Part 3

Forward of the hill, German stretcher-bearers moved openly, unmolested, at first. The Marines watched them curiously. The enemy, his works are always interesting. A sergeant said: “Hi! Look at those Fritzies yonder, right off the road, there—” A lieutenant got his glass on them; two big men, one with a yellow beard, wearing Red Cross brassards. They carried a loaded stretcher; it looked like a man lying with his knees drawn up, under a blanket. “Humph! Got him well covered—officer, probably.” One stumbled, or the wind blew, and an end of the blanket flapped back, disclosing unmistakably the blunt snout of a heavy Maxim.—“So that’s it, eh? Slover—Jennings—Heald—got a rifle, Cannon? Range 350—let ’em have it—we can play that game, too—” Thereafter it was hard on Red Cross men and wounded; hard, in fact, on everybody. Like reasonable people, the Americans were willing to learn from the Boche, from anybody who could teach them; and if the Boche played the game that way—they could meet him at it. “Schrechlichkeit—if he wants frightfulness, we can give it to him—” Later there was a letter, taken from a dead feldwebel in the Bois de Belleau—“The Americans are savages. They kill everything that moves....”

Late in the afternoon a great uproar arose to the right. There was more artillery up now, more machine-guns, more of everything. The 3d Battalion of the 6th Marines and the 3d Battalion of the 5th attacked the town called Bouresches and the wood known as Bois de Belleau. They attacked across the open, losing hideously. Platoons were shot down entire. The colonel commanding the 6th Regiment, farther forward than regimental commanders have any business being, was shot and evacuated. Lieutenant Robertson got into Bouresches, with twenty men out of some hundred who started, threw the Boche out, and held it. They gained a footing in the rocky ledges at the edge of the Bois de Belleau, suffering much from what was believed to be a machine-gun nest at this point. They tried to leave it and go on, with a containing force to watch it; they found that the whole wood was a machine-gun nest.

Night descended over a tortured area of wheat and woodland, lit by flares and gun-flashes, flailed by machine-guns, and in too many places pitiful with crying of wounded who had lain all the day untended in a merciless sun. Stretcher-bearers and combat patrols roamed over it in the dark. Water parties and ration parties groped back from forward positions over unknown trails. There were dog-fights all over the place, wild alarms, and hysterical outbreaks of rifle-fire. It was the same with the Boche; he knew the ground better, and he was determined to repossess it. His people filtered back through the American strong points, for the Marines did not hold a continuous line; isolated positions were connected by patrols and machine-guns laid for interlocking fire.

At the southern angle of Hill 142 the 49th Company put out a listening-post—one man down the slope a little way, to watch for visitors. In the night there was a trampling, a grunt, and one scream—“Boche!”—At once the hill blazed into action—weary men overspent, they fired into the dark until their pieces were hot. And after they found the listening-post fellow, bayoneted. And down the hill a little huddle of new dead. Not all the rifle-fire had gone astray.

Back in Brigade, officers bent over maps and framed orders for a stronger attack on the Bois de Belleau at dawn.... Brigade was writing also to Division: “... casualties severe ... figures on which to base call for replacements will be submitted as soon as possible....”

II REPLACEMENTS

At the crossroads beyond La Voie du Chatelle they met the War.

Behind them, crammed somehow into weeks, were Quantico, the transport, Brest, a French troop-train. Then there was the golden country around St. Aignan, the “Saint Onion” of Americans, a country full of growing wheat and fields of red-topped clover, picture-book houses, and neat little forests. A country stripped of men, where the women were competent and kindly. Almost any place you could get noble omelets and white wine that tasted better than chlorinated water—good kick in it, too. “I tell you, Boots, an’ you remember it, this here France is a fine place to have a war in. Now, Haiti, an’ in Nicaragua, an’ in China, it’s nowhere near as good. I hope Germany will be as good, when—” So Sergeant McGee, with his double rows of ribbons and his hash marks, over a canteen full of _eau de vie_—old-timer he was.

