THE IRON DIVISION

NATIONAL GUARD OF PENNSYLVANIA

IN THE WORLD WAR

THE AUTHENTIC AND COMPREHENSIVE NARRATIVE OF THE GALLANT DEEDS AND GLORIOUS ACHIEVEMENTS OF THE 28TH DIVISION IN THE WORLD'S GREATEST WAR

BY

H. G. PROCTOR

PHILADELPHIA
THE JOHN C. WINSTON COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1919, by
The John C. Winston Co.

Copyright, 1918, by
The Evening Bulletin

To The
Mothers of Pennsylvania,
And especially those who mourn for
Lads who lie in the soil
of France,
This Book is Dedicated

FOREWORD

If love, admiration and respect, with a sense of personal gratification at seeing the hopes and predictions of years fulfilled, may be pleaded as justification for a self-appointed chronicler, then this book needs no excuse. It is offered with a serene confidence that it does justice, and nothing more than simple justice, to as fine and gallant a body of soldiers as ever represented this great commonwealth in action.

There must be, for the loved ones of these modern crusaders, as well as for the thousands of former members of the National Guard, who, like the writer, whole-heartedly envied the opportunities for glorious service that came to their successors in the organization, a sense of deep and abiding pride in the priceless record of achievement. To all such, and to those others to whom American valor is always a readable subject, whatever the locale, the narrative is presented as not unworthy of its cause.

H. G. P.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

CHAPTER I

Men of Iron

"You are not soldiers! You are men of iron!"

Such was the tribute of an idolized general to the men of the Twenty-eighth Division, United States Army, after the division had won its spurs in a glorious, breath-taking fashion at the second battle of the Marne in July and August, 1918.

The grizzled officer, his shrewd, keen eyes softened to genuine admiration for the deeds of the gallant men and with real sorrow for the fallen, uttered his simple praise to a little group of officers at a certain headquarters.

It was too good to keep. It was repeated with a glow of pride to junior officers and swept through all ranks of the entire division in an incredibly short time. The gratified and delighted soldiery, already feeling the satisfaction of knowing their task had been well done, seized upon the words and became, to themselves and all who knew them, the "Iron Division."

The words of praise have been attributed to General Pershing. Whether they actually emanated from him has not been clearly established. That they did come from a source high enough to make them authoritative there is no shadow of doubt.

Furthermore, to make the approval wholly official and of record, there has come to the division from General Pershing a citation entitling every officer and enlisted man to wear on his left sleeve, just under the shoulder seam, a scarlet keystone, an unique distinction in the American Army. The citation called the Twenty-eighth a "Famous Red Fighting Division," but even this formal designation has not supplanted, in the minds of the soldiers, the name of "The Iron Division," which they regard as their especial pride.

And, to make the record complete, scores of the officers and men throughout the division have been cited for gallantry and awarded the Distinguished Service Cross by General Pershing, while others have won the French decoration, the Croix de Guerre.

So it is that the former National Guard of Pennsylvania has carried on the fame and glory which were the heritage of its fathers from the Civil War and from every other war in the history of the nation. At the cost of many precious young lives and infinite suffering, it is true, but that is war, whose recompense is that the victory was America's and that our men magnificently upheld all the traditions of their land.

Regiments and smaller units of the division which did not get into the line in time for that first swift battle looked with envy upon their comrades who did and pridefully appropriated the division's new-found honors, announcing themselves "members of the Iron Division." And when their own time came, they lived well up to the title and reputation.

Held up to scorn and contempt for years as "tin soldiers," made the plaything of the pettiest politics, hampered and hindered at every emergency and then thrown in a sector where it was believed they would have a chance to become fire-hardened without too great responsibility falling to their lot, they met the brunt of the last German advance from the Marne, held it and sent the enemy back, reeling, broken and defeated, saved Paris and won the grateful and admiring praise of their veteran French comrades in arms.

Throughout all the years of upbuilding in full belief that the time would come when they would have a chance to vindicate their faith in the National Guard system, a devoted group of officers and enlisted men remained faithful and unshaken. The personnel fell and rose, fell and rose. Men constantly dropped out of the service as their enlistments expired and the burden of recruiting and training new men was always to be met. It was discouraging work, but carried forward steadily and unfalteringly.

Persons who visited the National Guard of Pennsylvania in its training camps, especially the last one in this country, Camp Hancock, at Augusta, Ga., were impressed with the quiet confidence with which the older officers and enlisted men viewed their handiwork. Many of the newer men in the service, catching the spirit of confidence, voiced it in boyish boastfulness.

"These men are ripe and ready," said the older, more thoughtful ones. "They will give a good account of themselves when the time arrives. They are trained to the minute, and Pennsylvania never will have need to be ashamed of them."

"Just wait until this little old division gets to France," bragged the younger ones. "The Hun won't have a chance. We'll show 'em something they don't know. Go get 'em; that's us."

And today, Pennsylvania, mourning, grief-stricken, but aglow with pride and love for that gallant force, agrees with both.

It is an odd coincidence that the Twenty-eighth Division of the German army should have been one of the most frequently mentioned organizations of the Kaiser's forces during the war and that it, too, should have acquired, by its exploits, a title all its own. It was known as "the Flying Shock Division," and on frequent occasions it was disclosed, through the capture of prisoners, that the two Twenty-eighth Divisions were opposing each other—a fact eloquent in itself of the esteem in which the enemy held our Pennsylvania lads as foemen, for the "Flying Shock Division" was shunted from one end of the Western Front to the other, wherever a desperate situation for the Germans called for desperate fighting.

In the heroic stand of the Pennsylvania Guardsmen may be traced one more instance of the truth of the adage that "history repeats itself." On the field of Gettysburg a handsome monument marks the crest of Pickett's charge, the farthest point to which Confederate fighting men penetrated in their efforts to break through the Union lines. Here they were met and stopped by Pennsylvania troops (the Philadelphia Brigade). Had they not been stopped, military authorities have agreed, the battle of Gettysburg almost certainly would have been lost to the Union. The whole course of the war probably would have been changed and the Confederacy would have been within sight of ultimate victory.

But they were met and stopped by the Pennsylvania troops. From that time the cause of the Confederacy was a losing one, and for that reason the monument is inscribed as marking "The High Water Mark of the Rebellion."

It is not inconceivable that, when the time comes to erect monuments on the battlefields of the Great War, one will stand at or near the tiny village of St. Agnan, in the Department of the Aisne, France, fixing the "high-water mark" of the German bid for world domination.

Here it was, at this village and its vicinity, that Pennsylvania troops met and defeated the flower of the German army, halted the drive and sent the Huns staggering backward in what turned, within a few days, to wild flight. The Germans, in their first rush through Belgium and France in 1914, came closer than that to Paris, but with less chance of success. Then virtually everything was against them except the tremendous impetus of their forward movement. In July, 1918, everything favored them, and the entire world awaited with bated breath and agonized heart the news that Paris was invested.

When it seemed that nothing could prevent this crowning blow to our beloved Ally, the advancing Germans struck a portion of the line held by Pennsylvania's erstwhile despised National Guardsmen. Instead of news that Paris lay under the invader's heel came the gloriously thrilling tidings that the German was in retreat before our very own men, and that it was again Pennsylvania troops which had turned the tide.

To get a proper perspective on the organizations comprising the Iron Division, it is necessary to go back a few years in the history of the National Guard, before the various reorganizations to which it was subjected. The division was a product of gradual growth since the Spanish-American War. After that brief conflict, the National Guard of Pennsylvania set out upon a new course of development almost as a new organization.

