“long ’bout april second we passed through toul and hit the american front. the first division outfits was relieved there by us. most of our gang got billeted ’round a placed called boucq. i was at corniéville before we went into positions. our billets were the worst things a man could imagine. dirty, cold, and hardly any bunks at all.
“we soon found out that we was goin’ to fight a different kind of guerre down there than we had been doin’. the country was so muddy and soft that you couldn’t dig in and make dug-outs. everything was on the ground. course my battery had to get the worse place of all—up in a swamp. if you got off the little duckboard walks you had to get a detail to pull you out of the mud. the positions that we had was on the germans’ maps, as they had already got a gun belonging to the first division, before we took the position over.
“two days after we got our pieces layed on some boche targets they began throwin’ ’em over at us. that was the first time we’d ever been under real shell-fire in the positions. it was a regular circus. old bill conway was on gas guard at the time. they gave us a klaxon for a gas alarm, unless it’s possible to rig up some kind of a tin gong to heat on. well, bill, he was walkin’ post swingin’ the ford klaxon ’round, just as uninterested in the guerre as if he had been walkin’ post in a safe coast artillery fort. he had been told to sound that klaxon in case of gas. a big boy whistled on the way. sounds just like the whine of a dyin’ wildcat. something terrible to listen to, believe me, till you get kind of fed up on the stuff.
“bang—bluey! that two-twenty—we call ’em barrack bags, they’re so damn big—landed ’bout thirty feet from our last latrine and sent fragments of itself and trees, with about a ton of dirt, in all directions. old conway, with his eighteen years of continued service, started cranking that klaxon for all he was worth as he ran toward a bunkhouse.
“bang! bang! bang!
“the heinies were puttin’ ’em over for fair and too damn close to be interestin’. course everybody jerked on the old gas-mask. but bill conway was so excited and scared till he clean forgot all about his own mask—all he could do was sound that klaxon and shout, ‘gas!’ the skipper came tearin’ out of his b. c. station, gas-mask and all. the first thing he saw was conway without a mask. ‘put your mask on, you boob, ’ain’t you got any sense? i’ll court martial you for disregardin’ orders.’ conway drops the klaxon and pulls the mask over his bean and face toot sweet.
“corporal reynolds, who was gas non-com., comes up about that time and asks bill what the devil he sounded the gas alarm for. bill says, ‘we’re gettin’ gassed.’ reynolds, of course, was expected to know gas from ordinary fresh air, bein’ as how he was the gas non-com., so he pulled his mask off and sniffed ’round considerable. ‘hell afire,’ says he, ‘there ain’t no gas.’ everybody took off their masks and the skipper gave conway extra fatigue for causin’ such a disturbance.
“all durin’ the time that they was arguin’ ’bout the gas the old shells were sailing right over our heads and hittin’ pretty close. one guy got a splinter in the fat of his thigh and deacon o’tell’s underclothes were ripped off a line where he had ’em dryin’. but that was all the casualties we had that day. you see, the woods was mighty tall and strong there and they sorta shielded us from the fragments and hunks.
“things rattled on that way every day. we used to get shelled every afternoon ’round three or four o’clock. couple of the boys got it pretty soon and they carted ’em off to a hospital. never seen or heard of ’em since.
“the monjayin’ was pas bon. never got any sugar in the coffee, and as for milk—well, there wasn’t any ’round them diggin’s. o. d., that’s one thing that got my goat a long time. you read ’bout all this hooverizin’ stuff. how the folks back home is doin’ without sugar—havin’ wheatless, meatless, fireless and all kind of days so the men at the front can get the best monjayin’ there is—and we was starvin’ a good many times. course if we hadn’t been americans we’d have kicked and raised an awful smell, but bein’ a bunch of yankees and knowin’ what we was up against in this guerre, we just fooled ’em and kept on regardless. now i ain’t sayin’ this so much for myself, cause i’m pretty hefty and can get along. but we had a bunch of little guys up there that weren’t more than a bunch of strings. those kids used to stay up all night luggin’ ninety-five-pound shells—gettin’ wet most of the time—then dive into their cold bunks, cushay ’bout two hours and get up to monjay. what the hell do you think they’d get? maybe a thin slice or two of bacon—hardtack most of the time, black coffee with no sugar, and that’s all. fat breakfast for a fightin’ man. you can’t blame nobody for them things except the people back at the ports and in the s. o. s. who are supposed to get the eats up to us.
“that’s a rotten, damn shame, because we always got good eating back where i was—fresh meats—vegetables—butter—jam—milk in the coffee all the time,” interrupted o. d.
“listen to that,” exploded jimmy. “there you are—everybody for himself in this army. those ginks back there ain’t worryin’ much ’bout us guys that’s fightin’ this guerre. ‘send ’em up a carload of “corn-willy” and a train of hardtack—that’ll be enough to keep ’em goin’ another month or two,’ that’s what they say down in the s. o. s., i guess.
“round about april tenth the boches thought they’d give our lines a good feel, so they came over strong and sent gas barrages and high explosive mixed up with beaucoup shrapnel and other stuff, along with their doughboys. this happened up in the bois br?lé—which means burned woods in frog lingo. now you might think that our boys, bein’ a bit green at the guerre stuff, would have been sick to their stomachs, or somethin’ like that after gettin’ such rough treatment from the boches, but it wasn’t that way at all. i believe that most of the doughboys was just itchin’ for a good battle, anyway. the way they waded into the boches was big stuff. banged ’em all over the lots. when the ammunition gave out the fellows started wallopin’ ’em with their fists and the butt-ends of rifles. you know boches ain’t no good when it comes to fightin’ at close quarters. in fact, if you take ’em out of that close formation stuff that they pull when comin’ over—well, they ain’t worth a hurrah—so when the yanks shoved their fists in the snouts it was finee toot sweet.
“the battlin’ kept up for about three or four days. every time the boches tried to get a footin’ in appremont we’d throw ’em out again. soon they got tired, seein’ how impossible it was to stay there, and went back to their trenches and dug-outs.
“the boches stayed quiet until the night of april nineteenth, or rather first thing in the mornin’ of the twentieth. i was up in a position so close to the front-line trenches that you could throw hand grenades at a yankee doughboy, if he was fool enough to stick his bean over the parapet. about ten men from each battery had been detailed to man a ninety-five-millimeter battery—some old-fashioned french guns, relics of the war in 1870.
“well, o. d., they can talk ’bout battles till they’re blue in the face, but i’ll always claim that the battle of seicheprey which was pulled off that mornin’ was the first big battle of the guerre that this army ever got mixed up in. we lost five hundred men that one night and the boches lost a hell of a lot more—so you can judge by that.
“funny as the devil how a man kinda knows when somethin’ big is comin’ off. but you do. every night there’d be beaucoup rockets and star-shells goin’ up. but this night there was more than beaucoup, if you know what that means. the way those red and different colored rockets began goin’ up made me think that a bunch of pink, yellow, and red snakes had been turned loose in heaven and was crawlin’ ’round the sky. now and then a star-shell would go up and bust. then you could see the trenches and no man’s land. but that’s all. there wasn’t a thing stirrin’. not a sound. almost too quiet to be safe.
“just at the beginnin’ of one o’clock a german gun boomed. then hell broke loose all along our front. never heard such an infernal noise in all my life. sounded like a bunch of demons poundin’ on brass-drums with trip-hammers. toot sweet our guns began to talk back. they got us up to the pits and we started to man them crazy-looking ninety-five-millimeter stove-pipes. that’s what the cannon looked like, anyway.
“shells was whizzin’ in from every direction. high explosive cracked over our beans and rained down like hail. rat-ta-tat! ra-ta-tat! bang! bluey! smash! that was all we could hear up and down the lines. the barrages roared away like barbarian music. pretty soon the noise hurt my ears so till i couldn’t try to listen to orders. just worked away like a mechanical man.
“we started to fire just as a shell spilled its load near the first piece. god! the screech of them three boys that got all torn up was enough to tear a man’s ear-drums to shreds—couldn’t help but hear ’em even with the bangin’ of the guns.
“all of us was too busy rammin’ shells in our piece and firin’ the thing to notice much that was goin’ on, but the flames from the burstin’ shells and the flares made it almost as bright as day ever gets to be in this country. the yellow light was kinda blindin’ as it came in spurts and jerks. i looked ahead of us, down toward the trenches and no man’s land. the boche infantry was coming straight at us with fixed bayonets. i ain’t jokin’ you, boy, but there was some kind of a cold thing chasin’ up and down my old spine for a few minutes. i could almost see our doughboys strainin’ down in their trenches waitin’ to get up and at ’em.
“at last they let ’em go to it. it was some smash-up when they hit them germans. the boches was at least five to one stronger than us and their weight counted enough to make us fall back to the streets of seicheprey.
“i speak of streets and seicheprey as if it might have been a regular village. but it wasn’t. seicheprey was just like a village ghost. not a house standin’ up—everythin’ littered about. stones, bricks, wood heaps, rubbish, barbed-wire entanglements were in the streets and every place. the fightin’ down there was all hand to hand.
“we had been told to fall back with the infantry in case it was necessary to let the boches come on so that our reinforcements could get up and give us a hand. but lieutenant davis, who was runnin’ our battery, was off that fallin’-back stuff. he says, ‘stick to it, boys, and give ’em hell!’ we stuck all right, but it was hot stickin’.
“there was one boy only about eighteen years old in our crew, and when johnson got his arm ripped off by shrapnel and it flew off and hit jackson, the kid, he got up from the blow a wild man. that’s one of the worst things i’ve seen in this guerre.
“jackson’s face was drippin’ blood and he was swingin’ johnson’s arm around to hit the boys that was tryin’ to get him out of the pit. it’s damn hard to work with a madman next to you cursing and prayin’ in the same breath. finally they cornered him and carried him out. johnson was stone dead, o’ course, and they had to get him out, as we was steppin’ all over him and trippin’ up. sergeant broadhead and shorty williams picked poor johnson up and was gettin’ back toward a dug-out, when high explosive got ’em both—scooped broadhead’s stomach right off him and gashed the legs off of shorty. course we heard ’em groanin’ as the noise of the battle would go up and down just like a piece of music. but they quit sufferin’ soon, as both the lads went west toot sweet.
“all liaison with the other outfits was shot to hell, and we could only guess at what was goin’ on with the doughboys and batteries. from the rifle and machine-gun firin’ and the shoutin’ and cursin’, too—for there was beaucoup of that, and it sounded worse than the barrages, i judged that there must be some awful battlin’ down in topsy-turvy seicheprey. accordin’ to doughboys that i saw later, the boches got mashed up all over that place.
“you see, when the scrappin’ started down in seicheprey it wasn’t in formation. everybody was by himself—or almost that way. that made it rotten for the boches, as they ain’t got any guts once they’re alone. so the doughboys whaled ’em for a bunch of ghouls. tell me they stripped right down from helmets on and started in bare fist or with bayonets.
“the boches got some kind of a signal back to their batteries to throw over gas, and all of a sudden it looked as if the night had gone green. green is the gas warnin’, you know.
“‘gas! gas!’ you could hear that cry everywhere when the noise of the battle would let you. we stopped workin’ our piece long enough to jerk gas-masks on. i swear but we looked like a bunch of devils with them things on, ’specially when the flames would shoot up around us.
“our gang was gettin’ it pretty hot ’round the gun-pits and there was so many of the fellows wounded and lyin’ out beyond the pits that the sanitary guys couldn’t drag ’em in fast enough. most of these wounded had been on the ammunition details and were hit on the way to the guns with shells. every forty-five minutes a few of us would get relieved and crawl into the dug-out for a minute’s rest. the sanitary men asked for volunteers to help ’em get the wounded in. every man who was on relief at that minute jumped up and went out to bring the boys in. that’s the kind of spirit they had.
“a chap by the name of wilson from f battery had gone out to bring in some other lad and he got both of his own legs blown off. my old pal, frank gordon, heard wilson moanin’ out there and he ran out to get him.
“i’ll never forget what happened just as frank got on top of the little trench that ran ’round our gun. he had wilson’s legless body slung over his back. shrapnel screamed like a hell-cat and good old gordon’s left arm and part of his head were jerked right out of socket and went flyin’ over our heads. gordon and wilson toppled out of sight. i saw it all and couldn’t stop myself. i jumped the trench, grabbed the first moanin’ body i come to. couldn’t see ’em as there wasn’t so much flares goin’, and ran for the dug-out that they was usin’ as a first-aid station. i found out that i had brought ray mason in.”
