USA > Kansas > Shawnee County > Honor roll : Shawnee County, Kansas > Part 2
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Virtually all of the division had entrained at Eu or at other railroad points near there. On this journey, the men came to understand why someone had written "sunny France," for good weather attended through a beautiful green country.
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The men rode in the famed "Hommes 40, chevaux 8," as the little French freight cars were universally called. The four-wheeled cars looked flimsy to eyes used to considering the big, sturdy American box cars, but when one of those long trains got under way it moved with a dash and a bound which gave a good idea of France at war.
Headquarters was next set up at Arches, which the natives called "Arsh," but which we usually referred to as "Archie." Elements of the division were scattered about the countryside, and some of them unloaded at the wrong places, so that they drew long hikes as the result.
GENERAL MCCLURE BECOMES COMMANDER.
June 15 Major General Wright was put in com- mand of a corps and he left the division. Brig. Gen. Nathaniel F. McClure, who had commanded the 69th Infantry Brigade since May 26, took over command of the division, and Colonel McMahon was acting commander of the brigade.
June 17, when the rain had commenced again, orders were received to prepare to move. June 17 also produced a big mail delivery and a payday. Al- together it was a large occasion.
The 2nd Battalion of the 138th had the honor of being the first unit in the 35th to go to the front. Maj. Norman B. Comfort commanded it and the companies were under Captains Hundley, Lloyd, McDonald and Christ. Seventy trucks carried the men on a day lit by brilliant sunshine. The course lay through Arches, and up the Valley of the Moselle. At 5:55 p. m. the first truck passed through a tunnel at Bussang, and started down into a beautiful valley. They were now in the country which had been Germany up to the beginning of the war. The tunnel was the boundary line.
CHEERED BY ALSATIAN GIRLS.
Yellow-haired Alsatian girls from the dusty road- side shouted welcome, waved their hands hospitably and threw flowers into the trucks. The men were unanimous in the belief that it was a bully neighbor- hood to hold a war in, and everyone felt sure he was going to do well in this country.
In the town of Wesserling the men slept in a great barracks which formerly had been a German head- quarters. The town was really a little city set high in the mountains, with good hotels, and many shops and little cafes scattered about. These received a flattering business from the boys, whose pockets held their first pay for three months.
That march on the night of June 19 from Wes- serling to Bussat, though it was less than a year ago, is already beginning to take on the most and verdure of traditions. It was a killing hike on the men, who carried full packs up a switch back mountain road.
Each man carried more than sixty pounds of equipment, and some of them several pounds more. One man, I remember, quarreled and grumbled all night long about a 25-pound bag of machine gun ammunition which he had been detailed to carry. He was always just about to throw it away, and a dozen times he swore fervently that he would not carry it another step, even if they court-martialed him and shot him, but he arrived at camp at 4 the next morning with it. Private Bob Hoard carried his own pack and rifle, and the pack of his worn out bunkle. That was a classic feat of endurance and strength, for the dis- tance was nearly ten miles, and it was up hill all the way.
AT LAST, THE GUNS!
The weariness and the gloomy forests along the mountain side, the occasional clouds which blew against the mountain or the dashes of rain all tended to dull the keenness of perception, but every man felt the thrill of war when, at some point in the black road, it became sure to him that the rumble of distant thunder
VICTORY
HONOR ROLL
was what he had half suspected all the time. It was The Guns. It had come at last. The War was just a head.
Toward the end of the march the rumble disin- tegrated into its component sounds. The bellow of each gun could be heard and occasionally the valley would fill with a rush of sound as some big calibered piece turned loose.
In the days that followed, the 35th Division learned many things about war and how it is waged. In the De Galbert subsector, where the first men of the 35th went, they found the line held by a very tired French regiment, the 19th. It was a meeting of the East and the West, a joining and clashing of Old World ideas. These French had been but a few days in the Vosges, but they had been four years in the war. Our men had not been in the war yet, but they had been training for it nearly a year; they had sweat at Doniphan, had sailed thousands of perilous miles through the blue sea water, had ridden and trudged their way across France, and here they were at the trenches, in easy rifle range of the foe. So why not let the fighting begin?
"No, it is much better to lie quiet," the French commander said. "If we do not bother the boche the boche will not bother us, and we can rest and hold our ground."
"NO WAY TO WIN A WAR."
"Hell's fire and damnation," the Americans would reply. "That's no way to win a war. Let's go right through them! We can raid those trenches, drive the enemy back and, with proper artillery help, push right through to the Rhine Valley."
THE AMERICANS ARE IMPATIENT.
"But to what good end?" the patient French would ask. "The war will not be decided in these hopeless mountains. It is in the fertile valleys of the Somme, the Aisne and the Marne, it is in the Cham- pagne and in Picardy that the war must be fought. The high command does not desire a battle here. The high command has many battles in progress with which to worry. We could do the boche no great harm even if we drove him out of the Vosges. These mountains have little strategic importance."
"Well, what sort of an old soldiers' home is this we have been sent to? We are not wood choppers or mountain goats. We did not come here looking for a pleasant resort to spend the summer."
"No, my men are not so old," the French com- mandant said. "I am not nearly as old as I look and in a little while we will be quite fresh again. Soon, I am sure, we will be withdrawn and our American comrades will be put in charge of this line of trenches. Then you can make battles at will. A week ago we were fighting on the Chemin des Dames. We lost 65 per cent of our men. The regiment lost forty-two officers, among them our colonel and two majors, killed. The lieutenant on your left was a sergeant yesterday. All that we wish to do here is to rest for a little while, show your troops the way about the trenches, receive our replacements, work them into our companies and then return to the great battle, wherever France needs us most."
WARM FRIENDSHIP QUICKLY FORMED.
The battalion slept in barracks at Bussat after they reached that camp about 4 in the morning after the great hike, rested the next day and at night two companies went into the trenches. The relief was a sort of half relief, as half of the French soldiers stayed in the front line. A strong point, for example, would be manned by sixteen French poilus. Eight of them came out and eight remained in. Eight Americans joined them.
Here a peculiar thing was observed. It was a dark night. The trenches were close together and no lights
could be shown and there could be no talking except in whispers. Four Americans would be put in a dugout with four Frenchmen, a dark, wet place it was, and they would have no word of common speech. Four others would be assigned to stand sentry duty with four other Frenchmen. The next morning at breakfast time the warmest friendships would have been es- tablished. They slapped one another on the back and swapped cigarettes and pooled rations. It was a great night for the cordiale.
The trenches, as they were seen by the light of the following day, were far from charming. They had been located when the French made an advance into Alsace the first year of the war. When they stopped they dug in, and the gradual improvement of the de- fenses had built up the trench system. There was no such thing as parallel lines, and sometimes you could not tell exactly where the enemy's first line trench was. In front of our trenches was the inevitable tangle of barbed wire.
A BRIGADE IN LINE BY JULY 1.
By July 1 we had a brigade in line, under the command of the 33rd French Army Corps. The sector was called in proper military language "the Benoit and De Galbert subsectors of the north sector of the Wesserling sector," and its geographical location was east of the town of Wesserling. The regimental and brigade headquarters were in barracks and dug- outs built by the French on the side of the mountains soon after they reconquered the territory three years before. Supplies were brought to the foot of the moun- tains by train, standard or narrow gauge, and the most of the rations came up the mountain side in the baskets of an aerial tramway which started from Kruth and ended at Bussat. From there wagons could haul the provisions to virtually all battalion and company headquarters, and those inaccessible in this way were served by pack mules.
Patches of forest spread about over the mountains. The pines, spruce and fir rose straight as arrows, some- times a hundred feet. The side of the mountain would break into a precipiece and end in the wall of a canyon far below.
Quick rainstorms would blow up and clear away as quickly. After these squalls a sky of perfect blue would have a few fleecy white clouds scudding across it and a hot sun would fill the whole beautiful land. The wind, even in summer, usually blew fresh and keen.
A VIEW ACROSS THE GERMAN LINES.
Beyond the German lines we could look down into the little valleys and from the observation posts three little deserted Alsatian towns could be seen.
But at the trenches the beauty of the scene ended. The ground was bare of vegetation, there was the inevitable tangle of barbed wire in great profusion, like a heavy growth of some particularly venomous poison vine. It was all ugly and repulsive, as are most things in war.
We had great admiration for the French intelli- gence service when we learned how many of the German telephone and telegraph wires back on the German side of the trenches had been tapped. The second day after we had entered the trenches, the French commandant was notified that a message had been sent to the German rear from the front saying "The Americans entered the trenches at 3 o'clock in the morning." So we knew that they knew.
TAPPED AMERICAN WIRES.
It was not long until we knew that they had tapped our wires also. An American soldier was killed at midnight and headquarters notified. At noon another message was sent from the front saying that the body was being brought back. Headquarters replied that the funeral would be at 3 p. m. at the military cemetery.
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HONOR ROLL
At 3 o'clock precisely, the Germans shelled the ceme- tery. Then we knew they had our wires tapped.
For most of the first month the French corps kept the command, but by July 27 the French doubt- less decided the outfit could stand alone, so they gave the Fecht sector into the general commanding the 35th. The area was that already held with the Garibaldi subsector added. Division headquarters were set up at Kruth, the new territory was taken in hand, and the recurring series of duty and rest were continued as before, except that rest periods were shortened. August 10 the south sector of the Gerardmer sector was added, and the whole stretch of line was called the sector of Gerardmer, at which beautiful place division headquarters established itself.
AMERICANS MAKE QUIET SECTOR ACTIVE.
When the 35th went into the Vosges trenches the 32nd Division, an excellent outfit, made up of national guardsmen of Michigan and Wisconsin, was already in to the south, near Belfort. The French and Germans had seemed to agree that the decision would be gained in the rich valleys to the northwest, the Marne, Meuse, Aire, Somme and such like fields of fame, so they sent tired troops to the Vosges to rest or filled the line with territorials. A few shells were sent over each day, a few infrequent raids were made at night, to learn what troops were opposite, wire was kept in good shape and trenches and dugouts were maintained in good repair, but little beyond this was done. The great war was allowed to rage elsewhere. No men were sacrificed in this part of the world.
The American changed all this. They had men to be trained, battalions to be blooded, schemes to try and nerves to test.
HIKE DAYS OF THE 35TH.
The months of July and August spent in the Vosges saw the culmination of the training period for the 35th, for, while it held sectors of trench, there was no quieter place along the line from Switzerland to the sea except when the Americans stirred up trouble. The real business of the Americans was to fit them- selves for the big fight which they knew they would get into some day. The training in the Vosges was not of great value to the men in the Argonne battle. There they learned trench warfare, but that form of fighting was done. There were few places in the sector held by the division where it would have been possible to maneuver much more than a company of troops, and we were so near the enemy and under such constant observation that the few available open places could not be used, because such an assemblage of men would be sure to draw fire. Men in rest billets at the rear, where they went after a spell in the trenches, got some training, but it was not in the open warfare known of old.
LEFT 100 DEAD IN THE VOSGES.
But we left about one hundred of our men there in the foothills of the Alps. They were killed in action, died of wounds or of disease or accident. I had not realized the number was so large until I came to count them up. It shows how heavy is the toll even in the quietest of sectors.
THE 60TH ARTILLERY ARRIVES.
The 60th Field Artillery Brigade, which was a component of the 35th Division and which had en- viously watched the infantry depart and leave the big guns behind, reached England about June 1. It landed in Liverpool and after a stop of a week, proceeded to France, landing at Le Havre, and proceeding June 12 to Angers, where it received its equipment. From there it went to Camp Coetquidan for training. Two months were put in there getting acquainted with the guns and perfecting technique, and August 14 the artillery
joined up with the division, which then had head- quarters at Gerardmer.
Up to that time all artillery behind the 35th had been French. Under the French system artillery units usually held their places in the mountains, because of the difficulty of moving guns into and out of the emplacements and because of the additional value a prolonged experience gave to the gunners in that difficult territory.
SANITARY TRAIN AND SIGNAL MEN ARRIVE.
The 110th Sanitary Train and the 110th Field Sig- nal Battalion, though they had not traveled together, reached the division at the same time, June 12, and joined up at Arches.
Pleasant, easy or comfortable days for the 35th Division had now come to an end. The men had sworn mightily at the discomforts of the Vosges, and had been much disgusted with fighting above the clouds, sleep- ing in old French barracks and wearing overcoats in midsummer as the high altitude made necessary, a land where it was dusk as 9:30 p. m. and dawn at 3:30 a. m. They were also vexed with those absurd and un- seen officers in high places who would not let them fight. They wanted to walk through the boche lines and right into Germany.
A war of action had developed in the Marne Val- ley while the 35th lay in the Vosges. The enemy had attacked June 15 and had been stopped. The Allied troops had attacked July 18 and for the first time in four years, things had a very roseate glow. General Pershing had applied for and obtained per- mission to reduce the salient above St. Mihiel.
What degree of resistance the Americans would meet and what forces would be necessary to overcome it was unknown, but it was to be an all-American affair and plenty of men, munitions and guns were provided to take the salient, however hard the enemy fought. Most of the divisions in the fighting were the older, well tried ones. In support were other divisions ready to enter the frey, while behind them was the reserve, ready to go to the needed point. The 35th Division was in the army reserve and its business was to be mobile and ready to strike wherever needed.
Of course, none of the men of the 35th and few of the officers had any idea of the operation to which they were assigned. Troop movements usually look very silly to the man in the ranks who has no knowl- edge of the underlying purpose. That is why con- fidence in higher officers is one of the best sustainers of morale. The soldier should be able to say, "Well, the old man is doing it, and he knows his business. I'm willing."
The St. Mihiel operation plans were guarded with great secrecy and knowledge of the purpose kept within a circle as restricted as possible. But our men suspected there was a hen on when the shuffling commenced.
IN SUPPORT AT ST. MIHIEL.
August 27, 28 and 29, those elements not in the line were grouped about the town of Gerardmer, and the 31st Division was relieved. The last elements came out the night of September 2, and on the 4th, 5th and 6th the division entrained for what was known vaguely as the Rosieres area. That first of September was a notable day, although it did not appear so at the time, for it was the last time the men were to sleep under cover for more than a month, and that month the most trying in their histories.
Few of the men had opportunity through that September to remove their clothing except to change underwear or socks. They were not able to do that often, possibly once or twice, for there was a chronic shortage of new stuff to change into. Very few of them had a bath that month.
Rosières-aux-Salines proved to be a pretty good sort of town in a pretty little flat valley. Sections of the division were scattered about the countryside.
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VICTORY
HONOR ROLL
Then came days of waiting and policing and equipping and rain. Just about the time the pup tents were well set and drained and a fellow had a chance to make himself approximately comfortable there would come the order to march. Everything was done by night in that period, to avoid enemy ob- servation, and the feeling that something was about to happen was heavy in the air.
The directors of the operation, sitting in con- ference baek at Souilly, would look at their immense battle maps, and after calculating angles and distances for a while, one would say: "It seems to me the field would be better balanced if the reserve was a little further down the valley here," and that would be discussed and finally agreed to. "Do it," the com- manding general would say. A code telegram would be started to the headquarters of the 35th Division, the pins indicating the reserve on the battle map moved and the conference would proceed.
CHANGING POSITIONS CONTINUALLY.
At headquarters of the 35th, as soon as the tele- gram was received, there would be much bustle and preparing of orders. Motor cycle orderlies would stream away in a deafening clatter, and soon in all the towns and fields where units of the 35th were stationed, pup tents would be coming down, blankets rolled, packs made up, and at the given hour the men would fall in and the long column take up again the same old hike.
It grew very, very tiresome, and the conviction that great things were soon to happen did not make the work easy or pleasant. There is a fearful monotony to marching, marching, marching. It is hard work. Making a pup ten of two shelter halves and setting it up in the rain is not a pleasant pastime, and there is a physical revulsion against the discomforts of living outdoors in the rain.
