CHAPTER XXVII
BUNDY’S FAMOUS MESSAGE
It was the morning of the seventeenth of June. All night the duel of great guns had raged over Belleau Woods and to the north and the south.
With the coming of daylight, the Germans charged the combined French and American troops that held that part of the field. Fighting desperately, the Allied armies were forced to fall back in the face of superior numbers and a terrific rain of machine gun and artillery fire.
On the Allied right flank and again on the left flank the retirement of French troops began to take on the form of a disorderly retreat. It seemed that the day was lost.
Suddenly, in the early morning, there came pushing through the retreating French forces, a body of men in khaki, in perfect formation. Behind them came others.
General Bordeau, the French divisional commander, eyed them in surprise. Hastily he dispatched a courier to the American commander, General Omar Bundy. The courier made the journey quickly. General Bundy received him at once.
“General Bordeau advises that you fall back at once, sir,” said the courier. “It is folly to advance in the face of utter annihilation.”
General Bundy got slowly to his feet His face was stern and his eyes flashed as he delivered his now famous message.
“We regret, sir,” said he, “that we are unable to follow the counsels of our masters the French, but the American flag has been compelled to retire. This is unendurable, and none of our soldiers would understand not being asked to do whatever is necessary to reëstablish a situation which is humiliating to us and unacceptable to our country’s honor. We are going to counter attack!”
And counter attack the Americans did, led by the marines, with a result that the whole world knows.
That the reader may be better able to understand the situation, it will be well to go back a ways and tell in more detail of events leading up to the presence of the marines in Belleau Woods.
After having been drilled all summer, the regiment of marines which had come with the first convoy in June, was withdrawn from the First Division. Although this was most depressing to every officer and man, in that it meant that they would not be among the first in the trenches, the service to which they were assigned was in one sense a compliment to qualities which are as inseparable from them as their gallantry.
The marines have traditions, associated with ship’s orderliness, which are kept up by competent, veteran non-commissioned officers, that make them models in soldierly deportment.
After the withdrawal of the marines, the First Division was brought up to full strength as a complete regular division composed of the Sixteenth, Eighteenth, Twenty-sixth and Twenty-eighth Regiments of infantry and the first artillery brigade, of the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh artillery regiments.
On the third of June the German confined his attacks for the most part northward of the section held by the marines, but was feeding in machine gun groups with a view to future mischief. On the early morning of the fourth, the marines took over from the French a twelve-mile front, with the Third brigade, holding the Fourth from its left to the west of Belleau Woods. The Twenty-Third Regiment, and the marine battalion and the Fifth Machine Gun Battalion, which had been sent to fill the gap at Colombs, were returned to the division, which now held the sector alone.
The marines now held twelve miles of battleline with no reserves between them and the Marne.
From Hill 204 all the way to the American right the Germans had the advantage of observation.
The country is uneven, with many woods and the usual open fields between woods and villages. In front of the marines the Germans held the important tactical point of the village of Bouresches and the railroad station, and they had filtered into the adjoining Belleau Woods and around it as an ideal cover for machine-gun nests. This Bouresches-Belleau line was excellent for the purpose of the enemy if they were to stabilize their positions and cease to advance, or as a jumping-off place for continuing their offensive.
The spirit of rivalry between the Third (a regular brigade) and the Fourth (the marines) was very pronounced. Marine officers might not have had the schooling in tactics of the regulars, but being plain infantrymen, they considered at least that they were not afraid to fight.
The honor and future of the marine corps were at stake there before Belleau Woods and Bouresches. There had been people who had said the marine corps should be eliminated from the armed forces of the United States. The marines soon were to prove themselves.
On the Fourth of June, the first day they were in the front line, the marines had repulsed a German attack. At dawn on the morning of the Sixth, the second day after they were in the line, they made an attack in conjunction with the French on the left to rectify the line in the direction of Torcy; and they went through machine-gun fire and shell fire to their objectives all according to pattern.
According to General Bundy’s ideas, the way to act in an active sector was to be active, that is why the marines were enabled to make history at Belleau Woods, which battle included the fight at Chateau Thierry.
It was before noon on the seventeenth of June. Straggling figures came around a bend in the road near Meaux—they were French, the advance guards of the retreating columns that were to follow.
Folks from the nearby villages crowded the roadside with tears in their eyes as they watched their own French soldiers going back and back. It meant the Germans were coming on toward Paris!
Slowly it dawned on those French civilians that American marines, which now were seen approaching, were going ahead to fill the gap—to take the place left by their own poilus. The word passed quickly down the roadside. Girls and women ran forward with poppies and other blossoms and pressed them into the hands of the marines. Their gratitude was pathetic—it impeded the regular line of march, at first, but after the marines passed, every man was filled with a determination to make good.
The marines had marched about half an hour when Hal and Chester came across a sight they will never forget—a long line of stumbling, pitiful refugees.
A man behind Hal said two or three times to himself:
“Confound ’em!” and there was a murmured re-echo down the line.
“Quiet back there!” the platoon leader shouted, but there was a bit of sympathy in the command.
German shells began to fall near the road, thicker and thicker. They were feeling their way with artillery for the advance that was to follow. Not so many kilometers more, and their shells would be falling on Paris, the German staff thought.
Then came the orders to dig in, and the marines fell to.
They had no time to dig anything but individual rifle pits that June day, before they got their first chance to give “Fritz” a taste of the unexpected. With their bayonets and mess gear they scraped shallow holes in the ground, and along that afternoon the Germans marched confidently out of the woods, across the green wheatfield, in two perfect columns.
Then the marines opened fire.
Hardly a marine in that regiment, and other regiments behind—in fact hardly a man in the two divisions of marines that soon were to battle desperately, hand-to-hand, with the Germans, that did not boast a “marksman’s badge”; many were qualified as sharpshooters and expert riflemen. These men did not simply raise their rifles and shoot in the general direction of Germany. They adjusted their sights, coolly took aim and shot to kill. The Prussians dropped as if death was wielding a scythe in their midst, rank after rank.
Then the flower of the German army broke ranks and took refuge in the woods. But the impudence of the Americans could not be allowed to go unpunished. The Germans whipped and slashed that field of waist-high wheat with such a concentrated machine-gun fire as neither Hal nor Chester ever expected to encounter again.
But once again the unexpected.
Wave after wave of marines rose up in perfect alignment and charged!
Foolhardy? Of course. The marines dropped in twos, threes and fours, but they advanced. Whole platoons were wiped out, but the waves never broke.
At a certain point, say books on tactics, the remnants of decimated forces must waver, give way and retire. Never were ranks cut up so before, perhaps, but the book of tactics went awry when those American youngsters charged! Handfulls of them reached the trees and put the Boche to flight. Then they entrenched at the edge of the woods.
But the end was not yet. The advance of the marines continued through the woods.
At the very outset they met machine-gun fire; and out of the wood, after they were in it, came the persistent rattle of rifle fire, varied by veritable storms of machine-gun fire. Wounded began to flow back from the ravines. Calls came for Stokes’ mortars from the hidden scene of that vicious medley, along with the report that Colonel Catlin had been wounded half an hour after the attack began.
Machine-gun positions in the outskirts of the woods had been taken; but they were only the first lot. Hal had been through many woods where German machine gunners ensconced themselves, and none that he remembered afforded better positions for defense against any enemy.
Not only was the undergrowth advantageous, but there were numerous rocks and ravines and pockets, all of which favored the Germans. There was nothing new in the system which the enemy applied, but not until troops go against it for the first time do they realize its character.
When they could locate a gun, the marines concentrated their rifles upon it. The wounded crawled back behind rocks or into ravines, or to any place where they could find a dead space. Hot cries accompanied the flashing drives of the cold steel through the underbrush. Many bayonets might drop from the hands of the men who were hit, but some bayonets would “get there.”
Hal, stopping to get his breath, found time to say to Chester, who was near him:
“Hot work, old man; but we’re going through!”