In 1916, it consisted of four infantry brigades of three regiments each; one regiment of artillery; one battalion of engineers; one battalion of signal troops; two field hospitals, three ambulance companies and one regiment of cavalry.

The call for service in the threatened war with Mexico, resulting in a tedious tour of duty at Camp Stewart, Texas, on the Mexican border, caused lively recruiting and the upbuilding of the units. This was nearly offset on the return home by the eagerness of officers and enlisted men, disgusted with the fruitless task assigned them on the border, to get out of the service. When America entered the war against Germany, however, recruiting again livened up, but in the meantime the tables of organization of the whole army had been so changed and the regiments so enlarged that it was necessary to send quotas of selected men to fill the ranks to the required strength.

During the service on the Mexican border, a brigade of artillery had been formed and the number of infantry brigades was reduced to three. Also, a start was made on the work of expanding the engineer battalion into a regiment.

The division moved into camp at Augusta, Ga., from August 20 to September 15, 1917. The post was known as Camp Hancock. Here the drafts of selected men were received and the division was completely reorganized to conform to the new army standards. New designations also were awarded the units. It was necessary to reduce the number of infantry brigades to two, of two regiments each. The First Infantry Regiment, of Philadelphia; the Tenth, of Philippine fame, hailing from counties in the southwestern part of the state; the Sixteenth, centering in the oil country of the northwest, and the Eighteenth, of Pittsburgh, were chosen as base regiments, to retain their regimental organizations virtually intact.

The Thirteenth Infantry Regiment, of Scranton and vicinity, was broken up and its officers and men turned into the First to bring the companies up to the required strength. In the same manner, the Third, of Philadelphia, was consolidated with the Tenth; the Eighth, from Harrisburg and vicinity, with the Sixteenth, and the Sixth, from Philadelphia and surrounding counties, with the Eighteenth.

The former First and Thirteenth became the 109th Infantry, in the new designations; the former Third and Tenth, the 110th; the former Sixth and Eighteenth, the 111th, and the former Eighth and Sixteenth, the 112th.

The former First Artillery, whose batteries were distributed through the state from Pittsburgh to Ph[oe]nixville, became the 107th Field Artillery; the historic old Second Infantry, transformed into the Second Artillery during the border duty, whose home station is Philadelphia, became the 108th Field Artillery. The Third Artillery, which had been formed from the former Ninth Infantry, of Wilkes-Barre and the surrounding anthracite towns, became the 109th Field Artillery.

The cavalry regiment disappeared. One troop, from Sunbury, remained cavalry, being attached to division headquarters as Headquarters Troop. The rest were scattered through different organizations. The 103d Trench Mortar Battery was formed almost entirely from among the cavalrymen, largely members of the famous old First City Troop of Philadelphia.

The engineer regiment became the 103d Engineers, the signal troops the 103d Field Signal Battalion, and the field hospitals and ambulance companies became parts of the 103d Sanitary Train. In addition, there were formed the 103d Military Police, the 103d Ammunition Train, the 103d Supply Train, and the 107th, 108th and 109th Machine Gun battalions.

The 109th and 110th Infantry regiments were brigaded together under the designation of the 55th Infantry Brigade. The 111th and 112th regiments became the 56th Infantry Brigade and the three artillery regiments and the trench mortar battery became the 53d Artillery Brigade.

There were other Pennsylvanians—many thousands of them—in the war, but no other organization so represented every locality and every stratum of society.

© International Film Service.

France At Last! Iron Division Debarking

After months of vexatious delays, the Pennsylvania Guardsmen acknowledged their welcome on French soil with expansive smiles which showed their pleasure at having come thus far on the Great Adventure.

And so the division went to France. The movement to a port of embarkation began in April, 1918, and the convoy carrying the eager soldiers arrived in a French port May 18th. The troops were separated by organizations, brigaded with British troops in training areas and entered upon the final phases of their instruction. The men were discouraged by their exceptionally long period of preparation. They felt within themselves that they were ready for the front line, and the evident hesitation of the military authorities to put them there was distressing. Many of them began to doubt that they would see actual fighting. They had longed and waited for so many months that it is no exaggeration, on the word of men who have returned, to say that their very dreams were colored with the keen desire to try their mettle on the enemy.

According to the system worked out by the high command for bringing new troops up to front line caliber, they should then have gone into their own camp within sound of the guns, but behind the actual "zone of operations." There the division should have been reassembled and gotten to functioning properly and smoothly as a division, and then have been moved up by easy stages. It should have occupied one billet area after another, each closer to the lines, until it should actually have been under artillery fire behind the fighting line. Then, with its nerves tautened and having learned, possibly through some losses, how best to take care of and protect itself, it would at last have been sent into the front line, but even then not without some misgivings and it would have been carefully watched to see that it reacted properly to the new conditions.

In the progress of this customary routine, the work of assembling the division was begun a few miles northwest of Paris. Division headquarters was established at Gonesse, a little over ten miles from the heart of Paris. The infantry regiments and the engineers were scattered through a myriad of villages in the vicinity, billeted in houses, stables, buildings of any kind that could be turned to adequate shelters.

Established thus, the organizations extended over a considerable stretch of territory. The 109th, for instance, was at Mitry and Mory, twin villages, but a short distance apart and usually referred to, for convenience, as one place, Mitry-Mory, eight miles by airline from division headquarters.

The 53rd Artillery Brigade still was hard at its training work miles away and the doughboys, surmising that they would not be withheld from action to wait for the guns, gave thanks that it was the old Second, and not one of their regiments, that had been turned into artillery. Men of the old Third, particularly, recalled that it had been generally expected, when there was talk of transforming an infantry regiment to artillery, that theirs would be the regiment to be chosen, and that the naming of the Second had come as something of a surprise.

CHAPTER II

Off for the Front

The infantry regiments had been assembled during June and a long and a wearisome wait impended while other units moved into the divisional concentration. No leaves were granted to go to Paris, although the crown of the Eiffel Tower could be descried above the haze from the city by day and at night the searchlights, thrusting inquisitive fingers of light through the far reaches of the sky in search of prowling Hun airmen, seemed to point the way to joys to which all had long been strangers.

From the other direction came, when the wind was right, the dull rumbling, like distant thunder, which they had learned was the guns.

Longings were about evenly divided between the two directions. If they could not go up to the front, whither they had been headed for these many months, they would have liked to go to Paris. Failing of both the front and Paris, they would have liked to go "any old place away from here." Which is typical of the soldier, "here," wherever it may be, always being the least desirable place in the world.

So the doughboys and engineers whiled away the long, warm days, drilling and hiking, doing much bayonet work, polishing and cleaning rifles and other equipment and variously putting in the time as best they could, and fretting all the time for a chance at real action. That may be said to have been one of the most trying periods of their long probation.

It may not be amiss to recall the general situation on the Western Front at this time. After a winter of boastful preparation, during which they advertised in every possible way that they expected to launch in the spring the greatest effort they had yet put forth to break through the Allied lines, the Germans, on March 21st, strengthened by hundreds of thousands of veteran soldiers released from Russia through the farcical Brest-Litovsk treaty, boiled forth from their lines on the fifty-mile front from Arras to La Fere.

This was an effort to force a break at the juncture of the French and British lines about St. Quentin. It did not succeed in this, but a great wedge was thrust out to become a grave menace to Amiens, an important British distribution center.

