I reached my division on the first of October, 1918, after a tedious ten days on the way. I traveled most of the way with Lieutenant Colonel True, whom I met on the train coming out of Chaumont. I found that the higher ranking officers invariably approached the chaplains not as officers of inferior rank but as leaders of a different kind, much as a prominent business man treats his minister in civil life. Colonel True was a regular army man of long standing who was being transferred from another division to the Twenty-Seventh. When we arrived at the Hotel Richmond, the Y. M. C. A. hotel for officers in Paris, we found only one room available with a double bed, and so for the first time in my life I had the honor of sleeping with a Lieutenant Colonel. The honor was a doubtful one as he had at the time a slight attack of "flu" brought on from exposure and a touch of gas in the recent St. Mihiel drive. Colonel True had received his promotion from a majority and his transfer before the drive, but had not reported until he had gone through the whole fight at the head of his battalion. I mention this not as a striking, but strictly as a typical proceeding on the part of the average American officer.
For a few days we were held at the Replacement Camp at Eu in Normandy--an idyllic spot within sight of the English Channel, surrounded by gentle hills. While there I made several trips to Treport, a favorite summer resort on the Channel before the war. It is a quaint little fishing village with a typical modern summer resort superimposed.
The old stone Norman cottages with their high roofs always had a touch of decoration somewhere, in mosaic, paint or stained gla.s.s, different from the plainer architecture of Central France. The modern part consists of several beautiful hotels and a number of cheap restaurants and curio shops. Of course, the hotels were all used by the British Army as hospitals at this time. I visited Base Hospital 16, a Philadelphia Unit, which was loaned to the British. I had a delightful talk with our Red Cross Chaplain and made a tour of many of the wards. The patients were almost all British with a few Americans from the August campaign in Flanders. Among the rest I met about a dozen Jewish boys, English and Australian, who were naturally delighted by the rare visit of a Jewish Chaplain. The eight Jewish Chaplains in the British Expeditionary Forces were attached to the various Army Headquarters, and so had to cover impossible areas in their work. The nearest one to Treport was Rabbi Geffen at Boulogne with whom I afterward came into communication, and from whom I obtained a large number of the army prayer books arranged by the Chief Rabbi of England for use in the British Forces.
Hospital visiting is dreary work, especially when there is action going on from which one is separated. The work is exhausting physically, walking up and down the long wards and stopping by bedsides. It is especially a drain on the nerves and sympathies, to see so many sick and mutilated boys--boys in age most of them, certainly boys in spirit--and giving oneself as the need arises. And in a hospital so many men have requests. They are helpless and it is always impossible to have enough visitors and enough chaplains for them. I was glad to be useful at Treport but gladder still when the word came through to release all troops in the Second Corps Replacement Depot.
We were loaded on a train, the soldiers in box-cars of the familiar type ("40 men or 8 horses") with the little group of officers crowded together in a single first-cla.s.s coach. Broken windows, flat wheels and no lights showing--we were beginning to feel that we were in the war zone. From Eu to Peronne took from 4:30 A. M. to 9:30 P. M. with three changes of trains and ten additional stops. We got only a short view of the railroad station at Amiens, at that time almost completely destroyed. Our division was then in the British area on the Somme sector, and at the time of our arrival they had just come out of the great victory at the Hindenburg Line.
Our first ruined city was Peronne, which will never leave my memory. The feeling of a ruined town is absolutely indescribable, for how can one imagine a town with neither houses nor people, where the very streets have often been destroyed? This situation contradicts our very definition of a town, for a town is made of streets, houses and people; no imagination can quite grasp the reality of war and ruin without its actual experience. And Peronne was much more striking than most cities in the war zone; it had been fought through six different times, and its originally stately public buildings showed only enough to impress us with the ruin that had been wrought. Only one wall of one end of the church was standing, with two fine Gothic arches, only one side of the building on the square and so on through the whole town. We became inured to the sight of ruined villages later on, but the first shock of seeing Peronne will be indelible.
