Our Pennsylvania regiments now were operating directly with French troops, under French higher command, and in the line they were widely separated, with French regiments between.
The troops faced much open country, consisting chiefly of the well-tilled fields for which France is noted, with here and there a clump of trees or bushes, tiny streams, fences and an occasional farm building. Beyond these lay a dense woods, extending to the Marne, known variously in the different localities by the name of the nearest town. The Bois de Conde, near Monthurel, was the scene of some of the stiffest fighting that followed.
The real battle line lay right along the Valley of the Marne, a little more than two miles away, and the men of the Pennsylvania regiments were disappointed again to learn they were not actually holding the front line. That was entirely in the handsof the French in that sector, and French officers who came back to visit the American headquarters and to establish liaison with these support troops confidently predicted that the Boche never would get a foothold on the south bank of the river. The river, they said, was so lined with machine gun nests and barbed wire entanglements that nothing could pass.
That evening, Sunday, July 14th, runners brought messages from brigade headquarters to Colonel Brown, commanding the 109th, and Colonel George E. Kemp, of Philadelphia, commanding the 110th. There were little holes in the French line that it was necessary to plug, and the American support was called on to do the plugging.
Colonel Brown ordered Captain James B. Cousart, of Philadelphia, acting commander of the third battalion, to send two companies forward to the line, and Colonel Kemp, from his post command, despatched a similar message to Major Joseph H. Thompson, Beaver Falls, commanding his first battalion.
Captain Cousart led the expedition from the 109th himself, taking his own company, L, and Company M, commanded byCaptain Edward P. Mackey, of Williamsport. Major Thompson sent Companies B, of New Brighton, and C, of Somerset, from the 110th, commanded respectively by Captains William Fish and William C. Truxal.
Captain Cousart's little force was established in the line, Company M below Passy-sur-Marne, and Company L back of Courtemont-Varennes. The two companies of the 110th were back of Fossoy and Mezy, directly in the great bend of the river. The Dhuys River enters the Marne near that point and this river separated the positions of the 109th and 110th companies. Fossoy, the farthest west of these towns, is only four miles in an air line from Château-Thierry, and Passy is about four miles farther east.
The reason for this move was two-fold: Marshal Foch had manipulated his forces so that it was felt to be virtually certain the next outbreak of the Germans could be made only at one point, directly southwest from Château-Thierry. If the expected happened, the green Pennsylvania troops would receive their baptism of fire within the zone of the operation, but not in the direct line of the thrust. Thus, theywould become seasoned to fire without bearing the responsibility of actually stopping a determined effort.
The second reason was that the French had been making heavy concentrations around Château-Thierry, and their line to the east was too thin for comfort. Therefore, their units were drawn in somewhat at the flanks, to deepen the defense line, and the Pennsylvania companies were used to fill the gaps thus created.
French staff officers accompanied the four companies to the line and disposed them in the pockets left for them, in such a way that there were alternately along that part of the front a French regiment and then an American company. The disposition of the troops was completed well before midnight. The companies left behind had watched their fellows depart on this night adventure with longing, envious eyes, and little groups sat up late discussing the luck that fell to some soldiers and was withheld from others.
The men had had no sleep at all the night before and little during the day, but no one in those four companies, facing the Germans at last after so many weary months ofpreparation, thought of sleep, even had the artillery fire sweeping in waves along the front or the exigencies of their position permitted it.
Eagerly the men tried to pierce the black cloak of night for a first glimpse of the Hun lines. Now and then, as a star shell hung its flare in the sky, they caught glimpses of the river, and sometimes the flash of a gun from the farther shore gave assurance that the Boche, too, was awake and watching.
About 11.30 o'clock, the night was shattered by a ripping roar from miles of French batteries in the rear, and the men lay in their trenches while the shells screamed overhead. It was by far the closest the Pennsylvania men had been to intensive artillery fire, and they thought it terrible, having yet to learn what artillery really could be.
Days afterward, they learned that prisoners had disclosed the intention of the Germans to attack that night and that the French fire was designed to break up enemy formations and harass and disconcert their artillery concentration.
The Germans, with typical Teutonicadherence to system, paid little attention to the French fire until the hour fixed for their bombardment. Midnight came and went, with the French cannon still bellowing. Wearied men on watch were relieved by comrades and dropped down to rest.
At 12.30 o'clock, the German line belched forth the preliminary salvo of what the French afterward described as the most terrific bombardment of the war up to that time. The last German offensive had opened.
The gates to glory and to death swung wide for many a Pennsylvania lad that night.
That the French did not exaggerate in their characterization of the bombardment was shown in documents taken later on captured prisoners. Among these was a general order to the German troops assuring them of victory, telling them that this was the great "friedensturm," or peace offensive, which was to force the Allies to make peace, and that, when the time came to advance, they would find themselves unopposed. The reason for this, said the order, was that the attack was to be preceded by an artillery preparation that would destroy completely all troops for twenty miles infront of the German lines. As a matter of fact, shells fell twenty-five miles back of the Allied lines.
For mile on mile along that bristling line, the big guns gave tongue, not in gusts or intermittently, as had been the case for days, but continuously. Only later did the men in the trenches learn that the attack covered a front of about sixty-five miles, the most pretentious the Huns had launched. Karl Rosner, the Kaiser's favorite war correspondent, wrote to the Berlin Lokal Anzeiger:
"The Emperor listened to the terrible orchestra of our surprise fire attack and looked on the unparalleled picture of the projectiles raging toward the enemy's positions."
Pennsylvania's doughboys and engineers shared with the then Prussian War Lord the privilege of listening to the "surprise fire attack," but to them it was like no orchestra mortal ear had ever heard. Most of those who wrote home afterward used a much shorter word of only four letters to describe the event. There was, indeed, a strange unanimity about the expression: "It seemed as if all —— had broken loose!"
Crouching in their trenches, powerless to do anything for themselves or each other, they endured as best they could that tremendous ordeal. The very air seemed shattered to bits. No longer was it "the rumbling thunder of the guns," to which they had been giving ear for weeks. Crashing, ear-splitting explosions came so fast they were blended into one vast dissonance that set the nerves to jangling and in more than one instance upset completely the mental poise of our soldiers, so that they had to be restrained forcibly by their comrades from rushing out into the open in their temporary madness.
Paris, fifty miles away "as the crow flies," was awakened from its slumber after its holiday celebration by the sound of that Titanic cannonade and saw the flashes, and pictures were jarred from the walls by the trembling of the earth.
The regiments back in the support line were little, if any, better off than the four companies of Pennsylvanians up in the front line, for the Hun shells raked the back areas as well as tearing through the front lines. Men clenched their hands to steady shaking nerves against the sheerphysical pressure of that awful noise, but officers, both French and their own, making their way along the lines in imminent peril to encourage the men, found them grimly and amazingly determined and courageous.
As usual with the Boche, he had a schedule for everything, but it went wrong at the very start this time. The schedule, as revealed later in captured papers, called for the swinging of prepared pontoon bridges across the Marne at 1.30 o'clock, after one solid hour of artillery preparation, and the advance guards were to be in Montmirail, thirteen miles to the south, at 8.30 o'clock that morning.
As showing the dependence placed by the Germans on their own ability to follow such a schedule, it may be permissible here to recall that during the fighting an automobile bearing the black and white cross of the Germans was driven into a village held by Americans. It was immediately surrounded and a German major, leaning out cried, irascibly:
"You are not Germans!"
"That's very true," replied an American lieutenant.
"But our schedule called for our troops to be here at this time," continued the perplexed German.
"They missed connections; that's all. Get out and walk back. You are a prisoner," snapped the American.
The anticipatory artillery fire of the French had so harassed the Germans in their final preparations that it was not until two hours after their schedule time, or 3.30 o'clock in the morning, that the pontoons were swung across the river and the infantry advance began.
The Prussian Guards led. The bridges swarmed with them. The French and Americans loaded and fired, loaded and fired until rifle barrels grew hot and arms tired. Gaps were torn in the oncoming hordes, only to be filled instantly as the Germans pushed forward from the rear. The execution done among the enemy when they were concentrated in solid masses on the bridges was terrific, and for days afterward the stream, about 100 feet wide in that section, was almost choked with the bodies of Germans.
The moment the enemy appeared, the excitement and nerve-strain of ourPennsylvania soldiers dropped from them like a robe from a boxer in the ring. Their French comrades said afterward they were amazed and deeply proud of the steadiness and calmness of these new allies. Their officers, even in the inferno of battle, thrilled with pride at the way their men met the baptism of fire.
All the new troops going to France have been "blooded" gradually in minor engagements and have been frequently in contact with the enemy before being launched into a major operation. Virtually the only exception to this was the case of the seven divisions of the British regular army that landed in France and were rushed at once into the maelstrom of the first German onslaught in 1914, retreating day by day and being slaughtered and cut to pieces constantly, until they were almost wiped out.
It was the intention that the Pennsylvania troops should be carried by slow and easy stages into actual battle, too, but a change in the Boche plans decreed otherwise. Thus, Pennsylvania regiments, with the engineers fighting as infantry, found themselves hurled immediately into frontline fighting in one of the most ambitious German operations of the war.
The maximum German effort of the July thrust was made directly along their front. It seemed almost as if the enemy knew he faced many new troops at this point and counted on that to enable him to make a break-through.
But Pennsylvania held. The great offensive came to smash.
Official reports compiled from information gathered from prisoners and made public afterward showed that the enemy engaged fourteen divisions—approximately 170,000 men—in the first line in this part of the battlefield. Behind these, in support, were probably fourteen additional divisions, some of which, owing to the losses inflicted on those in the front line, were compelled to take part in the fighting. No figures are available as to the number of French, but their lines were so thin that Americans had to be thrust in to stop gaps, and there were fewer than 15,000 men in the Pennsylvania regiments.
Nothing human could halt those gray-green waves in the first impetus of the German assault across the Marne. They gained the bridgeheads, and were enabled to seek cover and spread out along the river banks. The grim gray line, like an enormous, unclean caterpillar, crept steadily across the stream. When enough men had gained the southern bank, the assault was carried to the Franco-American lines.
Machine guns in countless numbers spat venomously from both sides. Rifle-fire and rifle-grenade and hand-grenade explosions rolled together in one tremendous cacophony. The appalling diapason of the big guns thundered unceasingly.
Up the wooded slope swept the Hun waves. The furious fire of the defenders, whatever it meant to individuals, made no appreciable impress on the masses. They swept to and over the first line.
Then, indeed, did the Pennsylvanians rise to heroic heights. Gone was most of the science and skill of warfare so painstakingly inculcated in the men through months of training. Truly, it was "kill or be killed." Hand-to-hand, often breast-to-breast, the contending forces struggled. Men were locked in deadly embrace, from which the only escape was death for one or both.
One lad, his rifle knocked from his hands, plunged at an antagonist with blazing eyes and clenched fists in the manner of fighting most familiar to American boys. They were in a little eddy of the terrible melee. The American landed a terrific "punch" on the point of his opponent's chin, just as a bullet from the rear struck home in his back. The rifle, falling from the hands of the German, struck the outflung arms of the Pennsylvanian. He seized it, even as he fell, plunged the bayonet through the breast of his enemy, and, the lesson of the training camps coming to the fore in his supreme moment, he gurgled out the ferocious "yah!" which he had been taught to utter with each bayonet thrust.
The companies were split up into littlegroups. Back-to-back, they fired, thrust, hewed and hacked at the swarming enemy. No group knew how the others were doing. Many said afterwards they believed it was the end of all things for them, but they were resolved to die fighting and to take as many Huns with them as possible.
Then came the great tragedy for those gallant companies. Something went wrong with the liaison service. It was such a thing as is always likely to happen where two forces of men, speaking different languages, are working in co-operation.
An officer suddenly woke to the fact that there were no French troops on the flanks of his command. The same realization was forced home to each of the four companies. The now famous "yielding defense" of the French had operated and their forces had fallen back in the face of the impetuous German onslaught. Four companies of Pennsylvanians alone faced the army of the German Crown Prince.
In the midst of that Gehenna of fighting, no man has clearly fixed in his mind just what happened to cause the separation of the line. Certainly the French must have sent word that they were about to fallback. Certainly the companies, as such, never received it. Possibly the runners conveying the orders never got through. Maybe the message was delivered to an officer who was killed before he could pass it on.
Whatever the reason, the French fell back, and there were left in that fore-field of heroic endeavor only little milling, twisting groups, at intervals of several thousand feet, where our valiant Pennsylvania lads fought on still for very dear life.
The Boche hordes swept onward, pressing the French. The Americans were surrounded. Captain Cousart and a handful of his men were severed completely from the rest and taken prisoners. Lieutenant William R. Dyer, of Carney's Point, N. J., and Lieutenant Bateman, of Wayne, Pa., at the other flank of Company L, and almost half a platoon met a similar fate. Lieutenant Maurice J. McGuire was wounded.
Lieutenant James R. Schoch, of Philadelphia, was next in command of Company L. Not far from him, Sergeant Frank Benjamin, also of Philadelphia, was still on his feet and pumping his rifle at top speed. From forty to fifty men of thecompany were within reach. The lieutenant and the sergeant managed to consolidate them and pass the word to fall back, fighting.
