HISTORY
OF THE 305th FIELD ARTILLERY
by
Charles Wadsworth Camp
1919
XV
ACROSS THE MARNE TO NESLES WOODS
MORE detailed orders reached us the next day. We would
take the road Saturday, the 10th, and march thirty odd
kilometers before the next morning to Chezy-sur-Marne.
The next night we would cover approximately twenty
kilometers to a point to be chosen near Courpoil. The
third night we would complete our journey to Nesles
Woods, which had recently been cleared of the enemy.
We pored over our maps. The march would be a forced one.
It would carry us through the heart of the salient. Chezy
was only a few miles from Chateau Thierry. Courpoil
probably smoked from the fierce fighting it had
witnessed. Nesles Woods lay between Fere-en-Tardenois and
Fismes.
We spent Friday getting ready. In our spare moments we
wrote letters home.
That afternoon we were summoned to brigade headquarters
in Doue to meet the new brigade commander. He intimated
the serious nature of our next step. Afterwards Colonel
Doyle gave the organization commanders an extended talk
about aiming points and the identification of targets.
Since it was understood we couldn't safely start our
march before four o'clock the next afternoon, everyone
hoped for a good sleep Friday night. The men needed it,
but they didn't get it. About 9 o'clock regimental
headquarters stirred itself and began sending orders to
the battalions by bicycle messengers. The first was to
the effect that we would be prepared to take the road by
eight o'clock the next morning. That meant reveille
around four o'clock. Other orders came to send teams and
G. S. carts to various points to change and wove
equipment. It wasn't until 2 o'clock Saturday morning
that the excitement subsided. Bicycle Messenger
Montgomery came around then with a verbal order that we
wouldn't move until the time we had been given
originally, four o'clock in the afternoon. We took
advantage then of what remained of the mutilated night.
The regiment was to rendezvous at Done. It would take its
place in the brigade column on the national highway
beyond. So at four o'clock each organization mounted and
pulled out of its comfortable billets.
August smiled its best that afternoon. The cheerful
countryside seemed reluctant to let us go. Natives
watched us with emotionless faces. In their eyes we saw
dull souvenirs of four years of departures.
In the old days of pitched battles men walked from their
bivouac directly into the obliterating shock of a fight
whose duration was a matter of hours. Maybe that was
simpler than to move as we did for three nights into a
battle apparently without end, with sights and sound of a
new and peculiar brutality crowding each moment closer
about US.
We did get tired.
During our wait at the rendezvous we drank hot coffee,
and munched cold rations. When we turned into the
straight national highway, flanked by huge lime trees, we
could see the entire brigade stretching before and behind
us. French and American trucks snorted past without end.
The pleasant,
warm sun sank lower. By twilight, on the outskirts of a
town, we watched youths of the French 1920 class,
freshened after their day's training, walking in groups,
and watching our dusty column out of curious eyes. Here
and there one strolled by the side of a pretty girl,
shyly silent because of this undesired publicity.
They waved hesitant farewells. In the village little
children shrieked after us:
" Good, by I Good, by! Good-by!
The sun slipped away altogether. Night closed about us.
By the last light we twisted through Epieds. The people
gave us feeble cheers. But we paid little attention. We
were already footsore. Even the mounted men, to save the
animals, walked alternate hours. Our halts because of the
length of the column, had become extremely sketchy.
Sometimes you missed them altogether, closing up a gap.
And there were innumerable unexpected stops when you
dismounted and were up and off again almost before your
feet had touched the ground.
Our feet weren't up to much. During the past month we had
been either in the line or changing station. We were
soft. But songs brightened our worm-like progress along
the dark country roads.
The night brought the flashes back to the sky ahead of
us. They were not quite so pallid. They spread farther.
They soared higher. They were streaked by ominous lines
of ruddier flame.
Always the traffic of supply ground past us, forcing us
to the side of the road, struggling desperately forward
to feed the fires.
A cheery voice flashed bravely back at the burning sky.
" Gonna be some little fight, boys! "
Another voice rose with a quavering, melancholy quality.
Its song was something about a girl waiting at home,
waiting patiently and unselfishly for a man to come back
out of the fires-
The ranks fell silent. The voice died away.
Somewheres ahead a rolling kitchen commenced to drop a
trail of sparks. It wound, as the road twisted, like an
unbelievably long and phosphorescent serpent.