The war was represented by demoniac non-coms, instructors in this and that. Bayonet drills—“Come on, now; lemme hear you—‘_What do we wash our bay’nets in?—German blood!_’—Aw—sing out like you meant it, you dam’ replacements! I’ll swear, it’s a shame to feed animals like you to the Germans—” Gas-mask drill—“Take more than five seconds, an’ your Maw gets a Gold Star—Now!—the gas-alert position—O, for Gawd’s sake, you guy, you wit’ the two left feet—” “But, sergeant, I find that I have a certain difficulty—” Sergeants also swear terribly.... There was every kind of drill, eight hours a day of it, and police work.

Rumors of great battles in the north. Glum and sad civilians—they were glum and sad everywhere in France, that spring of 1918—talking in anxious groups after the town crier with his drum passed. Another troop-train—maybe the same train that was carelessly left alongside a train containing the wine ration for some French division, the papers in which case are probably still accumulating. Camions after that. The replacements debussed late of a June afternoon and went up a great white road between exactly spaced poplars. They marched first in column of squads, then in column of files, platoons on opposite sides of the empty road. At the crest of a slope the column stopped. You could see, hanging above the sky-line to the north and east, curious shapes—“Look like a elephant’s head, bows on, wit’ his ears out, don’t they, sergeant?” The tall non-com who was guiding the column—a silent man—observed to the replacement officer in charge: “We’ll stop here, sir. Boche sausages yonder—observation balloons—see the whole country. We’ll wait till dark.”

The detachment was glad to fall out, off the road. It sat in little groups, silent for the most part, and listened to a mutter and a rumble in the direction of the blimps. A dark, high plane came into view from the east; its motor filled the ear with a deep, vibrant droning, oddly ominous. All at once the air around it was stippled with little puff-balls, white against the blue. You could hear the drumming of artillery, and the faint cough of bursting shrapnel, very far off. The plane went away. “—Yes, sir. Anti-aircraft stuff. Pretty, but it seldom hits anything—though it does run ’em off. Theirs is black....” The sergeant only spoke when spoken to; there was a look about his eyes—he was the survivor of a platoon that was sixty strong two days before. The sun set, and the day drowsed into the long twilight. Presently the sergeant said: “We can move now, sir.” The replacements moved, making no conversation.

A little country road led them off the highway. They passed a shattered farmhouse where a few soldiers lounged in the dusk. “Regimental, sir. Gets shelled a lot. No, sir, they don’t expect you to report. Somebody on the road to meet you....” A little group of officers rose out of the ditch, yawning. They looked slack and tired. “Replacement column? You in charge? Yes—assignments made back in Brigade. You’ll go to—Henry: your battalion gets a hundred and seventy, with five officers. Take ’em off the head of the column—tell Major Turrill——”

The detachment followed the officer called Henry, who set what they considered an immoderate pace. He passed the word: “Don’t bunch up; if a plane comes over low, don’t look up at it—he can see your faces; no smokin’, an’ don’t talk—” Sergeant McGee thought audibly: “Where have I seen that bird? Was it in Managua, that time they broke me for ... was it in Cuba?—where the devil—he was somebody’s sergeant-major—” They turned off the lane and went through a wheat-field. The sky was sword-blade blue, with a handful of stars. There was a loom of woods ahead, the tops of them outlined by greenish flares ceaselessly ascending somewhere beyond. They heard a machine-gun. “Sounds like one of these here steam-riveters, now, don’t it?...” A vagrant puff of wind blew a smell across the column, a smell terrible and searing to the nose. “Phew! dead hawses—” The officer named Henry spoke crisply. “Those are not,” he said, “dead horses.” The replacements sweated and felt cold, and thirsty too. They went on, very silent.

They went through a gap in a hedge and were at another crossroads. “Fall out here, an’ form combat packs. Leave your stuff under the hedge. Take one blanket. Come on—quickly, now!—an’ don’t bunch up!—” The replacements formed combat packs expertly, remembering Parris Island and Quantico. “Smartly, now! Come by here, fill your pockets—each man take two boxes hard bread—Where’ll you carry them? How in hell do I know—There!”

Two goods-boxes sat close together, and the men filed between them. One box had dried prunes in it, the other bread. “Don’t stop! don’t stop! Right down that road, an’ keep movin’!”

Out over the woods a sound started, a new sound. It was a rumbling whine, it grew to a roar, and a 77 crashed down just beyond the crossroads. A cloud blacker than the night leaped up, shot with red fire—“Lie down, all hands!” Another landed at once; the air was full of singing particles. The men, flat on their faces, in the dark, waited numbly for the next order. There were a dozen or so shells all around the place. The last one hit between the two goods-boxes, where a man was lying. The boxes and the man vanished in a ruddy cloud—better than if he’d gotten it in the belly and rolled around screaming.... There were no more shells—“Say, you know, I saw a arm an’ a rifle goin’ up wit’ that burst—I—who was he, anyway?—” “Keep quiet, there! All right! on your feet—right down that road—” the officer ordered, and added to himself—“Dam’ it! Should have remembered they shell La Voie du Chatelle every night this time—but they acted fine....” A voice spoke up, excited, amused: “Say! Sergeant McGee—anything like that in Vera Cruz?” “Pipe down, you Boot.”

They went down a wood-road, black as a pocket, the files pressing close to keep the man ahead in sight. They went lightly, a weight off each man’s mind. They had been shelled, and nobody had run away, and only one man hurt! Most men are afraid when they go up to the front; and what they fear most is the fear of seeming afraid.... They were ordered to fix bayonets. The road began to have inequalities in it. There were noises, explosions, around in the dark. The machine-guns sounded nearer; the flares showed more starkly on the sky. A man fell into a hole, and there was an acrid smell that caught at your windpipe. Just ahead, down the road, came a bright flash and a roar, and fragments ripped through the woods, and they heard a lamentable crying, getting weaker: “First-aid! first-aid—” The column came to a dead mule and the wreck of a cart lying athwart the road, and a smoking hole, and a smell of high explosive, and the sharp reek of blood. There was a struggling group, somebody working swiftly in the dark, a whiteness of bandages, and the white blur of a man’s torso. “Lie still, damn you!”—“O, Jesus! Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ!—Ahhhhh! Go easy, you—” “Hell, I know it hurts, guy, but I got to get this bandage on, haven’t I? Come on—quit kickin’—” Passing around the mule, a man stepped on something neither hard nor soft—nothing else on earth feels that way—and he floundered to one side, cursing hysterically.—“Quiet, back there—pass the word, no talking!” The files obediently passed the word. The column groped on in the dark.

It came out of the woods into a pale stone town—Champillon. There were no lights in the houses; the place had an air of death about it. There was a well by Champillon, where the water-parties came back from the lines in the night for water.... One canteenful was a man’s allowance for each twenty-four hours. Men, after a time, made a shift to wash and shave and live not too thirsty out of one canteen a day. The replacements met two spectres who bore between them, on a long stick, twenty-odd canteens—the canteens of a platoon. “Hey! Guy!—” this in a hoarse whisper—“you comin’ up to relieve us?” “Hell, no!” a guide answered. “These is 1st Battalion replacements.” “I’ll be goddam’. Gonna leave us in forever—Ain’t we ever gonna be relieved?—” “Close up, there, and silence——”

There was a Ph.D. from Harvard in that sweating file, a big, pale, unhandy private, hounded habitually by sergeants, and troubled with indigestion and patriotism. For all his training, a pack was not at home on his shoulders or a rifle easy in his hands. He was aware of his panoply of war—the full belt dragging at his loins, the straps that cut into his shoulders, the bulge of prunes in his blouse-pockets, and his Springfield, increasingly heavy. He reflected, feeling for the road with clumsy hobnails—for he was blind in the dark—“Now, those men are undoubtedly of the professional-soldier type. It is all a business with them. They are tired and they want to rest, and they say so frankly. No matter how tired I was, I’d never have the courage to say I wanted a relief. I’d want to awfully, but——”

He thought of the pleasant study back Cambridge way, of the gold-and-blue sergeant under the “First to Fight!” recruiting poster—“Your job, too, fella! Come on an’ help lick the Hun! You don’t wanta wait to be drafted, a big guy like you! We can use you in the Marines—” A hearty, red-necked ruffian—extremely competent in his vocation, no doubt. Good enough chaps. Yes ... but ... tea by a sea-coal fire in the New England twilight, and clever talk of art and philosophic anarchism—one wrote fastidious essays on such things for the more discriminating reviews ... scholarly abstractions.... Of all the stupid, ignorant, uncivilized things, a war! Who coined that phrase, civilized warfare? There was no such thing!... Here, in the most civilized country on earth.... The neighborhood of Château-Thierry ... Montaigne’s town, wasn’t it? The kings of France had a château near it, once. And yet it was always a cockpit ... since Ætius rolled back Attila in the battle of the nations, at Châlons—Napoleon fought Champ-Aubert and Montmirail around here—always war——

The column was through Champillon, dipping into a black hollow. More shell-holes in the road here.... All at once there was a new shell-hole, and the doctor of philosophy, sometime private of Marines, lay beside it, very neatly beheaded, with the rifle, that had been such a bore to keep clean, across his knees, and dried prunes spilling out of the pockets that he never had learned to button. The column went on. At dawn a naval medico attached to the Marine Brigade, with a staff officer, passed that way.

“Odd, the wounds you see,” observed the naval man, professionally interested. He looked curiously. “I couldn’t have done a neater decapitation than that myself. Wonder who—took his identification tags with it. I see. Replacement, by his uniform—” (For the 5th and 6th Regiments had long since worn out their forester-green Marine uniforms, and were wearing army khaki, while the replacements came in new green clothing.) The staff officer picked up the rifle, snapped back the bolt, and squinted expertly down the bore. “Disgustin’,” he said. “Sure he was a replacement. You never catch an old-timer with a bore like that—filthy! Bet there hasn’t been a rag through it in a week. You know, surgeon, I was looking at some of the rifles of that bunch of machine-gunners lying in the brush just across from Battalion; they were beautiful. Never saw better kept pieces. Fine soldiers in a lot of ways, these Boche!...”

Meantime the column had passed into heavier woods, and halted where the rifles ahead sounded very near. They saw dugouts, betrayed by the thread of candle-light around the edges of the blankets that cloaked their entrances. One was a dressing-station, by the sound and the smell of it. The officer named Henry ducked into the other. There a stocky major sat up on the floor and rolled a cigarette, which he lighted at a guttering candle. “Replacements in? Well, what do they look like?—”

“Same men I saw in the training area last month, sir. A sprinkling of old-time Marines—Sergeant McGee, that we broke for something or other in Panama, is with ’em—and the rest of them are young college lads and boys off the farm—fine material, sir. Not much drill, but they probably know how to shoot, they take orders, and they don’t scare worth a cent! Shelled coming in, at Voie du Chatelle, and some more this side of Champillon—several casualties. No confusion—nothing like a panic—laid down and waited for orders—did exactly as they were told—fine men, sir!”

“All right! All right! Rush ’em right up to the companies. Guides are waiting around outside—company commanders have their orders about distribution. Start with the 49th and drop ’em off as you go along. They’ll do—they’ll have to!...”

III THE BOIS DE BELLEAU

They tried new tactics to get the bayonets into the Bois de Belleau. Platoons—very lean platoons now—formed in small combat groups, deployed in the wheat, and set out toward the gloomy wood. Fifty batteries were working on it, all the field pieces of the 2d Division, and what the French would lend. The shells ripped overhead, and the wood was full of leaping flame, and the smoke of H. E. and shrapnel. The fire from its edge died down. It was late in the afternoon; the sun was low enough to shine under the edge of your helmet. The men went forward at a walk, their shoulders hunched over, their bodies inclined, their eyes on the edge of the wood, where shrapnel was raising a hell of a dust. Some of them had been this way before; their faces were set bleakly. Others were replacements, a month or so from Quantico; they were terribly anxious to do the right thing, and they watched zealously the sergeants and the corporals and the lieutenants who led the way with canes.

One such group, over to the left, followed a big young officer, a replacement, too, but a man who had spent a week in Bouresches and was to be considered a veteran, as such things went in those days, when so many chaps were not with the brigade very long. He had not liked Bouresches, which he entered at night, and where he lived obscenely in cellars with the dead, and saw men die in the orange flash of minenwerfer shells, terribly and without the consolation of glory. Here, at last, was attack.... He thought, absently watching his flank to see that it guided true—guide centre was the word—of the old men who had brought him up to tales of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, in the War of the Southern Confederacy. Great battles, glamorous attacks, full of the color and the high-hearted élan of chivalry. Jackson at Chancellorsville; Pickett at Gettysburg—that was a charge for you—the red Southern battle-flags, leading like fierce bright-winged birds the locked ranks of fifteen gray brigades, and the screeching Rebel yell, and the field-music, fife and drum, rattling out “The Girl I Left Behind Me”:

“Oh, if ever I get through this war, And the Lincoln boys don’t find me, I’m goin’ to go right back again To the girl I left behind me——”

No music here, no flags, no bright swords, no lines of battle charging with a yell. Combat groups of weary men, in drab and dirty uniforms, dressed approximately on a line, spaced “so that one shrapnel-burst cannot include more than one group,” laden like mules with gas-masks, bandoleers, grenades, chaut-chaut clips, trudging forward without haste and without excitement, they moved on an untidy wood where shells were breaking, a wood that did not answer back, or show an enemy. In its silence and anonymity it was far more sinister than any flag-crowned rampart, or stone walls topped with crashing volleys from honest old black-powder muskets—he considered these things and noted that the wood was very near, and that the German shells were passing high and breaking in the rear, where the support companies were waiting. His own artillery appeared to have lifted its range; you heard the shells farther in, in the depths of the wood.

The air snapped and crackled all around. The sergeant beside the lieutenant stopped, looked at him with a frozen, foolish smile, and crumpled into a heap of old clothes. Something took the kneecap off the lieutenant’s right knee and his leg buckled under him. He noticed, as he fell sideways, that all his men were tumbling over like duck-pins; there was one fellow that spun around twice, and went over backward with his arms up. Then the wheat shut him in, and he heard cries and a moaning. He observed curiously that he was making some of the noise himself. How could anything hurt so? He sat up to look at his knee—it was bleeding like the deuce!—and as he felt for his first-aid packet, a bullet seared his shoulder, knocking him on his back again. For a while he lay quiet and listened to odd, thrashing noises around him, and off to the left a man began to call, very pitifully. At once he heard more machine-gun fire—he hadn’t seemed to hear it before—and now the bullets were striking the ground and ricocheting with peculiar whines in every direction. One ripped into the dirt by his cheek and filled his eyes and his mouth with dust. The lamentable crying stopped; most of the crawling, thrashing noises stopped. He himself was hit again and again, up and down his legs, and he lay very still.

Where he lay he could just see a tree-top—he was that near the wood. A few leaves clung to it; he tried to calculate, from the light on them, how low the sun was, and how long it would be until dark. Stretcher-bearers would be along at dark, surely. He heard voices, so close that he could distinguish words:

“_Caput?_”

“_Nein—nicht alles_—”

Later, forgetting those voices, he tried to wriggle backward into a shell-hole that he remembered passing. He was hit again, but somehow he got into a little shell-hole, or got his body into it, head first. He reflected that he had bled so much that a head-downward position wouldn’t matter, and he didn’t want to be hit again. Men all dead, he supposed. He couldn’t hear any of them. He seemed to pass out, and then to have dreamy periods of consciousness. In one of these periods he saw the sky over him was dark, metallic blue; it would be nearly night. He heard somebody coming on heavy feet, and cunningly shut his eyes to a slit ... playing dead.... A German officer, a stiff, immaculate fellow, stood over him, looking at him. He lay very still, trying not to breathe. The Boche had out his pistol, a short-barrelled Luger, rested it on his left forearm, and fired deliberately. He felt the bullet range upward through the sole of his foot, and something excruciating happened in his ankle. Then one called, and the German passed from his field of vision, returning his pistol as he went....