The Iron Division, National Guard of Pennsylvania, in the World War Part 5

A party of Huns made their way through the woods to a copse on the flank of the first battalion of the 109th, where they established a strong machine gun nest. From that position their fire was especially hara.s.sing to the battalion, and it was found necessary to clean out that nest if the position was to be maintained.

Accordingly Captain Meehan led Company D out from the shelter of their trench without the special protection of artillery fire. A piece of sh.e.l.l caught Captain Meehan in the shoulder and the impact half swung him around, but he kept on. Captain Felix R. Campuzano, also of Philadelphia, with B Company, went out in support of Captain Meehan's men, and Captain Campuzano was struck in the hand.

Company D spread out like a fan and stalked that copse as smoothly and faultlessly as ever a black buck was stalked in the heart of Africa by an expert hunter. Occasionally a doughboy would get a glimpse of a Boche gunner. There would be a crack from the thin American line, always advancing, and virtually every shot meant one Hun less. There were few wasted bullets in that fight. The storm of lead from the machine guns was appreciably less by the time the Americans entered the shelter of the woods. Once they reached the trees, there was a wild clamor of shouts, cries, shots, the clatter of steel on steel.

Presently this died down and Americans began to emerge from the woods.

Not so many came back as went out, but of the Huns who had crept forward to establish the nest, none returned to their own lines. Our men brought back several enemy machine guns.

Captain Williams, still with H Company in a well-advanced position, was pressed closely by Huns, but believed his position could be held with help. He despatched George L. MacElroy, of Philadelphia, a bugler, with a message to Colonel Brown, asking for a.s.sistance.

Nineteen years old, and only recently graduated from his status as one of the best Boy Scouts in his home city, young MacElroy trudged into the open s.p.a.ce before Colonel Brown's quarters, saluted and stood stiff and soldierly while he delivered his message. He looked very young and boyish, though his grimy face was set in stern, wearied lines under his steel helmet.

Colonel Brown read the message and started to give an order but checked himself as he noticed the messenger swaying slightly on his feet.

"My boy, how long has it been since you had food?" he asked.

The question, and particularly the kindly tone, were too much for the overwrought nerves of the lad.

"Forty-eight hours, sir," he responded, and then his stoicism gave way and he collapsed.

"Get something to eat here and take a sleep," said the Colonel. "You need not go back."

"No, sir," was the reply. "My company is up there in the woods, fighting hard, and I am going back to it. Captain Williams depends on me, sir."

And back he went, although he was persuaded to rest a few minutes while a lunch was prepared. He was asked to describe his experiences on that journey through the German-infested woods, but the sum of his description, given in a deprecatory manner, was: "I just crawled along and got here."

With such spirit as this actuating our men, it is small wonder that the Germans found themselves battling against a stone wall of defense that threatened momentarily to topple forward on them and crush them.

MacElroy was wounded slightly and suffered a severe case of sh.e.l.l shock a few days later. He was in the hospital many weeks and was awarded the French War Cross for his bravery.

Bugler MacElroy was by no means the only lad who did not eat for forty-eight hours. Those in the forward lines had entered the fight with only two days' rations. Many of them threw this away to lighten themselves for the contest. Subsequently food reached them only intermittently and in small quant.i.ties, for it was almost an impossible task to carry it up from the rear through that vortex of fighting.

Sleep they needed even more than food. For five days and nights hundreds of the men slept only for a few moments at a time, not more than three hours all told. They became as automatons, fighting on though they had lost much of the sense of feeling. It was a.s.serted by medical men that this loss of sleep acted almost as an anesthetic on many, so that wounds that ordinarily would have incapacitated them through sheer pain, were regarded hardly at all. When opportunity offered, more than one went sound asleep on his feet, leaning against the wall of a trench.

After that first splendid repulse of the German attack, the Crown Prince's forces, with typical Teuton stubbornness, launched a.s.sault after a.s.sault against our line. Officers could be seen here and there, mingling with the German soldiers, beating them and kicking them forward in the face of the murderous American fire.