It kept pace with us. After a time the odor of coffee
floated back along the trail. Between midnight and the
dawn we would know there was a jewel of a cook up there.
But was it safe, this red, serpentine trail? Are cooks
ever safe near the front? Everybody saw the sparks. And
everybody caught the aroma. The fires were still distant.
Nobody disturbed the cook. The red serpent persisted
until it was certain the coffee in the containers was hot
and would stay so.
We drank it between one and two o'clock, when we were
halted for some time on a high ridge. The flames seemed
nearer and brighter than they had been. Or perhaps it was
because the night was so dark up there. Then for the
first time we distinguished star shells. They separated
themselves from the flashes so slowly and disappeared so
reluctantly that you couldn't be sure at first they
weren't born of your imagination and your smarting eyes.
You thought the first one, perhaps, was the Pleides, less
distinct than usual. They all looked exactly like that,
tiny constellations, blurred by the shifting glow ahead.
But they were everywhere so you knew what they were.
As we munched a sandwich or a cracker and sipped the hot,
fragrant coffee everything impressed us as abnormally
still. We missed the rumbling of the wheels, just
silenced, and the rap of the horses' shoes on the road.
In the beginning there was only the slow shuffling of
feet in the dirt as the forms, detached a trifle from the
night, by the flickering in the sky, formed a line by the
rolling kitchen- that, and occasional dull clashing of
mess cups. Then a man spoke, and after a time another. It
was usually only some banal remark, drowned and forgotten
at once in this flickering stillness.
"You're spilling it on my wrist."
" God bless you for the chow, sergeant."
Or from the sergeant:
" Move on! Do you want to delouse yourself in it?
Such aimless accents of the silence were forgotten at
once.
Out of the subsequent, pallid calm stole the voice of
battle.
Men shifted their feet uneasily. It was the first of the
cannon mutter to reach us from the flames. A quick
activity thrust it back again.
"Prepare to mount!"
" Mount! "
"Forward yo-o-o-o-"
The orders came down the line, growing apparently out of
nothing as the cannon mutter had done, reaching a climax
in one's own mouth, dying away on the long drawn vowel of
the last command.
We were moving forward again, drawing an odd and
comfortable companionship from our rumbling, rapping
progress.
At the scarcely perceptible birth of dawn we were winding
sleepily on the shoulder of another ridge which looked
down on what might have been a long lake or a deep and
gigantic river flowing between the hills. It was possible
to guess, and here and there a man raised his head and
stared. Someone spoke in a harsh whisper.
"That's the valley of the Marne."
He whispered because we were somnolent and unalert. The
name possessed no dynamic power for us then. One fellow
did manage:
"Didn't know it was so blamed wide."
The other offered to instruct him.
"Oh, that's the mist."
"You don't say? Good-night!"
Shoulders drooped again.
" Ha-a-a-lt! "
The command sang down the line like a savage chant. The
regiment dismounted. One by one men dropped over against
the bank, and drifted into sleep, keeping a listless hand
on bridles. The horses, weary too, for the most part
stood with drooped heads, not even troubling to nibble
the lush grass. Now and then one would wander
indifferently from the feebly restraining grasp of his
master. An officer would rebuke sleepily, consigning the
careless one to walk the rest of that stage. At such a
time the world seemed drunk with sleep.
A dim headlight pushed through the mist below-guiding one
of the first trains, we guessed, to carry troops along
the reopened Chateau Thierry line.
The dawn strengthened. It grasped the fringes of the mist
and lifted it slowly from the valley. A stream, like a
ribbon, narrow and decorative, was strung across the
fields.
Tired eyes opened to gaze with an expression of discovery
at the pleasant little river that twice had been wider
than the ocean to Germany.
We resumed our crawling. There was no longer any reason
in mounting and dismounting. We would go ahead for a few
paces, then stop again. An anxiety grasped the command to
get somewhere beneath green trees before the light should
grow much stronger. Then we saw the head of the column
moving to the left to be swallowed by a large grove of
trees. A sigh went up. We were nearly there. Each halt
seemed longer than it was. We glanced upwards. We
listened for aeroplanes.
We, too, reached the fork. We turned and entered beneath
the friendly shrubbery. The chill of the night had
disappeared before the mounting sun.
As we parked an officer from headquarters ran about.
