“We held that hill all that day and night,” wrote Donovan, “although we had nothing on either of our flanks, and Oliver and I managed to get one hour’s refreshing sleep in a hole that he and my orderly Kayes dug out.”
Beyond the meadow where Donovan had placed his sharpshooters, the Germans had established a machine-gun post at the Meurcy Farm. The stone house, connected to a stone barn and sheds by a stone wall, made a sturdy fortress from which the Germans could fire down into the meadows along the Ourcq. The morning of July 29, Donovan directed attacks on the farm from his command post on a little knoll at the edge of the forest, despite the murderous German machine-gun fire.
Sergeant Dick O’Neill found himself involved in the fighting from the start of the day. He wrote in his diary, “Donovan had sent me out in charge of a mission of great importance. The success or failure of this mission would determine, in all probability, if or if not a good many of my buddies would be alive at day’s end. This was uppermost in my mind when the scrap began. As for the action itself, it all happened so fast I can’t really tell you what I was thinking. But I can tell you one thing: I had no desire to get killed. Who the hell does?”
Lieutenant H. D. Scott, in command of a battery of 155 pieces, found Donovan at his command post. Scott had gone forward from Forêt de Fère to establish liaison with the 165th so as to support the infantry more effectively with his fire. He was not too happy about the very good possibility of getting shot; tucked in his pocket were fresh orders for home.
“After some plain and fancy ducking and driving,” he wrote after the war, “we reached the infantry dug in on the hill of Bois Colas, under fire of small arms and shrapnel. They were firing from the forward edge of the woods on Meurcy Farm, Bois Brûlé, and a wheatfield between, at range of about four hundred meters. In command was Major William Donovan, who ever since has been my hero ideal of a soldier.”
During a lull, Scott crawled back to Donovan’s post of command and had a drink of French whiskey. About that time a very young soldier came running up. “Major, sir, the Germans are coming around the corner of the hill—there’s a thousand of them,” cried the boy.
“Oh, Lord,” thought Scott, “here’s where we get captured, and me with that order for home in my pocket.” Scott loosened up the Colt .45 he had never yet fired in anger.
Donovan glared at the young soldier and remarked, “very calmly and emphatically,” as Scott put it, “Why the hell come and tell me about it? Get your bayonets fixed and go out and get ‘em!”
Soldiers around Donovan jumped up and trotted off through the trees with their equipment rattling. There was a burst of small arms fire, a few shouts. Then the men came back and took cover around their leader, ready for the next alarm. Harold Henderson, a youth who only a year before had been a student in a New York City high school, brought a message to Donovan through the German fire “as if he were an A.D.T. messenger on Broadway,” according to Father Duffy. Donovan remarked on his bravery and then moved forward with his men up a creek bed that afforded some cover. Duffy later described what happened:
“Major Donovan, never happy unless in the middle of things, had gone up the bed of the brook so as to keep ahead of the advance of C on the left and A on the right. Lieutenant Ames, his adjutant, was with him, led by devotion as well as duty, for the Major was his ideal leader. They lay half in the brook, resting on the bank, when a sniper’s bullet from the farmyard whizzed past Donovan’s ear and struck Ames in the head, liberating for larger purposes a singularly attractive and chivalrous soul.”
Another bullet struck Donovan on the hand. When others came up, they discovered Donovan, his hand bleeding, still half in the water, cradling the dead youth in his arms. Private Pat Gillespie swore, and when he saw a flicker of movement behind a dead horse lying in the farmyard, he fired and killed the sniper who most likely had killed Oliver Ames.
Donovan wrote to Caroline Ames about her husband’s last morning:
Early again the next morning we started out to advance. The elements on our right and left failed to move forward, and we pushed on, driving the Germans back slowly. I shall always be glad for one thing that I did. Our forward lines were held up, and I called to your husband who was a little behind me and had him lie down behind a little mound of earth. I then told him what fine work he had been doing and that he had saved a good many lives for the battalion, and that I was not going to forget it. We were together from that time on until I heard that an officer in charge of the first group of troops had been wounded. I told your husband to take charge of headquarters, that I was going forward. I went forward alone. As I ran through machine gun fire, I heard a running behind me and turned and saw Oliver coming. I told him to go back. He said, “no,” that he was going to take care of me. I lay down by a little creek, and he came over beside me. A sniper, undoubtedly trying for me, hit him in the right ear. He died at once, painlessly.
I would gladly that I had been the one, and he had been spared to you.
That night Oliver Ames’s body was buried near where he had fallen. A corporal made a wooden cross from an empty ammunition box and placed it over the grave. “A courteous kindly gentleman and a true soldier,” somebody carved on the cross, together with the name and “Killed in action on July 29, 1918.”
Colonel Frank R. McCoy, commanding the 165th Infantry, summed up the fighting that led to Ames’s death:
My Third Battalion, commanded by Major McKenna, went over at daybreak and reached their objective without great loss, but their fighting Irish got the better of them, and they streamed up the open slopes to take Boche machine guns with their hands and teeth and as a battalion were soon finished; so that the First Battalion was ordered to make a passage of the lines. Ames came to my Post of Command under very heavy fire for final orders and took them back to Donovan, who with him soon appeared and led that battalion over the open valley so skillfully—he and Ames never handled a football eleven better—that with comparatively small losses they reached the heights around the Meurcy Farm and the following day the Bois Colas beyond the farm, where they were the arrow point of the whole Franco-American drive for four days and nights of bitter fighting.
I worked my way out that afternoon and found Donovan determinedly planning and fighting, but feeling as though he had lost his right hand.
Donovan waited for a few weeks to write to Caroline Ames: “I have no desire to intrude upon your grief. I have retrained until you should be in receipt of your husband’s citation for the Distinguished Service Cross. It was the one thing I could do to very inadequately obtain some recognition of his magnificent work. Now I must hasten to get you word, because one cannot tell when one’s own time is coming. More than my feeling of respect and admiration for his qualities as a soldier and a gentleman, there was between us an even deeper relation. To me he was like a younger brother.”
Donovan had lost Oliver Ames, but he still had Joyce Kilmer, who took Ames’s place as the battalion adjutant. “The Major placed great reliance on his coolness and intelligence,” wrote Father Duffy, “and kept him by his side. That suited Joyce, for to be at Major Donovan’s side in a battle, is to be in the center of activity and in the post of danger. To be in a battle, a battle for a cause that had his full devotion, with a regiment he loved, under a leader he admired, that was living at the top of his being.”
The morning of July 30 dawned over the beautiful French countryside with a perfection totally out of keeping with the brutal events taking place. German artillery were dropping shells upon the First Battalion’s positions when Dick O’Neill came upon Donovan, who was grieving for his lost friend. Donovan immediately told him that he must know how many machine guns the Germans had and exactly where they were placed. Then the artillery could zero in on them.
“Dick,” he said, “it would be a lot better if your boys could knock out those guns. We could move faster.”
“Dick,” said O’Neill to himself, “this is a hell of a morning to pick to get kill
ed.”
O’Neill took 35 men and moved toward the German lines. Just as he located the guns, the Germans opened up. A bullet knocked the rifle out of O’Neill’s hands. He still had his pistol, so he rushed forward and tumbled into a gravel pit where, to his dismay, 25 Germans and several machine guns were hidden. He threw his grenade and fired his pistol until it was empty. When the firing stopped, he had suffered five flesh wounds, and there were five dead Germans. The remainder surrendered, and O’Neill, bleeding from his wounds, had 20 prisoners to escort back to the American lines. He hadn’t gone far when the German machine guns opened up. He was hit again, and several of the captives were shot dead by their own countrymen’s fire.
When O’Neill brought the remainder of his captives into the lines, soldiers wrapped him in a blanket and started to carry him to a dressing station. O’Neill cursed them feebly and demanded that they instead take him to Donovan so he could tell him exactly where the German guns were located. The men, having seen his many wounds, argued that he must get to a doctor quickly.
“I’m not going anywhere until I tell the major where those machine guns are,” he insisted.
The soldiers carried him to Donovan, who listened intently to his report and began to give orders. His mission accomplished, O’Neill fainted and was carried to the dressing station.
Donovan then went forward through Bois Colas to observe across open fields Bois Brûlé, which he knew must be taken. Kilmer, unbidden, followed. Both men lay at the north edge of the woods, from where they could study the enemy positions. Donovan moved ahead in order to see better, but Kilmer remained behind. When Donovan, having made his observation to his satisfaction, returned to Kilmer, he found him lying as if still scouting, his eyes looking over a little ridge at the edge of the copse. A bullet had struck him in the head, and he was dead.
“His body was carried out and buried by the side of Ames,” said Duffy. “God rest his dear and gallant soul.”
Private Edwin J. Stubbs, an A Company sniper, and Pvt. Walter Collins, a sniper from B Company, carried Kilmer in from the battlefield in a shelter half. Fourth Division engineers helped Donovan’s men dig the grave.
“I remember distinctly,” Stubbs said after the war, “finding a stout wooden stake and driving it into the ground at the head of the grave, then securely fastened one of Kilmer’s identification tags thereto; later a wooden cross replaced the stake.
“I recall very clearly that after I had driven the stake home and when several of us paused to observe the work, a single 77 shell fell and exploded near our midst which caused us to scatter and hit the ground.”
On July 31, First Battalion attacked Meurcy Farm. Donovan led the attack across the open fields from Bois Colas. John Kayes, Colonel Astor’s former gentleman’s gentleman, had until now kept well out of the battle, but with both Kilmer and Ames dead he was determined not to let his beloved major out of his sight. He followed Donovan on his rounds as the commanding officer prepared for the attack, and he disregarded instructions to go to the rear.
“The little stream running through the farm land was the point of division between the assaulting companies,” Donovan noted, “A and C Companies being on the right of the advance, B and D on the left. Before we advanced, some of the regiment had been in the farm and in the farm house. As I was coming up, I saw a German detachment creeping back into position. As we advanced against the farm there were several members of our own regiment lying dead, which is proof to me that our outfit had already been there.”
During the charge across the fields, Kayes was at Donovan’s heels, his angular figure, stoop-shouldered and elderly, presenting an easy target. A German machine-gun slug hit him in the ankle, and as he pitched forward, other bullets hit him in the thigh, arm, and face. Stricken, he still found strength to protest when Donovan swooped him up in his arms and carried him through the machine-gun fire back to the safety of Bois Colas. Kayes was evacuated to a hospital but died a few weeks later.
Donovan’s men captured Meurcy Farm later that day. Fighting on August 1 was bloody. Donovan was concerned that the Germans might retake the farm, which had cost him so dearly to capture. “I kept everyone out of the farm building itself,” he wrote in his war diary, “for fear of its being destroyed by shell fire, although we sent patrols into the building from time to time to be sure that no Germans were hidden in there.”
All told in the fighting on the Ourcq, the 165th Infantry had lost 250 dead and 1,250 wounded. Donovan’s casualties were high, since First Battalion had led the attack for six days. On August 2 at 4:00 A.M. Donovan sent patrols scouting forward, and they returned to report that, finally, the enemy had vanished. The Prussian footguard had fallen back to a ridge south of the Vesle River. Their division had lost 184 officers and 5,450 men in the battle.
Now that the fighting was over, the Fighting 69th could bury its dead. A pebble’s toss from the Ourcq, Oliver Ames and Joyce Kilmer rested in fresh graves side by side. At the graveside services, a bugle sounded taps and “Rouge Bouquet” was read aloud. Alexander Woollcott reported, “The lines were read by Joyce’s own beloved Father Duffy, and those who were there told me the tears streamed down the face of every boy in the regiment. They just blubbered.”
Donovan, his hand wrapped in a bandage, one leg bloody from shrapnel, wept with the others. He had lost three of the finest friends he was ever to know, and all his life he was to live with an aching regret.
From the field hospital, Donovan wrote Ruth:
In every day of that fight, our Battalion had participated. It had never retired, it had gone the farthest and stayed the longest. I hope that my name on the casualty list did not worry you. My wounds amounted to nothing. The one on the hand simply made a little bone bruise, for as luck would have it my hand was going away when the bullet struck. By the way I had been previously hit on the chest with a piece of shell which ripped my gas mask, and another fragment had hit me on the left heel, tearing my shoe and throwing me off balance. I think perhaps there is a little shrapnel in my leg, but I hope to have some pretty Red Cross nurse hold my hand while they take it out. I guess I have been born to be hanged.
8
Wild Bill Leads the Charge
ON SEPTEMBER 7, 1918, Donovan stood at stiff attention together with other officers and men of his command while General Pershing awarded them the Distinguished Service Cross. Donovan was cited for being “in advance of the division for four days, all the while under shell and machine gun fire from the enemy, who were on three sides of him, and he was repeatedly and persistently counter-attacked, being wounded twice.”
“Pershing has been here and given us the crosses,” he wrote to Ruth. He could also now sign his name “Lieutenant Colonel.” There was talk about making him a full colonel and putting him in command of the regiment. “Oh, hell, Father,” he told Duffy, “I don’t want to be Colonel. As Lieutenant Colonel, I can get into the fight, and that’s what I’m here for.”
Donovan wrote to Ruth,
One thing I am glad of, and that is that the system which I used in the training of the men justified itself. Their discipline and above all their spirit held them full of fight in a position which had previously been given up by two other outfits. Physical endurance will give one control of one’s nerves long after the breaking point. Courage is the smallest part of it. These men who all along thought me too strict, and felt I had made them work when others did not work, are now convinced that I was right, and that I would ask them to do nothing that I myself would not do. This tribute is greater than any honor my superior officers can give me.
Although he remained in command of his troops, every few days in August Donovan made a trip to the field hospital to have his wounds cared for. There he saw his brother Tim, who was a surgeon with a Buffalo unit.
Only five days after Pershing had pinned the Distinguished Service Cross on his chest, Donovan was in action again. The German-held St. Mihiel salient thrust 30 miles into France from the town of St. M
ihiel, crossing the Meuse River and cutting communications from Paris and Verdun to the Lorraine front. It was a barrier to the invasion of southern Germany. An attack on the salient by 450,000 American troops was scheduled, and in the vanguard was the Rainbow Division. The 165th Infantry was picked to lead the Rainbow’s attack, and it fell to Lieutenant Colonel Donovan to spearhead the regiment’s attack with his First Battalion.
On the night of September 11, Donovan and his men were at the southeast of the salient at Pont-à-Mousson on the Moselle River, 30 miles south of Verdun. Rain swept down on the river valley with nightfall, and the men kept to their billets. Only a few wet and chilled soldiers held the trenches until a few hours before the attack was to begin. The attackers filed into the trenches with a gloomy air that made Donovan apprehensive. His battalion had suffered heavy casualties on the Ourcq, and three out of every four officers and 65 percent of the men were replacements. Plainly the Germans were in a strong defensive position, and casualties were bound to be high.
At 1:00 A.M., with the rain still swirling about the trenches, the French and British artillery opened up with a mighty salvo. All along the front 3020 guns roared. Although the Germans had expected the American attack for days, the onslaught in the dark and rainy night caught them off guard. To Donovan’s surprise no German guns fired back. Allied commanders did not know that the Germans had decided to give up the salient and were already moving valuable war materials out and beginning to withdraw their troops. One German commander of the 77th Reserve Division had misunderstood his instructions to withdraw and had kept two thirds of his men in position opposing the 165th, even though his artillery support had already withdrawn through St. Mihiel.
The rain stopped, but the dawn was cold and windy. Donovan moved through the trenches, smiling unless he noticed some preparation that was not exactly right. Then, either with a sharp command or a sorrowful look, he required the mistake to be corrected.
Donovan Page 13
