''And they thought we wouldn't fight'' by Floyd Phillips Gibbons (smart books to read .txt) 📕

dropped from it. It was a metal cylinder that glistened in the rays of the morning sun. Attached to it was a long streamer of fluttering white material. It dropped easily to the ground nearby. I saw an American signalman, who had been following its descent, pick it up. He opened the metal container and extracted the message containing the first aerial observations of the advance of the American lines. It stated that large numbers of prisoners had been captured and were bound for the rear.

Upon receipt of this information, Division Headquarters moved forward on the jump. Long before noon General Harbord, close behind his advancing troops, opened headquarters in the shattered farm buildings of Verte Feuille, the first community centre that had been taken by our men that morning. Prisoners were coming back in droves.

I encountered one column of disarmed Germans marching four abreast with the typical attitude of a "Kamerad" procession. The first eight of the prisoners carried on their shoulders two rudely constructed litters made from logs and blankets. A wounded American was on one litter and a wounded Frenchman on the other.

A number of German knapsacks had been used to elevate the shoulders of both of the wounded men so that they occupied positions half sitting and half reclining. Both of them were smoking cigarettes and chatting gaily as they rode high and mighty on the shoulders of their captives, while behind them stretched a regal retinue of eight hundred more.

As this column proceeded along one side of the road, the rest of the roadway was filled with men, guns and equipment all moving forward. Scottish troops in kilts swung by and returned the taunts which our men laughingly directed at their kilts and bare knees.

Slightly wounded Americans came back guarding convoys of prisoners. They returned loaded with relics of the fighting. It was said that day that German prisoners had explained that in their opinion, the British were in the war because they hated Germany and that the French were in the war because the war was in France, but that Americans seemed to be fighting to collect souveniers.

I saw one of these American souvenier collectors bound for the rear. In stature he was one of the shortest men I had ever seen in our uniform. He must have spent long years in the cavalry, because he was frightfully bowlegged. He was herding in front of him two enormous German prisoners who towered head and shoulders above him.

He manifested a confidence in his knowledge of all prisoners and things German. Germans were "foreigners." "Foreigners" spoke a foreign language. Therefore to make a German understand you, it was only necessary to speak with them in a foreign language. French was a foreign language so the bowlegged American guard made use of his limited knowledge.

"Allay! Allay! Allay veet t'ell outer here," he urged his charges.

He was wearing his helmet back on his head so that there was exposed a shock of black, blood-matted hair on his forehead. A white bandage ran around his forehead and on the right side of his face a strip of cotton gauze connected with another white bandage around his neck. There was a red stain on the white gauze over the right cheek.

His face was rinsed with sweat and very dirty. In one hand he carried a large chunk of the black German war bread—once the property of his two prisoners. With his disengaged hand he conveyed masses of the food to his lips which were circled with a fresco of crumbs.

His face was wreathed in a remarkable smile—a smile of satisfaction that caused the corners of his mouth to turn upward toward his eyes. I also smiled when I made a casual inventory of the battlefield loot with which he had decorated his person. Dangling by straps from his right hip were five holsters containing as many German automatic pistols of the Lueger make, worth about $35 apiece. Suspended from his right shoulder by straps to his left hip, were six pairs of highly prized German field glasses, worth about $100 apiece. I acquired a better understanding of his contagious smile of property possession when I inquired his name and his rank. He replied:

"Sergeant Harry Silverstein."

Later, attracted by a blast of extraordinary profanity, I approached one of our men who was seated by the roadside. A bullet had left a red crease across his cheek but this was not what had stopped him. The hobnail sole of his shoe had been torn off and he was trying to fasten it back on with a combination of straps. His profane denunciations included the U. S. Quartermaster Department, French roads, barbed wire, hot weather and, occasionally, the Germans.

"This sure is a hell of a mess," he said, "for a fellow to find himself in this fix just when I was beginning to catch sight of 'em. I enlisted in the army to come to France to kill Germans but I never thought for one minute they'd bring me over here and try to make me run 'em to death. What we need is greyhounds. And as usual the Q. M. fell down again. Why, there wasn't a lassoe in our whole company."

The prisoners came back so fast that the Intelligence Department was flooded. The divisional intelligence officer asked me to assist in the interrogation of the captives. I questioned some three hundred of them.

An American sergeant who spoke excellent German, interrogated. I sat behind a small table in a field and the sergeant would call the prisoners forward one by one. In German he asked one captive what branch of the service he belonged to. The prisoner wishing to display his knowledge of English and at the same time give vent to some pride, replied in English.

"I am of the storm troop," he said.

"Storm troop?" replied the American sergeant, "do you know what we are? We are from Kansas. We are Cycloners."

Another German student of English among the prisoners was represented in the person of a pompous German major, who, in spite of being a captive, maintained all the dignity of his rank. He stood proudly erect and held his head high. He wore a disgusted look on his face, as though the surroundings were painful. His uniform was well pressed, his linen was clean, his boots were well polished, he was clean shaven. There was not a speck of dust upon him and he did not look like a man who had gone through the hell of battle that morning. The American sergeant asked him in German to place the contents of his pockets on the table.

"I understand English," he replied superciliously, with a strong accent, as he complied with the request. I noticed, however, that he neglected to divest himself of one certain thing that caught my interest. It was a leather thong that extended around his neck and disappeared between the first and second buttons of his tunic. Curiosity forced me to reach across the table and extract the hidden terminal of that thong. I found suspended on it the one thing in all the world that exactly fitted me and that I wanted. It was a one-eyed field glass. I thanked him.

He told me that he had once been an interne in a hospital in New York but happening to be in Germany at the outbreak of the war, he had immediately entered the army and had risen to the rank of a major in the Medical Corps. I was anxious for his opinion, obvious as it might have seemed.

"What do you think of the fighting capacity of the American soldier?" I asked him.

"I do not know," he replied in the accented but dignified tones of a superior who painfully finds himself in the hands of one considered inferior. "I have never seen him fight. He is persuasive—yes.

"I was in a dugout with forty German wounded in the cellar under the Beaurepaire Farm, when the terrible bombardment landed. I presume my gallant comrades defending the position died at their posts, because soon the barrage lifted and I walked across the cellar to the bottom of the stairs and looked up.

"There in the little patch of white light on the level of the ground above me, I saw the first American soldier I have seen in the war. But he did not impress me much as a soldier. I did not like his carriage or his bearing.

"He wore his helmet far back on his head. And he did not have his coat on. His collar was not buttoned; it was rolled back and his throat was bare. His sleeves were rolled up to the elbow. And he had a grenade in each hand.

"Just then he looked down the stairs and saw me—saw me standing there—saw me, a major—and he shouted roughly, 'Come out of there, you big Dutch B——d, or I'll spill a basketful of these on you.'"

All through that glorious day of the 18th, our lines swept forward victoriously. The First Division fought it out on the left, the Foreign Legion in the centre and the Second Division with the Marines pushed forward on the right. Village after village fell into our hands. We captured batteries of guns and thousands of prisoners.

On through the night the Allied assault continued. Our men fought without water or food. All road space behind the lines was devoted to the forwarding of reserves, artillery and munitions. By the morning of the 19th, we had so far penetrated the enemy's lines that we had crossed the road running southward from Soissons to Château-Thierry, thereby disrupting the enemy's communications between his newly established base and the peak of his salient. Thus exposed to an enveloping movement that might have surrounded large numbers, there was nothing left for the Germans to do but to withdraw.

The Allied army commander, who directed the Americans on that glorious day, was General Joseph Mangin. His opinion of the immortal part played on that day by those two American divisions may be seen in the following order which he caused to be published:

Officers, Noncommissioned Officers, and Soldiers of the American Army: