Part 9

“It’s not nice when you’re stalled, you know. As long as you can move around, the 77 has a hard time getting you. But if you get stuck somewhere it doesn’t take a Boche gunner so very long to get your range. That’s why we were so anxious to have self-starters put on the American tanks, when we thought we were going to have American tanks. If there had been any self-starters on our Renaults we’d probably be shy about twenty casualties. Engine stalls, Boche gets busy, chap inside struggles with a crank, takes time, 77 lands, signal back for a reserve tank to come on into action. No, they didn’t put the self-starters on. Don’t ask me why; I don’t know.

TOO MUCH INGENUITY

“Sure, the American tanks were good tanks. We never used them in action that I know of. Those I saw got to France, or got where they might have been used, after the Armistice. But they were sure American all over—too much American, if you know what I mean. It’s a national failing, I guess, this business of being ingenious. There was so much ingenuity about those tanks there wasn’t always room for the crew. For instance, machine gun belts. When you use them, they are rolled up and in a carrier. Some wise tank builder decided all the ammunition in a machine gun tank ought to be in carriers, rolled up ready for use. When he got through, there wasn’t any room inside for the crew! No sense to it, of course; the same amount of ammunition stores flat, and leaves plenty of room, and it only takes a few seconds to roll up a belt and put it in a carrier.

“Then there was the compass. Some one must have read that British tanks carried compasses. So they did, until the tank crew could throw it away. So our American tanks came over with the handsomest compasses inside you ever saw; regular ship affairs, gimbals and all! Now, of course, that’s all foolishness. In the first place there wasn’t room for the compass and the crew. In the second place, when you start the engine, the compass does a fox trot, and keeps on whirling; it’s no good as a compass. And if it was, there wouldn’t be any sense in it; there’s a map stuck up right under your nose and that’s all you need, not to mention a few officers with flags telling you where to go, if they are not sitting on top going with you.

“Then there was the speedometer. Why any one should imagine a tank crew needed a speedometer I don’t know. But there it was, ready to tell us just how fast we were going. Maybe they thought, down in Washington, we were going to establish a tank speed record or something.

“And the hook—I mustn’t forget the hook. It’s so typically American—a device born of our national tendency to economise time. To put a hook in at the top of the tank meant at least two hours’ work. In 100 tanks that was 200 hours or 24 working days, slowing up production. The idea of the hook was that it would be so convenient when a crane had to lift the tank. Now the average tank gets lifted by a crane just four or six times; on a car at the factory, off the car, on the ship, off the ship, and maybe on and off a car again. So to save the six or twelve minutes it would take a crew to slip a chain around the tanks, they put a hook at the top, because it was efficient!

[Illustration:

_Drawn by Joseph Cummings Chase._

Sergeant Ralph M. Atkinson

_42nd Division, 167th Infantry, Headquarters Company_

While in command of a Stokes mortar platoon October 16, 1918, near Landres-et-St. Georges, Argonne, Sergeant Atkinson with three soldiers was advancing with the first wave of the assault, when on nearing the objective, he discovered about 250 of the enemy forming for a counter-attack. He advanced with the Stokes mortar under fire, and opened a murderous fire on the approaching enemy, dispersing them.]

“Oh, well, I oughtn’t to grouch. We never used the tanks. And no one that I know minds much. Those Renault tanks were little dandies. You have no idea how easily they run. You can crawl over a telegraph pole and hardly feel it, so well worked out has been the spring suspension, the relation of rollers, chariots and treads. And they didn’t go in for any fancy touches, the Renaults. No armor for the guns nor fancy locks on the door to keep some one from crawling up and throwing a grenade inside, nor deflection armor at odd angles which never did anything but stop bullets and make splinters that otherwise would never have endangered any one’s eyes.

SNIFFS AT HUN TANKS

“German tanks? Punk. Too slow, mechanism too exposed, too many slits. Oh, very well made, but poor design. Nor do I think very much of German tank men.

“We had about 44 per cent. casualties, and that covers 22 actions. Ten per cent. of the casualties were deaths. But I don’t recall many men dying without doing something first.

“I recall that there was one tank got stuck in a trench and nothing handy to rescue it. Captured, of course. Well, we captured it back two days later. Every round of ammunition was fired. Every pistol cartridge had been fired. And both men had been wounded long before they were killed; there was plain evidence of it in blood where no blood would be if they had just been snuffed out right at first. They must have put up a beautiful scrap. Americans don’t like to surrender, somehow.”