The march of the night of September 10-11 was into Tomblaine, at Jarville and Maron, which are suburbs of Naney, but that beautiful city few of the men were able to see at that time. The next night the division marched again-through the edge of the city of Nancy and into the Foret de Haye, where they went into concealed bivouac.
Those were trying times. The roar of the guns seemed very near, and the men knew that a big fight was on close at hand, and it was quite impossible to rest easy. At night enemy airplanes came over and dropped bombs on the forest and a good part of the time it rained. The Missouri and Kansas doughboys found it difficult to comprehend the denseness of a commander who would let a good division like theirs lie out in the rain night after night and rust when there was a fight going on right close by that might just as well be in as not. Really, Pershing ought to know better.
As a matter of fact, the St. Mihiel affair proved very easy. The operation had been planned largely by Col. R. MeCleave, former chief of staff of the 35th, and at that time chief of operations of the First Army. It was tactically perfect, and the toll of enemy prisoners alone was said to be more than four times our total casualties in the salient through which the Americans crashed at will. There was no occasion to call upon the reserves, who had to content themselves with being present with a "willingness to serve."
ITS PART OF ST. MIHIEL.
The part the 35th played was not big, but it was very important. General Pershing was able to order his combat battalions in whatever way he chose because he had a reserve behind them. The reserve is an essential part of the attacking force, even if it never moves a foot or fires a shot. The 35th Division was the salient, unseen force behind the line. It was ready to fill any gap the enemy might make, or to take the place of any weakening or shattered force in front of it.
I believe the division would have been better prepared for the Argonne fight if it had had a place in the line in the St. Mihiel operation. Its losses would have been light, and it would have then gone into the Argonne with battle experience, and with the as- surance and confidence which the other divisions gained at St. Mihiel.
MOVE TOWARD THE ARGONNE.
September 15 new orders came, and the air began to charge again with the electricity of coming action. That night the division moved to the region about Charmentois. The most of the infantry moved in busses, those immense lumbering cars which were stripped from the streets of London and Paris at the beginning of the war, and which had rambled all over the north of France since, hauling soldiers to many threatened fields, carrying wounded back and at times playing the part of trucks and taking supplies forward.
In the Charmentois area the division came under the 3rd Army Corps, and, as a result, was in the 2nd French Army for tactical control and supply. At this stopping place, which also was out of doors, the air bombs grew more frequent.
The 69th Brigade moved up near Auzeville the night of September 19-20, and the next night the re- mainder of the division went to the neighborhood of Grace-le-Comte Farm and into the woods east of Beauchamp, where the division relieved the 73rd French Division in charge of the sector. Because of their familiarity with the sector and that the relief might not be noted by the enemy, the French outposts remained in position. There was a sereen of French between the Americans and the enemy.
The 69th Brigade held the line, with the 70th in support. The formation was for each regiment of the 69th to have two of its three battalions in the line, each battalion having a machine gun company attached. One battalion and a machine gun company was in re- serve ro each regiment. This formation was main- tained up to the morning of September 26.
The division was now just behind the scenes, the stage was set and our actors ready. The 60th Brigade of Artillery was in its place, and tuning up its guns. That was about all they were allowed to do before the great artillery preparation began.
Our men did not take over the trenches, as they had done before when going into a sector. They were happily finished with trenches for all time.
COMING TO OPEN WARFARE.
A paragraph of recapitulation is in order here. This was a division of men who formerly belonged to the national guard, in which they had had a certain training in open warfare, the kind of war for which the Ameri- can soldier is primarily, essentially and everlastingly fitted. They had not been more than a year in the federal service, undergoing intensive training, nearly all of which was designed to fit them for the peculiar conditions incident to the fixed and established con- fliet known as trench warfare.
Now the last battles of the war were about to begin and they were to be fought, as many persons had suspected they would be fought, out in the open.
IMPORTANCE OF ARGONNE OFFENSIVE.
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