THE 151st BRIGADEI. CAMP DEVENS
THE 151st BRIGADE
InApril, 1917, the United States declared war against Germany. It was no surprise, but what did it mean? For it is one thing to declare war and another to wage it. We had no army and no ships and three thousand miles of ocean lay between the Yankee and the Hun. We would of course lend money to our allies. Would we give them our men? The answer, thank God, was the draft law which put into being the greatest democratic institution of our country,—the National Army.
Early in the fall of 1917, men from every walk of life, from every corner of every state, thronged to the huge, ugly, but business-like cantonments which had grown up, like the mushroom over night. These men, scientifically chosen, for their physique, mentality, character and patriotism, were as diversified in their civil life and occupations as men can be, but they had one thing in common: ignorance of the military. This and the single purpose that brought them there, welded them together. If Germany scorned our declaration of war, she must have sung another tune as she watched us prepare to wage it.
Camp Devens, Massachusetts, was the rendez-vous for New England’s Yankees. They were the personnel of the first of the National Army Divisions, the Seventy-Sixth.
The Divisional Artillery was to consist of the 301st, the 302nd, and 303rd regiments, Colonels Brooke, Craig and Conklin respectively commanding. Thus it was that the 151st Field Artillery Brigade was born, and with what promise! Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and Massachusetts furnished the quota, with many a generation of fighting ancestors behind them and traditions of battles won, not only in war but in every field of human endeavor.
Was it strange then that Major-General William S. McNair, then Brigadier-General, shortly after he took command in December of that year said that he felt as proud as the young mother when she sees her first born take its first four steps?
Those early months found us awkward and nearly as helpless as the infant to which the General referred, but men and officers alike were using this time to advantage; both had to adapt themselves to new ways of thinking and living, and even the language of the army was as strange to us then as was French when we finally got to France.
It was perhaps at this time more than any other, that we had cause to be thankful to the General, Colonels and Lieutenant Colonels for their able and generous assistance in getting the younger officers over those first hurdles. Let us here extend our utmost appreciation to Lieutenant Colonels Rehkopf, Danforth and Stopford whose loss to the Brigade we have had many an occasion to regret. But they like manyothers of our best were called upon to take bigger jobs where they could be of even greater value to the country all were now serving.
In many respects those days were the hardest of all; everything was strange. For a time, standing in line hour after hour was an interesting novelty and gave the ever-present jester an opportunity to exercise his wit; so with the drills. But human beings, particularly the Yankee variety, adapt themselves quickly to their surroundings. Standing in line a couple of hours for a pair of shoes or a cup of soup ceases eventually to be an interesting novelty. And when the soup so acquired is knocked from your hand by an over zealous companion and soils the uniform you must keep clean, you may perhaps forgive him and laugh; but all that is funny therein is almost sure to occur to your fertile mind and keen sense of humor the first time it happens. Repetition is superfluous.
Being herded together, seeing the same man on either side of you every day and all day, having to do what you are told day and night, has but limited charms for the independent citizen of America. Thoughts were turned, first backward, to the days when we had been individuals instead of a mite of a cog in a great machine, and then forward, with the inevitable question: how long was it all to last? We would have been homesick, desperately so, but there was no time. A bugle broke our sleep when it was still dark. Another summoned us to a formation before it was physicallypossible to get dressed, from which we were marched to breakfast. A whistle, followed by the First Sergeant’s “Fall Out”, arrested the first mouthful and told us we would not have time to wash mess kits before policing. Policing was followed by inspection, where the Captain would bawl us out for the condition of those same wretched mess kits. Inspection was followed by physical exercises; physical exercises by foot drill, foot drill by a hike, the hike by mess. In the afternoon we rehearsed the events of the morning. Supper was followed by school, then taps, then bed, then reveille. To-day is a repetition of yesterday, to-morrow will be a repetition of to-day. But to-day we are not going to be bawled out for dirty mess kits, we wash them and are late for policing; the First Sergeant puts us in the kitchen for a week and we learn the meaning of K. P.[A]We are soon repentant and resolve to be on time to formation. This is the school of the Rookie and this is how he learns the impossible. “Take therefore no thought for the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”
The next quota of men come into camp; we have graduated; they are the rookies; we are the soldiers; we laugh; they look puzzled.
Then came the winter, and what a winter! Arthur Mometer said it was zero hour all the time. Of coursehe did not know. He was a Rookie, but somehow it didn’t make it any warmer nor the snow less deep. We shovelled snow and froze doing it, we had exercises and we froze doing that, we drilled with the same result. Live horses took the place of those ever-to-be-remembered wooden monstrosities. We groomed them and they bit us. We exercised them and they kicked us. But we got hard and we got health and we became soldiers. Individuality was superseded by discipline.
About this time a touch of war and Hun Hellishness was brought home to us. William S. McNair, Colonel of the 6th Field Artillery was promoted in France and ordered to America to command our Brigade. Accordingly he left France on the U. S. S. “Antilles”. At about 6.45 in the morning of October 17th a German submarine succeeded in torpedoing his boat. She sank immediately with the loss of about 65 lives. The General was in the water for some three quarters of an hour, when he was taken into a life boat. Six hours later one of the convoy, the Morgan yacht “Corsair” returned from trying to find the submarine and took aboard all the survivors. They returned to France and two weeks later the General again sailed for home on the transport “Tenadores”. The “Tenadores” has since been sunk by a mine, but happily for the Brigade it was not on this voyage.
Christmas came and with it the joy of home for a few, but the majority of the men must stay in camp.It was all part of the great task we had undertaken. We accepted it as such. Transportation was not available to move our now vast army to its homes. We made merry, or rather, we did better than that; we pretended to make merry. We sang the songs we had rehearsed for the occasion. It was a holiday. There were no drills. We had time to think. We can be honest now. Our thoughts were not those of the schoolboy on his holiday with his plans for stockings and Christmas tree, dinner and stomach ache. They were far-away thoughts of things, once commonplace and taken for granted, now suddenly and forever dearer than life itself; things which in fact made life worth while. Home, loved, of course, but so much a part of us that we had grown to accept it as a matter of right. But strangely enough our thoughts carried us farther. We found that we were longing for the little individual problems of our daily routine in the past,—problems that had once perplexed and annoyed us we now craved as a hungry man craves food.
Months slipped by, and with them the winter. Spring rumors of France took the place of winter rumors, but the warm weather and a few guns found us ready for the real work of artillerymen. Reveille was an hour earlier and retreat an hour later. But we were up hours before reveille with a call to stables followed by boots and saddles. We hitched the horses to the guns in the darkness, that we might get all the daylight on the range. A runaway was not an unusualdiversion. But as we had become fit, so did the horses. Every day saw men and horses in better condition and better trained. Team work and order was taking the place of individual endeavor and chaos. A machine with intelligence was in the making, and results were beginning to assert themselves. Each cog was finding its place and taking hold with a will. A sharp command in the crisp air put the works instantly in motion, where a month before explanations, demonstrations, repeated attempts and failures had only succeeded in getting parts of our engine to function. Now the gears were adjusted, we needed but to limber them up and oil the parts. An occasional “Well Done” would take the place of continuous reprimand. We became proud of ourselves and our organization. A healthy spirit of rivalry stalked abroad. We were thebestsection in thebestbattery, and of course our regiment was thebestin the Brigade, if not in the army! Officers were proud of their men, and the men were proud of the officers. Each began to know the other, his powers and his limitations. Sympathy took the place of misunderstanding and surliness.
Colonel Geo. M. Brooke
So on the range, the officers acquired the theoretical elements of artillery firing. They learnt to figure their data with accuracy and to convey it to their batteries in terse and comprehensive commands. The men in their turn were seeing the purpose of the monotonous daily drills of the six months past and the value of team work. They acquired an intimate knowledge ofthe pieces they were serving; the delicacy of the mechanism and the consequent necessity for accurate laying. They responded with alacrity to the orders of their superiors, and the guns responded to the slightest touch of the crews. All were alert, smart, prompt,—officers and men alike, fascinated with the possibilities of the game they were rapidly learning to play. Even the details, after months of labor, became proficient at the wig wag, semaphore, buzzer, map-making and sketching; in short, all of those things which we discovered later, played such an important part in winning the war.
So when the government inspectors began to look us over and rumors flew faster, we were not found wanting. The wheels were oiled and the spirit was there.
But here I am rudely stopped by the adjutant of the 301st who says we can’t leave Devens without a Horse Show. Of course he is right. It can’t be done, although it does seem tough after having oiled the wheels to such perfection. However what must be done shall be done gracefully; so thought Captain Page at the second hurdle where he decided to make the rest of the trip on his ear.
And the horses, too, grasped the spirit. Like many people they enjoyed the show from without the ring better than within it. Some came on the scene with dignity, only to bolt the next minute, not to reappear. Some merely confounded their riders by refusing jumps, while others were unmannered enough to refuseto show. For all that, it was a Horse Show and one of which to be proud.
Since ceremonies are in order, let us not forget the prayer which took place one memorable day on the Parade Ground with the entire Division drawn up for the occasion. Here a horse also figured,—the Division Adjutant’s. As the parson began to pray, the horse started to jump and those who were nearest insisted that the adjutant outdid the parson. I will not say, for I could hear the adjutant and I could not hear the parson. This was the last time the Division was together as a unit.
One day toward the end of June a long train was spotted in the quartermaster yards. Trucks were soon busy carrying officers, men and their baggage in that direction. Of course, nobody knew that an advance party of some hundred officers and three hundred men had been secretly ordered to report to the Commanding General, Port of Embarkation, New York, for transportation overseas. On June 27th they sailed on the British liner “Justicia”, which was sunk on her return trip. But the American soldier is no fool. He has learnt to keep his eyes open and his mouth shut, to believe about half he sees and nothing he hears. He was more sure now that the Division was about to sail for France than if he had read it in every newspaper in the United States.
In another two weeks rumors were forgotten. On July 10th the Division was ordered overseas. Thiswas fact. The air was charged with excitement, which however found its expression in orderly and untiring hustle and bustle. Men, animals and transportation were all worked overtime, but even balky army trucks seemed to go for once with a will. The labors of the last ten months were not to be in vain. We were to have a chance to practise what we had learnt and perhaps to show the Hun a few tricks of his own game.
The Artillery were the last to leave. It was not a difficult task. We were to receive our materiel in France. Individual equipment only was to accompany the troops, for we had nothing else. The few guns we drilled with were out of date and not used abroad. The 302nd, and 303rd regiments were already motorized on paper, so horses were no longer needed for them, but the 301st must have shed bitter tears for the beautiful animals they had spent so much time and energy to condition and train.
Twenty-eight lieutenants of the 302nd left ahead of their regiment and sailed from Boston on the “Katoomba” which touched at Halifax on its way to Liverpool.