Very shortly after this move was checked, the British army in Flanders was heavily attacked, on April 9th, in the region of Ypres, and thrown back so badly that Field Marshal Haig issued his famous appeal to the troops "fighting with their backs to the wall."

The British line finally held, and, French reinforcements arriving, began to react strongly in counter-attacks. Again the boiling western line simmered down, but on May 27th the German Crown Prince's army flung itself out from the Chemin des Dames, in Champagne, and by June 3d had reached the Marne at Château-Thierry. Here forces which made their way across the river were hotly attacked and driven back, and this drive came to a halt.

One week later, on June 10th, the fighting was renewed from Montdidier to Noyon in a thrust for Compiegne as a key to Paris. This was plainly an effort to widen the wedge whose apex was at Château-Thierry, but Foch had outguessed the Germans, knew where they would strike and held them. The attack was fairly well checked in two days.

This was the situation, then, in those late June days, when our Pennsylvania soldiers pined for action within sight of Paris. The American army had been blooded in the various drives, but the Twenty-eighth Division had not yet had a taste of the Hun action. Marines, the First and Second divisions of the Regular army, engineers and medical troops, had had a gallant part in the defense of Paris, and even in defense of the channel ports, in the Flanders thrust.

Dormans, Torcy, Bouresches, Bois de Belleau, Cantigny, Jaulgonne, these and other localities had won place in the annals of American arms. Wherever they had come in contact with the enemy, without exception, the American troops had "made good," and won the high encomiums of their British and French comrades. Is it any wonder, then, that the Pennsylvanians chafed at the restraint which held them far away from where such great things were going forward?

It was at the critical juncture in March, the darkest hour of the Allied cause, that President Wilson, waiving any question of national pride, directed General Pershing to offer such troops as he had available to be brigaded with the French and English to meet the German assaults.

The reason for this was simple. The American army had not yet been welded into a cohesive whole. Its staff work was deficient. It was merely a conglomeration of divisions, each possibly capable of operating as a division, but the whole utterly unable to operate as a whole. By putting a brigade of Americans in a French or British division, however, the forces of our co-belligerents could be strengthened to the full extent of the available American troops.

The American offer was promptly and gratefully accepted. Came the day, then, when our Pennsylvania men were ordered to move up to a sector below the Marne, there to be brigaded with a French army. The artillery brigade had not yet come into the divisional lines and few, even of the officers, had seen their comrades of the big guns since leaving Camp Hancock.

Of all this, of course, the men in the ranks knew nothing. To them came only the command to "fall in," which had always presaged the same weary routine of drill and hike. This time, however, when they found lines of motor trucks stretching along the road seemingly for miles, they knew there was "something doing" and word swept through the ranks that they were off for the front at last.

When the truck trains got under way with their singing, laughing, highly cheerful loads of doughboys and engineers, it was not directly northward, toward Montdidier, nor northeast, toward Soissons, where the latest heavy fighting had been going on, that they moved, as the men had hoped, but eastward.

Through Meaux and La Ferte-sous-Jouarre they moved. At the latter place they came to the Petit Morin River and from there on the road followed the valley of the little river more or less closely. Through pretty little villages and, here and there, more pretentious towns they whirled, singing as the spirit moved them and waving cheery greetings to the townsfolk, who, apathetic at the sound of many motors, stirred to excitement when they realized the soldiers were "les Americaines."

After their period of inaction, the men enjoyed the ride immensely, even though a crowded motor truck careering at full tilt is not the most luxurious mode of travel, especially for those on the inside. It is, however, so much better than hiking that your soldier regards transportation thus almost as he would riding in a Pullman at home.

When at last the column came to a halt, those in the vanguard learned the town at hand was Montmirail. Except that it was east of where they had been, this meant little. They had small idea of the number of miles they had traveled, but they knew from the looks of the country and from the attitude of the eagerly welcoming residents that they were not very close to the battle line.

Clustered all about the countryside for miles were countless villages. Part of the troops passed through Montmirail and went further east to Vauchamps. The trucks in the rear of the long column turned off at Verdelot. In the tiny hamlets centering about these three towns, the regiments were billeted.

Then ensued another period such as tries a soldier's patience to the uttermost—a time of waiting for something big to do and having all the time to carry on with what seem like trifling tasks.

Here another feature of the advanced training was noted by the men. For weeks, now, they had been hearing the sound of the big guns at the front, but only as a low, growling rumble, so distant that, although it was ever present, after a day or so it became so much a part of the daily life that it was forced upon the attention only when the wind was from the northeast.

Here, however, it was louder and more menacing and by that token alone the men would have known they were closer to the front lines. Their surmises in this regard were strengthened by the added gravity of the officers and the frequency with which they were summoned to headquarters for consultation.

The Pennsylvania regiments were in a line some miles back of the front, which was held by French troops along the Marne. The distance between our men and the front lines then varied from ten to fourteen miles.

By the time the men had been in these billets three days, they were disgusted thoroughly with their failure to get farther. Hourly they grumbled among themselves at the delay, and told themselves it was "N. G. P. luck," to be held back so far at such a time.

However, there came a break in the monotony for the 109th. The men of the various regiments had been arranging for a mild sort of celebration of the Fourth of July, with extra "eats," concerts, sports and other events. The 109th had gone to sleep the night of Wednesday, July 3d, to dream of the "doings" of the morrow, which loomed large in view of the deadly routine they had been following so long.

They were not to sleep long, however. Shortly after midnight they were routed out and the companies were formed. "Something was up," though the men in the ranks knew not what. Officers knew that an emergency had arisen to the north and that they were under orders to hasten there with all speed, presumably for their first action.

The lads stumbled from their billets, many of them no more than half awake, doubting, confused, excited, demanding to know, being told wild rumors by their fellows, the most credible of which was that the Germans had broken through in the north and that "the old Hundred and Ninth is goin' in to stop Fritz, an' we sure will do that li'l thing." Small wonder that there was more than a usual touch of asperity in the commands snapped out in the dark, or that the doughboys seemed able to handle themselves and their accoutrements less smoothly and smartly than usual. Off to the front at last, in the dead of night! What an experience for these Pennsylvania men!

That the emergency was real and that they were not merely the victims of another practice hike, soon became clear. Hardly was the column under way than the order "double-time" was given and off they went at the smart dog trot that takes the place of running for an army on the march. Only when men began to lag behind was the return to regular "quick-time" ordered. Officers and non-coms busied themselves with urging on would-be stragglers, keeping the ranks closed up and encouraging the men.

Hours passed thus. The thrumming of a motor was heard ahead and the column halted. A sidecar motorcycle appeared. Riding in the "tin bathtub" was a staff officer. He talked aside briefly with Colonel Millard D. Brown, of Philadelphia. His message was that the regiment would not be needed at that time and that it was to return to billets.

A short rest was ordered. The men dropped almost where they stood, many not waiting to unsling their equipment. Not until daybreak was the order given for the return march. The men thought of the weary miles they had come in the cool of the night, glanced up at the scorching sun, remembered that lost Fourth celebration, and set off on the return march, slower and more wearisome than the northward journey, when every yard seemed a task to face.

It was not until the day was almost gone that the last company was safely back in billets. The Glorious Fourth—truly the strangest the men ever had spent—had come and gone. As they dropped into exhausted sleep that night, the last thought of many was of the familiar celebrations of the day at home and of what their loved ones had been doing.

When word had filtered through to the other regiments that the 109th was on its way to the front, the celebration of the Fourth had turned to ashes in their mouths and they very frankly were green with envy. When they heard the next day of the outcome of the move, they chuckled at the discomfiture of the 109th and regretted they had not put more "pep" into the events of the day before.

