The Iron Division, National Guard of Pennsylvania, in the World War Part 4

Lieutenant Thomas B. W. Fales, of Philadelphia, now became commander of the little band, as the only officer left with the main body of the company. Lieutenants Edward Hitzeroth, also of Philadelphia, and Walter L. Swarts, of Scranton, had disappeared, prisoners in the hands of the Germans, and Lieutenant Martin Wheeler, of Moscow, Pa., also had been separated with a few men.

There were thirty-five men in Lieutenant Fales' command. He rallied and re-formed them and they began the backward fight to the support line.

They made it in the face of almost insurmountable odds and, what is more, they arrived with half a dozen prisoners. Enough men of the company had been picked up on the way to make up for casualties suffered during the running fight.

Lieutenant Wheeler, who had been cut off with part of a platoon early in the rush, ordered his men to lie down in the trenches, where they were better able to stand off the Germans. He himself took a rifle from the hands of a dead man and a supply of ammunition and clambered out of the trench. Absolutely alone, he scouted along through the woods until he found a route that was relatively free from the German advance.

Then he went back for his men, formed them and led them by the selected route, fighting as they went against such of the enemy as sought to deter them. All of this Lieutenant Wheeler performed while suffering intense pain from a wound of the hand, inflicted early in the engagement. After reaching the regimental lines, he had first-aid treatment for the wound and continued in the battle.

Lieutenant W. M. R. Crosman found a wounded corporal who was unable to walk. He remained with the corporal and they became entirely isolated from all other Americans. They were given up for lost until the next night, when a message arrived that a patrol from another American unit on another part of the battle front, miles away, had brought in the lieutenant and the corporal, both utterly exhausted and almost unbalanced from their experience.

The lieutenant had dressed the corporal's wound roughly and then had started to lead him in. They became lost and wandered about for hours.

At times the lieutenant carried the corporal on his back, when the wounded man became unable to walk. Again they were forced to take shelter in a thicket, when parties of Germans approached, and to lie, in imminent fear of death, until the enemy groups had pa.s.sed on. Finally they heard voices speaking in English and came on the American patrol.

A message came back to the regimental lines from the beleaguered, hard-pressed M Company for ammunition. Supply Sergeant Charles McFadden, 3d, of Philadelphia, set out with a detail to carry the ammunition forward. They were trapped in a little hamlet by the advancing Germans.

McFadden sent his men back on the run, as they were badly outnumbered, but himself remained behind to destroy the ammunition to prevent its falling into the hands of the Germans.

He saw men approaching him in the French uniform and believed he was safe, until they opened fire on him with rifles and machine guns--by no means the first instance in which the Germans made such use of uniforms other than their own. Sergeant McFadden saw it was hopeless to try longer to blow up his ammunition and fled. He ran into a machine gun manned by three Germans. He took them at an angle and before they could swing the gun around to bear on him, he was upon them. Two shots from his rifle and a swift lunge with the bayonet and the machine gun crew was out of the way forever.

The Germans were coming on, however, and to reach his own lines, McFadden had to run almost a mile up a steep hill. A bullet pa.s.sed through his sleeve, another through his gas mask, one through his canteen, four dented his steel helmet and another shot the stock off his rifle, but he himself was untouched. He had taken off his outer s.h.i.+rt because of the heat. As he came up the hill toward his own lines, his comrades, not recognizing him in that wildly running figure, opened fire on him. He dropped to the ground, ripped off his unders.h.i.+rt and waving it as a flag of truce, made his panting way into the lines.

The two companies of the 110th were pa.s.sing through almost exactly similar experiences. Company B was surrounded and split. After a fight of twenty-four hours, during which it was necessary time after time to charge the Huns with bayonets and rally the group repeatedly to keep it from disintegrating, Captain Fish, whose home is in New Brighton, with Lieutenant Claude W. Smith, of New Castle, and Lieutenant Gilmore Hayman, of Berwyn, fought their way back with one hundred and twenty-three men. They brought with them several prisoners, and carried twenty-six of their own wounded.

The rest of the company, surrounded in the woods, also made a running fight of it, but was scattered badly and drifted back to the regimental lines in little groups, leaving many comrades behind, dead, wounded and prisoners.

The same kind of thing befell Company C, of which a little more than half returned, Captain Truxal, of Meyersdale, Pa., and Lieutenants Wilbur Sch.e.l.l and Samuel S. Crouse were surrounded by greatly superior forces and taken prisoner with a group of their men.