"Keep everything covered up, and don't let anybody
stand in open places. The Huns are watching these woods
for bivouacs.
Where carriages were parked in thinly roofed places we
draped them with cut shrubbery. We started the animals
down a path behind a guide who knew where water was to be
had. We got our paper work out of the way. We hurried the
war diary to regimental headquarters which had been
established in the deserted town of Chezy.
The rolling kitchens smoked. Men forgot their weariness
to form eager lines before them. Groups ate greedily
among the trees. The forest was noisy with talk called
from group to group. The Colonel arrived and approached a
party of officers on a tarpaulin, making a stupendous
breakfast in celebration of having brought men, animals,
and carriages through a stage that had worried everyone.
"Keep your seats, gentlemen," the Colonel said.
"I want to congratulate you on the way you handled
your paper work this morning."
The group returned to its breakfast refreshed. A word of
praise after such effort is a tonic.
The illusion of a picnic, however, was never very
convincing. The sunlight searched the woods, exposing
souvenirs of the recent fighting.
Half hidden by the underbrush were stained and eloquent
garments. Here lay a Hun helmet, a neat round bole
through the front. There was the stock of a rifle.
Men picked such objects up curiously. They gathered them
in little heaps, convenient for transportation. They
prepared for sleep. The sun seemed to laugh.
That is the curse of night marches. You can't get a
satisfactory sleep by day. There is a great deal to be
done, that robs many men even of the opportunity to
sleep. Guards must be posted. Kitchens must go as hard as
ever. Animals must be more carefully cared for than when
in billets or at an echelon. Equipment must be cleaned,
and the damage of the previous night's march repaired.
All these operations manufacture a noise that disturbs
those who do get a chance to rest. But it is the sun that
irritates the weary more than anything else. No matter
how shady the place you choose, the sun will find it out
sooner and later, will grin in your eyes, will inform you
that it is no time to be sleeping.
Maybe you move. Then a man shakes your shoulder,
demanding information which he foolishly imagines you
alone can furnish.
If on such a march you can average three hours' sleep out
of the twenty-four you are lucky and insensitive.
In Chezy woods there were other disturbing factors. The
men's feet had suffered. It was necessary to treat them.
You stood in line for long periods waiting to get to the
doctor. When you had been treated it was probably dinner
time.
After dinner nearly everyone that wasn't on duty strolled
down the hill, through the grounds of a modern chateau,
and so to the bank of the Marne. The water was dirty,
and, if one stopped to think, sinister. The afternoon, on
the other band, was warm, and we didn't forecast many
more opportunities in the near future to bathe. We filled
the murky water with active, noisy bodies. On the shore
mature men reproduced the antics of school boys. From
across the Marne frowned a landscape stifled beneath the
pestilential haze of war-a condition scarcely palpable,
reminiscent of a land whose inhabitants have been swept
down by some black plague. For there weren't so many
ruins. There pervaded everything, fields, farm houses,
villages, only this sense of desertion and a morbid
unhealth. It was like a picture from an artist whose
melancholy and diseased brain has retained of the visible
world no more than a sense of form.
All afternoon the activity about the banks mocked this
oppressive landscape. From time to time strings of
animals were led down and watered. The antics of the
bathers continued until dusk.
A few of our horses did not respond that day. We were
underhorsed anyway. A new fair started. Organizations
swopped animals about so that no carriage should be left.
That took time. Supper was a shadowy affair. We policed
the bivouac. We lashed equipment to the carriages again.
Souvenir hunters gazed at their stacks of trophies, shook
their heads, and scattered the stuff about the woods.
One man picked up a Hun helmet and beat with it
thoughtfully against a tree.
" Seems tough enough," he mused-" too
darned tough."
He flung it on the ground, thrust his hands in his
pockets, and leaned against a tree. His attitude was,
roughly, typical of everyone else's. The teams were
harnessed. Everything was ready. We waited for the word
to move out.
The dusk had forced into the woods an unwelcome
alteration. Instead of patches of sunlight, the grim
souvenirs of battle scattered about determined the values
of the picture. There was a chill in the air, too. One's
sense of sleeplessness returned with the night. And the
increasing darkness meant the resumption of those
breathless pyrotechnics in the north.
A little fellow, crouched on a stump, his hands clasped
about his knees, gazed straight ahead. His face was
immobile. You didn't like to look at it, because it
seemed an expression of many more carefully guarded
minds. You moved about, trying to throw the feeling off,
this difficult conviction that the forest was crowded
with homesickness.
A man strolled up and put his arm about the little
fellow's shoulders. His voice came with understanding.
"What's the matter, buddy?"
The little fellow sprang upright as an animal is startled
by the appearance of a hunter. He answered fiercely:
"Matter! Nothing the matter."
He burst into odd oaths, as if they might justify him.
The other gave him a cigarette.
Word came around that we were to be careful where we sat
down tonight, for there would be always the danger of
mustard gas. Other messengers appeared. We would cross
the Marne on pontoon bridges at Chateau Thierry.
Carriages would cross on one bridge with intervals of
fifty meters. Individually mounted men would use another,
dismounted men a third. An apprehension of shelling at
the crossing from long range guns saturated these orders.
The word to mount came with the last light. Whips cracked
and horses strained forward. The carriages reeled
drunkenly over roots and depressions. There were swaying
escapes while men shouted warnings, put their shoulders
to the wheels, and struck at the horses. Where the woods
trail turned into the main road an officer sat his horse,
repeating over and over again, like one reciting a piece.
"Men may smoke, but must use automatic lighters. No
matches will be struck tonight."
Brakes set, we slid down a long, curving hill into the
valley. The column moved faster this evening. A soft
moonlight gave an air of mystery to the few empty farm
houses we passed. Several groups of these suggested that
we were on the outskirts of Chateau Thierry. But the road
was longer than we thought. It was nearly midnight when
we entered the city at last. Through a dark silence we
became aware of a multiple activity. The streets were
full of half seen figures that passed us without words.
The place might have been a rendezvous of criminals,
furtively intent on avoiding discovery. There were no
lights. We could scarcely distinguish the jagged remains
of walls, and here and there in the building line a
fissure that we knew was the grave of a home.
At the railroad the column was cut by the passing of a
train, and the overanxiety of the military police, which
closed the gates too soon. Beyond, teams tore through the
dark to catch up, and men rode back and forth keeping in
touch with divided units.
In a narrow street close to the river more military
police were stationed. Their suppressed voices were
scarcely audible above the rumbling of the wheels on
cobble stones as they repeated our instructions for
crossing. Certainly the Hun wasn't so near!
We entered a wide place through the center of which the
Marne flowed. More military police stood on each bridge
nervously hurrying the crossing. But no shells fell. Our
own progress on the planking drowned the sound of guns
and the hill ahead was a curtain against the northern
sky.
We were over, but when we had climbed the hill above the
town the voice and the gestures of battle became eloquent
again. The passage of the river seemed to have brought us
much, much closer. The sky was a wavering sheet of flame,
no longer wan. It spread and contracted with a yellow
intensity. Star shells stood out against it clearly
enough now. As the rumblings increased and diminished one
could almost guess the caliber of the guns engaged. An
enormous mass of artillery was concentrated up there. It
was folly to try to sing against that greater song. The
column forged stolidly ahead.
We were in the heart of the salient now. Even by night
the country was haggard. The Hun's departure had been a
matter of a few days, and he had not neglected his
reputation in leaving.
We rode silently through village after village. They all
shared a dreadful similarity. They were clusters of
homes, roofless and with gashed walls. They were filled
with an odor which made the air reluctant in one's lungs.
It was compounded of stale gas, of lime, of ancient
plaster and woodwork, suddenly crumbled. It forced on one
an impression of death, still warm. It suggested the
proximity of departing souls. There seemed to be a
connection between this sense and the ghastly light that
flickered over everything.
Between these dead villages the open country stank, too.
At times we were sheltered by shell screens, raised by
the Hun for his own safety.
Towards morning we munched sandwiches and crackers, but
there was no hot coffee. The fires in all rolling
kitchens had been ordered drawn.
Shortly after this meal we turned to the right at
Cour-poil, another slaughtered, empty, stinking town, and
on a rough road ascended a long hill. The halts, as
always before the long halt, became numerous and
irritating. The road seemed interminable. In spite of the
brief stage, and our earlier speed, daylight would
probably catch us again, and the risk was greater here.
Yet a little daylight might be a safeguard against this
road which degenerated with each meter. Fourgons and
escort wagons lurched dangerously. Why the deuce were we
struggling so far from the main road anyway? We'd have to
come back by dark again over this risky trail. And our
horses were tired. The only excuse that occurred to us
was that we were going to a particularly safe and
convenient bivouac.
As the east grew ruddy the flashes faded. We saw a
fourgon on its side by the road. The horses stood by,
gazing at it with rather a pleased air. Tired soldiers
made unavailing efforts to get it up.
"No sleep for those guys," we said pityingly.
"They'll have to unpack everything, jack her up, and
pack again."
" Say, that must be a peach of a bivouac we're going
to."
It wasn't.
Just ahead two large masses of forest barely detached
themselves from the slow dawn. There was an open field
between. Some of the batteries were already strung out
along the edge of the woods. The rest of the column
halted. A group of officers and men stood in the field,
talking and gesticulating. One heard:
"Who made the reconnaissance for this blasted
thing?"
There had been a reconnaissance the previous day, but
something certainly had gone wrong. We asked eager
questions. The woods in spite of their size were for the
most part choked with underbrush, and the remainder was
rough and honey-combed with infantry trenches. There
wasn't room for the regiment under cover, and Hun planes
might appear at any moment.
"And those woods," you heard, "are full of
dead things."
Without calling attention to it we had all noticed the
thickening of the nauseating odor of wholesale animal
decay.
"It's bad for the men."
"The men have got to get used to it."
"But it's better to see those things in the heat of
action."
That, however, wasn't the point. We had to get covered up
before the light grew stronger.
The Headquarters Company, and Regimental Headquarters got
sketchily concealed in one piece of woods. The larger
part of the Second Battalion got in the other. The First
parked its pieces on the edge and cut foliage with which
it covered everything. Opposite, the Supply Company
employed the same makeshift.
The picket lines had to be placed inside.
Those who entered the forest to locate these lines went
softly. It was still night in there. You didn't want to
stumble over unseen obstacles. You fancied that the woods
were still inhabited by an army, which for the moment
slept. The trenches made angular scars between the
trees-shallow, makeshift defenses of the retreating Hun.
Their floors were littered with gray blouses, helmets,
round Hun caps, Mausers, grenades, belts of cartridges.
Scattered between them were artillery - ammunition dumps,
the shells in wicker containers, like wine baskets, or
else in elaborate and expensive metal frames. As the
light strengthened we saw quantities of rations which had
been thrown away, gasolene tanks, pioneer tools. If there
wasn't an army in the woods there was the equipment for
one. That day if we wanted anything-gasoline, for
example, for an automobile or a side-car,-we went through
no formalities.
" Go in the woods and get it," we said.
And the seeker obeyed and got what he wanted.
But in there the odor was poisonous. Everyone was warned
not to prowl in the underbrush.
As soon as the picket lines were established we went out,
clinging to the edge of the woods, and almost at once the
first Hun planes came over, but we were pretty well
concealed, and they didn't trouble us.
The question of water obtruded itself. By taking the
water carts all the way down the hill water for the men
could be drawn from a well in Courpoil. For the animals
the best that was offered was a pond a mile away. Its
banks were steep, so that the animals were watered
individually from buckets. The process was tedious.
Instead of watering three times that day we were lucky to
struggle into the mud and out again twice.
The lake wasn't any pleasanter than the woods. Scattered
equipment littered its banks. Some of our men tried it
for bathing. One or two of them cried out, and they all
waded to shore, talking among themselves. When we asked
what was the matter they looked sheepish.
"The lake is full of dead Bosche," they said.
There was a large farm house a few yards away. It had
evidently been used for some kind of a headquarters. The
garden had been trampled, and the fences broken down. In
a corner was a new cemetery with rows of wooden crosses,
made, we guessed, from packing cases. They marked
American graves. We were glad they were so few.
One man said brutally:
"There are a lot of things they didn't bury around
here."
We practiced making our lungs do with a minimum of air.
On the higher ground, among the deeper shell holes were
many small and shallow ones. We knew they had been made
by gas shells. Now and then you saw one whose bottom was
yellow with the spewed mustard gas that had failed to
volatilize.
Everywhere was telephone wire, laid on the ground from
position to position. There had been no time to salvage
it.
As we ate our late breakfast we noticed that the flies
were worse than they had been anywhere else, even at
Souge. And there was a strange variety-a big, blue nosed
sort that fought to get at your food and, defeated, flew
greedily back to the secrets of the underbrush.
