FIRST OF THE GREAT FRANCO-AMERICAN COUNTER-OFFENSIVE AT CHÂTEAU-THIERRY. THE FRENCH BABY TANKS, KNOWN AS "CHARS D'ASSAUTS," ENTERING THE WOOD OF VILLERS-COTTERETS, SOUTHWEST OF SOISSONSFIRST OF THE GREAT FRANCO-AMERICAN COUNTER-OFFENSIVE AT CHÂTEAU-THIERRY. THE FRENCH BABY TANKS, KNOWN AS "CHARS D'ASSAUTS," ENTERING THE WOOD OF VILLERS-COTTERETS, SOUTHWEST OF SOISSONS
YANKS AND POILUS VIEWING THE CITY OF CHÂTEAU-THIERRY, WHERE, IN THE MIDDLE OF JULY, THE YANKS TURNED THE TIDE OF BATTLE AGAINST THE HUNSYANKS AND POILUS VIEWING THE CITY OF CHÂTEAU-THIERRY, WHERE, IN THE MIDDLE OF JULY, THE YANKS TURNED THE TIDE OF BATTLE AGAINST THE HUNS
But she was a girl and her name was Yvonne. The red-winged letter on her coat lapel placed her in the automobile service and the motor ambulance stationed at the road side explained her special branch of work. She inquired the meaning of my correspondent's insignia andthen explained that she had drawn pastelles for a Paris publication before the war, but had been transportingblesséssince. The French lesson proceeded and Spokane Steve and I learned from her that the longest word in the French language is spelled "Anticonstitutionellement." I expressed the hope that some day both of us would be able to pronounce it.
On the girl's right wrist was a silver chain bracelet with identification disk. In response to our interested gaze, she exhibited it to us, and upon her own volition, informed us that she was a descendant of the same family as Jeanne d'Arc. Steve heard and winked to me with a remark that they couldn't pull any stuff like that on anybody from Spokane, because he had never heard that that Maid of Orleans had been married. Yvonne must have understood the last word because she explained forthwith that she had not claimed direct descendence from the famous Jeanne, but from the same family. Steve looked her in the eye and said, "Jay compraw."
She explained the meaning of the small gold and silver medals suspended from the bracelet. She detached two and presented them to us. One of them bore in relief the image of a man in flowing robes carrying a child on his shoulder, and the reverse depicted a tourist driving a motor through hilly country.
"That is St. Christophe," said Yvonne. "He is the patron saint of travellers. His medal is good luck against accidents on the road. Here is one of St. Elias. He is the new patron saint of the aviators. You remember. Didn't he go to heaven in a fiery chariot, or fly up on golden wings or something like that? Anyhow, all the aviators wear one of his medals."
St. Christophe was attached to my identification disk. Steve declared infantrymen travelled too slowly everto have anything happen to them and that he was going to give his to a friend who drove a truck. When I fell in line with the next passing battery and moved down the road, Spokane Steve and the Yvonne of the family of Jeanne had launched into a discussion of prize fighting and chewing tobacco.
In billets that night, in a village not far from Beauvais, the singing contest for the prize of fifty dollars offered by the battalion commander Major Robert R. McCormick was resumed with intense rivalry between the tenors and basses of batteries A and B. A "B" Battery man was croaking Annie Laurie, when an "A" Battery booster in the audience remarked audibly,
"Good Lord, I'd rather hear first call." First call is the bugle note that disturbs sleep and starts the men on the next day's work.
A worried lieutenant found me in the crowd around the rolling kitchen and inquired:
"Do you know whether there's a provost guard on that inn down the road?" I couldn't inform him, but inquired the reason for his alarm.
"I've got a hunch that the prune juice is running knee deep to-night," he replied, "and I don't want any of my section trying to march to-morrow with swelled heads."
"Prune juice" is not slang. It is a veritable expression and anybody who thinks that the favourite of the boarding house table cannot produce a fermented article that istrès fortin the way of a throat burner, is greatly mistaken. In France the fermented juice of the prune is called "water of life," but it carries a "dead to the world" kick. The simple prune, which the army usedto call "native son" by reason of its California origin, now ranks with its most inebriating sisters of the vine.
The flow ofeau de viemust have been dammed at the inn. On the road the next day, I saw a mule driver wearing a sixteen candle power black eye. When I inquired the source of the lamp shade, he replied:
"This is my first wound in the war of movement. Me and the cop had an offensive down in that town that's spelt like Sissors but you say it some other way." I knew he was thinking of Gisors.
The third and fourth day's march brought us into regions nearer the front, where the movement of refugees on the roads seemed greater, where the roll of the guns came constantly from the north, where enemy motors droned through the air on missions of frightfulness.
There was a major in our regiment whose knowledge of French was confined to the single affirmative exclamation, "Ah, oui." He worked this expression constantly in the French conversation with a refugee woman from the invaded districts. She with her children occupied one room in the cottage. When the major started to leave, two days later, the refugee woman addressed him in a reproving tone and with tears. He could only reply with sympathetic "Ah, oui's," which seemed to make her all the more frantic.
An interpreter straightened matters out by informing the major that the woman wanted to know why he was leaving without getting her furniture.
"What furniture?" replied the puzzled major.
"Why, she says," said the interpreter, "that you promised her you would send three army trucks to her house back of the German lines and bring all of her household goods to this side of the line. She says that she explained all of it to you and you said, 'Ah, oui.'"
The major has since abandoned the "ah, oui" habit.
At one o'clock one morning, orders reached the battalion for reconnaissance detail; each battery to be ready to take road by daylight. We were off at break of day in motor trucks with a reel cart of telephone wire hitched on behind. Thirty minutes later we rumbled along roads under range of German field pieces and arrived in a village designated as battalion headquarters to find that we were first to reach the sector allotted for American occupation. The name of the town was Serevilliers.
Our ears did not delude us about the activity of the sector, but I found that officers and men of the detail were inclined to accept the heavy shelling in a non-committal manner until a French interpreter attached to us remarked that artillery action in the sector was as intense as any he had experienced at Verdun.
If the ever present crash of shells reminded us that we were opposite the peak of the German push, there was plenty of work to engage minds that might otherwise have paid too much attention to the dangers of their location. A chalk cellar with a vaulted ceiling and ventilators, unfortunately opening on the enemy side of the upper structure, was selected as the battalion command post. The men went to work immediately to remove piles of dirty billeting straw under which was found glass, china, silverware and family portraits, all of which had been hurriedly buried by the owners of the house not two weeks before.
While linemen planned communications, and battery officers surveyed gun positions, the battalion commander and two orienting officers went forward to the frontal zone to get the first look at our future targets and establish observation posts from which our firing could bedirected. I accompanied the small party, which was led by a French officer familiar with the sector. It was upon his advice that we left the roads and took cuts across fields, avoiding the path and road intersections and taking advantage of any shelter offered by the ground.
Virgin fields on our way bore the enormous craters left by the explosion of poorly directed German shells of heavy calibre. Orders were to throw ourselves face downward upon the ground upon the sound of each approaching missile. There is no text book logic on judging from the sound of a shell whether it has your address written on it, but it is surprising how quick that education may be obtained by experience. Several hours of walking and dropping to the ground resulted in an attuning of the ears which made it possible to judge approximately whether that oncoming, whining, unseen thing from above would land dangerously near or ineffectively far from us. The knowledge was common to all of us and all of our ears were keenly tuned for the sounds. Time after time the collective judgment and consequent prostration of the entire party was proven well timed by the arrival of a shell uncomfortably close.
We gained a wooded hillside that bristled with busy French seventy-fives, which the German tried in vain to locate with his howitzer fire. We mounted a forest plateau, in the centre of which a beautiful white château still held out against the enemy's best efforts to locate it with his guns. One shell addressed in this special direction fortunately announced its coming with such unmistakable vehemence that our party all landed in the same shell hole at once.
Every head was down when the explosion came. Branches and pieces of tree trunk were whirled upward, and the air became populated with deadly bumble beesand humming birds, for such is the sound that the shell splinters make. When I essayed our shell hole afterward, I couldn't fathom how five of us had managed to accommodate ourselves in it, but in the rush of necessity, no difficulty had been found.
Passing from the woods forward, one by one, over a bald field, we skirted a village that was being heavily shelled, and reached a trench on the side of the hill in direct view of the German positions. The enemy partially occupied the ruined village of Cantigny not eight hundred yards away, but our glasses were unable to pick up the trace of a single person in the débris. French shells, arriving endlessly in the village, shot geysers of dust and wreckage skyward. It was from this village, several days later, that our infantry patrols brought in several prisoners, all of whom were suffering from shell shock. But our men in the village opposite underwent the same treatment at the hands of the German artillery.
It was true of this sector that what corresponded to the infantry front line was a much safer place to be in than in the reserve positions, or about the gun pits in villages or along roads in our back area. Front line activity was something of minor consideration, as both sides seemed to have greater interests at other points and, in addition to that, the men of both sides were busy digging trenches and shelters. There were numerous machine gun posts which swept with lead the indeterminate region between the lines, and at night, patrols from both sides explored as far as possible the holdings of the other side.
Returning to the battalion headquarters that night by a route apparently as popular to German artillery as was the one we used in the forenoon, we found a telephone switchboard in full operation in the sub-cellar, and messheadquarters established in a clean kitchen above the ground. Food was served in the kitchen and we noticed that one door had suffered some damage which had caused it to be boarded up and that the plaster ceiling of the room was full of fresh holes and rents in a dozen places. At every shock to the earth, a little stream of oats would come through the holes from the attic above. These falling down on the officer's neck in the midst of a meal, would have no effect other than causing him to call for his helmet to ward off the cereal rain.
We learned more about the sinister meaning of that broken door and the ceiling holes when it became necessary later in the evening to move mess to a safer location. The kitchen was located just thirty yards back of the town cross roads and an unhealthy percentage of German shells that missed the intersection caused too much interruption in our cook's work.
We found that the mess room was vacant by reason of the fact that it had become too unpleasant for French officers, who had relinquished it the day before. We followed their suite and were not surprised when an infantry battalion mess followed us into the kitchen and just one day later, to the hour, followed us out of it.
Lying on the floor in that chalk cellar that night and listening to the pound of arriving shells on nearby cross roads and battery positions, we estimated how long it would be before this little village would be completely levelled to the ground. Already gables were disappearing from houses, sturdy chimneys were toppling and stone walls were showing jagged gaps. One whole wall of the village school had crumbled before one blast, so that now the wooden desks and benches of the pupils and their books and papers were exposed to view from thestreet. On the blackboard was a penmanship model which read:
"Let no day pass without having saved something."
An officer came down the dark stone steps into the cellar, kicked off his boots and lay down on some blankets in one corner.
"I just heard some shells come in that didn't explode," I remarked. "Do you know whether they were gas or duds?"
"I don't know whether they were gas or not," he said, "but I do know that that horse out in the yard is certainly getting ripe."
The defunct animal referred to occupied an uncovered grave adjoining our ventilator. Sleeping in a gas mask was not the most unpleasant form of slumber.
It is strange how sleep can come at the front in surroundings not unlike the interior of a boiler factory, but it does. I heard of no man who slept in the cellars beneath the ruins of Serevilliers that night being disturbed by the pounding of the shells and the jar of the ground, both of which were ever present through our dormant senses. Stranger still was the fact that at midnight when the shelling almost ceased, for small intervals, almost every sleeper there present was aroused by the sudden silence. When the shelling was resumed, sleep returned.
"When I get back on the farm outside of Chicago," said one officer, "I don't believe I will be able to sleep unless I get somebody to stand under my window and shake a thunder sheet all night."
It is also remarkable how the tired human, under such conditions, can turn off the switch on an energetic imagination and resign himself completely to fate. In those cellars that night, every man knew that one direct hit of a "two ten" German shell on his particular cellar wall, would mean taps for everybody in the cave. Such a possibility demands consideration in the slowest moving minds.
Mentalities and morale of varying calibre cogitate upon this matter at varying lengths, but I doubt in the end if there is much difference in the conclusion arrived at. Such reflections produce the inevitable decision that if one particular shell is coming into your particularabode, there is nothing you can do to keep it out, so "What the hell!" You might just as well go to sleep and forget it because if it gets you, you most probably will never know anything about it anyway. I believe such is the philosophy of the shelled.
It must have been three o'clock in the morning when a sputtering motor cycle came to a stop in the shelter of our cellar door and a gas guard standing there exchanged words with some one. It ended in the sound of hobnails on the stone steps as the despatch rider descended, lighting his way with the yellow shaft from an electric pocket lamp.
"What is it?" inquired the Major, awakening and rolling over on his side.