Corporal Alvey C. Martz, of Glencoe, Somerset County, with a patrol of six men, was out in advance of the company stringing barbed wire right along the river bank, when the German bombardment began. They dropped into sh.e.l.l holes. At the point where they lay, the wire remained intact and the Hun flood pa.s.sed around them. When the hail of sh.e.l.ls pa.s.sed on in advance of the charging German lines, they arose, to find themselves completely cut off from their comrades.

"We've got to fight boys, so we might as well start it ourselves," said Martz, and his matter-of-fact manner had a strong steadying effect on his men.

Remember that it was the first time any of the youths had been face to face with the Germans. It was the first time they had ever been called on to fight for their lives. Less than a year before they had been quiet civilians, going about their peaceful trades. Martz had lived with his parents on a mountain farm in a remote part of Pennsylvania, six miles from the nearest railway. Add to this the fact that they had learned in their brief soldiering career to lean heavily upon their officers for initiative, instructions and advice, and what these men did attains epic proportions.

They came out of their sh.e.l.l holes shooting. No crafty concealment, no game of hide and seek with the Hun for them. Lest their firing might not attract enough attention, they let out l.u.s.ty yells. Groups of Germans before them, apparently believing they were being attacked from the flank by a strong force, fled. The seven men gained the shelter of the woods. For two hours they worked their way through the forest, fighting desperately when necessary, and hunting anxiously for the place where they knew their company had been. It was not there.

When, at last, they glimpsed American uniforms through the trees they thought they had come up with the company. But it was only Sergeant Robert A. Floto, of Meyersdale, Pa., of their own company, with half a dozen men.

Corporal Martz relinquished command of the party to Sergeant Floto. A little farther on they met another American, who joined the party. He was "mad all through" and on the verge of tears from anxiety and exasperation at his own helplessness.

"There were seven of us cut off from the company," he told them, "and we ran slap-bang into all the Boche in the world. I was several feet behind the other guys and the Fritzes didn't see me. It came so sudden, the boys didn't have a chance to do anything. When I took a peek through the trees, about a million Germans were around, and my gang was just being led back toward the river by two Hun officers. I figured I couldn't do anybody any good by firing into that mob, so I came away to look for help."

"Guess we'd better see what we can do for those fellows," remarked Martz in the same cool, almost disinterested manner he had used before.

Everybody wanted to go, but Martz insisted it was a job for only two men. As a companion he picked John J. Mullen, of Philadelphia. Mullen was not a former Guardsman. He was a selected man, sent from Camp Meade several months before with a draft to fill the ranks of the Twenty-eighth Division. But he had proved himself in many a training camp to be, as his comrades put it, "a regular fellow."

So Corporal Martz and Mullen, surrounded by a goodly part of the Crown Prince's crack troops, 3,000 miles from home, in a country they never had seen before, cut loose from the little group of their comrades, turned their backs on the American lines and hiked out through the woods toward Hunland to succor their fellows in distress.

The little prisoner convoy was not making great speed and the two Americans soon overtook them. The first torrent of the German advance had now pa.s.sed far to their rear. The two Americans circled around through the woods and lay in ambush for the party. The prisoners, because of the narrowness of the paths through the woods, were marching in single file, one German officer in the lead, the other bringing up the rear.

"You take the one in front and I'll take that bird on the end," said Martz to Mullen. Martz was something of a sharpshooter. Once he had gone to camp with the West Virginia National Guard, just over the state line from his home, and came back with a medal as a marksman, although he was only subst.i.tuting for a man who was unable to attend the camp.

They drew careful bead. Out of the corner of his eye Mullen could watch Martz, at the same time he sighted on his German officer. Martz nodded his head and the two rifles cracked simultaneously. Both officers dropped dead. The prisoners looked about them, stunned with surprise.

Martz and Mullen stepped out of the woods. There was no time for thanks or congratulations. They hurried back the way they had come. The released men had no trouble arming themselves with rifles and ammunition from the dead lying in the woods.

They soon overtook Sergeant Floto and his men. The party was now of more formidable size and as the Germans by this time were broken up into rather small groups, the Americans no longer felt the necessity of skulking through the woods, but started out as a belligerent force, not hunting fight, but moving not a step to avoid one.

A few hours later they joined another group of survivors, under Captain Charles L. McLain, of Indiana, Pa., who took command. He vetoed the daring rush through the Hun-infested woods by daylight and ordered that the party lie concealed during the day and proceed to the American lines after nightfall.