It was during this almost continuous game of attack and repulse that there occurred one of the most remarkable and dramatic events of the whole period. The Boche had been gnawing into the lines of the 110th, in the center of the Pennsylvania front, until it seemed nothing could stop them. Probably the most terrific pressure along that sector was exerted against this point.

For twenty-five hours the 110th had given virtually constant battle, and officers and men felt they soon must give way and fall back. Y. M. C. A.

men serving with the Americans had established themselves in a dugout in the face of a low bluff facing away from the enemy, where they and their supplies were reasonably safe from sh.e.l.l fire, and from these dugouts they issued forth, with a courage that won the admiration of the fighting men, to carry chocolate, cigarettes and other bits of comfort to the hard pressed doughboys and to render whatever aid they could.

Several of them pleaded to be allowed to take rifles and help withstand the onslaught, but this, of course was forbidden.

The Rev. Francis A. La Violette, of Seattle, Wash., one of the Y. M. C.

A. workers, had lain down in the dugout for a few minutes' rest when he heard a flutter of wings about the entrance. He found a tired and frightened pigeon, with a message tube fastened to its leg. Removing the carrier, he found a message written in German, which he was unable to read. He knew the moment was a critical one for the whole line. He knew there were grave fears that the Germans were about to break through and that if they did there would be little to hold them from a dash on Paris.

He rushed the message to headquarters, where it was translated. It was a cry of desperation from the Germans, intended for their reserve forces in the rear. It said that, unless reinforcements were sent at once, the German line at that point would be forced to retire. The pigeon had become lost in the murk of battle and delivered the message to the wrong side of the fighting front.

In half an hour word had gone down the line, and tanks, artillery and thousands of French troops were rus.h.i.+ng to the threatened point. With this a.s.sistance and the knowledge that the Germans were already wavering, the Pennsylvanians advanced with determination and hurled the enemy back. Headquarters was dumbfounded, when prisoners were examined, to learn that six divisions of Prussians, about 75,000 men, had been opposing the Allied force and had been compelled to call for help.

On the right of our line the enemy thrust forward strong local attacks, driving our men from St. Agnan, and La Chapelle-Manthodon. St. Agnan, three miles south of the nearest spot on the Marne, was the farthest point of the German advance. Almost immediately the 109th Infantry and 103d Engineers, in conjunction with French Chausseurs Alpin (Blue Devils), launched a counter attack which drove the Germans pell mell out of the villages and started them on their long retreat.

Just before this counter attack began the 109th was being hara.s.sed again by a machine gun nest, and this time Company K was sent out to "do the job." It did, in as workmanlike a manner as D Company had on the other occasion. Lieutenant Walter Fiechter, of Philadelphia, was wounded, as were several enlisted men.

When the counter attack finally was launched Captain Walter McC. Gearty, also a Philadelphian, acting as major of the First Battalion of the 109th, led the advance of that regiment. They ran into a machine gun nest that was spitting bullets like a summer rain. The stream of lead caught Captain Gearty full in the front, and he dropped, the first officer of his rank in the old National Guard of Pennsylvania to meet death in the war.

His men, frantic at the loss of a beloved officer, plunged forward more determinedly than ever and wiped out that machine gun nest to a man, seized the guns and ammunition and turned them on the already fleeing Boche.

The Americans had discovered by this time the complete truth of what their British instructors had told them--that the Hun hates and fears the bayonet more than any other weapon of warfare. So they wasted few bullets. Rifle fire, they discovered, was a mighty thing in defense, when a man has a chance to steady himself and aim with precision while the enemy is doing the advancing. But when conditions are reversed, the best rifleman has little chance to s.h.i.+ne in pressing forward in an attack, so it was the bayonet that was used this time.

The men had gone "over the top" without a barrage, but they had the best protection in the world--self-confidence, which the Hun had not. The Prussians had had a taste of American fighting such as they had thought never to experience, and for thousands of them the mere sight of that advancing line of grim, set faces, preceded by bristling bayonet points, was enough. They did not wait to be "tickled" with the point.

Others, however, stood their ground boldly enough and gave battle. As had been the case for several months, they depended little on the individual rifleman, but put virtually their whole trust in machine guns and artillery. With their ranks shorn of their old-time confidence and many of their men fleeing in panic rather than come to grips with the Americans and French, there was little chance to stem that charge, however, and the enemy fell back steadily, even rapidly, to the Marne.

CHAPTER VI

BOCHE IN FULL FLIGHT

It was in following up the German retreat from their "farthest south"

back to the Marne, that our men learned the truth of what they had heard and read so often, that the German is as good a fighter as any in the world when he is in ma.s.ses, but degenerates into a sickening coward when left alone or in small groups.

It was during this time, too, that they learned the truth of the oft-repeated charge that Germans were left behind, chained to machine guns so they could not escape, to hinder an advancing enemy and make his losses as heavy as possible.

Repeatedly groups of our men advanced on machine gun nests in the face of vicious fire until they were in a position to make a sudden rush and, on reaching the guns, were greeted by uplifted hands and bleats of "Americans, kamerads! kamerads!"

On the nature of the individual Americans depended what happened.

Sometimes the Germans were released from their chains and sent to the rear as prisoners. Sometimes the bayonet was used as the only answer to such tactics. And who shall blame either action?

When, as frequently happened, it was a case of man to man, the Pennsylvanians found that it was a rare German who would stand up and fight. Long afterward they told gleefully of finding, here and there, a Hun who bravely gave battle, for our men frankly preferred to kill their men fighting rather than to slaughter them or take them prisoner.

Some of the Americans were so eager to keep close on the heels of the retreating Huns that they did not stop long enough thoroughly to clean up machine gun nests and other strong points. Groups of the Boche hid until the main body of the Americans had pa.s.sed on, then raked them from the rear with machine gun and rifle fire, snipers concealed in trees being particularly annoying in this way.

In scores of instances our men found machine guns and their gunners both tied fast in trees, so that neither could fall, even when the operator was shot. It was reported reliably but unofficially that machine gun nests had been found where the Germans, in the short time they had been on the ground, had arranged aerial tramways of rope from tree to tree, so that if a machine gun nest were discovered in one tree and the gunners shot, the guns could be slid over to another tree on the ropes and another group of men could set them going again.

Many of the Huns "played dead" until the American rush was past, then opened fire on the rear. This is an old trick, but Allied soldiers who tried it early in the war discovered that the Germans countered it by having men come along after a charging body of troops, bayoneting everybody on the field to make sure all were dead. The Germans, however, knew they were safe in trying it with our men, for they were well aware Americans did not bayonet wounded men or dead bodies.

Sergeant McFadden, who has been mentioned before, was making his way through the woods with a single companion when he noticed an apparently dead Boche in a rifle pit. He got a glimpse of the face, however, and noticed the eyes were closed so tightly the man was "squinting" from the effort. McFadden jabbed his bayonet in the German's leg, whereupon he leaped to his feet and seized the rifle from the astonished American's hand. He threw it up to fire, but before he could pull the trigger, McFadden's companion shot him.

At one point, below Fossoy, the Germans not only went back to the river, but actually crossed it in the face of the 110th Infantry's advance.

Reaching the banks of the river, however, the enemy was within the protection of his big guns, which immediately laid down such fire that it was utterly impossible for the Americans and French to remain. Having had a real taste of triumph, the Pennsylvanians were loath to let go, but fell back slowly, unpressed by the Germans, to their former positions.

It was on this forward surge back to the Marne that Pennsylvania's soldiers began to get real first-hand evidence of Hun methods of fighting--the kind of thing that turned three-fourths of the world into active enemies of them and their ways, and sickened the very souls of all who learned what creatures in the image of man can do.

They came on machine gun nests, in the advance between Mezy, Moulins and Courtemont-Varennes, to find their comrades who had been taken prisoner in the earlier fighting tied out in front in such a way as to fall first victims to their friends' fire should an attack be made on the gunners.

Men told, with tears rolling down their cheeks, how these brave lads, seeing the advancing Americans, shouted to them: