After a week in the reserve trenches, the 106th Infantry began to move forward into the firing line on the evening of August 30, ready for the attack to be launched the next morning. They passed over shell-torn roads, jammed with vehicles and columns of men heading for the front lines, while streams of bedraggled, hollow-eyed men shuffled in the opposite direction. German aircraft bombed the advancing troops and long-range guns continued to rain down shells around them, but the 106th moved on, past Indus Farm and around the bend of the lake, where the “murky sheet of water seemed as silent as death itself.1 Not even a bullfrog croaked from its depths.” They passed an advanced dressing station at Trappest Farm and a casualty clearing station at Esquellec, both reminders of the fate that awaited some of the men moving forward on that late summer night.
On this, the last night before their first taste of an actual attack, despite all his previous “battlefield” experience on the streets of New York, even Monk must have felt the same mixture of curiosity, excitement, fear, and regret as his comrades, together with the closeness, sometimes beyond even that shared with their families, that men felt toward their buddies in the face of war and death. As one of his fellows in that polyglot division wrote that night,
Tonight we are more than brothers, for tomorrow may see things, and we know that shrapnel and bullets are absolutely unconscious of ancestry or creed, occupation or nationality.2 Among others we have Greek, Slav, Spanish, English, Swiss, the ever-present and irrepressible Irish, Italian and a descendant of an American Indian. We have Episcopalian, Methodist, Jew, Catholic, &c, but I feel sure we have tonight no atheist—nor will have until this is over.
A contact patrol of six riflemen and one Lewis-gun team of six men was sent out at once to locate the enemy. Before going out, they were stripped of all personal papers, letters, identity discs, regimental buttons, and numbers. They were also checked to ensure that there was nothing loose on them that might make a noise, because the least sound in No Man’s Land—even as faint as the scrape of a belt buckle against a gun barrel or the tinny rattle of a strand of barbed wire against a bayonet—could be fatal. The patrols, usually consisting of an NCO and five men, had been taught not to lift their heads, but just to keep one eye looking ahead as they crawled forward a few yards apart, keeping their heads as close to the ground as possible and using their toes, knees, and elbows to push themselves along. Moving virtually inch by inch, they took advantage of any gunfire or other noises from the trenches to cover the sounds of their movement, and at times, fearing detection, they remained motionless for minutes on end.
If the Germans put up a single Very light, the patrol would remain motionless until it had burned out and then move on again. More than one light put up close to the patrol was usually a sign that the Germans had heard a noise or seen some suspicious movement. The advice then was to keep quiet for half an hour before moving ahead again. Even if standing upright when a Very light was fired, patrol members ran virtually no risk of discovery if they turned their faces away from the light and stood perfectly still. They were told that they could lie down if they wished, but it wasn’t necessary, and might prove fatal if the movement caught the eye of a German sniper or machine gunner.3
Company I had been ordered to move up behind the patrol and occupy Macaw Trench, but were forced to withdraw again almost at once when a breakdown in communications led their own artillery to target the trench for more than two hours.4 This also provoked heavy return fire from the enemy, which fell on the same trench. The shelling caused carnage among Company I—a lieutenant and thirty men became casualties—but what was left of the company still managed to form a defensive line and advanced by degrees during the night to reoccupy Macaw Trench, with Company G ranged alongside them on their right.
The Germans had been expected to fight to the death to defend Mount Kemmel, but the returning patrols reported that they had detected no signs of the enemy, and frontline companies also reported unusual quiet from the German lines during the night. This backed up intelligence from prisoners and intercepted communications suggesting that the Germans had suspected American forces were being massed and had begun withdrawing their forces to a more defensible line at Wytschaete Ridge. The fires burning all the way from Armentières to within six miles of Lille and in the Bertincourt region, between Bapaume and the Hindenburg Line, were further confirmation, as the Germans destroyed stores they could not take with them, a certain indication of an imminent retreat.5
The Germans left machine-gun crews and snipers behind to hold the ground as long as possible. A prisoner interrogated early on August 31 believed that Kemmel Hill was already evacuated except by these screens of machine guns, and the whole terrain also remained subject to relentless German artillery fire.6 The machine-gun nests and sniping posts had tunnels leading to them and were camouflaged with turf and tall grass. The snipers wore different camouflage suits to blend with their surroundings, and concealed themselves in different hides. One sniper was spotted using a small pit hidden by some weeds, where he would drop after firing; another was hidden in the branches of a stunted willow.
American company commanders were informed of the German withdrawal and told to be ready to move forward at a moment’s notice. Strong combat patrols were sent out to make and maintain contact with the enemy, taking with them men specially trained to seek out mines and booby traps. The main advance began at 11:30 that morning—perhaps in the hope of confusing the enemy, used to attacks launched at first light—but the Allied barrage was answered at once by the German artillery, which poured a torrent of gas and high-explosive shells onto the entire length of the front line, following it with trench mortars and machine-gun fire. In the face of this barrage, the 105th Infantry suffered heavy casualties but silenced a number of enemy heavy machine guns and advanced up the lower slope in bitter hand-to-hand fighting.
The 106th then took up the assault. The Third Battalion led the way, with the First Battalion in support, and although the Second Battalion was held in reserve, Monk’s Company G was sent forward with the First Battalion in place of Company A, which had been heavily gassed, suffering such extensive casualties that it was too depleted to fulfill its part in the advance. Tasked with occupying Vierstraat Switch, the men of the 106th battled their way toward enemy machine guns sited in heavy brush about two hundred yards in front of them.7 Aided by Company G, the First Battalion reached their objective on the left of the advance, but the right flank was held up for some time by fierce fire from concealed machine-gun nests near Siege Farm, west of Vierstraat Switch, in which a further 15 men were killed, 53 wounded, and 106 gassed. However, the enemy machine guns were eventually eliminated with bombs and grenades, and the American troops then moved forward, crossing Cheapside and York roads. Although the intermediate ground still held many machine-gun nests and snipers, by five o’clock that afternoon the Americans were consolidating their lines along Vierstraat Ridge. They had suffered many casualties, but inflicted far more on the enemy.
At seven the next morning, September 1, 1918, the American attack resumed, with the 106th in the van, pushing forward past Dead Dog Farm as they attempted to force the enemy rearguard back from its last positions on the eastern slopes of Vierstraat Ridge and Mount Kemmel. The main body of German troops was meanwhile completing the retreat to Wytschaete Ridge, dominating the valley and the lower slopes over which the American troops would have to advance. They moved from shell hole to shell hole and across abandoned trenches, but concealed nests of enemy snipers and machine guns still studded the valley floor and lower slopes, and there was great confusion on the left flank as two battalions of the 106th became badly mixed up.8
When the regimental commander, Colonel Taylor, went forward to investigate, he reported that Major Hildreth, commanding the Third Battalion, had “entirely lost control and seemed at a loss as to what to do.”9 He relieved Hildreth of his command at once. Astonishingly, Hildreth was merely reprimanded and was restored to his position as battalion commander a few days later, though this must have been a reflection more of the regiment’s desperate and rapidly worsening shortage of officers than of any confidence in his abilities.
At nightfall, the commanding officer of Company G reported that his men had suffered heavy casualties during the day, including the loss of nearly all their NCOs. He added that his men were “worn out and unfit for further service.”10 Nonetheless, they were required to resume the advance the next morning. Reports were also received that a number of patrols were still out in front. Their locations were unknown, and as a result, it was impossible to put down a further barrage for fear of hitting them. During the night, replacement supplies of water, food, and ammunition were brought forward to the troops, much of the food carried in burlap bags, but the firing line remained restless, and at 4:00 a.m., when the 105th Infantry began to move forward on the left flank of the 106th, a heavy German barrage came down on the whole line.
During that night of September 1 through 2, Major Sidney G. de Kay, newly assigned to the 106th, had taken over command of the Second Battalion from its temporary commander, Captain Hetzel. As he took stock of the four companies under his new command, he found a somewhat dispiriting picture. Company E was somewhere on the south flank of the advance, though its exact location was unknown. Company G was in a trench, Company F was in shell holes, and the men of Company H were bringing up rations and ammunition.
