Part 9

It was the flank of the Boche column which had come out of St.-Etienne and struck the leading battalions of the 5th. It had watched first with keen delight, then with incredulity, the tortured advance of the battalion. It had waited too long to open its own fire. And now, already shaken by the sight of these men who would not die, it shrank from the long American bayonets and the pitiless, furious faces behind the steel. A few Brandenburger zealots elected to die on their spitting Maxim guns, working them until bayonets or clubbed rifles made an end. A few iron-souled Prussians—the Boche had such men—stood up to meet bayonet with bayonet, and died that way. The second-in-command saw such a one, a big feldwebel, spring against one of his sergeants with the long Prussian lunge that throws the bayonet like a spear to the full reach of the arm. It is a spectacular thrust, and will spit like a rabbit what stands in its way. But the sergeant, Bob Slover, a little fiery man with a penchant for killing Germans, ran under it and thrust from the ground for the Boche’s throat. And as his point touched, he pulled the trigger. The feldwebel’s helmet flew straight into the air, and the top of his head went with it.

A great many more flung away their arms and bleated “Kamaraden” to men who in that red minute knew no mercy. Some hid in holes, or feigned death, to be hunted out as the press thinned. And the rest scuttled through the fringe of trees and back down toward St.-Etienne, while the Marines, lying prone or taking rest for their Springfields, killed them as they ran. This same rifle-fire, directed against the flank and rear of the column which had pushed to the right against the other battalions of the 5th, broke that force and dispersed it. There was a battery of field-guns down the slope, 500 yards or so. The gunners—those who were lucky—took to cover after the first burst of fire. “Thank Gawd fer a shot at them dam’ artillerymen! Battle-sight, an’ aim low, you birds—don’t let any of them bastards get away!”... “Sergeant, reckon the lootenant would let us go down an’ take them 77s?”—“Shut up an’ work yo’ bolt, you dam’ fool!—Whatinell you think you are—a army core?”—“Besides, Mr. Connor’s dead....” On the hill beyond St.-Etienne new trenches scarred the slope; there were many Germans milling there, some 1,500 yards away. “Save your ammunition and lay low,” the word was passed. “We’re on our own out here.” And the battalion, a very small battalion now, little more than a hundred men, lay along the crest they had stormed, with their dead and wounded and the Boche dead and wounded around them.

[Illustration:

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

[Illustration:

The last few men are always the most difficult to kill. ]

Almost immediately the Boche began to react. He opened on them a storm of fire, high explosive and shrapnel, and his machine-guns dinned fiercely. A counter-attack began to form toward St.-Etienne. Sweating gunners struggled into position with the two machine-guns that were left in the battalion, and these, with their crews, were knocked out by shell-fire before either had been in action long enough to fire a clip. But the rifles gave tongue and continued to speak—the last few men are always the most difficult to kill—and the Boche had little taste for rifle-fire that begins to kill at 700 yards. That counter-attack shortly returned whence it came, and the one that followed it went back also.

The rifles fell silent, for the Boche infantry was in cover, or too far away to waste scant ammunition on. “O Lord, for one battery of 75s or a machine-gun outfit! All the Boches in the world, an’ nothin’ to reach ’em with!” lamented the captain of the 49th. “We’re clean away from our guns, and those devils seem to know it—look at ’em, yonder! Heard a shell from ours to-day, John? I haven’t.”—“Plenty from the other side, though—damn few of us left, capitan. Eastin’s got it, Tom Langford’s got it—Chuck Connor, and Matthews. Don’t know where Geer is. Guess I’m the only officer you have left—here’s Captain Whitehead.”

Whitehead, of the 67th Company, plumped down beside them. Small, very quick and wiry, with his helmet cocked on the side of his head, he gave the impression of a fierce and warlike little hawk. “Hunt’s comin’ over, Francis,” he said. “Bad place; worst I ever saw. Got about thirty men left. Hell that our machine-guns got knocked out so quick, wasn’t it?—must be two regiments of Fritzies on our front yonder!”

Captain Hunt, senior in the field, a big, imperturbable Californian, came, and Lieutenant Kelly, promoted by casualties in the last hour to command of the 66th Company. “How does it look to you, gentlemen?” said Hunt. “Damn bad” was the consensus of opinion, with profane embellishments. Followed some technical discussion. “Well,” concluded the senior captain, “we’ve accomplished our mission—broke up their attack—better hook up with the rest of the regiment. We’ll find them through the woods to the right. Move off your companies—Kelly, you go first.”

[Illustration:

A machine-gunner, Champagne.

A sketch made on the field. ]

Nobody remembers very clearly that swing to the right, through a hail of machine-gun fire and an inferno of shelling. They found the companies of the 2d Battalion digging in astride a blasted road, and went into position beside them.

