Part 1

FIX BAYONETS!

[Illustration: [Soldiers]]

[Illustration:

Flare—Front Line, Champagne.

That night, lying in its shallow, hastily dug holes, the remnant of the battalion descended through further hells of shelling. ]

FIX BAYONETS!

BY JOHN W. THOMASON, JR. _Captain, U. S. Marine Corps_

ILLUSTRATED BY THE AUTHOR

[Illustration: [Soldier]]

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS NEW YORK · LONDON 1927

COPYRIGHT, 1925, 1926, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

Printed in the United States of America

Published March, 1926 Reprinted April, May, September, 1926

[Illustration: [Icon]]

TO

THE MEN OF THE FIRST BATTALION FIFTH REGIMENT UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS 1918

[Illustration: [Soldiers]]

INTRODUCTION

THE LEATHERNECKS

[Illustration: [Soldier]]

INTRODUCTION THE LEATHERNECKS

They tell the tale of an American lady of notable good works, much esteemed by the French, who, at the end of June, 1918, visited one of the field-hospitals behind Degoutte’s Sixth French Army. Degoutte was fighting on the face of the Marne salient, and the 2d American Division, then in action around the Bois de Belleau, northwest of Château-Thierry, was under his orders. It happened that occasional casualties of the Marine Brigade of the 2d American Division, wounded toward the flank where Degoutte’s own horizon-blue infantry joined on, were picked up by French stretcher-bearers and evacuated to French hospitals. And this lady, looking down a long, crowded ward, saw on a pillow a face unlike the fiercely whiskered Gallic heads there displayed in rows. She went to it.

“Oh,” she said, “surely you are an American!”

“No, ma’am,” the casualty answered, “I’m a Marine.”

The men who marched up the Paris-Metz road to meet the Boche in that spring of 1918, the 5th and 6th Regiments of United States Marines, were gathered from various places. In the big war companies, 250 strong, you could find every sort of man, from every sort of calling. There were Northwesterners with straw-colored hair that looked white against their tanned skins, and delicately spoken chaps with the stamp of the Eastern universities on them. There were large-boned fellows from Pacific-coast lumber camps, and tall, lean Southerners who swore amazingly in gentle, drawling voices. There were husky farmers from the corn-belt, and youngsters who had sprung, as it were, to arms from the necktie counter. And there were also a number of diverse people who ran curiously to type, with drilled shoulders and a bone-deep sunburn, and a tolerant scorn of nearly everything on earth. Their speech was flavored with navy words, and words culled from all the folk who live on the seas and the ports where our war-ships go. In easy hours their talk ran from the Tartar Wall beyond Pekin to the Southern Islands, down under Manila; from Portsmouth Navy Yard—New Hampshire and very cold—to obscure bushwhackings in the West Indies, where Cacao chiefs, whimsically sanguinary, barefoot generals with names like Charlemagne and Christophe, waged war according to the precepts of the French Revolution and the Cult of the Snake. They drank the _eau de vie_ of Haute-Marne, and reminisced on saki, and vino, and Bacardi Rum—strange drinks in strange _cantinas_ at the far ends of the earth; and they spoke fondly of Milwaukee beer. Rifles were high and holy things to them, and they knew five-inch broadside guns. They talked patronizingly of the war, and were concerned about rations. They were the Leathernecks, the Old Timers: collected from ship’s guards and shore stations all over the earth to form the 4th Brigade of Marines, the two rifle regiments, detached from the navy by order of the President for service with the American Expeditionary Forces. They were the old breed of American regular, regarding the service as home and war as an occupation; and they transmitted their temper and character and view-point to the high-hearted volunteer mass which filled the ranks of the Marine Brigade.

[Illustration:

The Leathernecks, the Old Timers. ]

It is a pleasure to record that they found good company in the army. The 2d Division (U. S. Regular was the official designation) was composed of the 9th and 23d Infantry, two old regiments with names from all of our wars on their battle-flags, the 2d Regiment of Engineers—and engineers are always good—and the 12th, 15th, and 17th Field Artillery. It was a division distinguished by the quality of dash and animated by an especial pride of service. It carried to a high degree _esprit de corps_, which some Frenchman has defined as esteeming your own corps and looking down on all the other corps. And, although it paid heavily in casualties for the things it did—in five months about 100 per cent—the 2d Division never lost its professional character.

