Of course no officer, least of all a lieutenant in the first wave, could get the whole picture of an operation. Yet some individuals were born with a tactical seventh sense. It was an indescribable gift—“the feel of battle” Melville Goodwin had called it in a paper he had once read before the War College. You had it or you did not have it. He could see nothing except the men of his platoon walking through the woods, but at the same time he could feel whole divisions moving—reserves, artillery and supply. Attack was in the air and attack was in his blood. The feel of battle was impersonal, inexorable.
His platoon was a machine and he was already beginning to examine it and to estimate its capabilities. The men were wet and their faces were drawn. They were tired but not too tired. They moved ahead cautiously but not nervously. They had left their heavy equipment but they carried gas masks, rifles, grenades and bayonets.
“Sergeant,” he asked, “did the men have breakfast before they started?”
He thought that the sergeant gave him a peculiar look and he realized that “breakfast” sounded odd out there, though the word was quite correct.
“They had corned willy and hardtack, sir,” the sergeant said.
They were better off than he was, but he no longer felt hungry.
“What about water?” he asked. “Are their canteens filled?”
The sergeant gave him another look. “We’ve about run out of drinking water,” he said.
“Have they got chlorine tablets?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then have them fill their canteens the next place where there’s a well or any running water, and see that each of them drops in about six tablets.”
“Yes, sir,” the sergeant said, peering into the woods ahead. He knew that the sergeant must have thought he was a little snot, but still it was a sensible order.
He saw that the trees were thinning and that they were reaching the edge of the woods. Everything was quiet, except for the rustling of branches and the snap of small twigs underfoot and the dripping from the trees and the distant artillery, until suddenly he heard machine guns on the right front and the crack of bullets passing close overhead. The sound, he always had thought, was like his mother’s sewing machine—a mechanical staccato that frayed the nerves.
“Tell the men to lie down, Sergeant,” he said.
Perhaps he should have given the order himself, but then the men had hardly seen him. They were approaching a line of resistance, but it was only a hasty improvisation by the enemy to afford a delay which would facilitate his retreat.
“Come with me, Sergeant,” he said, and they crawled to the edge of the trees.
“Easy,” he heard the sergeant whisper. “You gotta watch it, Lieutenant.”
The sergeant did not need to tell him. He was crawling as he had been taught, wriggling and propelling himself with knees and elbows, taking advantage of the tall grass at the edge of the wood. A pretty pastoral scene lay before them, a broad open field of hay which had not yet been harvested but which was too short and trampled to afford cover. The ground ahead rose gradually to a low ridge crowned by another patch of woods. The whole scene was surprisingly peaceful, but still his breath was coming fast and his heart made a drumming sound in his ears, from excitement rather than fear. Frankly, he could never remember feeling fear in action. It was a thing that came before or afterwards rather than in the middle. Besides, his mind was concentrating on a simple problem. He was observing an almost classic defense position. It was a good two hundred yards across that field to the woods on the crest. When he looked to his right he saw why the gun there had revealed its position, because a handful of bodies lay sprawled in the open field. Then in his interest he raised his head too far—two inches higher and he would have been dead. Another machine gun had opened fire from the woods directly on his front. He lay flat with his face in the moist earth, but he had seen its flash near the trunk of a large oak tree and the fresh earth of the emplacement.
“It’s right up there,” he said.
“You ought to know, sir,” the sergeant answered, and they crawled back to the platoon.
Just then a runner came with word that Lieutenant Johnson wanted to see him. Even in this short interval everything had been moving up behind them until the woods were jammed with troops. Lieutenant Johnson was talking to a freckled, sandy-haired major who, Melville guessed, would be the battalion commander. Lieutenant Goodwin saluted smartly.
“Never mind that now,” the major said. “Who’s this officer, Lieutenant?”
“He just came up last night, sir,” the lieutenant answered. “I can’t remember his name.”
“Well, a name helps,” the major said, and he turned to Melville. “What is it?”