Part of the time they formed something like a circle, fighting outward in every direction, but always edging back to where they knew the support lines were. They literally fought their way through that part of the Prussian army that had gotten between them and the regimental lines.
At times they fought from tree to tree, exactly as they had read of Indians doing. When they were pressed so closely that they had to have more room, they used their bayonets, and every time the Hun gave way before the "cold steel."
Here and there they met, singly or in small groups, other men of the company who had become separated. These joined the party, so that when, after hours of this dauntless struggle, Lieutenant Schoch stood in front of headquarters, saluted and said: "Sir, I have brought back what was left of L Company," he had sixty-seven men in the little column.
During the day other men slipped from the shelter of the woods and scurried intothe company lines, but there were sad holes in the ranks when the last one to appear came in.
Company M was having the same kind of trouble. A swirl in the fighting opened a gap, and an avalanche of Germans plunged through, leaving Captain Mackey and a dozen men utterly separated on one side. It was impossible for them to rejoin the company, so they did from their position what the men of Company L were doing, fought their way through the Prussian-crowded woods to their own lines.
Lieutenant William B. Brown, of Moscow, Pa., near Scranton, senior officer remaining with the bulk of the company, became commander, but his responsibility was short-lived. He, too, was surrounded and made prisoner.
Lieutenant Thomas B. W. Fales, of Philadelphia, now became commander of the little band, as the only officer left with the main body of the company. Lieutenants Edward Hitzeroth, also of Philadelphia, and Walter L. Swarts, of Scranton, had disappeared, prisoners in the hands of the Germans, and Lieutenant MartinWheeler, of Moscow, Pa., also had been separated with a few men.
There were thirty-five men in Lieutenant Fales' command. He rallied and re-formed them and they began the backward fight to the support line. They made it in the face of almost insurmountable odds and, what is more, they arrived with half a dozen prisoners. Enough men of the company had been picked up on the way to make up for casualties suffered during the running fight.
Lieutenant Wheeler, who had been cut off with part of a platoon early in the rush, ordered his men to lie down in the trenches, where they were better able to stand off the Germans. He himself took a rifle from the hands of a dead man and a supply of ammunition and clambered out of the trench. Absolutely alone, he scouted along through the woods until he found a route that was relatively free from the German advance.
Then he went back for his men, formed them and led them by the selected route, fighting as they went against such of the enemy as sought to deter them. All of this Lieutenant Wheeler performed whilesuffering intense pain from a wound of the hand, inflicted early in the engagement. After reaching the regimental lines, he had first-aid treatment for the wound and continued in the battle.
Lieutenant W. M. R. Crosman found a wounded corporal who was unable to walk. He remained with the corporal and they became entirely isolated from all other Americans. They were given up for lost until the next night, when a message arrived that a patrol from another American unit on another part of the battle front, miles away, had brought in the lieutenant and the corporal, both utterly exhausted and almost unbalanced from their experience.
The lieutenant had dressed the corporal's wound roughly and then had started to lead him in. They became lost and wandered about for hours. At times the lieutenant carried the corporal on his back, when the wounded man became unable to walk. Again they were forced to take shelter in a thicket, when parties of Germans approached, and to lie, in imminent fear of death, until the enemy groups had passed on. Finally they heard voicesspeaking in English and came on the American patrol.
A message came back to the regimental lines from the beleaguered, hard-pressed M Company for ammunition. Supply Sergeant Charles McFadden, 3d, of Philadelphia, set out with a detail to carry the ammunition forward. They were trapped in a little hamlet by the advancing Germans. McFadden sent his men back on the run, as they were badly outnumbered, but himself remained behind to destroy the ammunition to prevent its falling into the hands of the Germans.
He saw men approaching him in the French uniform and believed he was safe, until they opened fire on him with rifles and machine guns—by no means the first instance in which the Germans made such use of uniforms other than their own. Sergeant McFadden saw it was hopeless to try longer to blow up his ammunition and fled. He ran into a machine gun manned by three Germans. He took them at an angle and before they could swing the gun around to bear on him, he was upon them. Two shots from his rifle and a swift lunge with the bayonet and themachine gun crew was out of the way forever.
The Germans were coming on, however, and to reach his own lines, McFadden had to run almost a mile up a steep hill. A bullet passed through his sleeve, another through his gas mask, one through his canteen, four dented his steel helmet and another shot the stock off his rifle, but he himself was untouched. He had taken off his outer shirt because of the heat. As he came up the hill toward his own lines, his comrades, not recognizing him in that wildly running figure, opened fire on him. He dropped to the ground, ripped off his undershirt and waving it as a flag of truce, made his panting way into the lines.
