History of the 305th Field Artillery/Making the Hun Dance
XI
MAKING THE HUN DANCE
That same evening the expected blow fell—rather sooner than anyone had anticipated. Major General Duncan, commanding the 77th Division, sent for Colonel Johnson, took him away from the regiment, and assigned him to G. I. at division headquarters. That loss is hard to estimate. The regiment missed his understanding and the inspiration of his ambition. He never lost his interest in the 305th, but his influence came from afar off. He was no longer a part of us.
For the difficult moment Captain Dana became acting battalion commander. Early on the morning of the 10th he took his acting adjutant and his battery reconnaissance officer and set out to reconnoiter the position Battery A would take up.
There are all sorts of reconnaissances, and we experienced most of them between Lorraine and the Meuse. Some are pleasant and not particularly hazardous. Some are dangerous in the extreme. Some are not fit to write about, because of their labor, their anxieties, and their lack of result. This was one of the first kind. It was always more or less pleasant relieving the French. And both battalion commanders can tell you the same story of a kindness, helpfulness, and hospitality utterly at variance with one's notions of life the front. We never ceased to marvel at the easy and efficient control the French had of their work. Things that seemed most dreadfully complicated and difficult to us at first, they took with a smile and a careless gesture. They impressed you as having assumed a habit of war that obliterated all the past, that assumed until the end of the world a continuation of disagreeable and morbid events that must be made the best of.
You trotted towards them through a succession of bivouacs of troops either resting or waiting to go up. We came, of course, on those Lorraine reconnaissances to our first shell screens—rows of dead cedar branches or dirty sacking, stretched between poles. At frequent intervals overhead hung lines from which branches were suspended. These shielded the road from aërial observation.
Regimental Headquarters had been established in Neuf Maisons, a village of perhaps a hundred houses nestling in a fold of the hills. The French for the present were standing by and rather teaching the child to walk. They gave us our destination, the group headquarters in Pexonne, a mile and a half nearer the enemy. The road beyond Neuf Maisons was more carefully screened. Ahead at last lay a village, which, even at that distance, had the appearance of something dead and corrupt. There wasn't a house which hadn't suffered from shell fire. Many were heaps of rubble. Here a façade would be gone. You could see into the intimacies of that house—clothes hung against a wall, a row of bottles in an open cupboard, a
"Something dead and corrupt"
tumbled bed. In the choir of the church yawned a hole large enough to take a column of squads.
There were doughboys in the streets, keeping close to the walls with furtive movements, as if they expected someone to catch them at an indiscretion. Engineers suggested the presence of nearby dumps. Guards were posted. One stopped us near the church. He seemed to think we had lost our way. He wouldn't let us pass until he had learned our mission and had scanned our identity books.
Just beyond we found the French group headquarters in a large dwelling reinforced with splinter screens constructed of logs and sand bags, and comparatively unhurt.
We had been told to ask for Captain Nicoll, the acting group commander. It must have been after seven o'clock by that time. We knew the captain had been warned the night before of our coming. Our minds were full of ourselves, and the serious nature of our errand. The war might have depended on what we where doing that morning. War for us was a matter of perpetual wakefulness, of extended hurry and effort, whether useful or not.
There was no stir about the headquarters. We knocked. We pulled at a broken bell handle. We glanced, amazed, at each other.
"Is it possible," we asked in our innocence of amateurs, "that they are still in bed?"
It was possible. After an interval a shuffling step within became audible. The door opened. A sleepy soldier, half-dressed, might have been gazing at a collection of unexpected specimens. Yet he overcame his astonishment and led us into a dining-room, tastefully paneled in dark wood. From there we heard reluctant stirrings upstairs, and before long three lieutenants appeared. Their astonishment, perhaps their disapproval, was smothered behind greetings and an undreamed of hospitality.
The captain, they explained, had been occupied until very late the night before, but our aflair was quite simple.