De Kay eventually located Company E in a section of trench. They were under constant machine-gun and sniper fire, had been so heavily shelled that they had lost many of their noncommissioned officers, and had wounded men with them whom they were unable to evacuate. De Kay’s orders were still to advance but, owing to the exhaustion of these and the other men under his command, and the heavy shell, shell-gas, machine-gun, and sniper fire, he resolved to continue the advance in small combat groups with automatic rifles and hand grenades, along each side of the sunken Vierstraat road toward the railroad track, where he could attempt to reorganize his men.
At 6:00 a.m. on September 2, Major de Kay met the commander of H Company, First Lieutenant Lennox C. Brennan, on the firing line and ordered him to go over the top and push forward with his company for a thousand yards to the railroad track, then pause and reorganize before advancing a further eight hundred yards to their objective, a line from Purgatory to Northern Brickstack on the shoulder of Wytschaete Ridge. When Brennan asked upon whose authority de Kay was issuing these orders, he was told that the battalion had been “sorted out” and de Kay had been placed in command.11
There had been no artillery preparation, nor was any covering barrage planned, and when Brennan told de Kay that a creeping barrage was essential if their men were to achieve their objectives, he was waved away: de Kay told him that there would be no barrage and no request for covering fire; they were late and had to push forward at once. The exhausted 106th resumed their advance alongside the 105th, but suffered losses as soon as they went over. Although they had advanced some way up Chinese Trench by 11:30 that morning, they were halted by heavy machine-gun fire. The enemy positions were too strongly held for them to advance farther. While his men dug in, Brennan moved forward to survey the ground between them and their objective. He concluded that there was no good line of defense at the designated objective and tried to impress upon Major de Kay the folly of moving the line from a defensible position into a valley where there was no field of fire and where they would be a sitting target for the German machine guns.12 This argument took place not in some debating chamber, but in a frontline trench with shell, shot, and shrapnel filling the air around them.
Brennan was sent back to brief officers at regimental headquarters, where he discovered that the Third Battalion had also been “sorted out,” with Captain Sullivan taking over command at 8:50 that morning. The regimental commander phoned the brigade commander at noon requesting permission to dig in on the line of the first objective and await relief there, but permission was refused.13 Ordered to advance, his men finally occupied part of Chinese Trench and even advanced a little beyond it.
De Kay and Captain Sullivan were now both claiming that it would be impossible to reach the objective; their units were seriously depleted by casualties, and the remaining men were exhausted and desperate for water and rations. However, Brennan, who had previously been urging caution, now told the regimental commander that with thorough artillery preparation and support he could reach and consolidate the objective line and clean up the intervening terrain.14 He was promptly given direct command of all that remained of the Second and Third Battalions and told to justify his claims.
At zero hour—five o’clock that afternoon—a barrage was to be laid along the entire regimental front, with particularly intense fire on the Purgatory–Northern Brickstack section.15 Five minutes later the barrage would lift and creep forward, allowing the troops to advance. The barrage would continue on the enemy positions for a further hour, by which time the objective should have been taken and consolidated. Monk and his comrades in G Company were to engage and destroy the machine guns in the Purgatory–Northern Brickstack pocket while the remaining companies advanced on the objective.
The men were all in their start positions at 4:45 p.m. Zero hour passed without any sign of the promised barrage; instead, at 5:15 p.m., a German barrage of high explosive and gas fell on them, so heavy it was almost impossible to move forward. Led by Lieutenant Archer, the men of Company G made progress during lulls in the shelling. Although “the rattle of the gang fighter’s automatic is only the faintest echo of the roar of battle,” Monk reveled in the fighting and close combat, setting the lead for his company as he had once done for his gang.16 “Crouched in a dugout while the barrage thundered above or creeping forward under machine gun fire,” Monk was “always cool and courageous.”
One of the most effective grenade throwers in the regiment, he spearheaded his company’s attacks and personally destroyed several machine-gun nests.17 Belly-crawling through the mud under constant shell and machine-gun fire, he wormed his way forward using any cover—battlefield debris, craters, shell holes, even the bodies of the dead—until he was within range, and then threw his grenades with an outfielder’s power and accuracy. If any of the German gun crew survived the blast, they were likely to be dispatched by Monk’s bayonet.
Even though he was wounded in his left leg and right hand, Monk refused to seek treatment, remaining with his company at the heart of the fighting. One soldier recalled the shot of being hit as “a sharp pain when you are hit, and a shock that leaves you faint.18 This lasts about fifteen minutes, then the pain is gone, but a raging thirst sets in. I guess I smoked at least a dozen cigarettes in about twenty minutes.” To Monk, a man who had been gutshot, scarred, and nicked innumerable times during his gangland career, the wounds would have been less of a shock.
While Company G was still battling to wipe out the machine-gun nests that were wreaking such havoc among the attackers, Brennan’s cobbled-together command advanced in small groups. Each move drew further shell fire, on one occasion so heavy that they were unable to move for more than an hour. They eventually completed the occupation of Chinese Trench in the face of a heavy bombardment from Wytschaete Ridge, but stragglers turning back from G Company reported that they had suffered very heavy casualties and were being driven back. The blizzard of shells and machine-gun fire eventually forced Lieutenant Archer to order a withdrawal.19 The mopping-up companies then withdrew to the old Vierstraat line, where they could get some shelter, while the remainder of the troops held position and awaited nightfall. As Company G began to withdraw, despite his wounds and in full view of the enemy guns, Monk crawled to a dugout under enemy fire to help one of his fallen comrades—Sergeant Francis X. “Hank” Miller—back to the lines.20 “ ‘The Monk’ was wounded,” Miller later said. “He saw me fall with a bullet through my right shoulder. He crawled to me, picked me up and carried me to the rear. He saved my life.”
After dark the men of E, F, and G companies fell back to the positions they had held that morning. Company H soon also withdrew, but the four companies of the First Battalion remained dug in, occupying a line along the railway at the foot of Wytschaete Ridge despite heavy barrages by artillery and machine guns. All the companies of the 106th were relieved by British troops during the course of that night. Major de Kay noted regretfully, though not without some satisfaction, that “the command I took charge of was worn out in forty-eight hours of the heaviest kind of work, during which time they had suffered heavy casualties and had been compelled to get little or no food, but the men responded to the call to go forward and continued to endeavor to clean up the machine gun nests and attack vigorously until absolutely stopped by machine gun fire.”21
Although the bravery of Monk and his fellow soldiers was not in doubt, de Kay admitted there had been confusion, even chaos, between the line officers, battalions, and companies of the regiment during the fighting around Vierstraat and Wytschaete ridges. While conceding that liaison between companies and battalions had been very poor, however, he blamed the difficulties in mopping up the German machine-gun nests on the fact that their organized plan of cross fire had been very little disrupted by American artillery.
The impact of that cross fire was shown in the casualty figures. During the action around Vierstraat and Wytschaete ridges, of the four companies of the Second Battalion, Company E had lost seven sergeants, nine corporals, and thirty-three privates; Company F lost one sergeant, four corporals, and twenty privates; Company G—the worst affected—lost one officer, one first sergeant, five sergeants, and thirty-eight privates; and Company H lost one sergeant, five corporals, and twenty-nine privates. A first sergeant of Company K and several other noncommissioned officers and runners were also killed when one of two concrete and brick pillboxes being used as a forward battalion headquarters was blown up by a delayed-action mine. The roof of the pillbox was a one-foot slab of concrete, covered by railroad iron, which in turn was covered by another one-foot slab of concrete, and about a foot of earth and grass on top of that.22 In the terrific explosion of the mine, the roof collapsed and all the occupants were instantly crushed.
Losses in the other battalions were not quite as severe as in the Second Battalion, nonetheless, in the regiment as a whole, 47 men had been killed, 267 wounded, and 41 gassed, and 7 more were missing in action and another 5 captured by the enemy. That casualty rate was equal to one-tenth of the original strength of the entire regiment when it disembarked in France, even before the steady attrition from gas, shell fire, shrapnel, sniper rifle, and machine gun had begun to whittle away its numbers. The dead—or those who could be found among the carnage of the battlefield—were buried in rows in a graveyard at Abeele, Belgium, the first of their countrymen to fight and die “in Flanders Fields.” Strangely, it was among the duties of the regiment’s mechanics to prepare the dead for burial, though after such losses, many others were compelled to lend a hand.23
The surviving men of the 106th Infantry had come through their ferocious baptism of artillery, rifle, and machine-gun fire. They had taken Vierstraat Ridge, pushed their lines forward more than a mile in the face of ferocious opposition, and only their mounting level of casualties had prevented them from taking and holding their final objective. However, while they and the men of the other American regiments had undoubtedly been brave fighters, their losses had been heavier than necessary. A German officer reported that these still inexperienced American troops did not yet comprehend “how to utilize the terrain in movement, work their way forward during an attack, or choose the correct formation in the event the enemy opens artillery fire.”24 Much of the blame for that had to be laid at the door of their officers, and Major Hildreth was only one of those whose abilities had been under question even before the 106th Infantry had embarked for France. First Lieutenant Fred E. Mayor and Second Lieutenants Lucius H. Doty and Harold deLoiselle had been reported to the inspector general as “professionally unfitted to hold their positions in the military service,” yet they nonetheless embarked with their men.25 The commanding officer, Colonel William A. Taylor, reversed his opinion about deLoiselle after the regiment had been in France for a few weeks, and he was later cited for gallantry in action. However, Lieutenant Mayor failed to win the endorsement of his commander, and Colonel Taylor noted that, though Lieutenant Doty was “studious and takes a very good book examination,” his battalion commander rated him as “having no qualities of leadership and states that his work as Company Commander … is unsatisfactory. Physically he would not rate above 6 [out of ten].” It was another vivid reflection of the paucity of good officers that, despite the withering assessment of his capabilities, First Lieutenant Doty had remained as second-in-command of Company G.
After the battle, the wounded Monk had been taken to a casualty clearing station and then to a British field hospital. The 27th Division’s medical facilities were still insufficient to cope with the level of casualties they were experiencing, and once more, British, Australian, and Canadian units filled the gap. Monk would have empathized with the soldier who noted that when they cut off his clothes in the hospital, it was the first time he had removed his shoes in a month.26
While his wounds were being treated, it was discovered that Monk had also been gassed, but had said nothing about it until then.27 Chlorine-gas casualties were particularly alarming. Fluid and blood filling the lungs would pour out of the casualty’s mouth, and his efforts to breathe were distressing to watch, let alone experience. The treatment required the victim to lie facedown with his feet at least twelve inches above his head, to allow the lungs to drain. Afterward, if the victim was still alive, the advice was to keep him warm and avoid giving him alcohol or morphine, both of which slowed respiration. If he could be kept alive for two days he would recover, but the recovery was only partial. The effects of chlorine gas were permanent, damaging the lining of the lungs, and victims were never 100 percent healthy again.
Gas patients were all stretcher cases because any exertion increased the damaging effects of the gas and could prove fatal. Military regulations required a gas victim to be stretchered from the battlefield and kept in the hospital for a week for observation, but Monk had other plans.28 His crude speech, rough manners, and bruiser’s appearance would not have endeared him to British officers and, in turn, he must have chafed at their rigid adherence to formalities, regulations and military etiquette, and a class consciousness that sometimes bordered on contempt. He had been in the field hospital only three days when he heard that the 106th Infantry was about to go back to the front lines. “Wanting to be in on the big show,” without notifying the surgeon or even an orderly, he slipped away from the field hospital, still wearing his pajamas.
Confused, traumatized soldiers, often suffering from shell shock, were not an unknown sight near field hospitals in the rear areas, and no one tried to detain Monk as he made his escape. Pausing only at a salvage dump, where he exchanged his hospital clothing for a uniform and a pair of boots that roughly approximated to his size, Monk headed east, toward the angry rumble of the guns.29 Bandaged, unarmed, and still only partly equipped, he eventually made his way back to his unit. By leaving the field hospital without permission, he had made himself technically absent without leave, but none of his officers were ever likely to have punished him for a breach of discipline motivated solely by his desire to rejoin his unit in the firing lines, and when the 106th Infantry went over, Monk was with them.