We ate, though, and we managed to sleep even in that
woods. We failed to find in Courpoil forest, however,
even the relaxation Chezy had offered. There was more to
be done. The animals required more attention. There were
more aeroplane alarms, and there was more danger of men
being caught in the open and not standing still.
That afternoon Captains Ravenel and Delanoy rejoined.
They had left Souge some time before, but had been unable
to locate the regiment. Captain Ravenel, because he was
senior, took command of the First battalion in place of
Captain Dana. Captain Delanoy assumed command of Battery
F.
We had with us two lame men who had failed to respond to
treatment. A passing ambulance picked them up and carried
them back to Chateau Thierry. The surgeon in charge gave
us some cheerful gossip.
"Some of your infantry went in yesterday," he
said in an off-hand way, "and last night they sent
out a lot of casualties. You won't want anything much
hotter than you'll get up there."
We thanked him, but we didn't press him to stay for
supper. His gossip gave the persistent grumbling in the
north a sharper threat. Yet, whatever the next day might
hold, I don't think anyone regretted escaping from
Courpoil woods.
We didn't dare budge until the dusk was thick. Then we
tore our improvised camouflage from the carriages and
formed in the shell-ploughed field for the final stage of
our march into the Oise-Aisne battle.
The last sunset glow fought for a time against the
violent and unnatural dawn in the north.
As always the fighting intensified with the night. The
gun chorus reached thicker, heavier notes. Once a sheet
of violet flame, supernatural in its vast luminosity,
sprang from the earth, and, while we watched, speechless,
unbelieving, mounted to the very zenith and spread half
the immeasureable circle of the horizon. During the
several seconds it lasted details of the landscape leered
at us through a mauve daylight.
The end of the world might come like that. You mocked
your savage instinct to fall prostrate before a power
greater than the power of man.
" Some flares those Huns have! " you said to
your neighbor, but you weren't quite sure it was an
ordinary flare. Was it some new device?
The violet sheet fell from the sky like a wind-swept
curtain. The lesser fires resumed their flickering.
Rockets and flares streaked always upwards, so that we
lived in a chameleon twilight. It was as if a gigantic
and undreamed of catastrophe had happened, could not be
controlled, and threatened to sweep Europe. That men
fought in its heart that we would fight there, too, was a
fantastic imagining.
"Organizations ready?"
Everyone reported ready. So forward then into the midst
of this mad disaster!
The moment had obliterating demands. Our carriages were
overloaded. The fourgons were top heavy. Horse covers,
packs, and various paraphernalia were lashed to the tops.
Inside were our instruments of precision and
communication. A picket line, perhaps, and heavy tools
were slung from the axles in an attempt to lower the
center of gravity. Sometimes a hand reel cart flopped
drunkenly along behind. A sensitive child would have wept
at sight of us. Of the attributes of vagabonds we lacked
only one thing-a fortune teller.
That long, rough road down the hill was damned as
perfectly as once in our remote youth stumps had been.
Horses were damned by drivers. Drivers were damned by
non-commissioned officers. Non-commissioned officers were
damned by officers, officers were damned by other
officers in order of rank from bottom to top. That is in
a fashion of speaking. Probably the language was quite
polite, and it was only the intention that swore. At any
rate it got us on. We reached the foot of the hill at
last and turned into the main road amidst the ruins of
Cour-poil.
We halted at once in the shelter of broken walls. There
was a block ahead. Pretty soon motor lorries detached
themselves from it and stormed petulantly past. Others
wormed a way from the other direction. These were heavily
loaded. They demanded the right of way. Some of the
trucks, we saw, belonged to our division ammunition
train.
" What outfit, Buddy? " a chauffeur yelled at
us.
"305th Field Artillery," a man answered
thoughtlessly.
Angry voices rebuked his indiscretion. It was a spirit
that had grown on us steadily. At the front no one knows
what ears are about. The chauffeurs, however, recognizing
us as of the same division, bandied words.
"Believe me, you're going to some summer
resort."
"Where there's a will there's a way, but don't
forget your will."
Hey! you look as if you were moving from the Bronx to
Brooklyn."
We didn't have much repartee. We were too anxious for the
obstructing lorries to get by. An hour must have slipped
away before the jam was broken. As we lurched ahead a
message came down the column, repeated from mouth to
mouth.
"Follow the carriage in front closely to avoid shell
holes."
That meant that the shells were falling on this road too
fast for the pioneers. To dodge such holes, in spite of
the advice, moreover, seemed an impossibility. We
couldn't snake along from side to side in all that
traffic. We couldn't stop until there was a chance to get
past a hole. So we assigned dismounted men to walk ahead
of the precious fourgons. We threatened dire penalties if
they didn't give plenty of warning.
The forest of La Fere closed about us, shutting out the
flames ahead and the wan light of the moon. We could see
nothing. The man riding beside you was blurred by the
heavy pall. You glanced to right and left, trying to
imagine the form of the forest and the things it hid.
Your only clear sensation was of the intolerable stench
of death.
We halted. Would we never go on again?
A double column of foot soldiers shuffled past. They,
too, halted. We couldn't make out what service they
belonged to, but it became clear something was wrong with
them. They didn't seem to know where they were. They had
an idea they had got on the wrong road, but they weren't
sure. They stood there beside us for a long time, growing
more and more impatient.
So there we were hopelessly blocked, a rare target for a
shell or an air bomb.
One of the scarcely seen men lamented.
"Ah'd rather take my chawnces in the line than be
walked ta death."
"Not me," another objected. "Abeanheahol
Mistah shell a singin' now. He says: gonta getcha, gonta
getcha, gonta getcha. Bam! Done gotcha."'
What appeared to be a huge light flashed out ahead, and
was immediately extinguished. It showed us that the foot
soldiers near us were from a southern engineer outfit.
Their lungs were good. They burst into a huge and angry
chorus.
"Put that blank, blank match out."
Expressions of pity and disgust followed.
"Say, Bo! Put yo'sel on a plate an' hand yo'sel with
a knife and fo'k to Mistah Jerry. But don't use me fo the
gravy.~
" Hey, Captain, take me away from these city fellahs
that strike matches in the dark."
We all shared the shame of that one culprit. We tried to
spot him to teach him a lesson. But the thing had been
too quick, and the night was too friendly a protection.
We were from the city. Perhaps the game of concealment
came harder to us than to some others, but we thought we
had learned it better. We had, as we found out later.
That particular crime wasn't repeated.
By this time the engineers had decided that they'd better
try another road, so, without saying anything, they
calmly counter marched, blocking the road more completely
than before, and holding us up for another half hour,
dividing our column at the same time.
We got out of the ruck at last, and upon a clear road.
We made fast progress, urged by the necessity of reaching
Nesles Woods before daylight. The dead towns echoed to
our hurrying hoofs and wheels. And the walls shook to the
reverberations of heavy guns just ahead.
We entered the outskirts of R
Fere-en-Tardennois, still under shell fire. We slipped
through unmolested. Scarcely anything remained of the
town-the largest in the district. It was a heap of rubble
with a few walls, like torn masks. It might have been the
site of a prehistoric capital about which an archeologist
has commenced to excavate.
Near by batteries pounded away. Our horses, weary as they
were, grew nervous. They moved restlessly about at halts.
The men, on the other hand, forgetting their
surroundings, the warnings against gas, everything except
their great weariness, sank on the banks of ditches and
slept fitfully.
Daylight caught us again as we wound through the town of
Nesles. It seemed impossible we should ever reach a
bivouac at the time scheduled. Nesles was in ruins except
for its storied mediaeval tower, which shells had only
scarred.
Beyond the town was a steep road, recently laid by the
pioneers, which climbed to the forest.
Even from there the forest was haggard and shell torn.
The sloping fields between us and it were strewn with
graves, dug where their occupants had fallen. Most of
them had rough crosses, from which German helmets hung.
The horses were unequal to the hill. We manned the
wheels, and forced our way up. We entered between the
broken trees.
We felt we had arrived too late. There had been
aeroplanes in the distant sky. We had no doubt that the
Hun knew there would be that night an artillery bivouac
in Nesles Forest.
The place had been policed after a fashion. The stench of
death was less here than it had been at Courpoil. A
regiment of pioneers was already in possession. They had
removed such refuse of battle as they had been able to.
Everywhere about the forest floor were, coffin-shaped
holes. We guessed they were individual shelters from
shell and bomb fragments. We learned to call them
"funk holes," a term we later applied to far
more ambitious refuges. Anti-air guns opened all around
us.