Some days before this, several platoons of picked men from the division had been sent into a sector west of Château-Thierry for advanced training under fire with French forces. They were not expected to have a very hot time. The sector was extremely lively, but not just then flaming with activity, as were other places.

Two of these platoons, from the 111th Infantry, under command of Lieutenants Cedric H. Benz and John H. Shenkel, both of Pittsburgh, made an extraordinarily good impression on their French comrades. The sector continually grew hotter and hotter until the French, early in July, launched repeated attacks on the village of Vaux and on Hill 204, close by.

These two positions were particularly difficult, and the French went about their operations under the watchful eyes of the learning Americans with all the skill and craft that long campaigning had taught them. Finally, just about the time their own regiments back in billets to the east were growing stale from monotony, the Americans around Vaux were invited to occupy positions where they could observe closely the whole operation. The platoons from the 111th had made such a favorable impression on their French hosts that the commander of the latter made a proposal to them.

"You will have every opportunity to observe the action," he said, "and that is all that is expected of you. If, however, you so desire, such of your numbers as care to may participate in the assault on Hill 204."

Participation in the attack was voluntary. Those who wanted to go were invited to step out of the ranks. The two platoons stepped forward as one man, went into the battle beside the French and under French command, laughing and singing, and covered themselves with glory. This was the first occasion in which units of the Pennsylvania Division had been in action, but as it was not under their own commanders it cannot properly be regarded as a part of the divisional activity.

Word of this action seeped back to the regiments and created a profound impression. The doughboys talked about and envied their companions and pledged themselves, each in his own heart, to maintain that high standard of soldierly character when the moment arrived.

Meantime, the regiments had gone plugging ahead with their training work—rifle shooting, bayonet work, hikes and practice attacks succeeding each other in bewildering variety.

The work was interrupted July 5th by the arrival of messengers from brigade headquarters. The regiments were to move up in closer support of the French lines. Marshal Foch had shepherded the Germans into a position where their only possibility for further attack lay almost straight south from the tip of the Soissons-Rheims salient. The French forces there were expected to make the crossing of the Marne so hazardous and costly an enterprise that the Germans either would give it up almost at the outset, or would be so harassed that the push could gain little headway. In any event, the American support troops—including our own Pennsylvanians—were depended on to reinforce the line at any critical moment. And for that reason it was imperative that they be within easier striking distance.

So, very early on the morning of July 6th, the bugles roused the men from their slumbers and word was passed by the sergeants to hurry the usual morning duties, as there was "something doing." No larger hint was needed. Dressing, washing, "police duty" and breakfast never were dispensed with more rapidly, and in less than an hour after first call the regiments were ready to move.

The 110th, the 111th and the engineers moved off without incident, other than the keen interest aroused by the increasing clamor of the guns as they marched northward, to the new positions assigned them. Parts of their routes lay over some of the famous roads of France that had not suffered yet from the barbarous invaders, and made fairly easy going. At times they had to strike across country to gain a new and more available road.

A doughboy, pressing close to where a fine old tree leaned protectingly across the sun-baked road, reached up and pulled a leafy twig. He thrust it into the air hole in his hat, and laughingly remarked that "now he was camouflaged." His comrades paid no attention until he remarked later that it was a good thing to have, as it helped keep the flies away. Thereafter there were many grasping hands when trees or bushes were within reach, and before noon the men bore some semblance to the Italian Bersaglieri, who wear plumed hats.

The going was not so smooth for the 109th, however. The farther the regiment moved along its northward road the louder and more emphatic became the cannonading. Both the officers and men realized they were getting very much closer to artillery fire than they had been. A spirit of tense, nervous eagerness pervaded the ranks. The goal of the long months of hard training, the achievement of all their dreams and desires, seemed just ahead.

They had passed the little village of Artonges, where the tiny Dhuys River, no more than a bush and tree-bordered run, swung over and joined their road to keep it company on the northward route. Pargny-la-Dhuys was almost in sight, when a shell—their first sight of one in action—exploded in a field a few hundred yards to one side.

At almost the same time an officer came dashing down the road. He brought orders from brigade headquarters for the regiment to turn off the road and take cover in a woods. Pargny and the whole countryside about were being shelled vigorously by the Germans with a searching fire in an effort to locate French batteries.

The shelling continued with little cessation, while the 109th in vexation hid in the woods south of Pargny. The doughboys became convinced firmly that the Germans knew they were on the way to the front and deliberately were trying to prevent them, through sheer fear of their well-known prowess. For many a Pennsylvania soldier had been telling his comrades and everybody else for so long that "there won't be anything to it when this division gets into action," that he had the idea fixed in his mind that the Germans must be convinced of the same thing.

Three times the cannonade slackened and the heckled Pargny was left out of the zone of fire. Each time the 109th sallied forth from its green shelter and started ahead. Each time, just as it got well away and its spirits had begun to "perk up" again, the big guns began to roar at the town and they turned back.

This continued until July 10th. When orders came that morning for the regiment to proceed northward, there was much gibing at Fritz and his spite against the regiment and little hope that the procedure would be anything more than another march up the road and back again.

Surprise was in store, however. This time the guns were pointed in other directions, and the regiment went over the hill, through what was left of Pargny after its several days of German "hate," and on up the road.

Just when spirits were soaring again at the prospect of marching right up to the fighting front, came another disappointment for the men. A short distance north of Pargny, the column turned into a field on the right of the road and made its way into a deep ravine bordering the northern side of the field. Ensued another period of grumbling and fault-finding among the men, who could not understand why they still saw nothing of the war at first hand.

The discussion was at its height as the men made camp, when it was interrupted by a screeching roar overhead, followed almost instantaneously by a terrific crash in the field above their heads and to the south.

"Whang" came another shell of smaller caliber on the other side of the road, and then the frightful orchestra was again in full swing. Suddenly that little ravine seemed a rather desirable place to be, after all. Most of the men would have preferred to be in position to do some retaliatory work, rather than sit still and have those shells shrieking through the air in search of them, but the shelter of the hollow was much more to be desired than marching up the open road in the teeth of shell fire.

An air of pride sat on many of the men. "Old Fritz must know the 109th is somewhere around," they reasoned.

Three days passed thus, with the regiment "holed up" against the almost continuous bombardment. Little lulls would come in the fire and the men would snatch some sleep, only to be roused by a renewal of the racket, for they had not yet reached that stage of old hands at the front, where they sleep undisturbed through the most vigorous shelling, only to be roused by the unaccustomed silence when the big guns quit baying.

Runners maintaining liaison with brigade headquarters and the other regiments were both better off and worse off, according to the point of view. Theirs was an exceedingly hazardous duty, with none of the relatively safe shelter of the regiment, but, too, it had that highly desirable spice of real danger and adventure that had been a potent influence in luring these men to France.

Liaison, in a military sense, is the maintaining of communications. It is essential at all times that organizations operating together should be in close touch. To do this men frequently do the seemingly impossible. Few duties in the ranks of an army are more alluring to adventurous youth, more fraught with risk, or require more personal courage, skill and resourcefulness.

At last, however, the tedious wait came to an end. Saturday night, July 13th, the usual hour for "taps," passed and the customary orders for the night had not been given. Toward midnight, when the men were at a fever heat of expectancy, having sensed "something doing" in the very air, the regiment was formed in light marching order. This meant no heavy packs, no extra clothes, nothing but fighting equipment and two days' rations. It certainly meant action.