THE GARIBALDI CODE

“To Be Ready Ever to Fight for the Cause They Think is Right”

Italy at war without a Garibaldi somewhere in the fighting columns is unthinkable. Even before the days of the famous Liberator, Giuseppe himself, there were Garibaldi who had arms and hearts ready to strike for freedom; but since the days when the great patriot and lover of liberty made romance as well as history out of his revolutionary spirit, arms and the defense of freedom are tenets of religion with the Garibaldi. With the exception of the Russian-Japanese War, it is said there has been no conflict of powers or revolutionary struggle without its Garibaldi bearing gun or sword. It goes _sans dire_, then, that the outbreak of war which arrayed western democracy against the encroachments of German autocracy was like a clarion call to the blood of the Garibaldi. They did not wait for Italy to speak—France was calling and that sufficed.

The son of the Great Garibaldi wrote letters to five of his seven sons scattered about the world. Two of them were in New York (Giuseppe, named for his grandfather, and Ricciotti, on his way to South America), one (Merotti) was in China, and one (Bruno) was in Cuba, and one (Sante) was in Upper Egypt. The two youngest, Costante and Ezio, were pursuing their studies in Italy. There was a sister, Italia, in Rio de Janeiro, who devoted herself to Red Cross organization. In the letters the sons were told to hold themselves in readiness for the receipt of a telegram appointing a rendezvous for which they were to start at once.

The cablegram came; the rendezvous was Paris. Giuseppe and Ricciotti sailed from New York by the next available steamer. They found Costante and Ezio awaiting them. Bruno and Sante arrived a few days later. But Merotti could not come from China until several months later, when Italy had entered the war. Other Italians were there also to tender their services to France and they organized an Italian Legion that was incorporated with that famous multiple battalion, the Foreign Legion. The Italians were soldiers of fortune all, and the brothers had hoped to be sent to the Balkans, Giuseppe frankly confessing that guerrilla warfare was his preference. But Ezio, who was sent to drive a camion at Salonika, was the only Garibaldi who got to the Balkans.

[Illustration:

© _New York Herald._

Sticking to Their Guns

A drawing by F. Matania picturing a valiant group of Italians who, although overwhelmed by the enemy, remained with their battery until the last man was killed.]

The Foreign Legion, as everyone knows, was made up of all sorts of adventurers, many of whom knew the meaning of grated windows and ankle chains, but “it isn’t where you come from in the battle-line but what you do that counts.” The world pretty well understands what the Foreign Legion did and how it was honored by grateful France. Elsewhere is told how they were given the place of honor in the attack on the Prussian Guard which they drove back, but with a loss that wrecked them as a legion.

[Illustration:

© _Underwood and Underwood._

General and Captain Garibaldi]

In a talk with Lewis R. Freeman, published in _The World’s Work_, Giuseppe Garibaldi is quoted as saying:

“I don’t recall anything that was actually said between us on the subject, but it seemed to be generally understood among us brothers that the shedding of some Garibaldi blood—or, better still, the sacrificing of a Garibaldi life—would be calculated to throw a great, perhaps a decisive, weight into the wavering balance in Italy, where a growing sympathy for the cause of the Allies only needed a touch to quicken it to action. Indeed, I am under the impression that my father said something to that effect to the two younger boys before he sent them on to France. At any rate, all three of the youngsters behaved exactly as though their only object in life was to get in the way of German bullets. Well—Bruno got his in the last week in December, ten or twelve days ahead of Costante, who fell on the 5th of January. Ezio—the youngest of the three fire-eaters—though through no fault of his own, had to wait and take his bullet from the Austrians on our own front.

“The attack in which Bruno fell was one of the finest things I have ever seen. General Gouraud sent for me in person to explain why a certain system of trenches, which we were ordered to attack, must be taken and held, no matter what the price. We mustered for mass at midnight—it was Christmas, or the day after, I believe—and the memory of that icicle-framed altar in the ruined, roofless church, with the flickering candles throwing just light enough to silhouette the tall form of Gouraud, who stood in front of me, will never fade from my mind.

“We went over the parapet before daybreak, and it was in the first light of the cold winter dawn that I saw Bruno—plainly hit—straighten up from his running crouch and topple into the first of the German trenches, across which the leading wave of our attack was sweeping. He was up before I could reach him, however (I don’t think he ever looked to see where he was hit), and I saw him clamber up the other side, and, running without a hitch or stagger, lead his men in pursuit of the fleeing enemy. I never saw him alive again.

“They found his body, with six bullet wounds upon it, lying where the gust from a machine gun had caught him as he tried to climb out and lead his men on beyond the last of the trenches we had been ordered to take and hold. He had charged into the trench, thrown out the enemy, and made—for whatever it was worth—the first sacrifice of his own generation of Garibaldi. We sent his body to my father and mother in Rome, where, as you will remember, his funeral was made the occasion of the most remarkable patriotic demonstration Italy has known in recent years. From that moment the participation of our country in the war became only a matter of time. Costante’s death a few days later only gave added impulse to the wave of popular feeling which was soon to align Italy where she belonged in the forefront of the fight for the freedom of Europe.”

After Italy came into the war, Giuseppe Garibaldi fought with his own countrymen, having the name of Colonel with those soldiers whose Herculean feats in the Alps made one of the most striking chapters in the war’s history of unprecedented achievements.

THE BALD FACTS

A Story of the Trenches by One Who Knew Them at Their Worst

He has a very illusory view of life who knows only its sunny phases; and his is worse than a deceptive impression of war—especially the monstrous war of 1914-18—who has vision only of its valorous deeds and heroisms, its thrilling tales of daring and achievement, of splendid adventure and fearless sacrifices.

Here is a revelation of the side of war seldom more than glanced at by those who tell of the moving exploits. It wears none of the trappings of romance; it is without allure; but it is terribly true. _The New York Times History of the War_ made certain of that before publishing what it rightly described as one of the most thrilling human documents produced during that awful four years. The grim record of the young soldier’s experience is necessarily curtailed here, enough being given, however, to picture the grisly reality of war as millions of youths encountered it. It is not the stirring tale of a hero.

Roméo Houle, French parentage, was born in New Bedford, Mass., in 1893. He was the son of a local barber, Zacharie Houle. In 1912 he removed to Montreal, where he was employed as a barber, having followed his father’s calling. He had a grammar school education. He enlisted in the Sixty-first Regiment, First Canadian Division, Aug. 1, 1914, eager to serve in the war. He went with the Division to France, and was soon in the front trenches. During his service he made notes of his experiences. With the assistance of the editor of a French paper in New Haven, these notes were put into narrative form after young Houle, through the efforts of his father, was discharged from the army in 1916.

The narrative begins: “The true story of the trenches has never been told. I know, because for many months I lived in trenches. I have slept daily in dread of bullet, shrapnel, mine and deadly gas; and nightly in fear of mine and gas—and the man-eating rats. I am one of the few soldiers living who entered the front trenches at the opening of the war and lived to fight the Germans in the front trenches in February, 1916. Of my original company (the Fourth of the Fourteenth Battalion, Third Brigade, First Canadian Division) which so gayly marched away to that hell at Laventie and Ypres—500 brave boys—I am one of the sixteen who survived. And returning unexpectedly, snatched by the American Government (as an American citizen who had enlisted under age) out of the very jaws of death, with the mud of the trenches still upon my clothing, I discovered how much American people have been talking of the trenches and how little, after all, they know about them.”

AGONIES OF BODY AND MIND

And during that trench existence, there was, he thinks, no conceivable agony of body or mind which he did not see and experience. There was the gas—“a crawling yellow cloud that pours in upon you, that gets you by the throat, and shakes you as a huge mastiff might shake a kitten, and leaves you burning in every nerve and vein of your body with pain unthinkable, your eyes starting from their sockets, your face turned yellow green.” There were the rats—“I see them still, slinking from new meals on corpses, from Belgium to the Swiss Alps. Rats, rats, rats, tens of thousands of them, crunching between battle lines while the rapid fire guns mow the trench edge, crunching their hellish feasts. Full fed, slipping and sliding down into the wet trenches they swarm at night—and more than one poor wretch has had his face eaten off by them attacking him in his sleep.”

[Illustration:

_Drawn by Joseph Cummings Chase._

Corporal Whitney D. Sherman

_2nd Division, 5th Regiment, 18th Company, U. S. M. C._

This soldier is a fine type of Marine and showed himself to be a brave and valiant soldier at the Battle of Belleau Woods, now known as the Bois de la Brigade de Marine. He was wounded in action June 10, 1918, in this engagement.]

There was the stink from decaying bodies, the filth of days and weeks of unmarked accumulation. “Ah! you would say ‘Roméo, Houle, you are lying’ were I to tell you some unbelievable things that I have really lived through. We go mad over there. My God! I am sick of adventure, for the adventures I have had will plague my sleep until I die.”