"Just come from regimental headquarters," said the messenger. "I'm carrying orders on to the next town. Adjutant gave me this letter to deliver to you, sir. The Adjutant's compliments, sir, and apologies for waking you, but he said the mail just arrived and the envelope looked important and he thought you might like to get it right away."
"Hmm," said the Major, weighing the official looking envelope in one hand and observing both the American stamps in one corner and numerous addresses to which the missive had been forwarded. He tore off one end and extracted a sheet which he unfolded and read while the messenger waited at his request. I was prepared to hear of a promotion order from Washington and made ready to offer congratulations. The Major smiled and tossed the paper over to me, at the same time reaching for a notebook and fountain pen.
"Hold a light for me," he said to the messenger as he sat on the edge of the bed and began writing. "This is urgent and I will make answer now. You will mail itat regimental headquarters." As his pen scratched across the writing pad, I read the letter he had just received. The stationery bore the heading of an alumni association of a well-known eastern university. The contents ran as follows:
"Dear Sir: What are you doing for your country? What are you doing to help win the war? While our brave boys are in France facing the Kaiser's shell and gas, the alumni association has directed me as secretary to call upon all the old boys of the university and invite them to do their bit for Uncle Sam's fighting men. We ask your subscription to a fund which we are raising to send cigarettes to young students of the university who are now serving with the colours and who are so nobly maintaining the traditions of our Alma Mater. Please fill out the enclosed blank, stating your profession and present occupation. Fraternally yours, —— Secretary."
The Major was watching me with a smile as I concluded reading.
"Here's my answer," he said, reading from a notebook leaf:
"Your letter reached me to-night in a warm little village in France. With regard to my present profession, will inform you that I am an expert in ammunition trafficking and am at present occupied in exporting large quantities of shells to Germany over the air route. Please find enclosed check for fifty francs for cigarettes for youngsters who, as you say, are so nobly upholding the sacred traditions of our school. After all, we old boys should do something to help along the cause. Yoursto best the Kaiser. ——, Major. —— Field Artillery, U. S. A. On front in France."
"I guess that ought to hold them," said the Major as he folded the letter and addressed an envelope. It rather seemed to me that it would but before I could finish the remark, the Major was back asleep in his blankets.
By daylight, I explored the town, noting the havoc wrought by the shells that had arrived in the night. I had thought in seeing refugees moving southward along the roads, that there was little variety of articles related to human existence that they failed to carry away with them. But one inspection of the abandoned abodes of the unfortunate peasants of Serevilliers was enough to convince me of the greater variety of things that had to be left behind. Old people have saving habits and the French peasants pride themselves upon never throwing anything away.
The cottage rooms were littered with the discarded clothing of all ages, discarded but saved. Old shoes and dresses, ceremonial high hats and frock coats, brought forth only for weddings or funerals, were mixed on the floor with children's toys, prayer books and broken china. Shutters and doors hung aslant by single hinges. In the villageestaminetmuch mud had been tracked in by exploring feet and the red tiled floor was littered with straw and pewter measuring mugs, dear to the heart of the antiquary.
The ivory balls were gone from the dust covered billiard table, but the six American soldiers billeted in the cellar beneath had overcome this discrepancy. They enjoyed after dinner billiards just the same with three large wooden balls from a croquet court in the garden.A croquet ball is a romping substitute when it hits the green cushions.
That afternoon we laid more wire across fields to the next town to the north. Men who do this job are, in my opinion, the most daring in any organisation that depends for efficiency upon uninterrupted telephone communication. For them, there is no shelter when a deluge of shells pours upon a field across which their wire is laid. Without protection of any kind from the flying steel splinters, they must go to that spot to repair the cut wires and restore communication. During one of these shelling spells, I reached cover of the road sideabriand prepared to await clearer weather.
In the distance, down the road, appeared a scudding cloud of dust. An occasional shell dropping close on either side of the road seemed to add speed to the apparition. As it drew closer, I could see that it was a motor cycle of the three wheeled bathtub variety. The rider on the cycle was bending close over his handle bars and apparently giving her all there was in her, but the bulky figure that filled to overflowing the side car, rode with his head well back.
At every irregularity in the road, the bathtub contraption bounced on its springs, bow and stern rising and falling like a small ship in a rough sea. Its nearer approach revealed that the giant torso apparent above its rim was encased in a double breasted khaki garment which might have marked the wearer as either the master of a four in hand or a Mississippi steamboat of the antebellum type. The enormous shoulders, thus draped, were surmounted by a huge head, which by reason of its rigid, backward, star-gazing position appeared mostly as chin and double chin. The whole was topped by a huge fat cigar which sprouted upward from the elevated chinand at times gave forth clouds like the forward smoke-stack on theRobert E. Lee.
I was trying to decide in my mind whether the elevated chin posture of the passenger was the result of pride, bravado or a boil on the Adam's apple, when the scudding comet reached the shelter of the protecting bank in which was located the chiselled dog kennel that I occupied. As the machine came to halt, the superior chin depressed itself ninety degrees, and brought into view the smiling features of that smile-making gentleman from Paducah—Mr. Irvin S. Cobb. Machine, rider and passenger stopped for breath and I made bold to ask the intrepid humourist if he suffered from a too keen sense of smell or a saw edge collar.
"I haven't a sensitive nose, a saw edge collar or an inordinate admiration for clouds," the creator of Judge Priest explained with reference to his former stiff-necked pose, "but George here," waving to the driver, "took a sudden inspiration for fast movement. The jolt almost took my head off and the wind kept me from getting it back into position. George stuck his spurs into this here flying bootblack stand just about the time something landed near us that sounded like a kitchen stove half loaded with window weights and window panes. I think George made a record for this road. I've named it Buh-Looey Boulevard."
When the strafing subsided we parted and I reached the next deserted town without incident. It was almost the vesper hour or what had been the allotted time for that rite in those parts when I entered the yard of the village church, located in an exposed position at a cross roads on the edge of the town. A sudden unmistakable whirr sounded above and I threw myself on the ground just as the high velocity, small calibre German shellregistered a direct hit on the side of the nave where roof and wall met.
While steel splinters whistled through the air, an avalanche of slate tiles slid down the slanting surface of the roof, and fell in a clattering cascade on the graves in the yard below. I sought speedy shelter in the lee of a tombstone. Several other shells had struck the churchyard and one of them had landed on the final resting place of the family of Roger La Porte. The massive marble slab which had sealed the top of the sunken vault had been heaved aside and one wall was shattered, leaving open to the gaze a cross section view of eight heavy caskets lying in an orderly row.
Nearby were fresh mounds of yellow earth, surmounted by now unpainted wooden crosses on which were inscribed in pencil the names of French soldiers with dates, indicating that their last sacrifice for the tri-colour of la Patria had been made ten days prior. In the soil at the head of each grave, an ordinary beer bottle had been planted neck downward, and through the glass one could see the paper scroll on which the name, rank and record of the dead man was preserved. While I wondered at this prosaic method of identification, an American soldier came around the corner of the church, lighted a cigarette and sat down on an old tombstone.
"Stick around if you want to hear something good," he said, "That is if that last shell didn't bust the organ. There's a French poilu who has come up here every afternoon at five o'clock for the last three days and he plays the sweetest music on the organ. It certainly is great. Reminds me of when I was an altar boy, back in St. Paul."
We waited and soon there came from the rickety oldorgan loft the soothing tones of an organ. The ancient pipes, sweetened by the benedictions of ages, poured forth melody to the touch of one whose playing was simple, but of the soul. We sat silently among the graves as the rays of the dying sun brought to life new colouring in the leaded windows of stained glass behind which a soldier of France swayed at the ivory keyboard and with heavenly harmony ignored those things of death and destruction that might arrive through the air any minute.
My companion informed me that the poilu at the organ wore a uniform of horizon blue which marked him as casual to this village, whose French garrisons were Moroccans with the distinctive khaki worn by all French colonials in service. The sign of the golden crescent on their collar tabs identified them as children of Mahomet and one would have known as much anyway upon seeing the use to which the large crucifix standing in what was the market place had been put.
So as not to impede traffic through the place, it had become necessary to elevate the field telephone wires from the ground and send them across the road overhead. The crucifix in the centre of the place had presented itself as excellent support for this wire and the sons of the prophet had utilised it with no intention of disrespect. The uplifted right knee of the figure on the cross was insulated and wired. War, the moderniser and mocker of Christ, seemed to have devised new pain for the Teacher of Peace. The crucifixion had become the electrocution.
At the foot of the cross had been nailed a rudely made sign conveying to all who passed the French warning that this was an exposed crossing and should be negotiated rapidly. Fifty yards away another board borethe red letters R. A. S. and by following the direction indicated by arrows, one arrived at the cellar in which the American doctor had established a Relief Aid Station. The Medico had furnished his subterranean apartments with furniture removed from the house above.
"Might as well bring it down here and make the boys comfortable," he said, "as to leave it up there and let shells make kindling out of it. Funny thing about these cellars. Ones with western exposure—that is, with doors and ventilators opening on the side away from the enemy seem scarcest. That seems to have been enough to have revived all that talk about German architects having had something to do with the erection of those buildings before the war. You remember at one time it was said that a number of houses on the front had been found to have plaster walls on the side nearest the enemy and stone walls on the other side. There might be something to it, but I doubt it."
Across the street an American battalion headquarters had been established on the first floor and in the basement of the house, which appeared the most pretentious in the village. Telephone wires now entered the building through broken window panes, and within maps had been tacked to plaster walls and the furniture submitted to the hard usage demanded by war. An old man conspicuous by his civilian clothes wandered about the yard here and there, picking up some stray implement or nick-nack, hanging it up on a wall or placing it carefully aside.
"There's a tragedy," the battalion commander told me. "That man is mayor of this town. He was forced to flee with the rest of the civilians. He returned to-day to look over the ruins. This is his house we occupy. I explained that much of it is as we found it, but that we undoubtedlyhave broken some things. I could see that every broken chair and window and plate meant a heart throb to him, but he only looked up at me with his wrinkled old face and smiled as he said, 'It is all right, Monsieur. I understand.C'est la guerre.'"
The old man opened one of his barn doors, revealing a floor littered with straw and a fringe of hobnailed American boots. A night-working detail was asleep in blankets. A sleepy voice growled out something about closing the door again and the old man with a polite, "Pardonnez-moi, messieurs," swung the wooden portal softly shut. His home—his house—his barn—his straw—c'est la guerre.
An evening meal of "corn willy" served on some of the Mayor's remaining chinaware, was concluded by a final course of fresh spring onions. These came from the Mayor's own garden just outside the door. As the cook affirmed, it was no difficulty to gather them.
"Every night Germans drop shells in the garden," he said. "I don't even have to pull 'em. Just go out in the morning and pick 'em up off the ground."
I spent part of the night in gun pits along the road side, bordering the town. This particular battery of heavies was engaged on a night long programme of interdiction fire laid down with irregular intensity on cross roads and communication points in the enemy's back areas. Under screens of camouflage netting, these howitzers with mottled bores squatting frog-like on their carriages, intermittently vomited flame, red, green and orange. The detonations were ear-splitting and cannoneers relieved the recurring shocks by clapping their hands to the sides of their head and balancing on the toes each time the lanyard was pulled.
Infantry reserves were swinging along in the road directly in back of the guns. They were moving up toforward positions and they sang in an undertone as they moved in open order.
"Glor—ree—us, Glor—ree—us!One keg of beer for the four of us.Glory be to Mike there are no more of us,For four of us can drink it all alone."
"Glor—ree—us, Glor—ree—us!One keg of beer for the four of us.Glory be to Mike there are no more of us,For four of us can drink it all alone."
Some of these marchers would come during an interval of silence to a position on the road not ten feet from a darkened, camouflaged howitzer just as it would shatter the air with a deafening crash. The suddenness and unexpectedness of the detonation would make the marchers start and jump involuntarily. Upon such occasions, the gun crews would laugh heartily and indulge in good natured raillery with the infantrymen.
"Whoa, Johnny Doughboy, don't you get frightened. We were just shipping a load of sauerkraut to the Kaiser," said one ear-hardened gunner. "Haven't you heard the orders against running your horses? Come down to a gallop and take it easy."
"Gwan, you leatherneck," returns an infantryman, "You smell like a livery stable. Better trade that pitchfork for a bayonet and come on up where there's some fighting."
"Don't worry about the fighting, little doughboy," came another voice from the dark gun pit. "This is a tray forte sector. If you don't get killed the first eight days, the orders is to shoot you for loafing. You're marching over what's called 'the road you don't come back on.'"
A train of ammunition trucks, timed to arrive at the moment when the road was unoccupied, put in appearance as the end of the infantry column passed, and thecaptain in charge urged the men on to speedy unloading and fumed over delays by reason of darkness. The men received big shells in their arms and carried them to the roadside dumps where they were piled in readiness for the guns. The road was in an exposed position and this active battery was liable to draw enemy fire at any time, so the ammunition train captain was anxious to get his charges away in a hurry.
His fears were not without foundation, because in the midst of the unloading, one German missile arrived in a nearby field and sprayed the roadway with steel just as every one flattened out on the ground. Five ammunition hustlers arose with minor cuts and one driver was swearing at the shell fragment which had gone through the radiator of his truck and liberated the water contents. The unloading was completed with all speed, and the ammunition train moved off, towing a disabled truck. With some of the gunners who had helped in unloading, I crawled into the chalk dugout to share sleeping quarters in the straw.
"What paper do you represent?" one man asked me as he sat in the straw, unwrapping his puttees. I told him.
"Do you want to know the most popular publication around this place?" he asked, and I replied affirmatively.
"It's called theDaily Woollen Undershirt," he said. "Haven't you seen everybody sitting along the roadside reading theirs and trying to keep up with things? Believe me, it's some reading-matter, too."
"Don't let him kid you," said the section chief, "I haven't had to read mine yet. The doctor fixed up the baths in town and yesterday he passed around those flea charms. Have you seen them?"
For our joint inspection there was passed the string necklace with two linen tabs soaked in aromatic oil ofcedar, while the section chief gave an impromptu lecture on personal sanitation. It was concluded by a peremptory order from without for extinction of all lights. The candle stuck on the helmet top was snuffed and we lay down in darkness with the guns booming away on either side.
Our positions were located in a country almost as new to war as were the fields of Flanders in the fall of '14. A little over a month before it had all been peaceful farming land, far behind the belligerent lines. Upon our arrival, its sprouting fields of late wheat and oats were untended and bearing their first harvest of shell craters.
The abandoned villages now occupied by troops told once more the mute tales of the homeless. The villagers, old men, old women and children, had fled, driving before them their cows and farm animals even as they themselves had been driven back by the train of German shells. In their deserted cottages remained the fresh traces of their departure and the ruthless rupturing of home ties, generations old.
On every hand were evidences of the reborn war of semi-movement. One day I would see a battery of light guns swing into position by a roadside, see an observing officer mount by ladder to a tree top and direct the firing of numberless rounds into the rumbling east. By the next morning, they would have changed position, rumbled off to other parts, leaving beside the road only the marks of their cannon wheels and mounds of empty shell cases.
Between our infantry lines and those of the German, there was yet to grow the complete web of woven wire entanglements that marred the landscapes on the long established fronts. Still standing, silent sentinels over some of our front line positions were trees, church steeples,dwellings and barns that as yet had not been levelled to the ground. Dugouts had begun to show their entrances in the surface of the ground and cross roads had started to sprout with rudely constructed shelters. Fat sandbags were just taking the places of potted geraniums on the sills of first floor windows. War's toll was being exacted daily, but the country had yet to pay the full price. It was going through that process of degeneration toward the stripped and barren but it still held much of its erstwhile beauty.
Those days before Cantigny were marked by particularly heavy artillery fire. The ordnance duel was unrelenting and the daily exchange of shells reached an aggregate far in excess of anything that the First Division had ever experienced before.
Nightly the back areas of the front were shattered with shells. The German was much interested in preventing us from bringing up supplies and munition. We manifested the same interest toward him. American batteries firing at long range, harassed the road intersections behind the enemy's line and wooded places where relief troops might have been assembled under cover of darkness. The expenditure of shells was enormous but it continued practically twenty-four hours a day. German prisoners, shaking from the nervous effects of the pounding, certified to the untiring efforts of our gunners.
The small nameless village that we occupied almost opposite the German position in Cantigny seemed to receive particular attention from the enemy artillery. In retaliation, our guns almost levelled Cantigny and a nearby village which the enemy occupied. Every hour, under the rain of death, the work of digging was continued and the men doing it needed no urging from theirofficers. There was something sinister and emphatic about the whine of a "two ten German H. E." that inspired one with a desire to start for the antipodes by the shortest and most direct route.
The number of arrivals by way of the air in that particular village every day numbered high in the thousands. Under such conditions, no life-loving human could have failed to produce the last degree of utility out of a spade. The continual dropping of shells in the ruins and the unending fountains of chalk dust and dirt left little for the imagination, but one officer told me that it reminded him of living in a room where some one was eternally beating the carpet.
This taste of the war of semi-movement was appreciated by the American soldier. It had in it a dash of novelty, lacking in the position warfare to which he had become accustomed in the mud and marsh of the Moselle and the Meuse. For one thing, there were better and cleaner billets than had ever been encountered before by our men. Fresh, unthrashed oats and fragrant hay had been found in the hurriedly abandoned lofts back of the line and in the caves and cellars nearer the front.
In many places the men were sleeping on feather mattresses in old-fashioned wooden bedsteads that had been removed from jeopardy above ground to comparative safety below. Whole caves were furnished, and not badly furnished, by this salvage of furniture, much of which would have brought fancy prices in any collection of antiques.
Forced to a recognition solely of intrinsic values, our men made prompt utilisation of much of the material abandoned by the civilian population. Home in the field is where a soldier sleeps and after all, why not have it as comfortable as his surroundings will afford? Thosecaves and vegetable cellars, many with walls and vaulted ceilings of clean red brick or white blocks of chalk, constituted excellent shelters from shell splinters and even protected the men from direct hits by missiles of small calibre.
Beyond the villages, our riflemen found protection in quickly scraped holes in the ground. There were some trenches but they were not contiguous. "No Man's Land" was an area of uncertain boundary. Our gunners had quarters burrowed into the chalk not far from their gun pits. All communication and the bringing up of shells and food were conducted under cover of darkness. Under such conditions, we lived and waited for the order to go forward.
Our sector in that battle of the Somme was so situated that the opposing lines ran north and south. The enemy was between us and the rising sun. Behind our rear echelons was the main road between Amiens and Beauvais. Amiens, the objective of the German drive, was thirty-five kilometres away on our left, Beauvais was the same distance on our right and two hours by train from Paris.
We were eager for the fight. The graves of our dead dotted new fields in France. We were holding with the French on the Picardy line. We were between the Germans and the sea. We were before Cantigny.
While the First U. S. Division was executing in Picardy a small, planned operation which resulted in the capture of the German fortified positions in the town of Cantigny, other American divisions at other parts along the line were indulging in that most common of frontal diversions—the raid.
