In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Eight • • The New Army 1 On October 12, 1918, the Eighty-ninth Division was transferred from the III to the V corps and ordered to march across country to the vicinity of Eclisfontaine and Epinonville about ten miles to the northwest (due west of Montfaucon). Leaving the Recicourt area on the morning of the twelfth we started for the new sector. The distance was nothing; the terrain was terrible. The entire area was an ex-battleground. In fact the American attack of the twenty-sixth of September started on the ground we had to march over. I say “marched over” but actually it was more of a migration. Orders required we move on a broad front with a long distance between organizations (platoons and companies). The country was covered with trenches and barbed wire; our progress was both laborious and slow. We made about five miles the first day, bivouacking near the village of Very. The rolling kitchens and other animal-drawn transportation followed the road towards Varennes, but the traffic was so heavy and so many traffic jams occurred that we saw nothing of them until late the next day. Emergency rations and what food the individual men carried was all we had for some thirty-six hours. Resuming the trek on the fourteenth, we were bivouacked in the woods in the triangle Gesnes-Epinonville-Eclisfontaine that afternoon. On the sixteenth General Wright gave a short talk to the officers and noncommissioned officers of the regiment. He rode up in front of the 126 127 The New Army group and told the corporals to move up in front. “Because it is upon you corporals that our success depends.” He asked them if they would put it across, and they answered with a powerful “we will.” Later that morning all the Eighty-ninth Division officers were assembled to hear a talk by General Summerall. We assembled near a road, in the mud, and the corps commander drove up in his Cadillac limousine. Feeling more than ever resentful over his treatment of me three months before, I could not help compare his fine car, his warmly clad figure and dry uniform to the wet and mud-coated uniforms of the hundreds of officers who had spent the past six days sleeping in the cold mud of the Argonne and eating under the almost continuous rains of October. He was greeted by General Wright, and then he stepped forward and in his best pontifical manner said, “Good morning, gentlemen. I am glad to see you. I hope to see some of you again not all of you, but some of you.” He then went on to tell how he had visited battalions that had failed to take their objectives, but they never had been able to give a good excuse for their failures. “As long as one man stands there is no excuse,” he said. Of course I realized he was talking heroics to men who were about to go into a fierce struggle after just five days of freedom from shell fire since August 6; that these officers and men were spending their days on cold wet ground and sleeping on it under their little tents, eating under the dripping trees or crouched in their “dog tents.” I knew, as he did, that there are few if any instances where 100 percent of an attacking force destroys itself in an attack, that 25 to 30 percent is a big loss. I knew, although he didn’t, that for an ex-artillery officer to stand forth before fighting infantry soldiers and in a deep resonant voice tell them how to fight, how he expected only “some” of them to survive, and that as long as any one of them could stand he would not accept their failure to capture their objective, was the poorest exhibition of battle leadership possible to make. It was well known among infantrymen that members of artillery brigades saw few casualties. Typical was the experience of Captain Harry S. Truman of Battery D in the Thirty-fifth Division, who began with two hundred men in his unit and took home 199, with one death caused by illness, not incurred in line of duty. .17.154.171] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 12:18 GMT) 128 Reminiscences of Conrad S. Babcock On our left we were in contact with the right of the Forty-second Division . We held the southwest edge of the Bois de Bantheville, while the 178th...

Share