And they thought we wouldn't fight

"Howdy, bowleg," was the greeting shouted by one of these motoring mockers, who looked down on our saddled steeds, "better get a hustle on them hayburners. We're going to be in Berlin by the time you get where the front used to be."

"Yes, you will," replied one of the mounted artillerymen, with a negative inflection. "You'll get a hell of a long ways without us. If you doughboys start anything without the artillery, you'll see Berlin through the bars of a prisoner's cage."

"Lucky pups – the artillery – nothing to do but ride," was the passing shout of another taunter, perched high on a bus. This was an unanswerable revision of an old taunt that the artillery used to shout to passing infantry in the days when a foot soldier was really a foot soldier. Then the easy-riding mounted troops, when passing an infantry column on the road, would say, "Pretty soft for the doughboys – nothing to do but walk."

"Times certainly have changed," one of our battery drivers felt it necessary to remark to me in defence of his branch of the service. "But there ain't no spark plugs or carburetors to get out of order on our mounts.

"However, we do have our troubles. That runaway wheeler in No. 2 section broke away from the picket line last night and Kemball and I were detailed to hunt all over town for him.

"You know that dark, winding, narrow street, that winds down the hill back of the cathedral. Well, it was about midnight and blacker than the ace of spades, when Kemball and I pushed along there in the dark, looking for that onery animal.

"Suddenly, we heard a sharp clatter on the cobblestones half a block up the hill. It was coming our way full speed. 'Here he comes now,' said Kemball, 'and he's galloping like hell. Jump into a doorway or he'll climb all over us.'

"We waited there pressed against the wall in the dark as the galloping came up to us and passed. What dy'e s'pose it was? It wasn't that runaway horse at all. Just a couple of them French kids chasing one another in wooden shoes."

The road to the front was a populous one. We passed numerous groups of supply wagons carrying food and fodder up to the front lines. Other wagons were returning empty and here and there came an ambulance with bulgy blankets outlining the figures of stretcher cases, piled two high and two wide. Occasionally a Y. M. C. A. runabout loaded down with coffee pots and candy tins and driven by helmeted wearers of the Red Triangle, would pass us carrying its store of extras to the boys up front.

We passed through villages where manufacturing plants were still in operation and, nearer the front, the roads lay through smaller hamlets, shell torn and deserted, save for sentries who stood guard in wooden coops at intersections. Civilians became fewer and fewer, although there was not a village that did not have one or two women or children or old men unfit for uniform.

Finally the road mounted a rolling hill and here it was bordered by roadside screens consisting of stretched chicken wire to which whisps of straw and grass and bits of green dyed cloth had been attached. Our men riding behind the screen peered through apertures in it and saw the distant hills forward, from which German glasses could have observed all passage along that road had it not been for the screen.

So we moved into position. It was late in the night of October 22nd, 1917, that our batteries of artillery and companies of infantry moved through the darkness on the last lap of their trip to the front. The roads were sticky and gummy. A light rain was falling. The guns boomed in front of us, but not with any continued intensity. Through streets paved with slippery cobbles and bordered with the bare skeletons of shell-wrecked houses, our American squads marched four abreast. Their passing in the darkness was accompanied by the sound of the unhastened tread of many hobnailed boots.

At times, the rays of a cautiously flashed electric light would reveal our infantrymen with packs on back and rifles slung over their shoulders. A stiff wind whipped the rain into their faces and tugged the bottoms of their flapping, wet overcoats.

Notwithstanding the fact that they had made it on foot a number of miles from the place where they had disembarked from the motor trucks, the men marched along to the soft singing of songs, which were ordered discontinued as the marching columns got closer to the communicating trenches which led into the front line.

In the march were machine gun carts hauled by American mules and rolling kitchens, which at times dropped on the darkened road swirls of glowing red embers that had to be hurriedly stamped out. Anxious American staff officers consulted their wrist watches frequently in evidence of the concern they felt as to whether the various moving units were reaching designated points upon the scheduled minute.