The headquarters of the division were then located at the Bois de Buire, about ten miles out, though for almost a half day we could find n.o.body to give us exact directions. At last Lieutenant Colonel H. S.
Sternberger, the division quartermaster, put in an appearance and offered to take me and Lieutenant Colonel True up to headquarters in his car. The rest of our party had all wandered off by then in the direction of their various units. Colonel Sternberger was the highest ranking officer at the time among the thousand Jews in the Twenty-Seventh Division. Lieutenant Colonel Morris Liebman of the 106th Infantry, also a Jew, had been killed in action in Flanders six weeks before, a loss which was very deeply felt in his regiment. Colonel Sternberger was one of the popular staff officers of the division owing to his indefatigable labors for the welfare of the boys. His great efforts at the expense of much personal risk and of serious damage to his health were directed to get the food up to the front on time. While I was with the division, Colonel Sternberger proved both a staunch personal friend and an active ally in my work.
It took more than a day to become acquainted with the camouflaged offices in the woods. Small huts, with semicircular iron roofs covered with branches, were scattered about among the trees. Some of them had signs, Division Adjutant, Commanding General, and the rest; others were billets. I invariably lost my way when I went to lunch and wandered for some minutes before finding "home." "Home" was a hut exactly like the rest, where the French mission and the gas officer had their offices during the day and where six of us slept at night. I fell heir to the cot of one of the interpreters then home on leave, Georges Levy, who afterward became one of my best friends. My baggage had disappeared on the trip, so that I had only my hand bag with the little it could hold.
My first need, naturally, was for blankets to cover the cot. I collected these from various places, official and otherwise, until the end of the month found me plentifully provided. I must admit that the first cool nights in the woods forced me to sleep in my clothes. Naturally, my first task was to wire for my baggage, but it had completely vanished and did not return for four long months. Everybody lost his possessions at some time during the war; I was unique only in losing them at the outset and not seeing them until the whole need for them was over.
The boys had just come out of the line, worn out, with terrible losses, but after a great victory such as occurs only a few times in any war.
They had broken the Hindenburg Line, that triple row of trenches and barbed wire, with its concrete pill-boxes, its enfilading fire from machine guns, its intricate and tremendous system of defenses. I crossed the line many times during the month that followed and never failed to marvel that human beings could ever have forced it. The famous tunnel of the St. Quentin Ca.n.a.l was in our sector, too, as well as part of the ca.n.a.l itself. The villages about us were destroyed so completely that no single roof or complete wall was standing for a shelter and the men had to live in the cellars.
One wall always bore the name of the former village in large letters, which became still larger and more striking in the territory near the Hindenburg Line, so long occupied by the Germans. I used to repay the generous Tommies for their rides on the constant stream of trucks (we called them "lorries," like the English) by translating the numerous German signs at railroad crossings and the like, about which they always had much curiosity.
One could travel anywhere on main roads by waiting until a truck came along and then hailing it. If the seat was occupied there was usually some room in the rear, and the British drivers were always glad to take one on and equally glad to air their views on the war. When one came to a cross road, he jumped off, hailed the M. P. (Military Police) for directions and took the next truck which was going in the proper direction. In that way I have often traveled on a dozen trucks in a day, with stop-overs and occasional walks of a few miles to fill in the gaps.
Between a map, a compa.s.s and the M. P."s, we always managed to circulate and eventually find our way home again.
We saw the heavy guns lumbering on their way to the front, the aeroplanes humming overhead like a swarm of dragon-flies. Day and night we could hear the rumble of guns like distant thunder, while at night the flashes showed low on the horizon like heat lightning. Our salvage depot was at Tincourt at the foot of the hill, and when I went over there Corporal Klein and Sergeant Friedlander were quick to repair gaps in my equipment. One night I witnessed the division musical comedy (the "Broadway Boys") in an old barn at Templeux le Fosse, where we walked in the dark, found the place up an alley and witnessed a really excellent performance with costumes, scenery and real orchestra. In the middle of an act, an announcement would be made that all men of the third battalion, 108th Infantry, should report back at once, and a group of fellows would rise and file out for the five-mile hike back in the darkness: they were to move up to the front before morning.
My chief effort during those few hurried days was to get into touch with the various units so that I could be of some definite service to them when they went into action. Unfortunately, almost every time I arranged for a service and appeared to hold it the "outfit" would already be on the move. The best service I held was at the village of Buire, where about forty boys gathered together under the trees among the ruined houses. They were a deeply devotional group, told me about their holyday services conducted by a British army chaplain at Doulens, about their fallen comrades for whom they wanted to repeat the memorial prayers, and about their own narrow escapes for which they were eager to offer thanks. They had the deep spiritual consciousness which comes to most men in moments of great peril.
I managed to reach most of the infantry regiments, however, by hiking down from the woods and sometimes catching a ride. Everywhere was action. It was the breathing s.p.a.ce between our two great battles of the war. Every unit was hoping and expecting a long rest. But that hope could not be fulfilled. The intensity of the drive against the entire German line was beginning to tell and every possible unit was needed in the line to push ahead. So the rest of the Twenty-Seventh Division was brief indeed. Every regiment was starting for the front with no replacements after the terrific slaughter of two weeks before, with very little new equipment and practically no rest. And the front was now further away than it had been. The success of the allied forces meant longer marches for our tired troops.
All the villages were devastated in this area. It was the section between Peronne and the old Hindenburg Line. Not until we came to the German side of the Hindenburg Line did we find the villages in any sort of repair. The men lived in cellars without roofs, in rooms without walls or sometimes in barracks which were constructed by either of the opposing armies during the long years of the struggle. Of course, many shelters existed such as our "elephant huts" in the woods or the perfect honeycomb of dugouts in the sides of the quarry at Templeux le Gerard.
One day I "lorried" up to the division cemeteries near the old battlefield, which were being laid out by a group of chaplains with a large detail of enlisted men. I saw the occasional Jewish graves marked with the Star of David and later was able to complete the list and have all Jewish graves in our division similarly marked. I got to know the country about Bellicourt and Bony, where our heaviest fighting had taken place. I heard the story of the eight British tanks, lying helpless at the top of the long ridge near Bony, where they had run upon a mine field. I got to know the "Ausies," always the best friends and great admiration of our soldiers, with their dashing courage and reckless heroism, and the "Tommies," those steady, matter-of-fact workmen at the business of war, whom our boys could never quite understand.
Finally our headquarters moved forward, too. I jumped out of a colonel"s car one dark night and hunted for an hour and a half among the hills before I found the chalk quarry where they now were hidden from prying air scouts. At last, finding the quarry, I met a boy I knew, who took me to the dugout where the senior chaplain was sleeping. I crawled into a vacant bunk, made myself at home and left the next morning for good. The quarry did not appeal to me when wet; one was too likely to slide from the top to the bottom and stay there; and I had no desire to test its advantages when dry. The next time I came back to headquarters they were in the village of Joncourt, beyond the Hindenburg Line, in territory which we had released from the Germans. The chief attraction of Joncourt was an occasional roof--of course, there were no windows. The cemetery had been used as a "strong point" by the retreating Germans, who had scattered the bodies about and used the little vaults as pill-boxes in which to mount machine guns. And our message center was located in a German dugout fully fifty feet underground; evidently plenty of precautions had been taken against allied air raids. In fact, from this point on every house in every village had a conspicuous sign, telling of the _Fliegerschutz_ for a certain number of men in its cellar. In addition, the placard told the number of officers, men and horses which could be accommodated with billets on the premises. Evidently, the Germans in laying out their permanently occupied territory, went about it in their usual business-like fashion.
But between my glimpses of these various headquarters, I was at the front with the troops going into the trenches and had had a glimpse of war. My first experience under fire was in some woods near Maretz, where I spent part of the night with one battalion, as they paused before going into the trenches. I finished the night on the floor of a house in the village, having grown accustomed enough to the sound of the sh.e.l.ls to sleep in spite of it. Like most people I had wondered how one feels under fire, and experienced a queer sensation when I first heard the long whine of a distant sh.e.l.l culminating in a sudden explosion. Now I realized that I was under fire, too. But I speedily found that one feels more curiosity than fear under long-distance fire; real fear comes chiefly when the sh.e.l.ls begin to land really near by. I was to experience that, too, a little later. In fact, I found out soon that every soldier is frightened; a good soldier is simply one who does his duty in spite of fear.
Then a report came in that Chaplain John Ward, of the 108th Infantry, had been seriously wounded and I was sent to take his place with the unit. In a push the chaplain works with the wounded; after it, with the dead. Of many sad duties at the front, his is perhaps the saddest of all. My first station was with the third battalion headquarters and aid post in a big white house set back in a little park in the tiny village of Escaufourt, a mile or so behind the lines. Captain Merrill was in command of the battalion and one could see how the work and responsibility wore on him day by day, reducing the round, cheerful soldier for the time almost to a whispering, tottering old man. But his spirit held him to the task; he slept for only a few minutes at a time, and then was back at work again. A conscientious man can have no more exacting duty than this, to care for the lives of a thousand men.
We were under constant fire there, though not under observation, but the little ambulances ran up to the gate of the chateau for the wounded, who had to walk or be carried in and out from the house to the gate. We ate upstairs in the stately dining room at times, though we usually ate and always slept in the crowded cellar where the major and his staff were housed. There eight or nine of us would sit on our brick seats and sleep with our backs against the wall, being awakened from time to time by a messenger coming in or by the ringing of the field telephone in the corner. The telephone operator was always testing one or another connection, day and night, for the emergency when it would be needed.
One night companies H and I of the 108th Infantry were almost completely wiped out by gas. They were in low lying trenches by the side of the ca.n.a.l under a constant fire of gas sh.e.l.ls, while the damp weather kept the dangerous fumes near the ground. They had no orders to evacuate to a safer post and no human being can live forever in a gas mask, so one after another the men yielded to temptation, took off their masks for momentary relief, and inhaled the gas-laden air. All evening and night they kept coming in by twos and threes to our aid post, the stronger ones walking, the rest on stretchers. Their clothing reeked of the sickeningly sweet odor. The room was soon full of it, so that we had to blow out the candles and open the door for a few minutes to avoid being ga.s.sed ourselves. There were three ambulances running that night to the Main Dressing Station, and I made it my task to meet each car, notify the doctor and bring the ga.s.sed and wounded men out to the ambulance.
Most of them were blinded for the time being by the effect of the gas.
No light was possible, as that would have drawn fire at once. Every ten minutes through the night our village was sh.e.l.led, and in walking the forty or fifty yards through the park to the gate, I had to make two detours with my blinded men to avoid fresh sh.e.l.l-holes made that very afternoon. I admit feeling an occasional touch of panic as I led the big helpless fellows around those fresh sh.e.l.l holes and helped them into the ambulances. The final touch came when a youngster of perhaps seventeen entered the aid post alone, walking painfully. "What outfit are you from, sonny?" was my natural greeting. "I am the last man left in Company H," was the proud reply.
This was the sort of fatal blunder which seemed to occur once in every command before the lesson was learned that gas-filled trenches need no defending, and that troops, safely withdrawn a hundred yards or more, can be moved forward again quickly enough the moment the gas lifts. The English had had the same lesson more than once until they learned it thoroughly; so had the Germans; now our armies, with their examples before us, had to learn it again through the suffering of our own soldiers. Our division was not the only one in which the same or a similar blunder cost the men so dearly, for I have read the same incident of more than one unit on other parts of the American line, and have had them verified by officers who were present at those other catastrophes. In the art of war the instruction of the generals costs the lives of the soldiers.
We had the peculiar experience of seeing the village which we had entered in good condition crumbling about us under the enemy fire. Even the windows were intact when we reached it; the Germans were just out, and our artillery had been outstripped completely in the forward rush.
Under the constant pounding of back area fire, designed to prevent ammunition and supplies coming up to the line unmolested, our little village lost windows, roofs and walls, disintegrating steadily into a heap of ruins.
One evening we were a.s.signed the task of evacuating some old French peasants who had clung to their little homes through all the world-shaking catastrophe. At last they had to leave, as the danger to them was too direct and, in addition, they const.i.tuted a hidden menace to our troops in case even one of them had been left behind as a spy. I went with a party of Australians and a few of our men to the houses in the outskirts of the town, where the greatest danger existed. I remember the utterly disconsolate att.i.tude of two old men and a little old woman in one of them, when they were told they had to leave. They seemed numb in the midst of all the rush and roar of warfare. Their little possessions were there, they were of the peasant type and had probably never been out of the district in their lives. The advance of the enemy in 1914 had been accompanied by no fighting near their homes, and now the allied victory, the one hope of their country, was the one thing that bore destruction to their little village and tore them away from the spot where they were rooted.
One evening I joined a ration party going forward and visited the lines and advanced headquarters at St. Souplet, hearing the peculiar whistle of a sniper"s bullet pa.s.s me as I made my way back after dusk. One of the boys carrying a heavy bag of hardtack had a sore shoulder, not quite well from a previous wound. So I shouldered his bag for a decidedly weary mile of skulking along a sunken road and hurrying across the occasional open s.p.a.ces. When we came to his unit I was glad to turn the bag over to him; I felt no pleasure in such lumpy burden, and would far rather have worn out my shoulder with something more appreciated by the boys than hardtack,--the one thing which n.o.body enjoyed but which was eaten only because they were desperately hungry. On the night of October 16th we all moved over, preparatory to the push across the Selle River.
We installed ourselves in the large building at the cross roads, where the aid post was stationed. I joined a group of sleepers on the cellar floor, picking my way in the darkness to find a vacant spot. My trench coat on the plank floor made a really luxurious bed.
The next morning, October 17th, I was awakened at 5:20 by the barrage; the boys were going over; the battle of the Selle River had began. By six o"clock the wounded began to flow in, at first by twos and threes, then in a steady stream. They came walking wearily along or were carried on the shoulders of German prisoners or occasionally by our own men. As we were at the crossroads, we got most of the wounded, English, German and American, as well as a great deal of the sh.e.l.ling with which back areas are always deluged during an attack. In this case, our post was just behind the lines at first, but it became a back area within a very few days owing to the dash and brilliancy of our tired troops when the orders came to go over the top. They stormed the heights across the stream after wading it in the first rush, and then went on across the hills and fields.
Our attack was a part of the campaign of the British Third Army and a small element in the great "push" going on at that time over the entire front. Our task with that of the Thirtieth Division on our right was to cross the Selle River and advance toward the Sambre Ca.n.a.l. On our left were British troops, while we were supported by Australian artillery and the British Air Service. In our first great battle, that of the Hindenburg Line, the "Ausies" had acted as the second wave, coming up just in time to save some of the hard pressed units of our Division and to complete the success of our a.s.sault. So we knew them well enough and were glad indeed to have their excellent artillery to put over the barrage for our second attack.
The Australians and, in fact, all the British Colonial troops, had much more in common with the American soldiers than had the British troops themselves. They were like our men, young, hardy, dashing. They were all volunteers. They had a type of discipline of their own, which included saluting their own officers when they wanted to and never saluting British officers under any circ.u.mstances. I took a natural pride in hearing of their commanding officer, Lieutenant General Sir John Monash, who held the highest rank of any Jew in the war. It was no little honor to be the commander of those magnificent troops from Australia.
Meanwhile we were busy at the first aid post. I found myself the only person at hand who could speak any German, so I took charge of the door, with a group of prisoners to carry the wounded in and out and load them in the ambulances. As soon as my dozen or so prisoners were tired out I would send them on to the "cage" and pick up new men from the constant stream flowing in from the front. Our opponents here were chiefly Wurtembergers, young boys of about twenty, although one regiment of Prussian marines was among them. Among the first prisoners were two German physicians who offered to a.s.sist ours in the work. They worked all day, one in our aid post, the other in that of the 107th Infantry, side by side with our surgeons and doing excellent work for Americans and Germans alike. They picked their own a.s.sistants from among their captured medical corpsmen, and were strictly professional in their att.i.tude throughout. One of them was Dr. Beckhard, a Jew from Stuttgart, with whom I had a few s.n.a.t.c.hes of conversation and whom I should certainly like to meet again under more congenial circ.u.mstances. I was amused in the midst of it all when the doctor noticed his brother, an artilleryman, coming in as one of the endless file of stretcher bearers, carrying wounded in gray or olive drab. The doctor asked me whether he might take his brother as one of his a.s.sistants for the day.
"Is he any good?" I asked. "Oh, yes," was the answer, "as good as any medical orderly." So I gave permission and the two, together with a real medical orderly and another young prisoner as interpreter, ran one room of the first aid post in their own way. I kept an American soldier on guard there chiefly to be prepared for any eventualities; as a matter of fact the German surgeons treated American wounded and American surgeons treated German wounded with the same impartial spirit. The two physicians joined the other prisoners at the end of the day bearing letters of appreciation written by Captain Miller, the surgeon in charge of our post.
About a year later when communication with Germany was opened again, I found that this chance meeting at the front proved an odd means of communication with my German cousins. When Dr. Beckhard returned to Stuttgart he lectured on his experiences at the front, mentioning among other things that he had met an American Rabbi by the name of Levinger.
Some distant relatives of mine living in the city heard the talk and wrote to a nearer branch of the family living in another part of Wurtemberg, so that shortly after the actual experience they knew of my being in the army and serving at the front.
Only the small Ford ambulances could come as near the front as our post, while the larger ones came only to the Advanced Dressing Station at Busigny. These smaller ambulances were unable to accommodate the constant stream of ga.s.sed and wounded men coming from the lines. Those who had minor wounds, especially in the arms, had to be directed along the proper road according to that ironical term, "walking wounded."
Cases which in civil life would be carried to an ambulance, given full treatment, and then driven gently to the nearest hospital, were here given emergency dressings and told, "The Advanced Dressing Station is two miles down that road, boys. Walk slow and don"t miss the sign telling where to turn to the left." Other more serious cases for whom there was no room in ambulances, at the moment were carried on stretchers by prisoners. I would a.s.semble three or four such cases, take a revolver left by some wounded officer or non-com, and give it to a "walking wounded" with instructions to "see that they get safely to the next point." Naturally, these boys with minor wounds of their own were safe guardians to see that the German prisoners did their duty. I can still see their grins as they a.s.sured me: "Those fellows are sure going to stick on the job, sir. I"ll say they will!" The att.i.tude of the slightly wounded men was often full of grim humor. I remember one Australian carried in on a stretcher who called me to his side with their customary "Here, Yank," and when I responded handed me very gravely a Mills bomb which he had used to overawe his captive bearers, apparently threatening to blow them up with himself should they prove insubordinate.
A constant worry of mine were the weapons which the wounded men dropped in front or within the aid post. Knowing that all army supplies would be reissued to them on release from the hospital, the soldiers did not care to carry heavy rifles or even revolvers and bombs back with them.
The result was a pile of weapons at just the point where my prisoner stretcher-bearers could have easy access to them. I kept an M. P. busy much of the time removing these to a place of comparative safety.
Behind the aid post we found a shed which served as temporary morgue for the men who died before we could give them emergency treatment and rush them off in the ambulances. The extreme tension of the actual fight and the tremendous pressure of administering to the living calloused the heart for the moment to these horrible necessities, which come back to memory in later days with the full measure of ghastly detail.
The chaplain is the handy man at the front, one of the few who is not limited by special duties or confined to a particular spot. He works forward or backward as the need exists. He ladles out hot chocolate with the Red Cross, carries a stretcher with the Medical Corps, ties up a bandage when that is needed, and prays for Jew and Christian alike. I ministered to a number of Jewish and Christian soldiers who were dying, leading the Jews in the traditional confession of faith, and reading a psalm for the Protestants. One of the surgeons came to me and said, "Captain Connor here is dying, and Chaplain Hoffman our priest is at Battalion Headquarters acting as interpreter to examine some prisoners.
What can we do?" So I borrowed the surgeon"s rosary and held the cross to the lips of the dying Catholic. This incident, so impossible in civil life, is really expected among soldiers,--it has been repeated so many times and in so many different ways.
We were constantly under heavy sh.e.l.l fire, as our place at the cross roads was not only convenient of access, but was also the only route for bringing supplies and ammunition to our part of the front. Once as I was in the middle of the road with several prisoners loading stretchers on an ambulance, a sh.e.l.l burst in a pool about twenty feet away, covering us with a shower of mud. My prisoners, who had a wholesome respect for their own artillery, could hardly be prevented from dropping the stretcher. However, we were too near the explosion to be hurt, as the fragments flew over our heads, killing one boy and wounding four others across the street. One of the wounded was an American runner from the front, who was enjoying a hasty bite at the army field kitchen around the corner. He came over in a hurry to have his cheek tied up and then went calmly back to the field kitchen to finish his interrupted lunch.
The man who was killed was standing about seventy-five feet from the spot of the explosion beside the motor-cycle which he drove, waiting for his commanding officer to come and use the side-car. He pitched forward as though falling to avoid the explosion, just as we would have done if we had not been holding a stretcher. When he did not rise, Father Kelley and I went over to him and found that a fatal bit of metal had struck him in the head just below his steel helmet.
And so the work went on. The next day we heard of some wounded who had not yet been brought in from Bandival Farm. Chaplain Burgh of the 107th Infantry and I gathered together a few volunteers of our ambulance men and several prisoners to go out and carry them in. It was about a mile and a half out across the battlefield under intermittent sh.e.l.l fire. I placed my captured Luger revolver, which one of the boys had brought me the day before, in a conspicuous position with the handle projecting from my front pocket. I had had the thing unloaded as soon as I got it because I preferred not to run any unnecessary risks. Being a non-combatant both by orders and inclination, I was afraid it might go off. But my prisoners did not know that and so I had no difficulty in silencing their muttered protests against such a hard and dangerous hike. Working prisoners under fire like this was strictly against international law, but that sort of a provision we violated frankly and cheerfully. On the way back with our wounded across the muddy and sh.e.l.l-pitted fields, we pa.s.sed German machine gun emplacements with the dead gunners still beside the guns, Americans lying with their faces toward the enemy, and constant heaps of supplies of all kinds strewn about. One of our stretchers was put down for a moment"s rest near such a scattered group of German knapsacks. One of the prisoners asked if he might help himself, and when I nodded all four made a wild dash for the supplies and each man came back carrying an army overcoat and a bag of emergency rations, the little sweetish crackers which they carried instead of our hard tack.
On the third day of the attack I joined two men of the Intelligence Department in walking out to the front line, then over five miles from the village. It was a hard hike through the mud and about the sh.e.l.l holes. Finally we found our friends dug in (for the fourth time that day) on a little ridge. Each time their temporary trenches had been completed orders had come either for a short retreat or a further advance, and now by the middle of the afternoon the boys were digging another at the place where they were to stay till the next morning.
Across the ravine in a little wood the Germans were hanging on for the time being until their artillery could be saved. I visited the 108th Infantry in reserve and emptied my musette bag of the sacks of Bull Durham which I had brought along from the Red Cross. Then the boys wanted matches, which I had forgotten, and their grat.i.tude was lost in their disgust.
I found Captain Merrill with his staff inspecting two captured German 77"s, on which they had just placed the name of their unit. By that time, after three consecutive battles without replacements, our units were so depleted that a regiment had only 250 rifles in the line instead of the original 3,000. Captain Merrill"s battalion consisted on that day of 87 riflemen. Just as we finished our inspection of the guns the enemy artillery started "strafing" again, so we jumped into a sh.e.l.l-hole which had been hollowed out into convenient form and finished our conversation there. I then visited some of the 107th Infantry in the front line rifle pits, one hundred yards or so ahead, and turned back again toward the village.
I was just losing my way among the hills with approaching twilight, when I met an Australian artillery train on their way back for supplies, and climbed on a limber to ride into town. It was a wild ride, with the rough roads and the drivers" habit of trotting over the spots where sh.e.l.l-holes showed that danger might linger. I held on in quite unmilitary fashion and wondered if the horse behind would be careful when I fell. But they brought me in safely and added one more means of locomotion to the dozens which I had utilized at various times: ammunition "lorries," ambulances, side-cars and even a railway locomotive--everything in fact except a tank.
The next day we breathed more freely again. Our tired boys, reduced in numbers, weakened in physical resistance, but going forward day after day as their orders came, were at last to go out of the lines. Their job was done; they had reached the Sambre Ca.n.a.l; and though we did not know it, they were not to go into battle again. I lorried back to Joncourt, the temporary division headquarters, for the night, changed my clothes, slept in a borrowed cot, read a very heartening pile of home letters which had acc.u.mulated for some weeks, and returned to St. Souplet the next day for the burial detail. It was the 21st of October; while the division as a whole marched back to the railhead, five chaplains with a detail of a hundred and fifty men stayed behind for the sad work that remained to be done.
At this time I stopped off at the 108th Infantry for a few minutes, as they halted for a meal after coming out of the lines, and had my orderly, David Lefkowitz, detached from his unit to serve with me for my entire remaining period with the division. I had become acquainted with him during my first few days in the division and found that he would be interested to work with me as orderly and a.s.sistant. The order a.s.signing him to this special work was made out before we left the woods at Buire. But our various units were so depleted at the time that I arranged to leave him with his "outfit" for the battle. It was a serious deprivation to me, as Lefkowitz had been through the earlier battle at the Hindenburg Line and could have given me much a.s.sistance and advice in the front line work. Now that the fighting was over, he left his company to go with me and enjoy the comparative luxury of division headquarters until he rejoined his company to sail home from France. He was one of the many Jewish soldiers who welcomed the presence of a chaplain and gladly cooperated in every possible way to make my work successful.
Chaplain Francis A. Kelley, in charge of our burial work, laid out the cemetery on a hill overlooking the village and the battlefield. The rest of us searched the field with details of men, brought in the bodies on limbers, searched and identified them as well as possible. In doubtful cases the final identification was made at the cemetery, where men from every regiment were working and where most soldiers would have some one to recognize them. In addition, we buried German dead on the field, marking the graves and keeping a record of their location for the Graves Registration Service. A hundred and fifty-two men were buried there at St. Souplet, the last cemetery of the Twenty-Seventh Division in their battle grounds of France. The last body of all, found after the work had been finished and the men released from duty, was buried by us chaplains and the surgeon, who went out under the leadership of Father Kelley and dug the grave ourselves. Every evening the six of us gathered about our grate fire and relaxed from the grim business of the day. If we had allowed ourselves to dwell on it, we would have been incapable of carrying on the work: it was so ghastly, so full of pathetic and horrible details. We sang, played checkers, argued on religion. Imagine us singing the "Darktown Strutters" Ball," or discussing the fundamental principles of Judaism and Christianity for several hours! The five of us were all of different creeds, too--Catholic, Baptist, Christian, Christian Scientist and Jew. Our cooperation and our congeniality were typical of the spirit of the service throughout.
On the last day we held our burial service. We gathered together at the cemetery with a large flag spread out in the middle of the plot. I read a brief Jewish service, followed by Chaplains Bagby and Stewart in the Protestant and Father Kelley in the Catholic burial service, and at the end the bugle sounded "taps" for all those men of different faiths lying there together. We could see and hear the sh.e.l.ls bursting beyond the hill, probably a hostile scout had caught sight of us at work. Above floated a British aeroplane. Some English soldiers working on their burial plot nearby stopped their digging and listened to our service.