Trench Knives and Mustard Gas: With the 42nd Rainbow Division in France

Chapter 16 St. Mihiel

166 TRENCH KNIVES AND MUSTARD GAS CHAP TE R SIXTE E N St. Mihiel S hells whirred and wailed above the water-logged ditch, where I huddled with Wally, Wheeler, and Jim. “Seventy-fives” barked, almost on line with us. Faroff machine guns chattered dully, in angry fits and starts. Exhausted men slept at our feet, oblivious to the noise and rain. Gray-green specters seemed to peer through the rumbling gloom; gray-green specters who waited, waited; waited for us to come. What were they like, these men whom we must kill? Were they like the others I had seen, or were they the huge, formidable men which my anguished imagination seemed to paint? Would I kill them or would they kill me? The thought brought an overwhelming wave of misery at the dreadful prospect of five o’clock. “No reprieve,” I muttered. “No reprieve from the punishment of five o’clock.” A “77” screeched above the cannonading, a blinding flash threw us flat. Jumpy nerves had hardly settled into gnawing anxiety again, when a husky voice breathed in my ear. Perce wanted us right away. We scrambled to our feet and followed Perce through the slippery trench. Boche shells streamed low overhead toward the carmine lightning that fringed the blackness in our rear. McDonough and Lawson hissed in recognition as we passed, stumbling over unseen figures who sprawled under our sucking feet. The eyes of other men seemed to pierce the mantle of darkness that shrouded their faintly visible tin hats. . . . We splashed by a shadowy mortar S T . M I H I E L 167 The front lines, St. Mihiel, September 12, 1918. Map by John M. Hollingsworth. 168 TRENCH KNIVES AND MUSTARD GAS crew, through a mystic maze of trenches, ducked under a blanketed entrance and groped down a narrow stair. Thumping artillery grew softer in the dripping candlelit shelter. A muffled thud shook the timbers of its filthy bunks, a gust of air fanned the sickly flame. Perce’s prominent features, surrounded by a villainous growth of beard, were ghostly in the feeble light. With my fellow “looeys” I crouched near, waiting for him to speak. How often I had witnessed such a tableau underground. What strange illusions wove themselves around the eerie scene. It was all a dream; a nightmarish dream, this business of five o’clock. We had gone back to the beginning of things, that was it; back to the trenches of Badonviller, which we had left in a dark and distant past. Perce’s baritone broke my spell of reverie . We would deploy in half-platoons when we had cleared our wire, I heard in a muddled daze. We must hug the barrage that would drop in front of us at five o’clock. Remember, it was nearly half a mile to the Bois de la Sonnard and the first line of “krautheads” we must rout out of the woods. Talbott’s platoon of K would mop up for us with bombs, while M.P.’s would handle all the prisoners we could grab. We must shove on through the woods, “knockin’ off” as many of the ————s as we could see. The voice asked a question now. Whose platoon was next to the 89th Division, on our right? Wheeler was already in touch with K company of the 356th. Well, he was to maintain liaison with our neighbors as long as they kept pace with our advance. The boy officer, who had never been in action before, was traveling with the best platoon commanders in the A.E.F., I heard in a paroxysm of thrilling pain. He would hold up his end of things, Perce knew, and Wheeler’s eyes shone with excitement in response to the throat-tightening words. How lucky he was, I thought, not to realize the full signi ficance of five o’clock. “Five o’clock.” The crushing weight hung like a pall over the bluffing words of Jim, who griped about our lack of wire cutters and bombs; over Perce’s sarcastic rejoinder that maybe Gen. Pershing would call off the war until Jim got fixed; over Wally’s grin at the sepulchral repartee. S T . M I H I E L 169 “Five o’clock.” I mumbled the bizarre phrase as we climbed the stairs and groped into the rumbling night again. It had stopped raining when we...