Longwood Middle School

FROM UPTON TO THE MEUSE WITH THE 307th INFANTRY

by,
W. KERR RAINSFORD
1920

Lorraine

LORRAINE

ON June seventeenth, the First Battalion moved to the ruined hamlet of Mesnil, the high-water mark of German invasion in September, 1914, and thence, the next evening, to Vacqueville, a dirty and inhospitable little village close behind the rather ill-defined Line of Resistance. On the twentieth, Battalion Headquarters moved up to St. Maurice, with companies D and A on the front and support of the right sector at Neuviller, and companies C and B on the left in Grand Bois, relieving the forward elements of the Forty-second Division on the line during the night of the twenty-first. The Third Battalion moved on the eighteenth to the meadows outside Rambervillers, and the next evening through the town, against the turbulent counter-current of the Forty-second's Alabamans, a splendid-looking lot of men, who appeared only by chance to be wearing uniforms.

With darkness came rain, at first a few large drops and then a roaring cloudburst. The evening had started fair and the raincoats were stowed inside the packs, where they alone remained dry. Somewhere in the drenching darkness ahead was a convoy of motor ambulances, traveling at the unexhausting rate of two miles an hour, and halting every fifteen or twenty minutes for repairs. Then the rain ceased and moonlight flooded the dark sprucewood, lighting mysterious vistas in its wet and misty depths. Through the gaunt ruins and moon-blanched streets of Mesnil the black column wound its way, looking beneath its gleaming steel like some invading host of old, but feeling less romantic than tired and wet. Toward midnight it reached Deneuvre on the hilltop overlooking Baccarat and billeted amid its crooked alleys in barns already crowded with troops who were supposed to have left.

The day following the troops moved across the Meurthe to the Haxo Barracks of Baccarat for another week of training, including the first firing with the new rifles and recently issued chauchat guns, and the first general use of rifle and live hand-grenades. The initial nervousness of most in handling the latter, and their evident desire to get rid of them, once the detonator had been fired, in almost any direction, was ample proof of the value of this opportunity without which, however, the First Battalion had entered the line. On the twenty-second, the Second Battalion took station on the Line of Resistance at Vacqueville, where Regimental Headquarters had also been located, and with the Supply Company at Creviller the regiment had established itself in its new sector.

The battalion at Haxo Barracks was for rest and training; that at Vacqueville and Les Carrieres for a perfunctory manning of the Line of Resistance with half-companies, while the rest could practice their chauchats and Eve grenades in the nearby quarry; and the forward Battalion held two companies on the outpost line and two on the Line of Support, which was in fact a line of resistance, that in front of Vacqueville not yet having been dug.

The region about and behind the front was of vast woodlands alternating with open and dusty meadows. In places the woods had been blown to pieces with artillery fire, and in places the meadows were pitted with craters of sun-cracked clay. One particular stretch of open marsh, near some abandoned artillery emplacements on the Line of Resistance, had been churned up into something like the surface of a sponge, and still, on misty nights, reeked with the sickish acid smell of gas. The white dusty roads were lined with dilapidated festoons of burlap, or screens of wilted and dust- covered rushes-to shelter from observation such traffic as must pass. Little half-ruined villages of roofless walls and tumbled masonry, like empty sea shells upon some desolate coast, lined the high-water mark of early invasion -and in the center of each rose the skeleton of some beautiful old church, its tower pierced with shell-holes and its entrance blocked by the fallen chimes.

The line was throughout jointly held with the French and under their command, one platoon of French being usually interlarded with two of Americans. The intention was for the practical instruction of inexperienced troops in trench-life and patrolling, the sector being notoriously a quiet one-in fact the opposing lines were substantially as determined in the first winter of the war. But while the French, especially the company officers, did their very best to produce cooperation, the system. was not regarded as successful by most on the American side. Extremely few of the officers and practically none of the enlisted men could speak each other's language, making whispered consultations in No Man's Land somewhat unfruitful of result; the orders for the defence of the sector were written in French and did not obtain translation until Major Jay, of the Second Battalion, so translated them during his tenure of the front; and the habit of the French outposts of firing on principle, broadcast through the night, got on the unseasoned American nerves, without mentioning the resultant danger to friendly patrols who were trying to win home.

At dawn of June twenty-fourth the regiment and the brigade first came to hand-grips with the German, with results largely in favor of the latter. Neuviller, a tiny ruined village on an isolated hill, that must once have been a very pleasant little spot, and is still, though more grimly, picturesque, with its loopholed cobblestone barricades, stood out as a dangerous salient from the French lines. The road to it from St. Maurice was still intact, but counted as No Man's Land; and its garrison of two American platoons and one French had only a single communicating trench, some three hundred yards long, connecting it across the marsh, for retreat or reenforcement, with their ting troops at the Moulin des Tocs. and Buisson, though at this time the support company was also forward in the Bois de la Voivre. The defences of the village were an extensive and intricate system of largely abandoned trenches, whose field-of-fire, in so far as it had ever existed, was in great measure obscured by overgrowing bushes. There were also dugouts, which have no proper place on an outpost line, and all indications pointed to its having been originally laid out for a purpose quite different from that for which it was now being used. Its present garrison was too weak for effective defense and too large for speedy withdrawal; the general orders of the Americans were clear about holding any part of the line entrusted to them; the policy of the French, though not then well understood, appeared to be to withdraw when attacked and counterattack. The Americans further had not yet had time to become accustomed either to their ground or to their weapons, the Machine Gun Company, which had two guns in the western outskirts of the village, and one near the Moulin des Toes, having also been very recently rearmed with Hotchkiss guns in place of the Vickers, and very insufficiently armed with automatic pistols-only three to the squad of eight having been issued. In reference to the time required for preparing Americans to meet the German armies in the field it is worth noting that though many of these men had trained for nine months as soldiers, yet, due to this exchange of arms, they first entered the line with weapons with which less than fifty per cent of their teams were familiar. This on the 307th front was the setting for the brief drama; with the 308th on the right at Badonviller the results obtained indicated much the same conditions.

About three A. M. of the twenty-fourth, a single shell came wailing in from over the Saillant du Feys and exploded near the church; two more followed, and then the storm burst. It extended over the Grand Bois des Haies on the left, through St. Maurice and the Bois de la Voivre, heavily mixed with gas, back across the Bois des Champs and over Badonviller on the right, with a storm-center and a box-barrage over Neuviller. The men ducked to the nearest shelter and waited; they waited too long, and they had done better not to have ducked. The rocket signal for counter-barrage brought a total of forty-two shells only from allied artillery. After nearly an hour of intense fire, the shelling ceased on the town, though still continuing around and behind it; there was hoarse shouting in the darkness, and then the Germans attacked. They attacked with rifles, hand-grenades, light machine-guns strapped to the back, heavy machine-guns from low-flying aeroplanes, aeroplane-bombs, and with flame-throwers; and they came in from the northwest and up the swamp from the southeast. A confused fight took place in the gray of dawn through the dense smoke of the echoing ruins. The French had for the most part withdrawn at the first opportunity; the Americans, broken into scattered groups amidst the maze of trenches, wire hurdles, and barricades, fought the best of their way back to the St. Maurice road; a number were caught in the dugouts and shelters, and bombed or burned to death; the bead of the communication trench was held by a German light machine-gun firing down it to prevent reinforcement. A stand was made at the western stone barricade to cover the scattered retreat, and the black tar-like stains over its front, with a few charred rifle-barrels from which the stocks had been burned away, bore evidence to the nature of the attack upon it. The report of a machine-gun lieutenant to the captain of that company gives a few interesting details:

"The guns were in emplacements in the extreme west end of the village, flanking its north front, and about one hundred yards apart, the rear gun with no infantry support and the forward gun with two chauchat rifles nearby. At 2:45 A. M. all were asleep in a dugout near the rear gun except one American and one French sentinel at each gun.