“I’ve organized the company sector with twenty men—all we’ve got left—you and I make twenty-two,” reported the second-in-command, dropping wearily into the shell-hole where the captain had established himself. “Lord, I’m tired ... and what I can’t see,” he added in some wonder, fingering the rents in his raincoat, “is why we weren’t killed too....”

That night, lying in its shallow, hastily dug holes, the remnant of the battalion descended through further hells of shelling. The next night tins of beef and bread came up. There was some grim laughter when it came. “Captain,” reported the one remaining sergeant, after distributing rations in the dark, “they sent us chow according to the last strength report—three days ago—230-odd rations. The men are building breastworks out of the corned-willy cans, sir!—twenty of ’em——”

Some runners got through, and Division H. Q., well forward in a pleasantly exposed spot on the Souain road, built up a picture of a situation sufficiently interesting. Four infantry regiments were thrust saw-wise northwest to northeast of Blanc Mont; all were isolated from each other and from the French, who had lagged behind the flanks. Four little islands in a turbulent Boche sea, and the old Boche doing his damnedest. The Marine major-general commanding, Lejeune, it is related, went serenely to sleep. And they relate further that a staff colonel who, like Martha, was careful and troubled about many things, came to rouse him with a tale of disaster: “General, general, I have word from the front that a regiment of Marines is entirely surrounded by the Germans!”

“Yes, colonel? Well, sir,” said the general, sadly and sleepily, “I am sorry for those Germans!”—and returned to his slumbers.

More days and nights, slipping, characterless, into each other. Being less than a company in strength, the 1st Battalion of the 5th was not called on to attack again. They lay in their holes and endured. “Until the division has accomplished its mission,” said the second-in-command, rubbing his dirt-encrusted and unshaven chin. “That means, until the rest of the outfit is killed down as close as we are. Then we’ll be relieved, an’ get a week’s rest and a gang of bloodthirsty replacements, an’ then we can do it all over again.” “Yes,” replied the captain, turning uneasily in the cramped, coffin-shaped hole in which they lay. He scratched himself. “I have cooties, I think. In plural quantities.” “Well, you would have that orderly strip the overcoats off a covey of dead Boches to furnish this château of ours. The Boche is such an uncleanly beast.... I have cooties, too, my capitan. Hell ... ain’t war wonderful!”

And after certain days the division was relieved. The battalion marched out at night. The drumming thunder of the guns fell behind them and no man turned his face to look again on the baleful lights of the front. On the road they passed a regiment of the relieving division—full, strong companies of National Guardsmen. They went up one side of the road; and in ragged column of twos, unsightly even in the dim and fitful light, the Marines plodded down the other side. They were utterly weary, with shuffling feet and hanging heads. The division had just done something that those old masters in the art of war, the French, and the world after them, including Ludendorff, were to acknowledge remarkable. They had hurled the Boche from Blanc Mont and freed the sacred city of Rheims. They had paid a price hideous even for this war. And they were spent. If there was any idea in those hanging heads it was food and rest.

The Guard companies gibed at the shrunken battalion as they passed. Singing and joking they went. High words of courage were on their lips and nervous laughter. Save for a weary random curse here and there, the battalion did not answer.... “Hell, them birds don’t know no better....” “Yeh, we went up singin’ too, once—good Lord, how long ago!... They won’t sing when they come out ... or any time after ... in this war.”... “Damn you, can’t you march on your own side the road? How much room you need?”

SONGS THREE “MADEMOISELLE FROM ARMENTIÈRES”

It was nice, back in billets, resting between battles, to sit on a bench in the sun and watch the world go by. Odette, the strapping and genteel daughter of the baker of Croutte-sur-Marne, here herds the duck Anatole into the courtyard of her mother’s bakery. (M. Boulanger was last heard from on the Chemin des Dames; Mme. Boulangère keeps the establishment going.) The duck Anatole has been ordered for dinner by two lieutenants of the 1st Battalion, the consideration being 37 francs 80 centimes. Two privates of the 49th Company are choiring softly “Mademoiselle from Armentières” as she passes. It is just as well that neither Odette nor Anatole comprend l’anglais.

[Illustration: [Soldiers]]

IV

[Illustration: [Hands rolling a cigarette]]

At various times and places in 1918 the 2d Marine Division was subsisted on the French ration, a component part of which was preserved Argentine beef with carrots in it. This was called monkey-meat by the Marines of the 4th Brigade. Men ate it when they were very hungry.

IV MONKEY-MEAT

In a mangled place called the Wood Northwest of Lucy-le-Bocage two lieutenants of the Marine Brigade squatted by a hole the size of a coffin and regarded with attention certain cooking operations. The older, and perhaps the dirtier of the two, was intent upon a fire-blackened mess-kit, which was balanced on two stones and two German bayonets over a can of solidified alcohol. In the mess-kit was simmering a grayish and unattractive matter with doubtful yellowish lumps, into which the lieutenant fed, discriminatingly, bits of hard bread and frayed tomatoes from a can.