The two companies of the 110th were passing through almost exactly similar experiences. Company B was surrounded and split. After a fight of twenty-four hours, during which it was necessary time after time to charge the Huns with bayonets and rally the group repeatedly to keep it from disintegrating, Captain Fish, whose home is in New Brighton, with Lieutenant Claude W. Smith, of New Castle, and Lieutenant Gilmore Hayman, of Berwyn,fought their way back with one hundred and twenty-three men. They brought with them several prisoners, and carried twenty-six of their own wounded.
The rest of the company, surrounded in the woods, also made a running fight of it, but was scattered badly and drifted back to the regimental lines in little groups, leaving many comrades behind, dead, wounded and prisoners.
The same kind of thing befell Company C, of which a little more than half returned, Captain Truxal, of Meyersdale, Pa., and Lieutenants Wilbur Schell and Samuel S. Crouse were surrounded by greatly superior forces and taken prisoner with a group of their men.
Corporal Alvey C. Martz, of Glencoe, Somerset County, with a patrol of six men, was out in advance of the company stringing barbed wire right along the river bank, when the German bombardment began. They dropped into shell holes. At the point where they lay, the wire remained intact and the Hun flood passed around them. When the hail of shells passed on in advance of the charging German lines, they arose, tofind themselves completely cut off from their comrades.
"We've got to fight boys, so we might as well start it ourselves," said Martz, and his matter-of-fact manner had a strong steadying effect on his men.
Remember that it was the first time any of the youths had been face to face with the Germans. It was the first time they had ever been called on to fight for their lives. Less than a year before they had been quiet civilians, going about their peaceful trades. Martz had lived with his parents on a mountain farm in a remote part of Pennsylvania, six miles from the nearest railway. Add to this the fact that they had learned in their brief soldiering career to lean heavily upon their officers for initiative, instructions and advice, and what these men did attains epic proportions.
They came out of their shell holes shooting. No crafty concealment, no game of hide and seek with the Hun for them. Lest their firing might not attract enough attention, they let out lusty yells. Groups of Germans before them, apparently believing they were being attacked from the flank by a strong force, fled. The sevenmen gained the shelter of the woods. For two hours they worked their way through the forest, fighting desperately when necessary, and hunting anxiously for the place where they knew their company had been. It was not there.
When, at last, they glimpsed American uniforms through the trees they thought they had come up with the company. But it was only Sergeant Robert A. Floto, of Meyersdale, Pa., of their own company, with half a dozen men.
Corporal Martz relinquished command of the party to Sergeant Floto. A little farther on they met another American, who joined the party. He was "mad all through" and on the verge of tears from anxiety and exasperation at his own helplessness.
"There were seven of us cut off from the company," he told them, "and we ran slap-bang into all the Boche in the world. I was several feet behind the other guys and the Fritzes didn't see me. It came so sudden, the boys didn't have a chance to do anything. When I took a peek through the trees, about a million Germans were around, and my gang was just beingled back toward the river by two Hun officers. I figured I couldn't do anybody any good by firing into that mob, so I came away to look for help."
"Guess we'd better see what we can do for those fellows," remarked Martz in the same cool, almost disinterested manner he had used before. Everybody wanted to go, but Martz insisted it was a job for only two men. As a companion he picked John J. Mullen, of Philadelphia. Mullen was not a former Guardsman. He was a selected man, sent from Camp Meade several months before with a draft to fill the ranks of the Twenty-eighth Division. But he had proved himself in many a training camp to be, as his comrades put it, "a regular fellow."
So Corporal Martz and Mullen, surrounded by a goodly part of the Crown Prince's crack troops, 3,000 miles from home, in a country they never had seen before, cut loose from the little group of their comrades, turned their backs on the American lines and hiked out through the woods toward Hunland to succor their fellows in distress.
The little prisoner convoy was notmaking great speed and the two Americans soon overtook them. The first torrent of the German advance had now passed far to their rear. The two Americans circled around through the woods and lay in ambush for the party. The prisoners, because of the narrowness of the paths through the woods, were marching in single file, one German officer in the lead, the other bringing up the rear.
"You take the one in front and I'll take that bird on the end," said Martz to Mullen. Martz was something of a sharpshooter. Once he had gone to camp with the West Virginia National Guard, just over the state line from his home, and came back with a medal as a marksman, although he was only substituting for a man who was unable to attend the camp.