Straight northward through the night they marched. Up toward the Marne the sky was aglow with star shells, flares and shrapnel and high explosives. The next day, July 14th, would be Bastille Day, France's equivalent of our Independence Day, and the men of the 109th commented among themselves as they hiked toward the flaring uproar that it looked as if it would be "some celebration."

The head of the column reached a town, and a glimpse at a map showed that it was Conde-en-Brie, where the little Surmelin River joins the Dhuys. Colonel Brown and the headquarters company swung out of the column to establish regimental post command there. The rest of the regiment went on northward.

A mile farther and a halt was called. There was a brief conference of battalion commanders in the gloom and then the first battalion swung off to the left, the third to the right and the second extended its lines over the territory immediately before it.

When all had arrived in position, the first battalion was on a line just south of the tiny hamlet of Monthurel, northwest of Conde. The second battalion was strung out north of Conde, and the third continued the line north of the hamlet of St. Agnan, northeast of Conde.

Then the regiment was called on to do—for the first time with any thought that it would be of real present value to them—that which they had learned to do, laboriously, grumblingly and with many a sore muscle and aching back, in camp after camp. They "dug in."

There was no sleep that night, even had the excited fancies of the men permitted. Up and down, up and down, went the sturdy young arms, and the dirt flew under the attack of intrenching picks and shovels. By daylight a long line of pits, with the earth taken out and heaped up on the side toward the enemy, scarred the fields. They were not pretentious, as trenches went in the war—scarcely to be dignified with the name of trenches—but the 109th heaved a sigh of relief and was glad of even that shelter as the Hun artillery renewed its strafing of the countryside.

Runners from the 109th carried the news to brigade headquarters that the regiment was at last on the line. Thence the word seeped down through the ranks, and the men of the 110th and 111th and of the engineers got little inklings of the troubles their comrades of the old First and Thirteenth had experienced in reaching their position.

Roughly, then, the line of the four regiments extended from near Chezy, on the east, to the region of Vaux, beyond Château-Thierry, on the west. The 103d Engineers held the eastern end. Then came, in the order named, the 109th, 110th and 111th. The 112th was busy elsewhere, and had not joined the other regiment of its brigade, the 111th.

CHAPTER III

The Last Hun Drive

Our Pennsylvania regiments now were operating directly with French troops, under French higher command, and in the line they were widely separated, with French regiments between.

The troops faced much open country, consisting chiefly of the well-tilled fields for which France is noted, with here and there a clump of trees or bushes, tiny streams, fences and an occasional farm building. Beyond these lay a dense woods, extending to the Marne, known variously in the different localities by the name of the nearest town. The Bois de Conde, near Monthurel, was the scene of some of the stiffest fighting that followed.

The real battle line lay right along the Valley of the Marne, a little more than two miles away, and the men of the Pennsylvania regiments were disappointed again to learn they were not actually holding the front line. That was entirely in the hands of the French in that sector, and French officers who came back to visit the American headquarters and to establish liaison with these support troops confidently predicted that the Boche never would get a foothold on the south bank of the river. The river, they said, was so lined with machine gun nests and barbed wire entanglements that nothing could pass.

That evening, Sunday, July 14th, runners brought messages from brigade headquarters to Colonel Brown, commanding the 109th, and Colonel George E. Kemp, of Philadelphia, commanding the 110th. There were little holes in the French line that it was necessary to plug, and the American support was called on to do the plugging.

Colonel Brown ordered Captain James B. Cousart, of Philadelphia, acting commander of the third battalion, to send two companies forward to the line, and Colonel Kemp, from his post command, despatched a similar message to Major Joseph H. Thompson, Beaver Falls, commanding his first battalion.

Captain Cousart led the expedition from the 109th himself, taking his own company, L, and Company M, commanded by Captain Edward P. Mackey, of Williamsport. Major Thompson sent Companies B, of New Brighton, and C, of Somerset, from the 110th, commanded respectively by Captains William Fish and William C. Truxal.

Captain Cousart's little force was established in the line, Company M below Passy-sur-Marne, and Company L back of Courtemont-Varennes. The two companies of the 110th were back of Fossoy and Mezy, directly in the great bend of the river. The Dhuys River enters the Marne near that point and this river separated the positions of the 109th and 110th companies. Fossoy, the farthest west of these towns, is only four miles in an air line from Château-Thierry, and Passy is about four miles farther east.

The reason for this move was two-fold: Marshal Foch had manipulated his forces so that it was felt to be virtually certain the next outbreak of the Germans could be made only at one point, directly southwest from Château-Thierry. If the expected happened, the green Pennsylvania troops would receive their baptism of fire within the zone of the operation, but not in the direct line of the thrust. Thus, they would become seasoned to fire without bearing the responsibility of actually stopping a determined effort.

The second reason was that the French had been making heavy concentrations around Château-Thierry, and their line to the east was too thin for comfort. Therefore, their units were drawn in somewhat at the flanks, to deepen the defense line, and the Pennsylvania companies were used to fill the gaps thus created.

French staff officers accompanied the four companies to the line and disposed them in the pockets left for them, in such a way that there were alternately along that part of the front a French regiment and then an American company. The disposition of the troops was completed well before midnight. The companies left behind had watched their fellows depart on this night adventure with longing, envious eyes, and little groups sat up late discussing the luck that fell to some soldiers and was withheld from others.

The men had had no sleep at all the night before and little during the day, but no one in those four companies, facing the Germans at last after so many weary months of preparation, thought of sleep, even had the artillery fire sweeping in waves along the front or the exigencies of their position permitted it.

Eagerly the men tried to pierce the black cloak of night for a first glimpse of the Hun lines. Now and then, as a star shell hung its flare in the sky, they caught glimpses of the river, and sometimes the flash of a gun from the farther shore gave assurance that the Boche, too, was awake and watching.

About 11.30 o'clock, the night was shattered by a ripping roar from miles of French batteries in the rear, and the men lay in their trenches while the shells screamed overhead. It was by far the closest the Pennsylvania men had been to intensive artillery fire, and they thought it terrible, having yet to learn what artillery really could be.

Days afterward, they learned that prisoners had disclosed the intention of the Germans to attack that night and that the French fire was designed to break up enemy formations and harass and disconcert their artillery concentration.

The Germans, with typical Teutonic adherence to system, paid little attention to the French fire until the hour fixed for their bombardment. Midnight came and went, with the French cannon still bellowing. Wearied men on watch were relieved by comrades and dropped down to rest.

At 12.30 o'clock, the German line belched forth the preliminary salvo of what the French afterward described as the most terrific bombardment of the war up to that time. The last German offensive had opened.

The gates to glory and to death swung wide for many a Pennsylvania lad that night.

That the French did not exaggerate in their characterization of the bombardment was shown in documents taken later on captured prisoners. Among these was a general order to the German troops assuring them of victory, telling them that this was the great "friedensturm," or peace offensive, which was to force the Allies to make peace, and that, when the time came to advance, they would find themselves unopposed. The reason for this, said the order, was that the attack was to be preceded by an artillery preparation that would destroy completely all troops for twenty miles in front of the German lines. As a matter of fact, shells fell twenty-five miles back of the Allied lines.

For mile on mile along that bristling line, the big guns gave tongue, not in gusts or intermittently, as had been the case for days, but continuously. Only later did the men in the trenches learn that the attack covered a front of about sixty-five miles, the most pretentious the Huns had launched. Karl Rosner, the Kaiser's favorite war correspondent, wrote to the Berlin Lokal Anzeiger:

"The Emperor listened to the terrible orchestra of our surprise fire attack and looked on the unparalleled picture of the projectiles raging toward the enemy's positions."