“Do what you will with it,” he observed, “monkey-meat is monkey-meat. It’s a great pity that damn Tompkins had to get himself bumped off last night when we came out. He had a way with monkey-meat, the kid did—hell! I never have any luck with orderlies!” He prodded the mess of Argentine beef—the French army’s canned meat ration—and stared sombrely. His eyes, a little bloodshot in his sunburnt, unshaven face, were sleepy.

The other waited on two canteen cups stilted precariously over a pale-lavender flame. The water in them began to boil, and he supplied coffee—the coarse-ground, pale coffee of the Frogs—with a spoon that shook a little. He considered: “S’pose I’d better boil the sugar in with it,” he decided. “There isn’t so much of it, you know. We’ll taste it more.” And he added the contents of a little muslin sack—heavy beet-sugar that looked like sand. His face was pale and somewhat troubled, and his week’s beard was straggling and unwholesome. He was not an out-of-doors man—and he was battalion scout officer. A gentleman over-sensitive for the rude business of war, he would continue to function until he broke—and one sensed that he would suffer while about it....

“I don’t like monkey-meat. Before this smell”—he waved his spoon petulantly—“got into my nose I never could eat it. But now you can’t smell but one thing, and, after all, you’ve got to eat.”

The smell he referred to lay through the wood like a tangible fog that one could feel against the cheek and see. It was the nub-end of June, and many battalions of fighting men had lain in the Wood Northwest of Lucy, going up to the front a little way forward or coming out to stand by in support. It was a lovely place for supports; you could gather here and debouch toward any part of the sector, from Hill 142, on the left, through the Bois de Belleau and Bouresches, to Vaux, where the infantry brigade took on. Many men had lain in the wood, and many men lay in it still. Some of these were buried very casually. Others, in hidden tangles of it, along its approaches, and in the trampled areas beyond it where attack and counter-attack had broken for nearly a month of days and nights, hadn’t been buried at all. And always there were more, and the June sun grew hotter as it made toward July.

[Illustration:

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

Troops lay in the wood now; a battalion of the 6th and two companies of the 5th Regiment outfit, half of which was still in line on the flank of the Bois de Belleau. These companies had come out at dawn, attended by shell-fire; they had plunged into the wood and slept where they halted, unawakened—except the wounded—by the methodical shelling to which the Boche treated the place every day. Now, in the evening, they were awake and hungry. They squatted, each man in his hole, and did what they could about it. A savage-looking lot, in battered helmets and dirty uniforms. But you saw them cleaning their rifles....

The scout officer, with his hand out to lift away the coffee, which was, in his judgment, boiled, heard: “Mr. Braxton? Yeh, he’s up thataway, with the lootenant.” “Hey, yuh dog-robbin’ battalion runner, you—what’s up? Hey?” “Scout officer? Over yonder, him wit’ the green blouse—” and a soiled battalion runner, identified by his red brassard and his air of one laden with vital information, clumped up and saluted sketchily.

“Sir, the major wants to see the battalion scout officer at battalion headquarters. The major said: Right away, sir.”

The scout officer swore, inexpertly, for he was not a profane fellow, but with infinite feeling. “Good God, I hope it ain’t—If you can keep my coffee hot, Tommie—Be right back as soon as I can. Save my slum. Don’t let anything happen to my slum—” The words trailed in the air as he went swiftly off, buckling his pistol-belt. The battalion commander was that kind of an officer.

The lieutenant growled in sympathy: “Somebody’s always takin’ the joy out of life. Jim, he’s hungry as I am, an’ that’s as hungry as a bitch wolf. That’s the trouble with this war stuff; man misses too many meals.” He took the cooking from the fire and replaced the lids on the little alcohol-cans with care. Canned heat was quite hard to come by; the Boche was much better provided with it; he was indebted for this to a deceased German gentleman, and it was the last he had.

“No tellin’ what the old man wants. Glad I ain’t a scout officer. This war’s hard on Jim—he takes it too serious. I’ll wait, though.” Absently he drank the tomato juice left in the can. He tried his coffee, and burned his mouth. “Wish I had the man here that invented this aluminum canteen cup! Time the damn cup’s cool enough so you won’t burn the hide off yo’ lip, the coffee’s stone cold.” Then, later: “Not boiled enough. Jim, he’s used to bein’ waited on—never make a rustler, he won’t....

“Well, he’s long in comin’. Old man sent him forward to make a map or something, most prob’ly.” He tasted the slum. “That Tompkins! Why the hell he had to stop one—only man I ever knew that could make this monkey-meat taste like anything! And he goes and gets bumped off. Hell! That’s the way with these kids. This needs an onion.”