They drew careful bead. Out of the corner of his eye Mullen could watch Martz, at the same time he sighted on his German officer. Martz nodded his head and the two rifles cracked simultaneously. Both officers dropped dead. The prisoners looked about them, stunned with surprise. Martz and Mullen stepped out of the woods. There was no time for thanks orcongratulations. They hurried back the way they had come. The released men had no trouble arming themselves with rifles and ammunition from the dead lying in the woods.
They soon overtook Sergeant Floto and his men. The party was now of more formidable size and as the Germans by this time were broken up into rather small groups, the Americans no longer felt the necessity of skulking through the woods, but started out as a belligerent force, not hunting fight, but moving not a step to avoid one.
A few hours later they joined another group of survivors, under Captain Charles L. McLain, of Indiana, Pa., who took command. He vetoed the daring rush through the Hun-infested woods by daylight and ordered that the party lie concealed during the day and proceed to the American lines after nightfall.
"We need a rear guard to protect us against surprise," said Captain McLain, and after what had gone before it seemed but natural that Corporal Martz and Private Mullen should be selected for the job when they promptly volunteered. Withlittle further adventure the party arrived in the regimental lines after about thirty-six hours of almost continuous contact with the Germans.
In each regiment the survivors of this first real battle of the troops of the Pennsylvania Division were formed into one company for the time being, until replacement drafts arrived to make up for the heavy losses.
This, then, is the tale of what happened when, as so many soldier letters have related, these four companies were "cut to pieces," and this is why L and M companies, of the 109th, and B and C companies, of the 110th, figured so largely in the casualties for a time.
Back in the regimental lines, while the four companies were being mauled badly by the Germans, anxiety had gone steadily from bad to worse.
Enduring the storm of shells with which the Germans continued to thresh the back areas for miles, the troops did not have, for some time after the battle began, the excitement of combat to loosen their tight-strung nerves.
They saw the French come filtering out of the woods before them, and watched eagerly for their comrades, but their comrades did not come and, as time passed, it was realized the detached companies were having a hard time.
The vanguard of the Prussians reached the edge of the woods shortly before daybreak. Men on watch in the American trenches saw hulking gray-clad figures slinking among the trees close to the forest's fringe and opened fire. As the day grewthe firing on both sides waxed hotter, and soon a long line of the enemy advanced from the shelter of the bois. They were met by a concentration of rifle, machine gun and cannon fire such as no force could withstand. The first waves seemed simply to wither away like chaff before a wind. The following ones slackened their pace, hesitated a moment or two then turned and ran for the timber.
From that moment, our men were themselves again. They saw the Germans were not invincible. They themselves had broken up a Prussian Guards' attack. All their confidence, self-reliance, initiative, elan, came to the fore. They felt themselves unbeatable.
But one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one repulse of an enemy make a victory. Time after time the Germans returned to the assault. Groups of them gained the wheat fields, where they felt protected from the fire of our men. Obviously, they expected to crawl through the wheat until they were on the southern edge of the fields, where, lying closely protected, they could pick the Americans off at leisure.
Whole platoons of our men volunteered to meet this move and were permitted to crawl forward and enter the wheat. Then ensued a game of hide and seek, Germans and Americans stalking each other as big game is stalked, flat on their faces in the growing grain.
But the Germans were no match for Americans at this kind of thing. There is something—a kind of heritage from our pioneer, Indian-fighting ancestors, probably—that gives to an American lad a natural advantage at this sort of fighting, and scores of Germans remained behind in the shelter of the wheat when the tide of battle had passed far away, with the spires of grain nodding and whispering a requiem over them.
Before dawn of that fifteenth of July, word was received from Colonel McAlexander, commanding the 39th Infantry of the old regular army, which was in front and to the right of the 109th, that the Germans had crossed the river and penetrated the Allied lines. He added that if they gained a foothold in the Bois de Conde, or Conde Wood, a high, wooded tract just north of Monthurel, the position of the 39th would be seriously menaced.
Captain William C. Williams, commanding Company H, 109th, and Captain Edward J. Meehan, commanding Company D, of the same regiment, and both Philadelphians, were ordered into the wood. The companies were led out and took positions on both sides of a narrow ravine in the wood.
Presently the French began to appear, falling back. First they came one or two at a time, then in larger groups. As they hurried by they gave some indication of the heavy fighting they had gone through and which still was going forward up toward the river.