One produced from a cupboard in the dark paneling a cobwebbed bottle.
"It is forty years old," he said, pouring a white liquid into glasses.
Coffee appcared. These officers were in no hurry to dis- cuss our affair. We experienced a sense of guilt while we waited for thein to come to business. Our restlessness grew. We wanted to be doing something.
At first that was the attitude of the average American soldier towards his job. Experience taught him eventually to take the day's work a trifle more sanely. But on the whole he was in a hurry. In quiet sectors he was up and at work earlier than the French, He took about one-fifth as much time for meals as they did. He went to bed a good deal later and seemed seldom to have had enough sleep; yet, until he learned something of the tricks of war, he was always surprised at the end of a day to find that the French, while apparently loafing, had accomplished a good deal more than he had done.
When the coffee was finished our Frenchmen were inclined to smoke and chat. Since we were in their hands we could only hint our anxiety.
They pointed out the paneling of the room.
“The house belongs to a rich man. Your soldiers call him the Count of Pexonne," One picked up the dusty bottle.
"He had a taste for such things. You haven't seen his cellar. You know in French a cellar is a cave, and a cave has come to mean a shelter from bombardment. When we saw the cave we decided never had war led us to such a shelter, and we didn't care how long the Bosches kept us there. It was filled with such bottles as these. They're about gone now, for the town is to be abandoned, and since there is very little transportation for the civilians the Count has sold his treasures to the French and Americans for a nothing."
We were astonished to learn the town was to be abandoned.
“Yes, as you can see, it is under constant shell fire, but the principal thing is the gas. They can fill it full of gas in a moment. You will notice that all the civilians carry gas masks, for the gas comes in frequently. In a few days the village will be deserted."
We moved at last. We descended first to the famous cave, the heart of the group's system of communication. We stood in a damp, vaulted cellar. A telephone operator crouched before three four-direction switchboards against the front wall. A number of wires came through an opening. They meshed like an untidy spider's web across the ceiling.
"You can communicate with the whole army system from here," one of the lieutenants explained. “That will make a little difficulty for you at the start, because, since the village is to be abandoned, you will have a new command post. You will have to arrange a new telephone central there."
Another of the officers got his horse, and we mounted and rode from the village at last. We hadn't expected to be able to continue our reconnaissance mounted, but most of the road, our guide explained, was defiladed, and on such a dull day the Bosche wasn't likely to be troublesome,
We left the dying village by a country road which brought us after a few hundred meters to the first of the battery positions. The pieces were placed in casemates constructed in the high bank of the road. The whole was extremely well camouflaged, and impressed us at first as a perfect position. The road did away with the danger of fresh tracks. It simplified the bringing up of ammunition. Then we noticed on both sides of it, and close to the guns, many shell holes.
"Yes," our guide said, "the Bosches have located this position. It would be well for you to leave this camouflage up and locate your guns somewheres else."
We examined casually a number of possible positions, but that morning we were chiefly concerned with the location of Battery A's guns which were lo fire in the proposed coup de main. The French had decided on their approximate position near one of the French batteries in the thick woods of La Haie Labarre.
Drawn by Capt. Dana, Battery A
The water cart
As we climbed a hill the sun appeared from behind the clouds. We were captured by the beauty and apparent peace of this rolling wooded country of the foothills of the Vosges. Between groves of birch and hemlock the fields were yellow with ripe wheat. From the yellow, like elaborately set jewels, flashed the turquoise blue of corn flowers, and the vivid scarlet of poppies. What firing there was that morning was far off and troubled us not at all. Except for our mission there was really nothing to remind us we were at the front, well within range, likely to be opened on at any moment.
We rode down a slope along a narrow path that overhanging branches nearly obliterated. Here and there among the trees appeared French artillerymen. One took our horses. The forest was full of a quiet, intense activity. Some figures lifted with difficulty stones and great blocks of cement. Others moved among the trees, bearing iron beams and logs, heavy and unwieldy. Many stooped and rose rhythmically. Accompanying their motions came the crunching of spades in earth and the thud of dirt on the dead leaves.
