Read Ebook: Over There with the Marines at Chateau Thierry by Ralphson G Harvey George Harvey

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Ebook has 812 lines and 48227 words, and 17 pages

The Marines thus deprived of a shelter rushed back into the roofless building, grabbed up a supply of entrenching tools and then made a dash for the woods. Most of them had snatched up their guns before making their hurried exit. About halfway between the barn and the woods another shell burst in their midst, killing five and severely wounding a score of others. Almost as if by magic a corps of stretcher-bearers were on the scene. The uninjured scarcely hesitated, and almost in less time than is required to tell it the order to "dig in" was being obeyed with the skill and speed of long practiced teamwork.

The digging-in process was a simple though strenuous task. All of the members of the company not seriously injured by the bursting of the shell were presently spading in the earth for dear life a short distance within the timber. They worked as if according to a systematic, prearranged schedule. If they had been going through a drill performance, under instruction from manual and teacher, their work could hardly have been more nearly true to military form.

Each of these Marines quickly scratched off a rectangular plot about three by five feet and then began to dig. Phil and Tim, who always endeavored to keep as near together as possible in all emergencies where they might be able to aid each other, "dug in" a few feet apart. After they had cut roots and scooped the dirt out to a depth of three or four feet, they dashed about here and there in the immediate vicinity and gathered dead limbs and brushwood with which each built a shelter at one end of his funk hole, or "stub trench." These shelters were rendered more stable and impervious to rain by heaping on them mounds of loose earth that had been shoveled out of the trenches.

But the disastrous explosion of the two shells seemed to have served as a false alarm as to what ought to be expected for some time thereafter. The fact of the matter is, "nothing happened." Three days they remained "dug in" and not another shell or bomb struck within two hundred yards of any point of the sheltered "stub trenches" of the recently bombarded regiment.

On the evening of the third day they received an order to make a quick march to a shell-shattered village on the front line.

"Now we're going to see some real fighting," Tim prophesied to his friend, as they prepared to obey the order.

He was not mistaken.

Phil and Tim had made good use of their time while in training at Paris Island, so that when they were ordered on board a transport to steam for "somewhere in France," they could boast of being "Jacks of all trades and masters of all" in the hyperbolic parlance of Sea Soldier excellence. They could do pretty nearly everything from the fitting of gun gear to the operation of a wireless outfit or a portable searchlight. Moreover, they were both well qualified to handle machine guns, and Phil was drawing an extra a month as a rifle sharpshooter.

The company to which Phil and Tim belonged was stationed just outside the village. They reached this position at about 2 p. m. and had little more than completed their digging-in operations, when the word was passed along that they would "go over the top" at 4:30.

But this announcement was presently countered from headquarters, coupled with a "man-to-man message" that scouting aeroplanes and observation balloons had communicated to headquarters the information that the boches were evidently planning to "come over" at the Yanks. A hurried conference among the officers of the Marines decided then that it would be better strategy to let the enemy come on and get their fill and then counter their decimated forces with a good strong bayonet and hand-grenade drive.

Phil and Tim were near enough to each other to carry on a conversation in ordinary tones, and when the word reached them that they must wait for the enemy to attack them they expressed their disappointment vigorously.

"I hate this waiting business," Phil declared. "We'll never reach Berlin at this rate."

"So do I," responded Tim. "I wonder what those minions of the kaiser think they're going to do. To my mind it's a sign of weakness on their part, making a drive this time o' the day."

"Why?" Phil inquired. "I don't see why it should be a sign of weakness on their part any more than our plan to go over the top at 4:30 is a sign of weakness."

"Maybe not from their point of view. But we know what we've got behind us--millions of men and billions of money. We know, too, that we've got vastly more of these than the boches have. So you see, I have something more than suspicion to base my theory on that they like to make an attack late in the day so that if they fail they will have the darkness to cover their retreat. I bet that when our record is summed up you'll find that we made most of our dashes against the enemy's lines at 4 or 5 o'clock in the morning."

"I hope I'm spared to contemplate such a record," said Phil soberly.

"You don't doubt it, do you?" Tim asked, for he was surprised and disappointed to hear his friend speak so diffidently.

"I was just wondering," Phil replied meditatively.

"See here, Phil," Tim said, shaking his hand toward his soldier comrade; "you're making a big mistake. You're meditating. Do you realize that a soldier should never meditate? He should never even think twice. He's got to do his best thinking the first time."

"What's that got to do with my wondering whether I'm going to come out o' this alive?" Phil inquired.

"Sure thing I get you," Phil answered enthusiastically; "that's a peach of an idea. It's too bad all the other soldiers of the Allies haven't got the same idea."

"How do you know they haven't?" Tim demanded quickly.

"I don't know it," Phil admitted with a smile, for he saw what was coming next.

"A fellow must get this pretty much by himself to make the best kind of soldier," Tim said, speaking with the convincing manner of a veteran. "I've heard young fellows talk about going into battle with the expectation of being killed, but that's before the bullets begin to fly and the shells begin to burst. The real soldier is never desperate. The minute you get desperate, that minute you are rattled. The soldier who goes into battle expecting to be killed, goes into battle desperate and is soon rattled. Don't go into battle expecting to be killed; go into battle expecting to kill, kill, kill, and keep on killing."