Captain Williams took a platoon of his company to establish it in a strong position to protect the flank of the company. While doing so, the firing, which had been growing closer all the time, broke out right at hand and Captain Williams discovered he and his men were cut off from the company. The Captain was shot in the hand at the first fire and several of his men were wounded, but the Captain rallied his little party and they fought their way back and rejoined the company. Captain Williams was wounded twice more, but so serious was the emergency that he had a first aiddressing applied and continued the fight without further treatment.
Both Captain Williams and Captain Meehan since have been promoted to the rank of Major and have been awarded Distinguished Service Crosses. Major Williams is an old regular army man. With the rank of sergeant, he was attached to the former First Pennsylvania Infantry as an instructor and served in this capacity during the Mexican border duty in 1916. Later he was commissioned Captain and assigned to command Company H.
A party of Huns made their way through the woods to a copse on the flank of the first battalion of the 109th, where they established a strong machine gun nest. From that position their fire was especially harassing to the battalion, and it was found necessary to clean out that nest if the position was to be maintained.
Accordingly Captain Meehan led Company D out from the shelter of their trench without the special protection of artillery fire. A piece of shell caught Captain Meehan in the shoulder and the impact half swung him around, but he kept on. Captain Felix R. Campuzano, also of Philadelphia, with B Company, went out in support of Captain Meehan's men, and Captain Campuzano was struck in the hand.
Company D spread out like a fan and stalked that copse as smoothly and faultlessly as ever a black buck was stalked in the heart of Africa by an expert hunter. Occasionally a doughboy would get a glimpse of a Boche gunner. There would be a crack from the thin American line, always advancing, and virtually every shot meant one Hun less. There were few wasted bullets in that fight. The storm of lead from the machine guns was appreciably less by the time the Americans entered the shelter of the woods. Once they reached the trees, there was a wild clamor of shouts, cries, shots, the clatter of steel on steel.
Presently this died down and Americans began to emerge from the woods. Not so many came back as went out, but of the Huns who had crept forward to establish the nest, none returned to their own lines. Our men brought back several enemy machine guns.
Captain Williams, still with H Companyin a well-advanced position, was pressed closely by Huns, but believed his position could be held with help. He despatched George L. MacElroy, of Philadelphia, a bugler, with a message to Colonel Brown, asking for assistance.
Nineteen years old, and only recently graduated from his status as one of the best Boy Scouts in his home city, young MacElroy trudged into the open space before Colonel Brown's quarters, saluted and stood stiff and soldierly while he delivered his message. He looked very young and boyish, though his grimy face was set in stern, wearied lines under his steel helmet.
Colonel Brown read the message and started to give an order but checked himself as he noticed the messenger swaying slightly on his feet.
"My boy, how long has it been since you had food?" he asked.
The question, and particularly the kindly tone, were too much for the overwrought nerves of the lad.
"Forty-eight hours, sir," he responded, and then his stoicism gave way and he collapsed.
"Get something to eat here and take asleep," said the Colonel. "You need not go back."
"No, sir," was the reply. "My company is up there in the woods, fighting hard, and I am going back to it. Captain Williams depends on me, sir."
And back he went, although he was persuaded to rest a few minutes while a lunch was prepared. He was asked to describe his experiences on that journey through the German-infested woods, but the sum of his description, given in a deprecatory manner, was: "I just crawled along and got here."
With such spirit as this actuating our men, it is small wonder that the Germans found themselves battling against a stone wall of defense that threatened momentarily to topple forward on them and crush them.
MacElroy was wounded slightly and suffered a severe case of shell shock a few days later. He was in the hospital many weeks and was awarded the French War Cross for his bravery.
Bugler MacElroy was by no means the only lad who did not eat for forty-eight hours. Those in the forward lines hadentered the fight with only two days' rations. Many of them threw this away to lighten themselves for the contest. Subsequently food reached them only intermittently and in small quantities, for it was almost an impossible task to carry it up from the rear through that vortex of fighting.
Sleep they needed even more than food. For five days and nights hundreds of the men slept only for a few moments at a time, not more than three hours all told. They became as automatons, fighting on though they had lost much of the sense of feeling. It was asserted by medical men that this loss of sleep acted almost as an anesthetic on many, so that wounds that ordinarily would have incapacitated them through sheer pain, were regarded hardly at all. When opportunity offered, more than one went sound asleep on his feet, leaning against the wall of a trench.