Our guide took all this in with a sweeping gesture.
"We have already got the new battalion command post well started here. You have only to install yourselves and complete it as you go along."
Nearby we found the battery under the tutelage of which our Battery A would be placed until the final relief. Captain Des Vignes, the officer commandiny, took us over the position. We marveled at the neat and efficient arrangement of the positions and the ammunition dumps. We had never imagined such trail logs as the French had here.
The captain showed us, not four hundred meters to the right, the temporary position suggested for Battery A. There was plenty of natural cover. Just to the rear sloped a steep wooded hillside, perfect for the construction of dugouts. At the edge of the forest was a rough road which men and carriages could track safely, Captain Dana was satisfied and returned to the eсhelon to arrange for getting the first platoon up that night.
It was understood that morning that the French group would remain with us for a week or more. On their departure we would leave the temporary positions for the ones they occupied now. All that was altered the next day, and, except for the first platoon of Battery A, the guns of the regiment went directly to the French emplacements.
It was noon, The French habit obtruded itself. Why, the captain wanted to know, shouldn't we lunch? Captain Des Vignes' one officer appeared, Lieutenant Riveau, executive, reconnaissance officer, telephone officer, department B man, and popotte, as the trench call their mess officer. In front of a round, white tent a table had been laid beneath the pine trees with cloth napkins and china. It wasn't Page:History of the 305th field artillery (IA historyof305thfi01camp).pdf/149 Page:History of the 305th field artillery (IA historyof305thfi01camp).pdf/150 Page:History of the 305th field artillery (IA historyof305thfi01camp).pdf/151 Page:History of the 305th field artillery (IA historyof305thfi01camp).pdf/152 Page:History of the 305th field artillery (IA historyof305thfi01camp).pdf/153 Page:History of the 305th field artillery (IA historyof305thfi01camp).pdf/154 The reverse, of course, was inevitable. There were desperate little combats in the dark. It was troublesome to get the wounded back. Such conditions moulded too expectant an attitude.
In case of an attack in force these outposts were to fall back on the line of resistance where the real stand would be made. That necessitated an extreme care in the system of rocket calls for barrages. How it worked out you will see later. It made us all the more dissatisfied with our observatories. Yet we only established one new one which was in no way superior to Nenette. We built a platform in the tops of several birch trees on the edge of a wood. It gave us something to fall back on in case we were shelled out of Nenette.
About three o'clock that afternoon of July 11th Captain Dana, Lieutenant Brassell, and Lieutenant Camp were at Nenette, locating points in the sector from the battle map. Lieutenant-Colonel Stimson appeared. Captain Dana wanted to register. Lieutenant Colonel Stimson was anxious to avoid stirring the enemy up. But the platoon was in. The guns were ready. The effect on the men of a few rounds was worth considering. So Lieutenant Colonel Stimson consented, and Captain Dana telephoned the data down to the battery. The registration point was a corner of a Hun trench at a range of 5,500 meters.
"Fire when ready!"
Drawn by Private Everts, Battery E
An observatory
The crack of the gun reached us. We heard the projectile rushing over our heads towards Germany. The first shot of the National Army artillery was on its way.
That shell was normal charge, high explosive. Considering the range and the nature of the terrain it was quite reasonable it should not be observed. The captain called for high burst shrapnel, and not long after we heard its swishing flight we saw appear near the corner of the trench a pretty white ball of smoke. There was an error of only three mils in deflection, and less than a hundred meters in range.
Corporal Andrew Ancelowitz laid the piece. Sergeant Fred Wallace gave the command to fire. Private George Elsnick pulled the lanyard for the shot that put the National Army artillery in the war.
"Guess," said someone drily, "they heard that shot in Berlin."
Certainly it was the first note of the music to which the Hun danced back to the Rhine and defeat.