"Hooray!" said Phil jocularly. "That's what I call war philosophy. Get me? War Phil-osophy for a fighting Phil of Philadelphia."

"Philosophy nothing," Tim snapped back. "You make me ashamed of your name with your jesting pun. I thought you understood me better than that, Phil. Wartime is no time for philosophy. That's what got a lot of pacifists into trouble and some of them in prison. They weren't philosophers enough to realize that you can't stop to philosophize when somebody is punching you in the nose."

"Gas masks!" yelled Phil suddenly, and similar cries came from others along the timber-sheltered line.

But the warning was not needed by Tim.

Even as he uttered the last word of his soldier's common-sense lecture, he caught a faint whiff of mustard. Instinctively he held his breath, and eight seconds later he was inhaling the pure, safe lung-fuel, "canned oxygen," contained in the reservoir of his mask.

That settled it in Phil's mind. There would be no "over the top" from the enemy lines that night. Probably, after all, he was mistaken in assuming that the boches, conscious of their own insufficiency of reserves, would hesitate to make a morning attack. They were planning to harass the Yanks all night with gas and a hurricane of shells, and in the morning make a charge that would sweep everything before it.

With the putting on of the masks, the conversation between Phil and Tim stopped. It really seemed that the former's soliloquy following this operation was better reasoning than his earlier conjectures had been. The cannonade that followed the "gas wave" was terrific and it seemed that such a barrage must mean something in the nature of a sequence, but they would hardly charge right into the gas they had shelled into the Yank's lines.

But again Phil was privileged to change his mind, and that very suddenly. The bombardment continued until after dark and many shells exploded perilously near the Pershing forces--a few did fatal damage right in the midst of the waiting Americans at the edge of the woods.

At about 9:30 o'clock this bombardment ceased as suddenly as it had begun. Neither Phil nor Tim had taken part in or witnessed a night attack, except in the nature of a cannonading, since their first experience on the Verdun front, and they were greatly astonished at what came next.

But they were not without warning, for the signal service was on the qui vive constantly, as were also the advance sentries, and about two minutes before there was any sign of the approach of the enemy, word went along the line to be on the lookout for an attack.

"So my first surmise was right, after all," Phil mused. "They're going to attack under cover of the darkness so that they may retreat more successfully if their attack fails."

Another surprise was coming not only to Phil and Tim, but to many other "dug-in" Marines along the American front. It had to do with the character of the attack.

Suddenly the American lines were swept with a sharp, snappy, vicious machine-gun fire. The boches had crept up under cover of the darkness and succeeded in planting a score or more of machine guns at various places in the timber a hundred yards ahead and started pumping a murderous storm of bullets at the doughboys.

But fortunately it was murderous in sight and sound chiefly, for very few of the Yanks were hit. In the first place, it was almost a random attack, for the muzzles of the guns were elevated a degree or more too high to rake the edges of the funk holes in which the Americans were crouching. Moreover, the intervening trees intercepted many of the bullets, as was evident from the tattoo thuds that could be heard even amid the noisy spitting of the machine guns.

Just what the enemy hoped to accomplish by this method of attack it was difficult at first to determine, although the Yanks were destined to discover very shortly that it was a clever sort of camouflage.

But the cunning boches were destined to discover something, too, and to Phil was due the credit for this rather startling enlightenment of the enemy.

"Tim," he called out to his friend, "I believe that is nothing but a machine-gun barrage intended to throw us off our guard. They're planning a surprise attack."

A "machine-gun barrage" was a new one to Tim, but he listened respectfully for further explanation.

The thunder of the cannonade and the sharper rattle of the machine guns were so intense that Phil found it necessary to scream his message to his next-trench neighbor to insure being heard.

"Well, if it's so very important, don't stop to tell me about it, but hurry up and get it where it will do most good," Tim yelled back. "They won't take me by surprise."

A moment later Phil was dashing over the underbrush and among the trees in momentary danger of butting his head against a very solid and substantial interference or of sprawling violently on the ground. But he had surveyed the vicinity carefully before the shadows of evening thickened in the woods and knew pretty accurately where the lieutenant had dug in. He had to move just as carefully also as if he were stealing along an enemy line of trenches, for some of the American soldiers were likely to discover him and shoot him as a spy.

He succeeded in making his way within a few feet of the lieutenant's trench and, crouching low, began to signal to him by calling his name in graduated rising tones. Presently the officer replied and Phil informed him who he was.

In a few words the sergeant communicated his self-imposed message to his superior officer.

"That is probably the best suggestion that has come from any source on this front since the American Marines were stationed here," remarked Lieutenant Stone. "Now, you get back to your post as fast as ever you can, or I'll order you sent back behind the lines under guard."

Phil darted back gleefully along the rear of the American line and toward his empty funk hole, which he reached with very good caution as well as expedition.

Before Phil got back to his funk hole, the intelligence he had communicated to Lieutenant Stone had been transmitted over the trench telephone to every camouflaged station, and rapidly thereafter by runners to every man in the line. The message thus delivered was this:

"Look out for an attack while the machine guns are going full blast. They may elevate the muzzles of their machine guns and send their men over the top when it seems impossible for them to leave their trenches without being mowed down with their own fire."

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