I was a party to one of these affairs on the Toul front. The 26th Division, composed of National Guard troops from New England, made the raid. On Memorial Day, I had seen those men of the Yankee Division decorating the graves of their dead in a little cemetery back of the line. By the dawning light of the next morning, I saw them come trooping back across No Man's Land after successfully decorating the enemy positions with German graves.
It was evening when we dismissed our motor in the ruined village of Hamondville and came into first contact with the American soldiers that had been selected for the raid. Their engineers were at work in the street connecting sections of long dynamite-loaded pipes which were to be used to blast an ingress through the enemy's wire. In interested circles about them were men who were to make the dash through the break even before the smoke cleared and the débris ceased falling. They were to be distinguished from the village garrison by the fact that the helmets worn by the raiders were covered with burlap and some of them had their faces blackened.
In the failing evening light, we walked on throughseveral heaps of stone and rafters that had once been villages, and were stopped by a military policeman who inquired in broad Irish brogue for our passes. These meeting with his satisfaction, he advised us to avoid the road ahead with its dangerous twist, known as "Dead Man's Curve," for the reason that the enemy was at that minute placing his evening contribution of shells in that vicinity. Acting on the policeman's suggestion, we took a short cut across fields rich with shell holes. Old craters were grown over with the grass and mustard flowers with which this country abounds at this time of year. Newer punctures showed as wounds in the yellow soil and contained pools of evil-smelling water, green with scum.
Under the protection of a ridge, which at least screened us from direct enemy observation, we advanced toward the jagged skyline of a ruined village on the crest. The odour of open graves befouled the sheltered slope, indicating that enemy shells had penetrated its small protection and disturbed the final dugouts of the fallen.
Once in the village of Beaumont, we followed the winding duckboards and were led by small signs painted on wood to the colonel's headquarters. We descended the stone steps beneath a rickety looking ruin and entered.
"Guests for our party," was the Colonel's greeting. The command post had a long narrow interior which was well lighted but poorly ventilated, the walls and floor were of wood and a low beamed ceiling was supported by timbers. "Well, I think it will be a good show."
"We are sending over a little party of new boys just for practice and a 'look-see' in Hunland. We have two companies in this regiment which feel they've sorter been left out on most of the fun to date, so this affair has been arranged for them. We put the plans together last week and pushed the boys through three days of trainingfor it back of the lines. They're fit as fiddlers to-night and it looks like there'll be no interruption to their pleasure.
"No one man in the world, be he correspondent or soldier, could see every angle of even so small a thing as a little raid like this," the Colonel explained. "What you can't see you have got to imagine. I'm suggesting that you stay right in here for the show. That telephone on my adjutant's desk is the web centre of all things occurring in this sector to-night and the closer you are to it, the more you can see and learn. Lieutenant Warren will take you up the road first and give you a look out of the observatory, so you'll know in what part of Germany our tourists are going to explore."
Darkness had fallen when we emerged, but there were sufficient stars out to show up the outline of the gaping walls on either side of our way. We passed a number of sentries and entered a black hole in the wall of a ruin. After stumbling over the uneven floor in a darkened passage for some minutes, we entered a small room where several officers were gathered around a table on which two burning candles were stuck in bottles. Our guide, stepping to one end of the room, pulled aside a blanket curtain and passed through a narrow doorway. We followed.
Up a narrow, steep, wooden stairway between two walls of solid masonry, not over two feet apart, we passed, and arrived on a none too stable wooded runway with a guide rail on either side. Looking up through the ragged remains of the wooden roof frame, now almost nude of tiles, we could see the starry sky. Proceeding along the runway, we arrived, somewhere in that cluster of ruins, in a darkened chamber whose interiorblackness was relieved by a lighter slit, an opening facing the enemy.
Against the starry skyline, we could see the black outline of a flat tableland in the left distance which we knew to be that part of the heights of Meuse for whose commanding ridge there have been so many violent contests between the close-locked lines in the forest of Apremont. More to the centre of the picture, stood Mont Sec, detached from the range and pushing its summit up through the lowland mist like the dorsal fin of a porpoise in a calm sea. On the right the lowland extended to indistinct distances, where it blended with the horizon.
In all that expanse of quiet night, there was not a single flicker of light, and at that time not a sound to indicate that unmentionable numbers of our men were facing one another in parallel ditches across the silent moor.
"See that clump of trees way out there?" said the lieutenant, directing our vision with his arm. "Now then, hold your hand at arm's length in front of you, straight along a line from your eyes along the left edge of your hand to that clump of trees. Now then, look right along the right edge of your hand and you will be looking at Richecourt. The Boche hold it. We go in on the right of that to-night."
We looked as per instructions and saw nothing. As far as we were concerned Richecourt was a daylight view, but these owls of the lookout knew its location as well as they knew the streets of their native towns back in New England. We returned to the colonel's command post, where cots were provided, and we turned in for a few hours' sleep on the promise of being called in time.
It was 2 A. M. when we were summoned to commandpost for the colonel's explanation of the night's plans. The regimental commander, smoking a long pipe with a curved stem, sat in front of a map on which he conducted the exposition.
"Here," he said, placing his finger on a section of the line marking the American trenches, "is the point of departure. That's the jumping off place. These X marks running between the lines is the enemy wire, and here, and here, and here are where we blow it up. We reach the German trenches at these points and clean up. Then the men follow the enemy communicating trenches, penetrate three hundred metres to the east edge of Richecourt, and return.
"Zero hour is 2:30. It's now 2:10. Our raiders have left their trenches already. They are out in No Man's Land now. The engineers are with them carrying explosives for the wire. There are stretcher bearers in the party to bring back our wounded and also signal men right behind them with wire and one telephone. The reports from that wire are relayed here and we will also be kept informed by runners. The whole party has thirty minutes in which to crawl forward and place explosives under the wire. They will have things in readiness by 2:30 and then the show begins."
Five minutes before the hour, I stepped out of the dugout and looked at the silent sky toward the front. Not even a star shell disturbed the blue black starlight. The guns were quiet. Five minutes more and all this was to change into an inferno of sound and light, flash and crash. There is always that minute of uncertainty before the raiding hour when the tensity of the situation becomes almost painful. Has the enemy happened to become aware of the plans? Have our men been deprived of the needed element of surprise? But for thethousands of metres behind us, we know that in black battery pits anxious crews are standing beside their loaded pieces waiting to greet the tick of 2:30 with the jerk of the lanyard.
Suddenly the earth trembles. Through the dugout window facing back from the lines, I see the night sky burst livid with light. A second later and the crash reaches our ears. It is deafening. Now we hear the whine of shells as they burn the air overhead. The telephone bell rings.
"Yes, this is Boston," the Adjutant speaks into the receiver. We listen breathlessly. Has something gone wrong at the last minute?
"Right, I have it," said the Adjutant, hanging up the receiver and turning to the Colonel; "X-4 reports barrage dropped on schedule."
"Good," said the Colonel. "Gentlemen, here's what's happening. Our shells are this minute falling all along the German front line, in front of the part selected for the raid and on both flanks. Now then, this section of the enemy's position is confined in a box barrage which is pounding in his front and is placing a curtain of fire on his left and his right and another in his rear. Any German within the confines of that box trying to get out will have a damn hard time and so will any who try to come through it to help him."
"Boston talking," the Adjutant is making answer over the telephone. He repeats the message. "233, all the wire blown up, right."
"Fine," says the Colonel. "Now they are advancing and right in front of them is another rolling barrage of shells which is creeping forward on the German lines at the same pace our men are walking. They are walking in extended order behind it. At the same time our artilleryhas taken care of the enemy's guns by this time so that no German barrage will be able to come down on our raiders. Our guns for the last three minutes have been dumping gas and high explosives on every battery position behind the German lines. That's called 'Neutralisation.'"
"Boston talking." The room grows quiet again as the Adjutant takes the message.
"2:36. Y-1 reports O. K."
"Everything fine and dandy," the Colonel observes, smiling.
"Boston talking." There is a pause.
"2:39. G-7 reports sending up three red rockets east of A-19. The operator thinks it's a signal for outposts to withdraw and also for counter barrage."
"Too late," snaps the Colonel. "There's a reception committee in Hades waiting for 'em right now."
At 2:40 the dugout door opens and in walks Doc Comfort from the Red Cross First Aid Station across the road.
"Certainly is a pretty sight, Colonel. Fritzies' front door is lit up like a cathedral at high mass."
At 2:41. "A very good beginning," remarks a short, fat French Major who sits beside the Colonel. He represents the French army corps.
2:43. "Boston talking,—Lieutenant Kernan reports everything quiet in his sector."
2:45. "Boston talking," the Adjutant turns to the Colonel and repeats, "Pittsburgh wants to know if there's much coming in here."
"Tell them nothing to amount to anything," replies the Colonel and the Adjutant repeats the message over the wire. As he finished, one German shell did land so close to the dugout that the door blew open. The officerstepped to the opening and called out into the darkness.
"Gas guard. Smell anything?"
"Nothing, sir. Think they are only high explosives."
2:47. "Boston talking—enemy sent up one red, one green rocket and then three green rockets from B-14," the Adjutant repeats.
"Where is that report from?" asks the Colonel.
"The operator at Jamestown, sir," replies the Adjutant.
"Be ready for some gas, gentlemen," says the Colonel. "I think that's Fritzie's order for the stink. Orderly, put down gas covers on the doors and windows."
I watched the man unroll the chemically dampened blankets over the doors and windows.
2:49. "Boston talking—23 calls for barrage."
The Colonel and Major turn immediately to the wall map, placing a finger on 23 position.
"Hum," says the Colonel. "Counter attack, hey? Well, the barrage will take care of them, but get me Watson on the line."
"Connect me with Nantucket," the Adjutant asks the operator. "Hello, Watson, just a minute," turning to Colonel, "here's Watson, sir."
"Hello, Watson," the Colonel says, taking the receiver. "This is Yellow Jacket. Watch out for counter attack against 23. Place your men in readiness and be prepared to support Michel on your right. That's all," returning 'phone to the Adjutant, "Get me Mr. Lake."
While the Adjutant made the connection, the Colonel explained quickly the planned flanking movement on the map. "If they come over there," he said to the French Major, "not a God-damn one of them will ever get back alive."
The French Major made a note in his report book.
"Hello, Lake," the Colonel says, taking the 'phone. "This is Yellow Jacket. Keep your runners in close touch with Michel and Watson. Call me if anything happens. That's all."
3:00. "Boston talking—G-2 reports all O.K. Still waiting for the message from Worth."
3:02. "Storming party reports unhindered progress. No enemy encountered yet."
This was the first message back from the raiders. It had been sent over the wire and the instruments they carried with them and then relayed to the Colonel's command post.
"Magnifique," says the French Major.
3:04. "Boston talking. X-10 reports gas in Bois des Seicheprey."
3:05. "Boston talking. Hello, yes, nothing coming in here to amount to anything. Just had a gas warning but none arrived yet."
3:07. "Boston talking,——Yes, all right" (turning to Colonel), "operator just received message from storming party 'so far so good.'"
"Not so bad for thirty-seven minutes after opening of the operation," remarks the Colonel.
"What is 'so far so good'?" inquires the French Major, whose knowledge of English did not extend to idioms. Some one explained.
3:09. "Boston talking—Watson reports all quiet around 23 now."
"Guess that barrage changed their minds," remarks the Colonel.
With gas mask at alert, I walked out for a breath of fresh air. The atmosphere in a crowded dugout is stifling. From guns still roaring in the rear and from in front came the trampling sound of shells arriving onGerman positions. The first hints of dawn were in the sky. I returned in time to note the hour and hear:
3:18. "Boston talking—O-P reports enemy dropping line of shells from B-4 to B-8."
"Trying to get the boys coming back, hey?" remarks the Colonel. "A fat chance. They're not coming back that way."
3:21. "Boston talking—23 reports that the barrage called for in their sector was because the enemy had advanced within two hundred yards of his first position. Evidently they wanted to start something, but the barrage nipped them and they fell back fast."
"Perfect," says the French Major.
3:25. "Boston talking—two green and two red rockets were sent up by the enemy from behind Richecourt."
"Hell with 'em, now," the Colonel remarks.
3:28. "Boston talking—all O. K. in Z-2. Still waiting to hear from Michel."
"I rather wish they had developed their counter attack," says the Colonel. "I have a reserve that would certainly give them an awful wallop."
3:30. "Boston talking—more gas in Bois des Seicheprey."
3:33. "Boston talking—white stars reported from Richecourt."
"They must be on their way back by this time," says the Colonel, looking at his watch.
3:37. "Boston talking,—enemy now shelling on the north edge of the town. A little gas."
3:40. "Boston talking—X-1 reports some enemy long range retaliation on our right.
"They'd better come back the other way," says the Colonel.
"That was the intention, sir," the lieutenant reported from across the room.
3:42. "Boston talking—signalman with the party reports everything O. K."
"We don't know yet whether they have had any losses or got any prisoners," the Colonel remarks. "But the mechanism seems to have functioned just as well as it did in the last raid. We didn't get a prisoner that time, but I sorter feel that the boys will bring back a couple with them to-night."
3:49. "Boston talking—G-9 reports some of the raiding party has returned and passed that point."
"Came back pretty quick, don't you think so, Major?" said the Colonel with some pride. "Must have returned over the top."
It is 3:55 when we hear fast footsteps on the stone stairs leading down to the dugout entrance. There is a sharp rap on the door followed by the Colonel's command, "Come in."
A medium height private of stocky build, with shoulders heaving from laboured breathing and face wet with sweat, enters. He removes his helmet, revealing disordered blonde hair. He faces the Colonel and salutes.
"Sir, Sergeant Ransom reports with message from Liaison officer. All groups reached the objectives. No enemy encountered on the right, but a party on the left is believed to be returning with prisoners. We blew up their dugouts and left their front line in flames."
"Good work, boy," says the Colonel, rising and shaking the runner's hand. "You got here damn quick. Did you come by the Lincoln trench?"
"No, sir, I came over the top from the battalion post. Would have been here quicker, but two of us had to carryback one boy to that point before I could get relieved."
"Wounded?"
"No, sir,—dead."
"Who was it?" asks the young lieutenant.
"Private Kater, sir, my squad mate."
As the sergeant raised his hand in parting salute, all of us saw suspended from his right wrist a most formidable weapon, apparently of his own construction. It was a pick handle with a heavy iron knob on one end and the same end cushioned with a mass of barbed wire rolled up like a ball of yarn. He smiled as he noticed our gaze.
"It's the persuader, sir," he said. "We all carried them."
He had hardly quitted the door when another heavily breathing figure with shirt half torn off by barbed wire appeared.
"K Company got there, sir; beg pardon, sir. I mean sir, Sergeant Wiltur reports, sir, with message from Liaison officer. All groups reached the objectives. They left their dugouts blazing and brought back one machine gun and three prisoners."
"Very good, Sergeant," said the Colonel. "Orderly, get some coffee for these runners."
"I'd like to see the doctor first, sir," said the runner with the torn shirt. "Got my hand and arm cut in the wire."
"Very well," said the Colonel, turning to the rest of the party, "I knew my boys would bring back bacon."
More footsteps on the entrance stairway and two men entered carrying something between them. Sweat had streaked through the charcoal coating on their faces leaving striped zebra-like countenances.
"Lieutenant Burlon's compliments, sir," said the first man. "Here's one of their machine guns."
"Who got it?" inquired the Colonel.
"Me and him, sir."
"How did you get it?"
"We just rolled 'em off it and took it."
"Rolled who off of it?"
"Two Germans, sir."
"What were they doing all that time?"
"Why, sir, they weren't doing anything. They were dead."
"Oh, very well, then," said the Colonel. "How did you happen to find the machine gun?"
"We knew where it was before we went over, sir," said the man simply. "We were assigned to get it and bring it back. We expected we'd have to fight for it, but I guess our barrage laid out the crew. Anyhow we rushed to the position and found them dead."
"All right," said the Colonel, "return to your platoon. Leave the gun here. It will be returned to you later and will be your property."
I went out with the machine gun captors and walked with them to the road. There was the hum of motors high overhead and we knew that American planes were above, going forward to observe and photograph German positions before the effects of our bombardments could be repaired. A line of flame and smoke pouring up from the enemy's front line showed where their dugouts and shelters were still burning.
Daylight was pouring down on a ruined village street, up which marched the returning raiders without thought of order. They were a happy, gleeful party, with helmets tipped back from their young faces wet and dirty, with rifles swung over their shoulders and the persuaders dangling from their wrists. Most of them were up to their knees and their wrap puttees were mostly in tattersfrom the contact with the entanglements through which they had penetrated.
As they approached, I saw the cause for some of the jocularity. It was a chubby, little, boyish figure, who sat perched up on the right shoulder of a tall, husky Irish sergeant. The figure steadied itself by grasping the sergeant's helmet with his left hand. The sergeant steadied him by holding one right arm around his legs.
But there was no smile on the face of the thus transformed object. His chubby countenance was one of easily understood concern. He was not a day over sixteen years and this was quite some experience for him. He was one of the German prisoners and these happy youngsters from across the seas were bringing him in almost with as much importance as though he had been a football hero. He was unhurt and it was unnecessary to carry him, but this tribute was voluntarily added, not only as an indication of extreme interest, but to reassure the juvenile captive of the kindly intentions of his captors.
"Jiggers, here's the Colonel's dugout," one voice shouted. "Put him down to walk, now."
The big sergeant acted on the suggestion and the little Fritz was lowered to the ground. He immediately caught step with the big sergeant and took up the latter's long stride with his short legs and feet encased in clumsy German boots. His soiled uniform had been the German field grey green. His helmet was gone but he wore well back on his head the flat round cloth cap. With his fat cheeks he looked like a typical baker's boy, and one almost expected to see him carrying a tray of rolls on his head.
"For the luva Mike, Tim," shouted an ambulance man, "do you call that a prisoner?"
"Sure he does look like a half portion," replied Sergeant Tim with a smile. "We got two hundred francs for a whole one. I don't know what we can cash this one in for."
"He ought to be worth more," some one said; "that barrage cost a million dollars. He's the million dollar baby of the raid."
"Sergeant, I'm not kidding," came one serious voice. "Why turn him in as a prisoner? I like the kid's looks. Why can't we keep him for the company mascot?"
The discussion ended when the Sergeant and his small charge disappeared in the Colonel's quarters for the inevitable questioning that all prisoners must go through. Several wounded were lying on the stretchers in front of the first aid dugout waiting for returning ambulances and passing the time meanwhile by smoking cigarettes and explaining how close each of them had been to the shell that exploded and "got 'em."
But little of the talk was devoted to themselves. They were all praise for the little chaplain from New England who, without arms, went over the top with "his boys" and came back with them. It was their opinion that their regiment had some sky pilot. And it was mine, also.