It was after midnight that our men reached the front line. It was the morning of October 23rd, 1917, that American infantrymen and Bavarian regiments of Landwehr and Landsturm faced one another for the first time in front line positions on the European front.

Less than eight hundred yards of slate and drab-coloured soft ground, blotched with rust-red expanses of wire entanglements, separated the hostile lines.

There was no moon. A few cloud-veiled stars only seemed to accentuate the blackness of the night. There, in the darkness and the mud, on the slippery firing step of trench walls and in damp, foul-smelling dugouts, young red-blooded Americans tingled for the first time with the thrill that they had trained so long and travelled so far to experience.

Through unfortunate management of the Press arrangements in connection with this great historical event, American correspondents accredited by the War Department to our forces, were prevented from accompanying our men into the front that night. Good fortune, however, favoured me as one of the two sole exceptions to this circumstance. Raymond G. Carroll, correspondent of the Philadelphia Public Ledger, and myself, representing the Chicago Tribune and its associated papers, were the only two newspaper men who went into the line with the men that night. For enjoying this unusual opportunity, we were both arrested several days later, not, however, until after we had obtained the first-hand story of the great event.

A mean drizzle of rain was falling that night, but it felt cool on the pink American cheeks that were hot with excitement. The very wetness of the air impregnated all it touched with the momentousness of the hour. Spirits were high and the mud was deep, but we who were there had the feeling that history was chiselling that night's date into her book of ages.

Occasionally a shell wheezed over through the soggy atmosphere, seeming to leave an unseen arc in the darkness above. It would terminate with a sullen thump in some spongy, water-soaked mound behind us. Then an answering missive of steel would whine away into the populated invisibility in front of us.

French comrades, in half English and half French, gushed their congratulations, and shook us by the hand. Some of us were even hugged and kissed on both cheeks. Our men took the places of French platoons that were sent back to rest billets. But other French platoons remained shoulder to shoulder with our men in the front line. The presence of our troops there was in continuation of their training for the purpose of providing a nucleus for the construction of later contingents. Both our infantry and our artillery acted in conjunction with the French infantry and artillery and the sector remained under French command.

Our men were eager to ask questions and the French were ever ready to respond. They first told us about the difference in the sound of shells. Now that one that started with a bark in back of us and whined over our heads is a départ. It is an Allied shell on its way to the Germans. Now, this one, that whines over first and ends with a distant grunt, like a strong wallop on a wet carpet, is an arrivée. It has arrived from Germany. In the dugouts, our men smoked dozens of cigarettes, lighting fresh ones from the half-consumed butts. It is the appetite that comes with the progressive realisation of a long deferred hope. It is the tension that comes from at last arriving at an object and then finding nothing to do, now that you are there. It is the nervousness that nerveless youth suffers in inactivity.

The men sloshed back and forth through the mud along the narrow confines of the trench. The order is against much movement, but immobility is unbearable. Wet slickers rustle against one another in the narrow traverses, and equipment, principally the French and English gas masks, hanging at either hip become entangled in the darkness.

At times a steel helmet falls from some unaccustomed head and, hitting perhaps a projecting rock in the trench wall, gives forth a clang which is followed by curses from its clumsy owner and an admonition of quiet from some young lieutenant.

"Olson, keep your damn fool head down below the top of that trench or you'll get it blown off." The sergeant is talking, and Olson, who brought from Minnesota a keen desire to see No Man's Land even at the risk of his life, is forced to repress the yearning.

"Two men over in B Company just got holes drilled through their beans for doing the same thing," continued the sergeant. "There's nothing you can see out there anyhow. It's all darkness."

Either consciously or unconsciously, the sergeant was lying, for the purpose of saving Olson and others from a fool's fate. There was not a single casualty in any American unit on the line that first night.

"Where is the telephone dugout?" a young lieutenant asked his French colleague. "I want to speak to the battalion commander."

"But you must not speak English over the telephone," replied the Frenchman, "the Germans will hear you with the instruments they use to tap the underground circuit."

"But I was going to use our American code," said the front line novice; "if the Germans tap in they won't be able to figure out what it means."

"Ah, no, my friend," replied the Frenchman, smiling. "They won't know what the message means, but your voice and language will mean to them that Americans are occupying the sector in front of them, and we want to give them that information in another way, n'est ce pas?"

Undoubtedly there was some concern in the German trenches just over the way with regard to what was taking place in our lines. Relief periods are ticklish intervals for the side making them. It is quite possible that some intimation of our presence may have been given.

There was considerable conversation and movement among our men that night. Jimmy found it frequently necessary to call the attention of Johnny to some new thing he had discovered. And of a consequence, much natural, but needless, chattering resulted.

I believe the Germans did become nervous because they made repeated attacks on the enveloping darkness with numbers of star shells. These aerial beauties of night warfare released from their exploding encasements high in the air, hung from white silk parachutes above the American amateurs.

The numerous company and battery jesters did not refrain from imitative expressions of "Ahs" and "Ohs" and "Ain't it bootiful?" as their laughing upturned faces were illuminated in the white light.

That night one rocket went up shortly before morning. It had a different effect from its predecessors. It reared itself from the darkness somewhere on the left. Its flight was noiseless as it mounted higher and higher on its fiery staff. Then it burst in a shower of green balls of fire.

That meant business. One green rocket was the signal that the Germans were sending over gas shells. It was an alarm that meant the donning of gas masks. On they went quickly. It was the first time this equipment had been adjusted under emergency conditions, yet the men appeared to have mastered the contrivances.

Then the word was passed along the trenches and through the dugouts for the removal of the masks. It had not been a French signal. The green rocket had been sent up by the Germans. The enemy was using green rockets that night as a signal of their own. There had been no gas shells. It was a false alarm.

"The best kind of practice in the world," said one of our battalion commanders; "it's just the stuff we're here for. I hope the Germans happen to do that every night a new bunch of our men get in these trenches."

While the infantry were experiencing these initial thrills in the front line, our gunners were struggling in the mud of the black gun pits to get their pieces into position in the quickest possible time, and achieve the honour of firing that first American shot in the war.

Each battery worked feverishly in intense competition with every other battery. Battery A of the 6th Field, to which I had attached myself, lost in the race for the honour. Another battery in the same regiment accomplished the achievement.

That was Battery C of the 6th Field Artillery. I am reproducing, herewith, for what I believe is the first time, the exact firing data on that shot and the officers and men who took part in it.

By almost superhuman work through the entire previous day and night, details of men from Battery C had pulled one cannon by ropes across a muddy, almost impassable, meadow. So anxious were they to get off the first shot that they did not stop for meals.

They managed to drag the piece into an old abandoned French gun pit. The historical position of that gun was one kilometre due east of the town of Bathelemont and three hundred metres northeast of the Bauzemont-Bathelemont road. The position was located two miles from the old international boundary line between France and German-Lorraine. The position was one and one-half kilometres back of the French first line, then occupied by Americans.

The first shot was fired at 6:5:10 A. M., October 23rd, 1917. Those who participated in the firing of the shot were as follows:

Lieutenant F. M. Mitchell, U.S.R., acted as platoon chief.

Corporal Robert Braley laid the piece.

Sergeant Elward Warthen loaded the piece.

Sergeant Frank Grabowski prepared the fuse for cutting.

Private Louis Varady prepared the fuse for cutting.

Private John J. Wodarczak prepared the fuse for cutting.

Corporal Osborne W. De Varila prepared the fuse for cutting.

Sergeant Lonnie Domonick cut the fuse.

Captain Idus R. McLendon gave the command to fire.

Sergeant Alex L. Arch fired first shot.

The missile fired was a 75 millimetre or 3-inch high-explosive shell. The target was a German battery of 150 millimetre or 6-inch guns located two kilometres back of the German first line trenches, and one kilometre in back of the boundary line between France and German-Lorraine. The position of that enemy battery on the map was in a field 100 metres west of the town which the French still call Xanrey, but which the Germans have called Schenris since they took it from France in 1870. Near that spot – and damn near – fell the first American shell fired in the great war.

Note: It is peculiar to note that I am writing this chapter at Atlantic City, October 23rd, 1918, just one year to the day after the event. That shot surely started something.

CHAPTER VIII

THE FIRST AMERICAN SECTOR

It was in the Luneville sector, described in the preceding chapter, that the first American fighting men faced the Germans on the western front. It was there that the enemy captured its first American prisoners in a small midnight raid; it was there that we captured some prisoners of theirs, and inflicted our first German casualties; it was there that the first American fighting man laid down his life on the western front.

In spite of these facts, however, the occupation of those front line posts in that sector constituted nothing more than a post-graduate course in training under the capable direction of French instructors who advised our officers and men in everything they did.

At the conclusion of the course, which extended over a number of weeks, the American forces engaged in it were withdrawn from the line and retired for a well-earned rest period and for reorganisation purposes in areas back of the line. There they renewed equipment and prepared for the occupation of the first all-American sector on the western front.

That sector was located in Lorraine some distance to the east of the Luneville front. It was north and slightly west of the city of Toul. It was on the east side of the St. Mihiel salient, then occupied by the Germans.

The sector occupied a position in what the French called the Pont-à-Mousson front. Our men were to occupy an eight-mile section of the front line trenches extending from a point west of the town of Flirey, to a point west of the ruins of the town of Seicheprey. The position was not far from the French stronghold of Verdun to the northwest or the German stronghold of Metz to the northeast, and was equidistant from both.

That line changed from French blue to American khaki on the night of January 21st. The sector became American at midnight. I watched the men as they marched into the line. In small squads they proceeded silently up the road toward the north, from which direction a raw wind brought occasional sounds resembling the falling of steel plates on the wooden floor of a long corridor.

A half moon doubly ringed by mist, made the hazy night look grey. At intervals, phantom flashes flushed the sky. The mud of the roadway formed a colourless paste that made marching not unlike skating on a platter of glue.

This was their departure for the front – this particular battalion – the first battalion of the 16th United States Infantry. I knew, and every man in it knew, what was before them.

Each man was in for a long tour of duty in trenches knee-deep with melted snow and mud. Each platoon commander knew the particular portion of that battle-battered bog into which he must lead his men. Each company commander knew the section of shell-punctured, swamp land that was his to hold, and the battalion commander, a veteran American soldier, was well aware of the particular perils of the position which his one thousand or more men were going to occupy in the very jaw-joint of a narrowing salient.

All branches of the United States military forces may take special pride in that first battalion that went into the new American line that night. The commander represented the U. S. Officers Reserve Corps, and the other officers and men were from the reserves, the regulars, West Point, the National Guard and the National Army. Moreover, the organisation comprised men from all parts of the United States as well as men whose parents had come from almost every race and nationality in the world. One company alone possessed such a babble of dialects among its new Americans, that it proudly called itself, the Foreign Legion.

For two days the battalion had rested in the mud of the semi-destroyed village of Ansauville, several miles back of the front. A broad, shallow stream, then at the flood, wound through and over most of the village site. Walking anywhere near the border of the water, one pulled about with him pounds of tenacious, black gumbo. Dogs and hogs, ducks and horses, and men, – all were painted with nature's handiest camouflage.

Where the stream left the gaping ruins of a stone house on the edge of the village, there was a well-kept French graveyard, clinging to the slope of a small hill. Above the ruins of the hamlet, stood the steeple of the old stone church, from which it was customary to ring the alarm when the Germans sent over their shells of poison gas.

Our officers busied themselves with, unfinished supply problems. Such matters as rubber boots for the men, duck boards for the trenches, food for the mules, and ration containers necessary for the conveyance of hot food to the front lines, were not permitted to interfere with the battalion's movements. In war, there is always the alternative of doing without or doing with makeshifts, and that particular battalion commander, after three years of war, was the kind of a soldier who made the best of circumstances no matter how adverse they may have been.

That commander was Major Griffiths. He was an American fighting man. His military record began in the Philippine Insurrection, when, as a sergeant in a Tennessee regiment of National Guard, he was mentioned in orders for conspicuous gallantry. At the suppression of the insurrection, he became a major in the United States Constabulary in the Philippines. He resigned his majority in 1914, entered the Australian forces, and was wounded with them in the bloody landing at Gallipoli. He was invalided to England, where, upon his partial recovery, he was promoted to major in the British forces and was sent to France in command of a battalion of the Sherwood Foresters. With them, he received two more wounds, one at the Battle of Ypres, and another during the fighting around Loos.

He was in an English hospital when America entered the war, but he hurried his convalescence and obtained a transfer back to the army of his own country. He hadn't regained as yet the full use of his right hand, his face still retained a hospital pallor, and an X-ray photograph of his body revealed the presence of numerous pieces of shell still lodged there. But on that night of January 21st, he could not conceal the pride that he felt in the honour in having been the one chosen to command the battalion of Americans that was to take over the first American sector in France. Major Griffiths survived those strenuous days on the Pont-à-Mousson front, but he received a fatal wound three months later at the head of his battalion in front of Catigny, in Picardy. He died fighting under his own flag.

Just before daylight failed that wintry day, three poilus walked down the road from the front and into Ansauville. Two of them were helping a third, whose bandaged arm and shoulder explained the mission of the party. As they passed the rolling kitchens where the Americans were receiving their last meal before entering the trenches, there was silence and not even an exchange of greetings or smiles.

This lack of expression only indicated the depth of feeling stirred by the appearance of this wounded French soldier. The incident, although comparatively trivial, seemed to arouse within our men a solemn grimness and a more fervent determination to pay back the enemy in kind. In silence, our men finished that last meal, which consisted of cold corned beef, two slices of dry bread per man, and coffee.

The sight of that one wounded man did not make our boys realise more than they already did, what was in front of them. They had already made a forty mile march over frozen roads up to this place and had incurred discomforts seemingly greater than a shell-shattered arm or a bullet-fractured shoulder. After that gruelling hiking experience, it was a pleasant prospect to look forward to a chance of venting one's feelings on the enemy.

At the same time, no chip-on-the-shoulder cockiness marked the disposition of these men about to take first grips with the Germans, – no challenging bravado was revealed in the actions or statements of these grim, serious trail-blazers of the American front, whose attitude appeared to be one of soldierly resignation to the first martial principle, "Orders is orders."

As the companies lined up in the village street in full marching order, awaiting the command to move, several half-hearted attempts at jocularity died cold. One irrepressible made a futile attempt at frivolity by announcing that he had Cherokee blood in his veins and was so tough he could "spit battleships." This attempted jocularity drew as much mirth as an undertaker's final invitation to the mourners to take the last, long look at the departed.

One bright-faced youngster tingling with the thrill of anticipation, leaped on a gun carriage and absently whistled a shrill medley, beginning with "Yaka-hula," and ending with "Just a Song at Twilight." There was food for thought in the progress of his efforts from the frivolous to the pensive, but there was little time for such thoughts. No one even told him to shut up.

While there was still light, an aerial battle took place overhead. For fifteen minutes, the French anti-aircraft guns banged away at three German planes, which were audaciously sailing over our lines. The Americans rooted like bleacherites for the guns but the home team failed to score, and the Germans sailed serenely home. They apparently had had time to make adequate observations.