His first acquaintance with the trench under fire was at Richebourg. “There Charles Lapointe, the first of our company to die, looked over the edge of the trench. That is death. Machine guns all the day sweep the trench edges. If you raise your hand your fingers will be cut off as by a knife. Well, Lapointe looked over the trench; and nobody knows what he saw. His brother was there to lay him down. He buried him (as we ever must the dead) in a hollow pit in our trench. And the brother had for a time the agony of having to fight and feel the earth over Charley’s breast give under his feet.”

He fought in the first line again at Laventie, and there got his first taste of gas. It came while he was trying for a little rest after a turn at guard duty. Some one having stolen the two empty sandbags he had been using for bedding, he spread his overcoat on the ground and pulled a blanket over him. “The sun meantime was shining hotly on the heaps of dead bodies which lay not far outside the trench, and I was glad to cover my head with the blanket to shut out some of the awful stink. And that is how the smell of decaying bodies saved my life. Arthur Robillard, a car conductor back in Montreal, was on guard duty. I was roused by his falling over me. As I sat up something got me by the throat and I began to strangle for my life. The air was rent with awful cries. Many of my comrades lay dying and dead about me. I hurled myself in semi-madness into a huge crater near by in which there was a little water, and I fell in it face down.

BLOWN FROM THE TRENCH

“The water relieved me a little and I wet my handkerchief in it and covered my face. I crawled out and half blindly sought my chum, who was unconscious, and dragged him to the crater where the water was. I laid him there face downward, and he, too, revived a little, and then we lay waiting for death.”

Ten minutes later there was a shouting that announced the approach of the Germans on a charge. Houle, followed by Robillard, ran back into the trench, got his gun and began firing. When the rifle became so hot that it burned his hands he threw it down and began hurling bombs. They were ordered to retreat to the next trench and the Germans began pouring into the vacated one. Houle and his fellows got hold of two machine guns, good for from 560 to 700 shots a minute.

“I shall never forget those Germans. When our guns suddenly spoke their front line melted; their second crumpled before this destruction; but on, on, on they came, unflinching, marching with even steps into certain death. We were like lions at bay. It was our lives or the Germans’. Then, as fourteen of us fought together, a bomb dropped amid us, and killed eleven. I came to consciousness, lying in the bottom of a trench, with Roy leaning over me.

“‘Are you living yet, Roméo!’ he exclaimed in amazement. I rose dizzily. He and I and one other stood alone among our eleven dead friends.

“Then Roy told me that I had been blown clear of the trench, twenty feet from where I stood, and that he had braved death to secure, as he supposed, my dead body. A careful examination showed that my only injury was a terrible bruise on the calf of my leg, where the round surface of a flying shard had struck me, but without breaking the skin. Miracles are but small matters when you fight in the presence of death.

“‘I’m not afraid now,’ I told Roy. And from then on I and all my soldier friends believed my life was charmed and that the Germans could not kill me.”

The defenders were driven back to the fourth trench which they were almost immediately ordered to leave, which they did with all speed as it had been mined by the engineers and was ready to give the Germans a warm reception as they came surging in. Houle describes the explosion. “The whole earth seemed to leap skyward, and through and through the black mountain of earth and stones shot heads and arms and legs, torn fragments of what were once heroic men. Next to the gas which they gave us, I think our blowing them up was surely the worst thing men could do to men.”

He describes mining operations, which are a big part of trench warfare, as one of the most dismaying features of trench life. Apparently the mines were more feared than anything else. “It was more terrible than gas poisoning to think that at any moment you would be thrown a thousand ways at once.... The soldier in the trench never knows when he may be blown into small pieces,—and that is why we are always prepared to risk uncertain dangers between the lines at night, instead of lying down in the wet trench hopelessly waiting for death.

FELT SAFEST WHEN ON GUARD

“I never felt so secure, indeed, as when I was on guard between the trenches. Through all the night I could hear the bullets go over me. Men go crazy there. And the insane are sent to England. Sometimes men go mad and become a menace to their own comrades and officers. They sometimes have to be killed. And there have been times when I crouched in some first line trench, where no communication trench joined us to the second or third line, where no doctor could reach us. And I have seen men so terribly wounded, enduring such agonies, and screaming so heart-breakingly for somebody to kill them, that our boys have done what they asked, to save them the unnecessary horror of living dismembered. And I have seen men of good health grow so weary of the trenches that they have simply stood up at noonday. Some machine guns swiftly ended them. And others, as I have written, simply stick their hands above the trench top and bullets trim off their fingers.”