Seven years after, across the world from France, I met a major of the American General Staff, who was on the Paris-Metz road that last week in May, 1918, and saw the Marine Brigade. “They looked fine, coming in there,” he said. “Tall fellows, healthy and fit—they looked hard and competent. We watched you going in, through those little tired Frenchmen, and we all felt better. We knew something was going to happen—” and we were silent, over Chilean wine, in a place on the South Pacific, thinking of those days and those men....

There is no sight in all the pageant of war like young, trained men going up to battle. The columns look solid and businesslike. Each battalion is an entity, 1,200 men of one purpose. They go on like a river that flows very deep and strong. Uniforms are drab these days, but there are points of light on the helmets and the bayonets, and light in the quick, steady eyes and the brown young faces, greatly daring. There is no singing—veterans know, and they do not sing much—and there is no excitement at all; they are schooled craftsmen, going up to impose their will, with the tools of their trade, on another lot of fellows; and there is nothing to make a fuss about. Battles are not salubrious places, and every file knows that a great many more are going in than will come out again—but that is along with the job. And they have no illusions about the job.

There is nothing particularly glorious about sweaty fellows, laden with killing tools, going along to fight. And yet—such a column represents a great deal more than 28,000 individuals mustered into a division. All that is behind those men is in that column, too: the old battles, long forgotten, that secured our nation—Brandywine and Trenton and Yorktown, San Jacinto and Chapultepec, Gettysburg, Chickamauga, Antietam, El Caney; scores of skirmishes, far off, such as the Marines have nearly every year—in which a man can be killed as dead as ever a chap was in the Argonne; traditions of things endured and things accomplished, such as regiments hand down forever; and the faith of men and the love of women; and that abstract thing called patriotism, which I never heard combat soldiers mention—all this passes into the forward zone, to the point of contact, where war is girt with horrors. And common men endure these horrors and overcome them, along with the insistent yearnings of the belly and the reasonable promptings of fear; and in this, I think, is glory.

[Illustration:

“They looked fine, coming in there ... through those little tired Frenchmen.” ]

In Charles the Second’s time the English formed the first sea regiment—soldiers equipped as infantry, to serve on the sea in the fleet; to clear with musketry the enemy’s decks and fighting-tops when the ships of the line went into close action; to go ashore and take up positions when the naval forces would seize a base preliminary to land operations of the army.

Here, by the way, comes the quip of old time: “Tell it to the Marines.” They relate of Charles the Second that at Whitehall a certain sea-captain, newly returned from the Western Ocean, told the king of flying fish, a thing never heard in old England. The king and the court were vastly amused. But, the naval fellow persisting, the Merry Monarch beckoned to a lean, dry colonel of the sea regiment, with a seamed mahogany face, and said, in effect: “Colonel, this tarry-breeks here makes sport with us stay-at-homes. He tells us of a miraculous fish that forsakes its element and flies like a bird over the water!” “Sire,” said the colonel of Marines, “he tells a true thing. I myself have often seen those fish in your Majesty’s seas around Barbados—” “Well,” decided Charles, “such evidence cannot be disputed. And hereafter, when we hear a strange thing, we will tell it to the Marines, for the Marines go everywhere and see everything, and if they say it is so, we will believe it!”

The Continental Congress, on 10 November, 1775, authorized a corps of American Marines. This was the first Federal armed force to be raised by the young nation, and it antedated both the Federal army and navy, which had, until that time, been matters of individual commonwealths. And since that date Marines have participated honorably in all American wars, and in some affairs, more or less interesting, where powder was burnt but which do not rate as wars. (Under international law Marines can be landed to protect the lives and property of nationals without a declaration of war.)

Captain Richard Dale’s Marines served with John Paul Jones on the _Bonhomme Richard_, and it was a grenade thrown from the tops that set off the powder-magazine of H. M. S. _Serapis_ and turned the tide of events in favor of the poor old _Richard_, in the fight off Flamborough Head. There were United States Marines in Barney’s naval force, formed across the Bladensburg Road when Admiral Cockburn’s people marched to burn Washington; and they stayed there until the line was turned by British regulars and they were all, including Barney, casualties; it was the only material resistance the British met. Marines marched to Mexico City in 1846; the red stripe on the blue trousers of officers and non-commissioned officers commemorates to this day service in that war. They served in the Civil War very widely: Marines died on Henry Hill, at First Manassas, and on the fire-swept beaches in front of Fort Fisher, and on the Mississippi around Vicksburg and Island No. 10. Colonel Huntington’s Marines took Guantanamo, landing from U. S. S. _Marblehead_ in 1898. They marched to Pekin in 1900, and were in the legation guard shut up there during the Boxer trouble. Cuba knows them, and the Philippines. They were ashore at Vera Cruz in 1914; every uneasy and volatile West Indian and Central American republic has become acquainted with them in a professional way, and their appearance at storm centres has always produced, very presently, a sweet tranquillity. The navy takes them there, and sends bluejackets and chow along always. Every capital ship carries a guard of them. Aboard ship, besides forming the nucleus of the ship’s landing-force, they man the secondary batteries, the five-inch guns; furnish guards of honor for the comings and goings of the admiral and distinguished visitors, and so forth; perform all manner of curious and annoying details; and post ship’s sentries whose meticulous ideas about the enforcement of orders lacerate the souls of jolly mariners, seamen, and engineer ratings. Normally, the strength of the corps is twenty per cent of the navy; just now there are about 19,000. They constitute an organization within an organization, with their own commandant, who functions under the secretary of the navy. The rank and file are good enough Latinists to know what “Semper Fidelis”—which is their word—means; and any private will assure you that the Marines are a corps d’élite.

In 1917, when trained soldiers in the United States were at a premium, the navy offered a brigade of Marines for service in France; it was regarded desirable for Marine officers to have experience in large operations with the army; for it is certain that close co-operation between the army and the navy is a necessary thing in these days of far-flung battle lines. The British distress at Gallipoli is a crying witness to this principle. In a navy transport, therefore, U. S. S. _Henderson_, the 5th Regiment of Marines embarked for France in June, 1917, with the first armed American forces. The 6th Marines followed. The two regiments constituted the 4th Brigade, and served in the 2d Division, U. S. Regular, until the division came home, in August, 1919. About 30,000 Marines were sent to France; some 14,000 of these went as replacements to maintain the two regiments of the 4th Brigade. A brigade musters some 7,500 officers and men; this brigade took part in some very interesting events.

Hereafter I have written of the Marines in the war with Germany; how they went up, and what they did there, and how some of them came out again. Being a Marine, I have tried to set forth simple tales without comment. It is unnecessary to write what I think of my own people, nor would it be, perhaps, in the best taste.

And I have written of Marines in this war because they are the folks I know about myself. Those battle-fields were very large, and a man seldom saw much or very far beyond his own unit, if he had a job in hand. As a company officer, I always had a job. There is no intent to overlook those very gallant gentlemen, our friends, the army. Their story is ours, too.

JOHN W. THOMASON, JR.

[Illustration: [Soldier]]

[Illustration: [Soldiers]]

CONTENTS

PAGE I. BATTLE-SIGHT 1 II. THE CHARGE AT SOISSONS 73 III. MARINES AT BLANC MONT 131 IV. MONKEY-MEAT 199 V. THE RHINE 227

[Illustration: [Soldiers]]

ILLUSTRATIONS

Flare—Front Line, Champagne _Frontispiece_

PAGE

The Leathernecks, the Old Timers _Facing page_ x

“They looked fine, coming in there ... through those _Facing page_ little tired Frenchmen” xiv

Occasional wounded Frenchmen drifted back 3

Sketches from Captain Thomason’s note-book _Facing page_ 6

Platoon column in support, Champagne, 1918 _Facing page_ 10

“Catch some alive——” _Facing page_ 14

The 2d Engineers _Facing page_ 20

A tortured area ... lit by flares and gun-flashes _Facing page_ 24

The hill blazed into action—not all the rifle-fire had _Facing page_ gone astray 28

Pencil sketches made on scraps of paper, in Belleau Wood _Facing page_ 32

Combat patrol _Facing page_ 36

A sprinkling of old-time Marines _Facing page_ 40

Some of them had been this way before 47

Boche grenadier _Facing page_ 48

So many chaps were not with the brigade very long 51

The Boche had out his pistol _Facing page_ 52

Certain designated individuals watched 57

Men fought in its corpse-choked thickets. 59

Bringing in German prisoners at St. Mihiel _Facing page_ 60

Ration parties always sweated mightily and anticipated exciting incidents 63

“Bang away, Lulu——” _Facing page_ 68

The automatic-rifle men _Facing page_ 78

Prussians from Von Boehn’s divisions in and around the _Facing page_ Bois de Belleau 82

“Keep on to the left until you meet the Moroccans, and _Facing page_ go forward....” 4.30 A. M., July 18, 1918 90

Listening-post rushed by Senegalese _Facing page_ 94

A fighting swirl of Senegalese _Facing page_ 98

Fighting from tree to tree in the woods south of _Facing page_ Soissons 102

With reason the Boche feared them worse than anything _Facing page_ living 106

The fighting in the woods at Soissons was close and _Facing page_ savage 110

A lieutenant of Marines and a German major, hand to hand _Facing page_ 114

Sketches made by Captain Thomason at Soissons on scraps _Facing page_ of paper taken from a feldwebel’s note-book 118

Fighting north of Blanc Mont, Champagne 124

“Carry me back to Ole Virginny” _Facing page_ 126

French grenadier—Blanc Mont _Facing page_ 136

Those sawed-off shotguns they gave us at St. Mihiel _Facing page_ 142

The shells began to drop into the trench 149

A flare during shelling in the front-line trenches _Facing page_ 150

In the Essen trench—a runner _Facing page_ 154

The morning of October 3d came gray and misty—a patrol _Facing page_ 158

“Lordy, ain’t we ever goin’ to get outa this dam’ place an’ get at ’em—?” 161

Others lay on the ground over which the battalion passed 163

“Oh, Lordy! They’ve got us bracketed!” _Facing page_ 164

Before zero hour _Facing page_ 168

Flanking fire _Facing page_ 172

The hush still hung around them as they moved out of the flat and began to ascend the long gray slope ahead 175

The first shell came screaming down the line from the _Facing page_ right 176

“Here comes a battalion runner—what’s up anyway?” _Facing page_ 180

A few iron-souled Prussians—the Boche had such men—stood _Facing page_ up to meet bayonet with bayonet, and died that way 184

The last few men are always the most difficult to kill 187

A machine-gunner, Champagne 189

“Mademoiselle from Armentières” _Facing page_ 194

“Hey, yuh dog-robbin’ battalion runner, you—what’s up!” _Facing page_ 200

“He takes the war too serious” _Facing page_ 204

The scout officer and the sergeant got him back some _Facing page_ way, both filled with admiration at his language 212

“War—sure—is—hell” _Facing page_ 216

“Sweet Ad-o-line” _Facing page_ 222

The cooks issued corn-bill hash and dared any man to _Facing page_ growl 228

A nice day for a hike 231

Men walked silent, remembering the old dead _Facing page_ 232

One thick-bodied Boche ... His face in a cast of hate _Facing page_ 236

They stood in stolid groups, wooden-faced _Facing page_ 240

“I tell you, these Boche are dangerous! They have too _Facing page_ many children.” 243

The 1st Battalion of the Rhine—5th Marines took the road 245

“Long Boy” _Facing page_ 248

FIX BAYONETS!

I

BATTLE SIGHT

THE FIGHTING AROUND THE BOIS DE BELLEAU

[Illustration: [Soldiers]]

I BATTLE-SIGHT THE FIGHTING AROUND THE BOIS DE BELLEAU

I ATTACK

In the fields near Marigny Marines of the 1st Battalion of the 5th found an amiable cow. There had been nothing in the way of rations that day; there were no prospects. All hands took thought and designated a robust Polish corporal as executioner. He claimed to have been a butcher in a former existence. He was leading the cow decently away from the road when a long gray car boomed up, halted with the touch of swank that Headquarters chauffeurs always affect, and disgorged a very angry colonel. The colonel’s eye was cold upon the interested group around the cow. They stood now to attention, the cow alone remaining tranquil, with a poppy dangling from her languid mouth.

“Lieutenant, what are you doing there——?”

“Sir, you see, the men haven’t had anything to eat, and I thought, sir—we found this cow wanderin’ around—we couldn’t find any owner—we’d like to chip in and buy her—we were goin’ to——”

“I see, sir, I see! You were going to kill this cow, the property of some worthy French family. You will bear in mind, lieutenant, that we are in France to protect the lives and property of our allies from the Germans—Release that animal at once! Your rations will be distributed as soon as possible—carry on—” The colonel departed, and four or five 77s crashed into a little wood two hundred yards up the road. There were more shells in the same place. “Hi! Brother Boche must think there’s a battery over there!”—“Well, there ain’t—” The Marines sat down in the wheat and observed the cow.

“Property of our gallant allies—yeh!—” “Old man’s in an awful humor—wonder what—” The lieutenant sucked a straw reflectively. His sergeant solaced himself with tobacco. The cow ruminated, quite content. She had nourished herself at will for three delightful days, since her people, in a farm over toward Torcy—where, at the minute, the Boche was killing off a battalion of French territorials—had incomprehensibly turned her out and vanished. Full-fed, she eyed the strangers without emotion.

“I was a quartermaster sergeant once, sir,” said the platoon sergeant dreamily. “I remember just what the cuts of beef are. There’d be fine sirloin on that cow-critter, now.... Mr. Ashby (another flight of 77s burst in the wood), if we was to take that cow over an’ tie her in that brush—she oughten to be out here in the open, anyway—might draw fire ... shell’s liable to hit anything, you know, sir——”

“Sergeant, you heard what the colonel said. But if you think she’d be safer—I’d suggest volunteers. And by the way, sergeant, I want a piece of tenderloin—the T-bone part——”

[Illustration:

Occasional wounded Frenchmen drifted back. ]

The cow was duly secured in the wood, men risking their lives thereby. The Boche shelled methodically for two hours, and the Marines were reduced to a fearful state of nerves—“Is that dam’ heifer gonna live forever?—” Two or three kilometres away fighting was going on. The lieutenant, with his glass, picked up far, running figures on the slope of a hill. You caught a flicker, points of light on the gray-green fields—bayonets. Occasional wounded Frenchmen wandered back, weary, bearded men, very dirty. They looked with dull eyes at the Americans—“_Très mauvais, là-bas! Beaucoup Boche, là_—” The Marines were not especially interested. Their regiment had been a year in France, training. Now they, too, were dirty and tired and very hungry. The war would get along ... it always had.

A week ago, Memorial Day, there had been no drills. The 2d Division, up from a tour in the quiet Verdun trenches, rested pleasantly around Bourmont. Rumors of an attack by the 1st Division, at Cantigny, filtered in. Cantigny was a town up toward Montdidier. Notions of geography were the vaguest—but it was in the north, where all the heavy fighting was. It appeared that the 2d was going up to relieve the 1st.... “Sure! we’ll relieve ’em. But if they wanted a fight, why didn’t they let us know in the first place?—We’d a-showed ’em what shock troops can do!”

The division set out in camions; in the neighborhood of Meaux they were turned around and sent out the Paris-Metz road, along which the civilian population from the country between the Chemin des Dames and the Marne, together with the débris of a French army, was coming back. No man who saw that road those first days of June ever forgot it. A stream of old men and children and old and young women turned out of their homes between two sunrises, with what they could carry in their hands. You saw an ancient in a linen smock and sabots, trundling a wheelbarrow, whereon rode a woman as old as himself, with a feather-bed and a selection of copper pots and a string of garlic. There were families in amazing horse-drawn vehicles, models of the Third Empire, and horses about as old, clutching unreasonable selections of household effects—onyx clocks and bird-cages and rabbits—what you like. Women carrying babies. Children—solemn little boys in black pinafores, and curly-headed, high-nosed little girls, trudging hand-in-hand. People of elegance and refinement on inadequate shoes. Broad-faced peasants. Inhabitants of a thousand peaceful little villages and farms, untouched by the war since 1914. Now the Boche was out again, and those quiet places, that had drowsed in obscurity while generations lived and worked and died, were presently to be known to all the world—names like Bouresches, and Belleau, and Fismes, and Vierzy, and Fismettes. They walked with their faces much on their shoulders, these people, and there was horror in their eyes. The Marines took notice of another side of war.... “Hard on poor folks, war is.” “You said it!”—“Say—think about my folks, an’ your folks, out on the road like that!...” “Yeh. I’m thinkin’ about it. An’ when we meet that Boche, I’m gonna do something about it—Look—right nice-lookin’ girl, yonder!”