[Illustration:

“He takes the war too serious.” ]

He ate half the mess, with scrupulous exactness, and drank his coffee. He put the lid on the mess-kit, and covered Jim’s coffee, now getting cold. He smoked a cigarette and talked shop with his platoon sergeant. He gave some very hard words and his last candle-end to a pale private who admitted blistered heels, and then stood over the man while he tallowed his noisome socks. He interviewed his chaut-chaut gunners, and sent them off to beg new clips from the battalion quartermaster sergeant. It grew into the long French twilight; Boche planes were about, and all the anti-aircraft stuff in the neighborhood was furiously in action. Strolling back to his hole, the lieutenant observed that the pale private had resumed his shoes and was rolling his puttees with a relieved look. At this moment the nose-cap of a 75 came whimpering and hirpling down out of the heavens and gutted the fellow.... When that was cleaned up, the lieutenant lay in his hole, weighing the half-empty mess-kit in his hands, and trusted that nothing unseemly had happened to Jim. He thought of going up to battalion to see what was doing—but the major liked for you to stay with your men, unless he sent for you.... “Well! Might as well get some sleep....”

Toward dark the Boche began to slam 77s and 150s into the Wood northwest of Lucy. It became a place of horror, with stark cries in the night, between the rending crashes of the shells. About an hour before midnight the word was passed and the two companies got out and went up across the pestilential wheat-fields and into the Bois de Belleau.

That same afternoon an unassigned colonel had come up to Brigade Headquarters. Wanted to go to Paris, he did, and the brigade commander said that the only way to get there was to bring in a prisoner. One prisoner; seven days’ leave. Be glad to get a prisoner. Intelligence had word of a new division or so moved in over there last night; identification not yet positive.

This colonel took steps. He was a man of parts and very desirous of the fleshpots of the Place de l’Opéra. There was an elegant French captain attached to brigade for no very evident reason—just attached—spoke English and knew vintages. Said to be an expert on raids. The colonel put it up to him in such and such a way: would he go? Yes, but certainly. Just a small raid, my colonel? Oh, a very small raid. Now, as to artillery support—a map was broken out.

Brigade artillery officer—chap the colonel knew out on the Asiatic station—happened in. How about it—just about half as much stuff as you fellows wasted on the Tartar Wall that time—eh? Sure: it could be arranged. Ten minutes’ intensive; say, one battery; where you want it? Brigade intelligence took thought: They’ve got some kind of a strong point out from the ruined airdrome in front of Torcy. Their line is through Torcy; battalion in there. Left of the Bois—see here? Our photos show two big craters—some of the heavy stuff they shot at the railroad the 29th of May, or the 30th, most likely—eh, m’sieur le capitaine? Might look at that, colonel. Best jump-off is from Terry’s battalion—about here—he has two companies here. Six hundred yards to go; keep the Bois well away—well starboard, as you leathernecks say; come back the same route. Wheat. Little gully here. Craters just beyond. Main line at least a hundred metres back. Good? Let’s call up Terry and see if he’ll give you the men.... Terry would give him twenty-five men and two chaut-chauts and not a Marine more. Who wanted a raid, anyway? Sending two support companies up to the Bois as soon as it’s dark. Looks interestin’ on the right.... Good! All set. Start your covering fire at 23 hours 15. You jump off at 23 hours 19. Take you six minutes to get over, huh? “All right, colonel, bonne chance!”

Just before dark the colonel and Captain de Stegur were at battalion headquarters. “Whitehead will give you your men, and I’m sending my scout officer along. Needs that sort of thing. Be sure you come back where you went out. Crabbe’s to the right of there. You know Crabbe. Shoots quick.”

“But, my colonel,” represented Captain de Stegur, “one should arrange, one should explain, one should instruct—in effect, one should rehearse——”

“Rehearse hell, sir! I’m due in Paris to-morrow night. Where those Marines, major? I’ll tell ’em what I want——”

So it was that a wedge of men debouched into the wheat at 23 hours 19 minutes;[1] it being sufficiently dark.

Footnote 1:

11.19 P. M.

The battalion scout officer and a disillusioned sergeant, with hash marks on his sleeve, were the point. The men were echeloned back, right, and left with an automatic rifle on each flank. In the centre marched the colonel, smoking, to the horror of all, a cigar. Smoking was not done up there, after dark. With him was the elegant French captain, who appeared to be very gallantly resigned to it. The story would, he reflected, amaze and delight his mess—if he ever got back with it! These droll Americans! He must remember just what this colonel said: a type, _Nom de Dieu_! If only he had not worn his new uniform—the cloth chosen by his wife, you conceive——

The 75s flew with angry whines that arched across the sky and smote with red and green flames along a line.... There was a spatter of rifle-fire toward the right; flares went up over the dark loom of the Bois; a certain violence of machine-gun fire grew up and waxed to great volume, but always to the right. Forward, where the shells were breaking, there was nothing....