

Well! they piled up, at first with excellent formation and a distribution of machine guns, as bumble bees distribute themselves after the small boy wallops their nest with his handful of switches—all over everywhere.

On the river bank where they came in crowds, boats, and pontoon bridges, it was eye to eye, tooth to tooth, and hand-to-hand. It was a strange silence after the barrage had passed. The tack-tack-tack of machine guns, mounted and firing from boats as they came, and the clash of steel as the bayonets met sounded like a death stillness compared to it.

The lines on the river were fought out completely. The barrage had not reached the railway bank and reënforcements could not be sent to them. They paid the supreme price, but the action delayed the enemy advance so that the organizations in depth could unlimber and meet the advance with the result as stated above—this is a story, not a requiem.

Their barrage got away from them, an unpardonable crime in military science but humanly pardonable when one learns they thought it impossible to be met and fought on the river bank.

* * * * *

Our line of resistance was the Metz-Paris Railway. The embankment is some nine feet high with tiny slit trenches on the forward edge but not sufficiently forward to be on the military crest. When the Boche started their advance across the wheat fields intervening, some five hundred yards, this embankment became a living thing and American Springfields began to laugh in their faces.

That wasn’t fair. They had been assured with all German sangfroid that there would be no resistance after their barrage. But those were shock troops brought from afar with orders. “To Paris. No Stop-overs.”

Though their brains became loose-leaf ledgers with no index and the Kaiser became a more ghastly figure, they were fighters. I should say, professional soldiers. So they came on. We admit they looked like the whole German army and we had to wonder if the little old Springfield would keep on laughing. We had been warned of a big offensive, but we did not know the Boche thought our front was like a city park, free for all.

The Springfield did keep on laughing and after covering about half the distance they were transferred from a soldiers’ maneuver column into a German military omelet. However, their machine guns had infiltrated through the high wheat and covered our front as flies cover spilled molasses.

The rest hit the ground and continued their advance in a more becoming manner, like a mole. They wriggled themselves, many of them to the very foot of the railway embankment, where they were safe from our fire for the above mentioned reason. They rested, then charged the crest, were hurled back; rested, threw stick grenades and charged some more, but never successfully, until the splendid heroes of that line joined their comrades of the river bank, joined them on that long journey to that land which knows no war.

Then came the supporting troops from their immediate rear in a charge to which history will never do justice. They couldn’t come before, as there is only room for a certain number to fight on the forward edge. To the Germans on the embankment the Kaiser must have taken on a more material aspect; they saw visions of Paris, but visions only, which disappeared like mist in the sunshine.

It was not sunshine that hit them. No. It was an earthquake. San Francisco one April morning of 1906 had nothing on that shock which must have been felt back in the Reichstag. Bayonets, rifle butts, fists and teeth. Our boys in khaki were overwhelmed by numbers in gray.

But the McAlexander spirit; that is God-given and Heaven-sent!

The Colonel had said, “Let ’em come.” Well, here they are, and God, the joy of it all!

* * * * *

Did you ever turn yourself loose in a mad passion that knew no limit? Were you ever blinded by blood and lust to kill and let yourself go in a crowd where you could feel their bodies crumble and sink to the depths below you, then brace yourself on them, and destroy, destroy, destroy!

I hope not, but we did—and what do numbers amount to against spirit? In San Francisco the earthquake subsided and we were left to contemplate and ponder. There was no subsiding of these seismic demons of Colonel Ulysses Grant McAlexander, once they had their orders. We were to hold that railroad. Did we hold it, Go down there and count the German graves. Six hundred before one company alone. Ask the prisoners, pens of them, why they didn’t fulfil their mission. They don’t know just what happened, but whatever it was, it was awful, colossal.

Sir, they did not even take the first line of resistance of the 38th. An officer, later captured, stated that only twelve of the 6th Grenadiers, the Kaiser’s favorite Prussian shock troops, returned to their side of the Marne.

Yes, back they went, and they stood not upon the manner of their going, although I will say their machine guns covered their retreat to the limit of their ability. Without their usual “nest” arrangement they were comparatively easy picking for us. For instance, during the retreat Corporal Newell with his squad augmented by two men went down into the field and captured five guns, killing or capturing their crews.

* * * * *

During the heat of battle one lone private crawled down the embankment through the wheat to the flank of a machine-gun crew who were too busy on their front to know where his shots were coming from. He picked off seven Germans and dragged the gun back with him. These incidents are not typical, but they serve to illustrate the many, many remarkable individual feats of heroism of the 38th, under the stress of battle.

No grander man lived than Lieutenant Kenneth P. Murray, killed in a flank attack which started in a line from the railway to the church in Mézy, drove in one hundred and eighty-five prisoners, but from which only three returned, the company commander and two privates. Lieutenant Mercer M. Phillips died on the railway with a blood-dripping bayonet on the rifle in his hands. Lieutenant David C. Calkins, whose troops blocked the enemy’s progress at the river edge until the barrage passed and those in his support could get into action, made the supreme sacrifice.

Many, many other splendid souls, born leaders of brave men, joined the great majority with a smile on their lips and pistols empty.

Lieutenant Colonel Frank H. Adams, that great soldier with a lion’s heart, and yet who led his command by an irresistible personal magnetism, by precept and example and never an unkind word—that big, handsome, he-fighter won the Distinguished Service Cross by standing in the way of a whole regiment, not one that he had any direct connection with, but one nearby that was practically routed by the shock the 38th stood and fought back. He brought comparative order out of chaos and succeeded in getting them in a support position.

We could mention hundreds of great deeds by great men on that day, but this is a story of the 38th, not of the indomitable spirits that go to make it up, or we would never reach the end.

* * * * *