“It’s Goodwin, sir.”
“All right,” the major said. “What have you stopped for, Mr. Goodwin, are you tired?”
Melville reported the situation quickly and concisely. He was even able to take a pencil and paper and sketch the position in the major’s notebook.
“Very pretty,” the major said. “Take me up there and show me the original. We can’t wait here all day.”
They were faced with the same old problem that cropped up in any battle, the balance of loss of life against the element of time. That light defense in front would be overrun eventually. The only question was how soon and at what cost. Obviously it was necessary to test the strength of the position before deciding whether or not to wait for heavy weapons. In a few minutes there must be an approach.
That defense could have been brushed aside in modern war with its profusion of supporting weapons always close at hand, but in World War I the machine gun was still an ace that was hard to beat. With a few well-placed automatic weapons, a handful of enemy specialists who were willing to die could delay a whole division and snarl up the timetable. When you came to think of it, you had to admire those German gunners, left alone to hold up the advance. It took guts and devotion to duty, and you might as well face it—Germans were born soldiers.
The plan was improvised right there in the woods. The attack was ordered along the regimental front and his platoon was in it. He had only time before the show started to find a haversack and fill it with four grenades, those stylized iron ones that looked like pineapples. He was to lead the platoon, of course, and he remembered that he was shaking—you often got involuntary shakes before a jump-off—but he was also conscious of a detached academic interest through the minutes of preparation. He had the sense to examine the contours of the slope ahead and to take note of a fold of ground about seventy-five yards in front that might afford some shelter. Beyond this he saw there was a depression, not a watercourse or even a gully, but still a depression that wound toward the tall oak on the hill. He could see the fresh earth of the gun emplacement on his front, and to the right he could see another. Haste had denied the Germans the refinements of concealment, and luckily neither of those guns supported the other perfectly—two facts which explained why he came through that attack alive.
He pointed out the fold of ground to the sergeant and also the depression beyond it. When he told the platoon to follow him, his voice had an unwelcome quaver. He had often dreamed, both asleep and awake, of leading a real attack, but now that he was in motion, the ground was not solid and he seemed to move with exasperating slowness. Then he found himself flat on his belly behind that bulge of ground with half the platoon there with him. German machine guns had rather narrow traverses and they could not fire everywhere at once, and the gunners had no time to pick up the whole weapon in order to fire at a wider angle. This explained why half the platoon reached the shelter.
As he lay there catching his breath, he saw that the whole advance had been checked halfway across the field. He could see the dead and wounded on the open ground and small pockets of the living pinned down by the fire. His platoon was out ahead and a glance at the woods behind him showed that the attack was not being pressed. His men lay in temporary safety, although bullets were g
ouging the crest in front of them. It might have been better judgment to have stayed pinned down instead of attempting to reach the depression winding up the hill. He was not thinking in the least of himself, but only of the minor tactical problem. If they could wriggle up that hollow toward the oak tree, they might knock out the gun with grenades. It would have been more correct if he had balanced the chances, and he might as well admit it now that they were fifty to one against him, but his whole mind was focused on a single desire to get up the hill. There were twenty yards of open space between the rise that sheltered them and the winding hollow.
“Follow me,” he called. The Jerries did not quite catch him before he reached the hollow. Only the sergeant and a private went with him. He never could blame the others for staying where they were.
He would not try to describe that crawl up the hill. He could only admit that he was shot with luck and besides the nearer you got to an emplacement the harder it was to get you. When he reached the crest, he remembered rising to his knees with a grenade in his hand and pulling out the pin and seeing the newly dug earth and a German helmet. Then he threw the grenade and fell flat. He got up again directly after the explosion. He had hit the nest right on the button.
“Come on,” he heard himself calling, “come on.” He had another grenade ready in his hand as he ran through the trees to the emplacement on the right. Perhaps he was two minutes in reaching it. He had no way of checking the time, but he came on it suddenly from the rear. The gun was firing, and its noise must have prevented any of the crew from hearing him. As he crouched behind a tree before tossing the grenade, he had a glimpse of the gray backs of the gunners. The air was full of dirt and stones and the gun had stopped before he could throw another. The Germans who weren’t dead were in a daze. There was one thing in particular he did not like to remember—a German officer smeared with blood, staggering toward him with his hands above his head and then the sight of Sergeant Riley running him through with a bayonet. He could still remember his amateurish wonder at the sergeant’s struggles to pull the bayonet out. Then it seemed as though everyone had followed him, not just the sergeant and the private. The attack had carried through.
He grew accustomed to the sight of corpses later—since sudden death and mutilation were sequels to any action, and after all, war in itself was a grotesque abnormality—but this was his first day in a practical school. The mangled bodies of those Germans around their gun brought home to him, ail in a rush, the enormity of what he had been through, and a spasm of nausea swept over him. He staggered weak-kneed to a tree, leaned against it and retched. Fortunately there was nothing much to come up as his stomach had been empty for many hours. Though later he had seen other good men succumb to this and to more humiliating forms of bodily weakness, he could never quite forgive himself. It was all well enough to explain that exertion and emotion had put an undue strain on him. It was a mortifying anticlimax to find himself puking in front of troops. He had a frantic wish to crawl away somewhere with his seizure but there was never any privacy at a time like that. All he could do was to lean against the tree, shaking with the spasm. At any rate that was how the regimental commander found him, and later he had to admit that it made a good story at his own expense.
H. J. Jeffers was commanding the regiment then. If you were interested in military bibliography, he was the same Jeffers who had written a useful book, A Foot Soldier’s Notes, which had been used in army schools before the war. Later, after the armistice, when the colonel once alluded to their meeting, at brigade headquarters mess, Melville was glad that he was able to laugh about it.
He had been leaning against the tree only half conscious of what was being said or done around him when he heard a voice ask if this was the officer. Someone slapped him hard on the shoulder and told him to go on with what he was doing, that there was no hurry, and when he turned around, he saw that Colonel Jeffers, in a muddy trench coat, had been addressing him. Beside the colonel was a French officer in horizon blue, looking extraordinarily neat under the circumstances, and the major was also with them, and a few paces behind were some other officers. It was his good luck, of course, that the colonel and the Frenchman should have arrived at that particular time.
When he saluted, his diaphragm and intestines were still chasing each other inside him.
“I’m sorry, sir,” he said.
“That’s all right,” the colonel said, “quite all right, Lieutenant. What did you say his name was, Major?”
“He told me but I’ve forgotten, sir,” the major said. “He just came up last night … but it ought to be Frank Merriwell.”
As soon as the colonel laughed, everyone else joined him hastily and the joke settled Melville’s stomach. There was nothing like a joke at a time like that. Later it always reminded him of a line in What Price Glory.
“Who is it,” the Frenchman asked slowly, “this Frank Merriwell?”
“He’s an American folk hero,” the major said.
“Oh la-la,” the Frenchman said, and everybody laughed again. Nothing ever sounded right in French.
“Sergeant,” the major called. “Where’s the sergeant? Come here, Sergeant.”
Melville found himself standing with the sergeant as though they were two schoolboys led out before the class, and of course the major was vicariously pleased.
“This is Sergeant Riley, sir,” the major said, “Second Platoon, C Company. Tell the colonel what you told me, Sergeant.”
The sergeant was an old-timer but he was also overwrought.
“No crapping, sir,” the sergeant said, “the lieutenant got the both of them.”
Then Melville found his voice.
“There was a private with us, too, sir,” he said.
“Jackson, sir,” the sergeant said. “He’s dead.”
The colonel pulled a notebook from his pocket. Melville remembered that he had to hold it almost at arm’s length because of the farsightedness that comes with middle age.
“What’s your name, Lieutenant?” the colonel asked.
“Goodwin, sir,” he answered, “Melville A. Goodwin.”
“What’s your class at the Point?” He had noticed Melville’s ring.
“Nineteen-nineteen, sir,” Melville said, “but we graduated this year.”
“Do you feel all right now?”
“Yes, sir,” Melville said.
“Then walk along with us, Mr. Goodwin. We’d better catch up with things. This is Captain Bouchet, and we don’t want Captain Bouchet to tell his general that we’re loafing around here.”
There was a gentle undercurrent of appreciative merriment.
“It is a pleasure to meet the lieutenant,” the Frenchman said.
There was no use trying to imitate his accent, but those French liaison officers were all smooth and hand-picked for the job of establishing cordial relations. It was only good luck that the captain was there, itching to pass out Croix de guerres. Melville never knew until later that he was getting the Distinguished Service Cross out of it, too. He was pretty hot that day; it was all good luck.
On the other hand, there weren’t any colonels or Frenchmen around to see him when he led a patrol across the Vesle River and returned with sixteen German prisoners. No medal except a Purple Heart was passed out when he got his bayonet wound in the Bois des Rappes. Actually both those occasions had demanded more in the departments of skill and guts and leadership than that episode in the Château-Thierry salient. Further, he had seen a lot of others, both officers and enlisted men, who had done more than he ever had beyond the call of duty, without even getting a word of commendation. He was luckier than a great many others, and that was about all there was to say. From his experience many soldiers who did most said the least, and he had described that episode only to give a tactical picture.
His service in France had taught him that he was adequate according to certain standards, and from the very beginning he had loved the life. He had been right when he had followed that pa
rade in Nashua. He loved marching columns and pup tents and foxholes, and he loved to serve with troops. He never forgot the lessons he had learned in World War I about team play and the soldier. He had learned how to speak the enlisted man’s language, and he could speak it still. He learned to get the best out of troops simply by letting them know that he placed their physical comfort and safety above his own and making them learn that he would never order them to do anything he would not do himself. In many ways enlisted men were a lot of kids. He was never bored with fussing over their food and equipment. Any little thing you could do for them, such as talking over their home problems or their gripes, paid dividends. Right now he could still make a good estimate of soldiers because of his experience in France. They were in the end the raw material with which you had to work.
Everyone, of course, had his own theories about bravery, an abstract quality which he had heard discussed interminably during his years in the service. Bravery, he was sure, was not a constant attribute but one which changed from day to day under varying climates of leadership. In the final analysis, willingness to face death and to toss one’s life into the scales in order to achieve a result depended on pride and conviction. There were two kinds of pride, one that emanated from position and responsibility, which training could develop, and the other, greater pride that had its roots in loyalty to the outfit. If your unit was a good team whose members believed in themselves and their leader, death became preferable to letting down the crowd. You could take your outfit anywhere, and you would even be reluctant to stay behind as long as you could put one foot in front of the other. In the end personal courage depended almost exclusively upon mass emotion. You could do anything if you had a good team, though in the beginning you had to sometimes show the boys the way.
There had been a lot of time to think while he lay in the hospital, and he had gathered enough ideas so that he was neither restless nor lonely. He had been indoctrinated with the theories of offense and defense, but he began to think seriously about weight of fire power. He never forgot the columns of cavalry he saw on the road from Château-Thierry, pathetically waiting for a chance for action that never came. He knew, without anyone’s telling him, that cavalry was on the way out, in the face of automatic weapons; and he would never forget the thrill he experienced when he first saw a line of tanks clanking through a French village toward the front. They were ponderous vehicles and they did not have the power next day to get them where they should, but unlike a lot of young fellows around him, he never discounted the potential of the tank in a future war. The Germans knew it, by God, better than the British, who invented tanks. As General Forrest had so aptly said, the secret of war lay in gittin’ thar fustest with the mostest. He was already thinking of combinations of fire power when he lay in the base hospital before he went to convalesce on the Riviera. Of course other men were also thinking, and abler men than he, in English and French and German—but the armistice was signed while he was on the Riviera, and an era was ended.
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