Pennsylvania's doughboys and engineers shared with the then Prussian War Lord the privilege of listening to the "surprise fire attack," but to them it was like no orchestra mortal ear had ever heard. Most of those who wrote home afterward used a much shorter word of only four letters to describe the event. There was, indeed, a strange unanimity about the expression: "It seemed as if all —— had broken loose!"

Crouching in their trenches, powerless to do anything for themselves or each other, they endured as best they could that tremendous ordeal. The very air seemed shattered to bits. No longer was it "the rumbling thunder of the guns," to which they had been giving ear for weeks. Crashing, ear-splitting explosions came so fast they were blended into one vast dissonance that set the nerves to jangling and in more than one instance upset completely the mental poise of our soldiers, so that they had to be restrained forcibly by their comrades from rushing out into the open in their temporary madness.

Paris, fifty miles away "as the crow flies," was awakened from its slumber after its holiday celebration by the sound of that Titanic cannonade and saw the flashes, and pictures were jarred from the walls by the trembling of the earth.

The regiments back in the support line were little, if any, better off than the four companies of Pennsylvanians up in the front line, for the Hun shells raked the back areas as well as tearing through the front lines. Men clenched their hands to steady shaking nerves against the sheer physical pressure of that awful noise, but officers, both French and their own, making their way along the lines in imminent peril to encourage the men, found them grimly and amazingly determined and courageous.

As usual with the Boche, he had a schedule for everything, but it went wrong at the very start this time. The schedule, as revealed later in captured papers, called for the swinging of prepared pontoon bridges across the Marne at 1.30 o'clock, after one solid hour of artillery preparation, and the advance guards were to be in Montmirail, thirteen miles to the south, at 8.30 o'clock that morning.

As showing the dependence placed by the Germans on their own ability to follow such a schedule, it may be permissible here to recall that during the fighting an automobile bearing the black and white cross of the Germans was driven into a village held by Americans. It was immediately surrounded and a German major, leaning out cried, irascibly:

"You are not Germans!"

"That's very true," replied an American lieutenant.

"But our schedule called for our troops to be here at this time," continued the perplexed German.

"They missed connections; that's all. Get out and walk back. You are a prisoner," snapped the American.

The anticipatory artillery fire of the French had so harassed the Germans in their final preparations that it was not until two hours after their schedule time, or 3.30 o'clock in the morning, that the pontoons were swung across the river and the infantry advance began.

The Prussian Guards led. The bridges swarmed with them. The French and Americans loaded and fired, loaded and fired until rifle barrels grew hot and arms tired. Gaps were torn in the oncoming hordes, only to be filled instantly as the Germans pushed forward from the rear. The execution done among the enemy when they were concentrated in solid masses on the bridges was terrific, and for days afterward the stream, about 100 feet wide in that section, was almost choked with the bodies of Germans.

The moment the enemy appeared, the excitement and nerve-strain of our Pennsylvania soldiers dropped from them like a robe from a boxer in the ring. Their French comrades said afterward they were amazed and deeply proud of the steadiness and calmness of these new allies. Their officers, even in the inferno of battle, thrilled with pride at the way their men met the baptism of fire.

All the new troops going to France have been "blooded" gradually in minor engagements and have been frequently in contact with the enemy before being launched into a major operation. Virtually the only exception to this was the case of the seven divisions of the British regular army that landed in France and were rushed at once into the maelstrom of the first German onslaught in 1914, retreating day by day and being slaughtered and cut to pieces constantly, until they were almost wiped out.

It was the intention that the Pennsylvania troops should be carried by slow and easy stages into actual battle, too, but a change in the Boche plans decreed otherwise. Thus, Pennsylvania regiments, with the engineers fighting as infantry, found themselves hurled immediately into front line fighting in one of the most ambitious German operations of the war.

The maximum German effort of the July thrust was made directly along their front. It seemed almost as if the enemy knew he faced many new troops at this point and counted on that to enable him to make a break-through.

But Pennsylvania held. The great offensive came to smash.

Official reports compiled from information gathered from prisoners and made public afterward showed that the enemy engaged fourteen divisions—approximately 170,000 men—in the first line in this part of the battlefield. Behind these, in support, were probably fourteen additional divisions, some of which, owing to the losses inflicted on those in the front line, were compelled to take part in the fighting. No figures are available as to the number of French, but their lines were so thin that Americans had to be thrust in to stop gaps, and there were fewer than 15,000 men in the Pennsylvania regiments.

CHAPTER IV

"Kill or Be Killed"

Nothing human could halt those gray-green waves in the first impetus of the German assault across the Marne. They gained the bridgeheads, and were enabled to seek cover and spread out along the river banks. The grim gray line, like an enormous, unclean caterpillar, crept steadily across the stream. When enough men had gained the southern bank, the assault was carried to the Franco-American lines.

Machine guns in countless numbers spat venomously from both sides. Rifle-fire and rifle-grenade and hand-grenade explosions rolled together in one tremendous cacophony. The appalling diapason of the big guns thundered unceasingly.

Up the wooded slope swept the Hun waves. The furious fire of the defenders, whatever it meant to individuals, made no appreciable impress on the masses. They swept to and over the first line.

Then, indeed, did the Pennsylvanians rise to heroic heights. Gone was most of the science and skill of warfare so painstakingly inculcated in the men through months of training. Truly, it was "kill or be killed." Hand-to-hand, often breast-to-breast, the contending forces struggled. Men were locked in deadly embrace, from which the only escape was death for one or both.

One lad, his rifle knocked from his hands, plunged at an antagonist with blazing eyes and clenched fists in the manner of fighting most familiar to American boys. They were in a little eddy of the terrible melee. The American landed a terrific "punch" on the point of his opponent's chin, just as a bullet from the rear struck home in his back. The rifle, falling from the hands of the German, struck the outflung arms of the Pennsylvanian. He seized it, even as he fell, plunged the bayonet through the breast of his enemy, and, the lesson of the training camps coming to the fore in his supreme moment, he gurgled out the ferocious "yah!" which he had been taught to utter with each bayonet thrust.

The companies were split up into little groups. Back-to-back, they fired, thrust, hewed and hacked at the swarming enemy. No group knew how the others were doing. Many said afterwards they believed it was the end of all things for them, but they were resolved to die fighting and to take as many Huns with them as possible.

Then came the great tragedy for those gallant companies. Something went wrong with the liaison service. It was such a thing as is always likely to happen where two forces of men, speaking different languages, are working in co-operation.

An officer suddenly woke to the fact that there were no French troops on the flanks of his command. The same realization was forced home to each of the four companies. The now famous "yielding defense" of the French had operated and their forces had fallen back in the face of the impetuous German onslaught. Four companies of Pennsylvanians alone faced the army of the German Crown Prince.

In the midst of that Gehenna of fighting, no man has clearly fixed in his mind just what happened to cause the separation of the line. Certainly the French must have sent word that they were about to fall back. Certainly the companies, as such, never received it. Possibly the runners conveying the orders never got through. Maybe the message was delivered to an officer who was killed before he could pass it on.

Whatever the reason, the French fell back, and there were left in that fore-field of heroic endeavor only little milling, twisting groups, at intervals of several thousand feet, where our valiant Pennsylvania lads fought on still for very dear life.