"We need a rear guard to protect us against surprise," said Captain McLain, and after what had gone before it seemed but natural that Corporal Martz and Private Mullen should be selected for the job when they promptly volunteered. With little further adventure the party arrived in the regimental lines after about thirty-six hours of almost continuous contact with the Germans.

In each regiment the survivors of this first real battle of the troops of the Pennsylvania Division were formed into one company for the time being, until replacement drafts arrived to make up for the heavy losses.

This, then, is the tale of what happened when, as so many soldier letters have related, these four companies were "cut to pieces," and this is why L and M companies, of the 109th, and B and C companies, of the 110th, figured so largely in the casualties for a time.

CHAPTER V

THE GUARD STANDS FAST

Back in the regimental lines, while the four companies were being mauled badly by the Germans, anxiety had gone steadily from bad to worse.

Enduring the storm of sh.e.l.ls with which the Germans continued to thresh the back areas for miles, the troops did not have, for some time after the battle began, the excitement of combat to loosen their tight-strung nerves.

They saw the French come filtering out of the woods before them, and watched eagerly for their comrades, but their comrades did not come and, as time pa.s.sed, it was realized the detached companies were having a hard time.

The vanguard of the Prussians reached the edge of the woods shortly before daybreak. Men on watch in the American trenches saw hulking gray-clad figures slinking among the trees close to the forest's fringe and opened fire. As the day grew the firing on both sides waxed hotter, and soon a long line of the enemy advanced from the shelter of the bois.

They were met by a concentration of rifle, machine gun and cannon fire such as no force could withstand. The first waves seemed simply to wither away like chaff before a wind. The following ones slackened their pace, hesitated a moment or two then turned and ran for the timber.

From that moment, our men were themselves again. They saw the Germans were not invincible. They themselves had broken up a Prussian Guards'

attack. All their confidence, self-reliance, initiative, elan, came to the fore. They felt themselves unbeatable.

But one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one repulse of an enemy make a victory. Time after time the Germans returned to the a.s.sault.

Groups of them gained the wheat fields, where they felt protected from the fire of our men. Obviously, they expected to crawl through the wheat until they were on the southern edge of the fields, where, lying closely protected, they could pick the Americans off at leisure.

Whole platoons of our men volunteered to meet this move and were permitted to crawl forward and enter the wheat. Then ensued a game of hide and seek, Germans and Americans stalking each other as big game is stalked, flat on their faces in the growing grain.

But the Germans were no match for Americans at this kind of thing. There is something--a kind of heritage from our pioneer, Indian-fighting ancestors, probably--that gives to an American lad a natural advantage at this sort of fighting, and scores of Germans remained behind in the shelter of the wheat when the tide of battle had pa.s.sed far away, with the spires of grain nodding and whispering a requiem over them.

Before dawn of that fifteenth of July, word was received from Colonel McAlexander, commanding the 39th Infantry of the old regular army, which was in front and to the right of the 109th, that the Germans had crossed the river and penetrated the Allied lines. He added that if they gained a foothold in the Bois de Conde, or Conde Wood, a high, wooded tract just north of Monthurel, the position of the 39th would be seriously menaced.

Captain William C. Williams, commanding Company H, 109th, and Captain Edward J. Meehan, commanding Company D, of the same regiment, and both Philadelphians, were ordered into the wood. The companies were led out and took positions on both sides of a narrow ravine in the wood.

Presently the French began to appear, falling back. First they came one or two at a time, then in larger groups. As they hurried by they gave some indication of the heavy fighting they had gone through and which still was going forward up toward the river.

Captain Williams took a platoon of his company to establish it in a strong position to protect the flank of the company. While doing so, the firing, which had been growing closer all the time, broke out right at hand and Captain Williams discovered he and his men were cut off from the company. The Captain was shot in the hand at the first fire and several of his men were wounded, but the Captain rallied his little party and they fought their way back and rejoined the company. Captain Williams was wounded twice more, but so serious was the emergency that he had a first aid dressing applied and continued the fight without further treatment.

Both Captain Williams and Captain Meehan since have been promoted to the rank of Major and have been awarded Distinguished Service Crosses. Major Williams is an old regular army man. With the rank of sergeant, he was attached to the former First Pennsylvania Infantry as an instructor and served in this capacity during the Mexican border duty in 1916. Later he was commissioned Captain and a.s.signed to command Company H.