After that first splendid repulse of the German attack, the Crown Prince's forces, with typical Teuton stubbornness, launched assault after assault against our line. Officers could be seen here and there, mingling with the German soldiers, beating them andkicking them forward in the face of the murderous American fire.
It was during this almost continuous game of attack and repulse that there occurred one of the most remarkable and dramatic events of the whole period. The Boche had been gnawing into the lines of the 110th, in the center of the Pennsylvania front, until it seemed nothing could stop them. Probably the most terrific pressure along that sector was exerted against this point.
For twenty-five hours the 110th had given virtually constant battle, and officers and men felt they soon must give way and fall back. Y. M. C. A. men serving with the Americans had established themselves in a dugout in the face of a low bluff facing away from the enemy, where they and their supplies were reasonably safe from shell fire, and from these dugouts they issued forth, with a courage that won the admiration of the fighting men, to carry chocolate, cigarettes and other bits of comfort to the hard pressed doughboys and to render whatever aid they could. Several of them pleaded to be allowed to take rifles and help withstand the onslaught, but this, of course was forbidden.
The Rev. Francis A. La Violette, of Seattle, Wash., one of the Y. M. C. A. workers, had lain down in the dugout for a few minutes' rest when he heard a flutter of wings about the entrance. He found a tired and frightened pigeon, with a message tube fastened to its leg. Removing the carrier, he found a message written in German, which he was unable to read. He knew the moment was a critical one for the whole line. He knew there were grave fears that the Germans were about to break through and that if they did there would be little to hold them from a dash on Paris.
He rushed the message to headquarters, where it was translated. It was a cry of desperation from the Germans, intended for their reserve forces in the rear. It said that, unless reinforcements were sent at once, the German line at that point would be forced to retire. The pigeon had become lost in the murk of battle and delivered the message to the wrong side of the fighting front.
In half an hour word had gone down the line, and tanks, artillery and thousands of French troops were rushing to thethreatened point. With this assistance and the knowledge that the Germans were already wavering, the Pennsylvanians advanced with determination and hurled the enemy back. Headquarters was dumbfounded, when prisoners were examined, to learn that six divisions of Prussians, about 75,000 men, had been opposing the Allied force and had been compelled to call for help.
On the right of our line the enemy thrust forward strong local attacks, driving our men from St. Agnan, and La Chapelle-Manthodon. St. Agnan, three miles south of the nearest spot on the Marne, was the farthest point of the German advance. Almost immediately the 109th Infantry and 103d Engineers, in conjunction with French Chausseurs Alpin (Blue Devils), launched a counter attack which drove the Germans pell mell out of the villages and started them on their long retreat.
Just before this counter attack began the 109th was being harassed again by a machine gun nest, and this time Company K was sent out to "do the job." It did, in as workmanlike a manner as D Company had on the other occasion.Lieutenant Walter Fiechter, of Philadelphia, was wounded, as were several enlisted men.
When the counter attack finally was launched Captain Walter McC. Gearty, also a Philadelphian, acting as major of the First Battalion of the 109th, led the advance of that regiment. They ran into a machine gun nest that was spitting bullets like a summer rain. The stream of lead caught Captain Gearty full in the front, and he dropped, the first officer of his rank in the old National Guard of Pennsylvania to meet death in the war.
His men, frantic at the loss of a beloved officer, plunged forward more determinedly than ever and wiped out that machine gun nest to a man, seized the guns and ammunition and turned them on the already fleeing Boche.
The Americans had discovered by this time the complete truth of what their British instructors had told them—that the Hun hates and fears the bayonet more than any other weapon of warfare. So they wasted few bullets. Rifle fire, they discovered, was a mighty thing in defense, when a man has a chance to steady himself and aim with precision while the enemy isdoing the advancing. But when conditions are reversed, the best rifleman has little chance to shine in pressing forward in an attack, so it was the bayonet that was used this time.
The men had gone "over the top" without a barrage, but they had the best protection in the world—self-confidence, which the Hun had not. The Prussians had had a taste of American fighting such as they had thought never to experience, and for thousands of them the mere sight of that advancing line of grim, set faces, preceded by bristling bayonet points, was enough. They did not wait to be "tickled" with the point.
Others, however, stood their ground boldly enough and gave battle. As had been the case for several months, they depended little on the individual rifleman, but put virtually their whole trust in machine guns and artillery. With their ranks shorn of their old-time confidence and many of their men fleeing in panic rather than come to grips with the Americans and French, there was little chance to stem that charge, however, and the enemy fell back steadily, even rapidly, to the Marne.