The Boche hordes swept onward, pressing the French. The Americans were surrounded. Captain Cousart and a handful of his men were severed completely from the rest and taken prisoners. Lieutenant William R. Dyer, of Carney's Point, N. J., and Lieutenant Bateman, of Wayne, Pa., at the other flank of Company L, and almost half a platoon met a similar fate. Lieutenant Maurice J. McGuire was wounded.

Lieutenant James R. Schoch, of Philadelphia, was next in command of Company L. Not far from him, Sergeant Frank Benjamin, also of Philadelphia, was still on his feet and pumping his rifle at top speed. From forty to fifty men of the company were within reach. The lieutenant and the sergeant managed to consolidate them and pass the word to fall back, fighting.

Part of the time they formed something like a circle, fighting outward in every direction, but always edging back to where they knew the support lines were. They literally fought their way through that part of the Prussian army that had gotten between them and the regimental lines.

At times they fought from tree to tree, exactly as they had read of Indians doing. When they were pressed so closely that they had to have more room, they used their bayonets, and every time the Hun gave way before the "cold steel."

Here and there they met, singly or in small groups, other men of the company who had become separated. These joined the party, so that when, after hours of this dauntless struggle, Lieutenant Schoch stood in front of headquarters, saluted and said: "Sir, I have brought back what was left of L Company," he had sixty-seven men in the little column.

During the day other men slipped from the shelter of the woods and scurried into the company lines, but there were sad holes in the ranks when the last one to appear came in.

Company M was having the same kind of trouble. A swirl in the fighting opened a gap, and an avalanche of Germans plunged through, leaving Captain Mackey and a dozen men utterly separated on one side. It was impossible for them to rejoin the company, so they did from their position what the men of Company L were doing, fought their way through the Prussian-crowded woods to their own lines.

Lieutenant William B. Brown, of Moscow, Pa., near Scranton, senior officer remaining with the bulk of the company, became commander, but his responsibility was short-lived. He, too, was surrounded and made prisoner.

Lieutenant Thomas B. W. Fales, of Philadelphia, now became commander of the little band, as the only officer left with the main body of the company. Lieutenants Edward Hitzeroth, also of Philadelphia, and Walter L. Swarts, of Scranton, had disappeared, prisoners in the hands of the Germans, and Lieutenant Martin Wheeler, of Moscow, Pa., also had been separated with a few men.

There were thirty-five men in Lieutenant Fales' command. He rallied and re-formed them and they began the backward fight to the support line. They made it in the face of almost insurmountable odds and, what is more, they arrived with half a dozen prisoners. Enough men of the company had been picked up on the way to make up for casualties suffered during the running fight.

Lieutenant Wheeler, who had been cut off with part of a platoon early in the rush, ordered his men to lie down in the trenches, where they were better able to stand off the Germans. He himself took a rifle from the hands of a dead man and a supply of ammunition and clambered out of the trench. Absolutely alone, he scouted along through the woods until he found a route that was relatively free from the German advance.

Then he went back for his men, formed them and led them by the selected route, fighting as they went against such of the enemy as sought to deter them. All of this Lieutenant Wheeler performed while suffering intense pain from a wound of the hand, inflicted early in the engagement. After reaching the regimental lines, he had first-aid treatment for the wound and continued in the battle.

Lieutenant W. M. R. Crosman found a wounded corporal who was unable to walk. He remained with the corporal and they became entirely isolated from all other Americans. They were given up for lost until the next night, when a message arrived that a patrol from another American unit on another part of the battle front, miles away, had brought in the lieutenant and the corporal, both utterly exhausted and almost unbalanced from their experience.

The lieutenant had dressed the corporal's wound roughly and then had started to lead him in. They became lost and wandered about for hours. At times the lieutenant carried the corporal on his back, when the wounded man became unable to walk. Again they were forced to take shelter in a thicket, when parties of Germans approached, and to lie, in imminent fear of death, until the enemy groups had passed on. Finally they heard voices speaking in English and came on the American patrol.

A message came back to the regimental lines from the beleaguered, hard-pressed M Company for ammunition. Supply Sergeant Charles McFadden, 3d, of Philadelphia, set out with a detail to carry the ammunition forward. They were trapped in a little hamlet by the advancing Germans. McFadden sent his men back on the run, as they were badly outnumbered, but himself remained behind to destroy the ammunition to prevent its falling into the hands of the Germans.

He saw men approaching him in the French uniform and believed he was safe, until they opened fire on him with rifles and machine guns—by no means the first instance in which the Germans made such use of uniforms other than their own. Sergeant McFadden saw it was hopeless to try longer to blow up his ammunition and fled. He ran into a machine gun manned by three Germans. He took them at an angle and before they could swing the gun around to bear on him, he was upon them. Two shots from his rifle and a swift lunge with the bayonet and the machine gun crew was out of the way forever.

The Germans were coming on, however, and to reach his own lines, McFadden had to run almost a mile up a steep hill. A bullet passed through his sleeve, another through his gas mask, one through his canteen, four dented his steel helmet and another shot the stock off his rifle, but he himself was untouched. He had taken off his outer shirt because of the heat. As he came up the hill toward his own lines, his comrades, not recognizing him in that wildly running figure, opened fire on him. He dropped to the ground, ripped off his undershirt and waving it as a flag of truce, made his panting way into the lines.

The two companies of the 110th were passing through almost exactly similar experiences. Company B was surrounded and split. After a fight of twenty-four hours, during which it was necessary time after time to charge the Huns with bayonets and rally the group repeatedly to keep it from disintegrating, Captain Fish, whose home is in New Brighton, with Lieutenant Claude W. Smith, of New Castle, and Lieutenant Gilmore Hayman, of Berwyn, fought their way back with one hundred and twenty-three men. They brought with them several prisoners, and carried twenty-six of their own wounded.

The rest of the company, surrounded in the woods, also made a running fight of it, but was scattered badly and drifted back to the regimental lines in little groups, leaving many comrades behind, dead, wounded and prisoners.

The same kind of thing befell Company C, of which a little more than half returned, Captain Truxal, of Meyersdale, Pa., and Lieutenants Wilbur Schell and Samuel S. Crouse were surrounded by greatly superior forces and taken prisoner with a group of their men.

Corporal Alvey C. Martz, of Glencoe, Somerset County, with a patrol of six men, was out in advance of the company stringing barbed wire right along the river bank, when the German bombardment began. They dropped into shell holes. At the point where they lay, the wire remained intact and the Hun flood passed around them. When the hail of shells passed on in advance of the charging German lines, they arose, to find themselves completely cut off from their comrades.

"We've got to fight boys, so we might as well start it ourselves," said Martz, and his matter-of-fact manner had a strong steadying effect on his men.

Remember that it was the first time any of the youths had been face to face with the Germans. It was the first time they had ever been called on to fight for their lives. Less than a year before they had been quiet civilians, going about their peaceful trades. Martz had lived with his parents on a mountain farm in a remote part of Pennsylvania, six miles from the nearest railway. Add to this the fact that they had learned in their brief soldiering career to lean heavily upon their officers for initiative, instructions and advice, and what these men did attains epic proportions.

They came out of their shell holes shooting. No crafty concealment, no game of hide and seek with the Hun for them. Lest their firing might not attract enough attention, they let out lusty yells. Groups of Germans before them, apparently believing they were being attacked from the flank by a strong force, fled. The seven men gained the shelter of the woods. For two hours they worked their way through the forest, fighting desperately when necessary, and hunting anxiously for the place where they knew their company had been. It was not there.

When, at last, they glimpsed American uniforms through the trees they thought they had come up with the company. But it was only Sergeant Robert A. Floto, of Meyersdale, Pa., of their own company, with half a dozen men.

Corporal Martz relinquished command of the party to Sergeant Floto. A little farther on they met another American, who joined the party. He was "mad all through" and on the verge of tears from anxiety and exasperation at his own helplessness.

"There were seven of us cut off from the company," he told them, "and we ran slap-bang into all the Boche in the world. I was several feet behind the other guys and the Fritzes didn't see me. It came so sudden, the boys didn't have a chance to do anything. When I took a peek through the trees, about a million Germans were around, and my gang was just being led back toward the river by two Hun officers. I figured I couldn't do anybody any good by firing into that mob, so I came away to look for help."

"Guess we'd better see what we can do for those fellows," remarked Martz in the same cool, almost disinterested manner he had used before. Everybody wanted to go, but Martz insisted it was a job for only two men. As a companion he picked John J. Mullen, of Philadelphia. Mullen was not a former Guardsman. He was a selected man, sent from Camp Meade several months before with a draft to fill the ranks of the Twenty-eighth Division. But he had proved himself in many a training camp to be, as his comrades put it, "a regular fellow."

So Corporal Martz and Mullen, surrounded by a goodly part of the Crown Prince's crack troops, 3,000 miles from home, in a country they never had seen before, cut loose from the little group of their comrades, turned their backs on the American lines and hiked out through the woods toward Hunland to succor their fellows in distress.

The little prisoner convoy was not making great speed and the two Americans soon overtook them. The first torrent of the German advance had now passed far to their rear. The two Americans circled around through the woods and lay in ambush for the party. The prisoners, because of the narrowness of the paths through the woods, were marching in single file, one German officer in the lead, the other bringing up the rear.

"You take the one in front and I'll take that bird on the end," said Martz to Mullen. Martz was something of a sharpshooter. Once he had gone to camp with the West Virginia National Guard, just over the state line from his home, and came back with a medal as a marksman, although he was only substituting for a man who was unable to attend the camp.

They drew careful bead. Out of the corner of his eye Mullen could watch Martz, at the same time he sighted on his German officer. Martz nodded his head and the two rifles cracked simultaneously. Both officers dropped dead. The prisoners looked about them, stunned with surprise. Martz and Mullen stepped out of the woods. There was no time for thanks or congratulations. They hurried back the way they had come. The released men had no trouble arming themselves with rifles and ammunition from the dead lying in the woods.

They soon overtook Sergeant Floto and his men. The party was now of more formidable size and as the Germans by this time were broken up into rather small groups, the Americans no longer felt the necessity of skulking through the woods, but started out as a belligerent force, not hunting fight, but moving not a step to avoid one.

A few hours later they joined another group of survivors, under Captain Charles L. McLain, of Indiana, Pa., who took command. He vetoed the daring rush through the Hun-infested woods by daylight and ordered that the party lie concealed during the day and proceed to the American lines after nightfall.

"We need a rear guard to protect us against surprise," said Captain McLain, and after what had gone before it seemed but natural that Corporal Martz and Private Mullen should be selected for the job when they promptly volunteered. With little further adventure the party arrived in the regimental lines after about thirty-six hours of almost continuous contact with the Germans.

In each regiment the survivors of this first real battle of the troops of the Pennsylvania Division were formed into one company for the time being, until replacement drafts arrived to make up for the heavy losses.

This, then, is the tale of what happened when, as so many soldier letters have related, these four companies were "cut to pieces," and this is why L and M companies, of the 109th, and B and C companies, of the 110th, figured so largely in the casualties for a time.

CHAPTER V

The Guard Stands Fast

Back in the regimental lines, while the four companies were being mauled badly by the Germans, anxiety had gone steadily from bad to worse.

Enduring the storm of shells with which the Germans continued to thresh the back areas for miles, the troops did not have, for some time after the battle began, the excitement of combat to loosen their tight-strung nerves.

They saw the French come filtering out of the woods before them, and watched eagerly for their comrades, but their comrades did not come and, as time passed, it was realized the detached companies were having a hard time.

The vanguard of the Prussians reached the edge of the woods shortly before daybreak. Men on watch in the American trenches saw hulking gray-clad figures slinking among the trees close to the forest's fringe and opened fire. As the day grew the firing on both sides waxed hotter, and soon a long line of the enemy advanced from the shelter of the bois. They were met by a concentration of rifle, machine gun and cannon fire such as no force could withstand. The first waves seemed simply to wither away like chaff before a wind. The following ones slackened their pace, hesitated a moment or two then turned and ran for the timber.

From that moment, our men were themselves again. They saw the Germans were not invincible. They themselves had broken up a Prussian Guards' attack. All their confidence, self-reliance, initiative, elan, came to the fore. They felt themselves unbeatable.

But one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one repulse of an enemy make a victory. Time after time the Germans returned to the assault. Groups of them gained the wheat fields, where they felt protected from the fire of our men. Obviously, they expected to crawl through the wheat until they were on the southern edge of the fields, where, lying closely protected, they could pick the Americans off at leisure.

Whole platoons of our men volunteered to meet this move and were permitted to crawl forward and enter the wheat. Then ensued a game of hide and seek, Germans and Americans stalking each other as big game is stalked, flat on their faces in the growing grain.

But the Germans were no match for Americans at this kind of thing. There is something—a kind of heritage from our pioneer, Indian-fighting ancestors, probably—that gives to an American lad a natural advantage at this sort of fighting, and scores of Germans remained behind in the shelter of the wheat when the tide of battle had passed far away, with the spires of grain nodding and whispering a requiem over them.

Before dawn of that fifteenth of July, word was received from Colonel McAlexander, commanding the 39th Infantry of the old regular army, which was in front and to the right of the 109th, that the Germans had crossed the river and penetrated the Allied lines. He added that if they gained a foothold in the Bois de Conde, or Conde Wood, a high, wooded tract just north of Monthurel, the position of the 39th would be seriously menaced.

Captain William C. Williams, commanding Company H, 109th, and Captain Edward J. Meehan, commanding Company D, of the same regiment, and both Philadelphians, were ordered into the wood. The companies were led out and took positions on both sides of a narrow ravine in the wood.

Presently the French began to appear, falling back. First they came one or two at a time, then in larger groups. As they hurried by they gave some indication of the heavy fighting they had gone through and which still was going forward up toward the river.

Captain Williams took a platoon of his company to establish it in a strong position to protect the flank of the company. While doing so, the firing, which had been growing closer all the time, broke out right at hand and Captain Williams discovered he and his men were cut off from the company. The Captain was shot in the hand at the first fire and several of his men were wounded, but the Captain rallied his little party and they fought their way back and rejoined the company. Captain Williams was wounded twice more, but so serious was the emergency that he had a first aid dressing applied and continued the fight without further treatment.

Both Captain Williams and Captain Meehan since have been promoted to the rank of Major and have been awarded Distinguished Service Crosses. Major Williams is an old regular army man. With the rank of sergeant, he was attached to the former First Pennsylvania Infantry as an instructor and served in this capacity during the Mexican border duty in 1916. Later he was commissioned Captain and assigned to command Company H.

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 harassing 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 shell 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 assistance.

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 space 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 shell 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 quantities, 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 asserted 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 assault after assault 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 shell 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 rushing to the threatened point. With this assistance 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 harassed 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 shine 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 masses, 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 passed 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:

"Shoot! Shoot! Don't stop for us!"