Tsching! Tsching!
Two shell cases whistled down in our woods.
We put on our tin hats, but we knew they were no
protection against shell cases.
We recalled all the aeroplanes that had bothered us at
Doue. We asked the pioneers with a perfect confidence if
we didn't have the control of the air up here. We felt
that if the American air service was concentrated
anywheres it would be on this front.
The pioneers looked at us with pity.
"The Huns, they answered, "own the air here and
have a mortgage on the ether."
Usually they followed with accounts of American balloons
brought down by Hun planes, and unrestricted bombing
attacks. Our hearts sank. We knew we had been seen coming
in that morning. Yet we felt the pioneers must be wrong.
The money spent, the men enlisted in the air service, and
all those fellows flying about Coulommiers!
Before many days we accused the pioneers of uttering
conservative statements.
A messenger found Captain Ravenel and took him to the
Colonel. The Colonel introduced him to an officer who had
just reported as assigned to the regiment. His name was
Major George W. Easterday. He would take command of the
First Battalion. Captain Ravenel would return to the
command of his battery.
Major Easterday, we learned, had come originally from the
regular army coast artillery. He had entered the service
from civil life. He had been removed by a telegram from a
few days' dalliance in Paris after a lively share in the
advance north from Chateau Thierry, and shot back into
the show as a member of the 305th. He was destined to
remain with the regiment until it sailed from France.
So the forced march ended, and we were in the woods which
after disastrous experiments in other localities, was to
become the regimental echelon. We breakfasted, unstrapped
our packs, and stretched out to sleep. We were awakened
almost immediately by the news that there would be a
preliminary reconnaissance that afternoon. We studied our
maps in preparation. The little party rode from the
woods, and in an hour's time returned. There had been a
blunder somewheres, for the rendezvous had not been made
clear, and the various portions of the reconnaissance
hadn't got together. So a real reconnaissance was set for
early the next morning.
We dined to the mounting accompaniment of gun fire, and
crawled gratefully into our shelter tents, believing that
no amount of noise could keep us awake.
The old metaphor of the orchestra of the guns is
justified. Batteries and individual guns seem to have
their own tones. When a great many are firing
perpetually, as on this front, the tones blend into
crashing chords. We fell asleep to this gargantuan
lullaby.
After a few minutes the hideous screech of the gas alarm
had us up and snapping our respirators on. The screeching
died away. After a time the gas officers went around
singing out:
"Masks may be removed."
We went to sleep again. Again we were awakened by that
unholy screeching. It happened three times. We told
ourselves that the horns wouldn't awake us again, gas or
no gas.
On the heels of the last alarm something else aroused us.
We heard the throbbing whir of Hun aeroplanes. There were
plenty of targets on the Vesle, heaven knows, but we
remembered our fear that we had been seen coming into the
bivouac that morning. And the throbbing grew.
Ba-room-ba-room-ba-room-
As if the enaines missed fire rhythmically.
Then above the artillery we got the crunching detonations
of large air bombs. Those aeroplanes were coming nearer.
There was a squadron out, and if it wasn't after us it
would pass very close.
Ba-room-ba-rcom-ba-room-Always nearer, and the
detonations were louder now, and they came in salvos of
four, each burst half drowned by the next.
Nearly overhead we heard the petulant rattle of a machine
gun.
"That's the scout signalling to the bombers,"
someone said.
"Why," we asked irritably, "are our
aeroplanes back in cheerful places while these fellows
give us their droppings undisturbed? "
We thought of the other bivouacs, crowded with American
soldiers, with the Hun birds merrily hopping from one to
another.
The bombers responded to the scout, and their bombs fell
on the edge of our woods with roars that made the
artil-lery seem like childish fireworks. And you smiled
grimly as you thought of those fellows making us blow our
bugles all day long back near Coulommiers.
The Huns dropped several salvos, and throbbed away to
other pastures.
Men were killed in Nesles Woods that night, but our check
showed us that the 305th had escaped, and we crawled back
to bed, and went to sleep, and didn't answer any more
alarms until reveille dragged us out.
That was the first of many experiences on the Vesle with
Hun aeroplanes, working nearly undisturbed. Most men will
agree there is no form of attack less pleasant. You
approximate the sensations of an insect above which a
giant foot wavers, waiting to descend obliteratingly.