The next day dawned dry and hot, and in the aftermath of the battle a stomach-churning smell hung over the battlefield, “an odor unexplainable that issues not from dead animals, birds or fishes, but issues only from dead men upon whom the sun shines.”1 Everywhere were dreadful sights that the soldiers would never forget. There were also other, hateful reminders of man’s venality and corruption. “Human vultures” had been active during the night, and the bodies of American soldiers had been looted as they lay strewn over the battlefield. Wallets and personal possessions were removed, and in at least one case a dead man’s finger was cut off to obtain the ring he had worn. Australian troops were strongly suspected to have been the culprits, but nothing could be proved and in the interests of inter-Allied harmony, the matter was dropped.
While the 3rd and 5th Australian divisions continued the advance beyond the Hindenburg Line, the 106th Infantry retired to Villers-Faucon during the night of September 30, though the last units did not arrive until the following day. Once more, these exhausted, shell-shocked, and battle-scarred men were quartered in elephant huts and broken-down billets. General O’Ryan remarked that “it is first depressing, then inspiring to see your units coming out after perhaps three or four days of continuous fighting, plastered with mud, more or less dazed from shell shock, many sick from gas fumes, all stiff from nights spent in shell holes, number slightly wounded who refused to be evacuated, and to note the dead, tired eyes flash with Division esprit the message—‘Give us forty-eight hours in the hay, some “vin blink” and plenty of eats and then let us at them again.’ ”2
While such tub-thumping comments no doubt boosted morale, a more sober evaluation suggested that the losses his men had suffered would have been lessened by better tactical appreciation. It was evident that the enemy tactics were to let the first wave of attackers pass through the defenses to a certain extent, and German soldiers would then emerge from emplacements, pillboxes, and dugouts, cutting off the first wave, who faced attack from in front and behind, as well as enfilading fire from the flanks. A critical Australian report claimed that the excitement of their first battle, together with the difficulty of locating all the dugout and tunnel entrances in the dense mist and smoke, made the American moppers-up move on without dealing with all the enemy who had taken shelter from the barrage during the initial advance and then emerged behind the Americans.3 When the smoke and mist at last began to clear, some troops, realizing how precarious their position had become, were able to pull back, but a considerable number were cut off and captured or killed.
Another observer also felt that the American moppers-up had been too anxious to join their comrades at the cutting edge of the attack, rather than completing the slow, tedious process of methodically clearing the ground and locating all the concealed dugouts and tunnel entrances. As a result, fierce resistance was still being encountered on ground over which the first wave had long since advanced. Even when battlefield experience had shown this to be a crucial flaw, attempts to remedy it were limited to vague, generalized orders to mop up thoroughly.
On October 2, the 106th Infantry began a brief rest period at Halle Wood, where its broken ranks were reorganized. It took some time for the regiment’s casualty figures to be collated and forwarded to divisional headquarters, but when complaints were made to Colonel Franklin W. Ward, he replied—with more tolerance and forbearance than many might have mustered in such circumstances—that in the majority of cases, the first sergeant and company clerk, responsible for compiling the figures, had been killed or wounded, or was missing in action. He did not add that, in any event, filling in forms to satisfy bureaucrats at headquarters was hardly a priority for a regiment that had been so ravaged by one of the most bloody engagements of even that sanguinary war. When the statistics were finally produced, it was revealed that the 106th Infantry had suffered 1,185 battle losses in the seven days between moving up to the front lines on September 24 and being relieved after the battle of the Hindenburg Line. The regiment was now a “mere skeleton” and, in addition to the killed, seriously wounded, missing, or captured, almost all its effectives were also carrying lesser wounds of some sort, or suffering the aftereffects of gas or shell shock.4
On October 3, the morning after their arrival at Halle Wood, burial detachments numbering two hundred men and accompanied by chaplains returned to the battleground surrounding the Hindenburg Line to begin the grisly task of identifying and burying their dead comrades. They were informed that they were to perform this duty as a tribute to their dead.5 The dead men’s shoes were removed to be salvaged if in good condition, and the bodies were then wrapped in twelve-foot lengths of burlap for burial. The brother of Corporal Porter of Company G had seen Porter killed during the 106th Infantry’s advance on September 27 and was almost deranged by it. He recovered his brother’s body and buried it himself.
Fired on from time to time by the enemy, the men went about their melancholy work. Where the dog tags of the dead had survived, one was buried with the body, placed outside the undershirt but under the jacket to protect it from damage, and the other nailed to a peg, inscribed on both faces, and then placed at an angle of forty-five degrees, so that the inscription on the underside was shielded from the weather.6 If there were no pegs, burial parties were told to write the dead man’s details on any piece of paper or cardboard, put it in a bottle or a tin can, and bury it almost its full length in the ground. In theory, the tag would later be retrieved by a graves register service officer, but in practice, shelling and fighting often obliterated all trace of the tag and the gravesite it marked, adding yet more to the millions of unidentified dead who had no known grave.7
Units were to bury all soldiers, American, Allied, or German, but in fact, there was inevitably less appetite for burying the bodies of the enemy, and many were either left lying where they fell or were dumped in abandoned trenches or shell holes.8 Alongside the burial parties, salvage details including two officers and sixty-five men from the 105th Infantry were also at work, gleaning rifles, ammunition, grenades, and any other reusable equipment from the battlefield and the bodies of the dead.
On the afternoon of the fifth day, the burial and salvage details completed their work and set off to rejoin the rest of their comrades. Sorely depleted and with no prospect of any replacements, the 106th Infantry and the rest of the 27th American Division had begun the move back to the front lines on October 6, 1918. All this time the enemy had been in slow retreat, and a week’s marching was required before contact was again made. The 106th Infantry first moved up to Tincourt Wood.9 Arriving at nightfall, during a heavy downpour, the men blundered through the dark forest and took whatever shelter they could find in caves and hastily improvised foxholes. The following afternoon they marched on to the shell-battered Hargicourt area, where the First Battalion bivouacked in the ruins of the town, while the Second and Third halted in and around Templeux, where their comrades from the burial details at last caught up with them.
On October 9 they began another night march, setting out for Bellicourt at dusk. The city lay directly behind the Hindenburg Line and the regiment had to pick its way through a morass of craters, tangled barbed wire, and shell-torn terrain. Persistent drizzle added to the misery of the troops and made conditions underfoot treacherous. Horse-drawn transport struggled even more than the infantry in the slippery, cloying mud. Wagons slid off the road and had to be hauled back by the sweating, cursing infantry, and when a medical cart overturned it had to be abandoned. When they finally reached the end of that march, the weary, mud-encrusted men again had to bivouac in the open fields.
Ahead of the 106th, the American 30th Division was still making advances against fierce German opposition. Enemy aircraft were very active, and to protect themselves from bombing, on this as on many other occasions, each man dug a shallow trench like an open grave and lay in it, safe from shrapnel, though not from a direct hit. At daybreak the shivering men emerged, cold and wet but otherwise unharmed.
While awaiting orders to again take their place in the firing line, some of the men of the 106th explored the now empty and abandoned Hindenburg Line. They found a scene of total devastation and desolation. The graves of some American soldiers lay practically on the jump-off line, the men having been killed before taking more than a few steps. Quennemont Farm had been completely demolished, and the trees in the orchard had been reduced to stumps that were so studded with shrapnel and bullets that they rang like iron when struck. The camouflaged machine-gun nests and strips of machine-gun ammunition were still in place around Guillemont Farm. Mountains of empty shells showed the extent of firing by the German defenders before they were overwhelmed, and the still-unburied bodies of German soldiers on the Knoll proved that it had also not been given up without a fearsome struggle.
Around the strongpoints, discarded first-aid packets, gas masks, and other American equipment revealed where the U.S. troops had occupied trenches as they fought their way forward. There were numerous concrete-lined passages leading down into the Saint-Quentin Tunnel, most of them blocked by the bodies of dead German machine gunners, and on the ravaged grass slopes lay the unburied bodies of hundreds of German infantrymen, intermingled with the as yet unburied remains of British and Australian soldiers.10 There was also evidence of how ineffective the artillery barrage that preceded the assault had been; engineers discovered only one destroyed machine-gun post along the entire length of the defenses from Bony as far as Bellicourt. Every other post was still intact.
After almost four years of static warfare, fought from trench systems that stretched, uninterrupted, from the Channel coast to the Swiss border—it was said that you could walk the entire distance without ever once coming aboveground—the “war of movement” that had characterized the opening months of the conflict had now been resumed. The aim of the Americans and their allies was now simply to maintain relentless pressure on the German armies, driving them back with continual attacks, giving them no rest or chance to regroup. The Allied commanders, seeing the daily returns of ground gained and German casualties, prisoners, and deserters, knew that the enemy forces were close to the point of collapse; there were no more troops on which they could call. One final push, one last rolling Allied offensive, might be enough to decide the war and force a German surrender.
Just after noon on October 10, the 53rd Brigade, including the 106th Infantry, received orders to move at once to the Montbrehain-Brancort area, and then be prepared to move farther into action on one hour’s notice.11 Leaving behind the ravaged area around the Hindenburg Line, they began a long march eastward across open country and through the battered towns of Neuroy, Joncourt, and Ramicourt, to Montbrehain, where they bivouacked for the night. It was a brief rest; their orders, again underlined, required them to move on at daybreak.
As they formed up again at first light, enemy artillery launched a sudden barrage. Several men were hit by shrapnel before the regiment escaped the town, making for Premont. Australian troops had recently fought their way through Montbrehain, and in an attempt to slow their advance the Germans had saturated the town with heavy concentrations of “Green Cross”—tear gas—which affected the 106th as well. On the night of October 11 through 12, they marched on, following a British guide, and at daybreak they rested in Butry Wood west of Busigny, but hardly had they thrown off their packs than the enemy began to shell the area with gas and shrapnel.
The Second Battalion continued their advance from the wood and completed the march to their position in the reserve trenches that morning, relieving the 30th Division. It had been a difficult, frustrating march, taking nine hours to cover nine kilometers, for the Germans had blocked all approaches to Busigny by felling trees and telegraph poles, and, in the absence of pioneer troops to clear the way, Monk and his fellows had to pick their way through tangles of wire, poles, tree trunks, and improvised barricades.12
Alongside the 105th Infantry, the 106th deployed along a fifteen-hundred-yard front, in close support of the 107th and 108th in the firing line. They remained there for four days, during which their working parties and formations were so regularly and so accurately shelled that it seemed as if “some sinister agency informed the enemy of every movement within the American lines.” The duration and intensity of the shell fire increased each day, and it was almost a relief to the troops when, on the night of October 16, they were ordered to move up to the Selle River, where the retreating German troops had now dug in on the far bank. Normally a modest waterway, the Selle was swollen by heavy fall rains, and the enemy had blown up the bridges and dammed the river downstream, flooding some of the low-lying lands on the western bank.
Once more, the German artillerymen seemed to have sensed the impending battle, for the afternoon of October 16 saw such ferocious shelling that the men of the 106th were forced to huddle in slimy trenches in the marshy ground. Despite constant enemy shelling with high explosive and gas, the regiment advanced that night to take its place on the jump-off line, supporting the 105th and 108th. As an anti-gas precaution, all American soldiers were required to add two teaspoonsful of bicarbonate of soda to the water in their canteens, which could be used to clean off and neutralize any gas or liquid residue adhering to their gas masks, skin, or clothes.13
The 106th Infantry now had a rifle strength of just four hundred men, and the 27th Division as a whole was so depleted by the loss of men killed or wounded—reduced to about twenty men per company, one fifth of its strength little more than a month before—that it was now nicknamed the “Phantom Division.” As the infantrymen groped their way forward in the dark, slipping in the mud and stumbling over ruts and potholes, shell bursts claimed a steady toll of yet more dead and wounded. A high-explosive shell burst immediately behind one company, wiping out most of a platoon.14 Casualties had to be left where they fell, for others to treat, and once more Monk and his comrades had to harden their hearts and close their ears to the screams and cries of wounded comrades writhing under the terrible effects of gas poisoning.
German shelling continued all night, interspersed with gas attacks, but by 4:20 on the morning of October 17 the 106th had formed up on the white tape stretched across the ground. They deployed in artillery formation with greatly extended intervals between platoons and companies, waiting in a downpour that had turned the chalky ground into gray mud, while a thick mist made having any sense of location or direction virtually impossible.
The task of the infantry spearheading the attack was to cross the river and assault the heavily defended German positions at the top of the slope leading up from the far bank. The river had been reconnoitered during the previous night and was found to be fordable, except for a few deep holes in the riverbed.15 But General O’Ryan was in no doubt about the serious obstacle presented by the river, with its steep approaches, absence of bridges, and high embankments on the far side, bristling with machine guns, antitank guns, and Minenwerfer, supported by artillery.16 The terrain in that area was also unusual in that all the fields were bordered by hedgerows, which provided perfect cover for machine gunners.
After a sixty-minute silent period before zero hour, an hour-long barrage, launched at 5:20 a.m. on October 17, breached the enemy barbed-wire defenses in several places. At 6:20, as the barrage lifted and began to creep forward, the infantry started over the top, the first wave wading the river while the engineers began trying to place light bridges for the use of the second wave.
The heavy fog and rain that had rolled in at two that morning showed no sign of clearing, and the infantry advanced into an almost impenetrable murk of mist and yellow smoke; once more the smokescreen proved as much of a hindrance as a help to the attacking troops. It was impossible to see more than a few feet, and compass bearings proved unreliable.17 Almost at once the first wave began to fall behind the barrage. The 106th Infantry moved up in reserve, so that when the 105th Infantry started to advance from the first objective, the 106th was just west of the Selle River and ready to cross. The mist was so dense that a machine-gun nest on the ridge to the east of the railway was completely missed by the first wave and not discovered until it began firing on the supporting troops, delaying their advance until the 106th Machine Gun Company eliminated the problem.
Ten heavy tanks were to cross the Selle after the infantry and advance in support of them, but the much-vaunted tanks again proved of very limited value. Having moved south to cross the river, they then lost their way in the fog, and only two tanks joined the battle at all—both of which were soon destroyed by shell fire.18 One of them had reached the village of Arbre Guernon before it was disabled, where it lay blocking the crossroads and drawing fire.
Monk’s Second Battalion reached the river by sliding down the embankment onto the heads of a company of the 102nd Engineers still engaged in the futile attempt to lay footbridges across the river.19 After fording the river and climbing the slippery banks, the battalion attacked and mopped up, crossing a trench system cratered by shell fire, which proved a formidable obstacle.20 They then entered Saint-Martin-Rivière and cleared the town, silencing the enemy guns from which heavy firing had been coming, and taking numerous prisoners.
The Second Battalion moved on to a railroad a thousand yards east of the town and took cover under the embankment—about forty feet high—unaware that enemy troops were occupying dugouts on the other side, within a few yards of them. When this startling discovery was made, Monk led his comrades in scaling the embankment and bombing the enemy dugouts. More prisoners were taken, and the Second Battalion marched their captives forward with them, making them identify enemy positions.21 Using captives as human shields breached the rules of warfare, but the weary and now battle-hardened New Yorkers were less concerned with legal niceties than with ensuring the survival of as many of their remaining comrades as possible.
Fierce resistance at Jonc de Mer Ridge was overcome by rifle fire and a frontal attack, with the Second Battalion clearing the trenches at the point of the bayonet. They were then held up by machine-gun nests hidden in hedges and thickets just outside Arbre Guernon, fulfilling the prophecy contained in their battle orders that the main resistance might not come from the village itself but from the hedges flanking the road to the northwest.22 Strong patrols eliminated the machine guns, and the Second Battalion then linked up with the 105th Infantry and established a line of resistance just east of the main road. The other battalions of the 106th were digging in along a sunken road west of Arbre Guernon, ready to hold this line for the night.
As Monk and a comrade worked their way forward, mopping up enemy positions with bombs, bullets, and bayonets, they came across a young German soldier huddled in a dugout and paralyzed with fright. He was only fifteen years old but looked even younger. In these dying days of the war, in a last desperate attempt to hold the line, the Germans were throwing their last reserves of manpower—the young, the old, the wounded—into the fight. The boy made no effort to defend himself, staring helplessly up at them as Monk’s buddy raised his rifle. He was about to shoot the boy when Monk pushed the gun’s barrel down.23 “Don’t shoot,” Monk said. “He’s only a kid.” They took him prisoner instead and sent him under guard to the rear as they continued to advance. The boy owed his life to Monk.
By now, the 106th Infantry had crossed the crest to the east of the river and advanced two miles, but they had suffered more heavy casualties. The First Battalion was down to ten officers and thirty-eight men, and the others were little stronger. Along with the other exhausted men of the 27th Division, they were due to be relieved that night, but the British commander, General Sir Henry Rawlinson, informed General O’Ryan that unforeseen circumstances would prevent this and asked whether the American troops would be willing to hold their lines until the following morning.24 With a confidence shading into hubris, O’Ryan replied that they would not only be willing to hold their ground but would make a further advance if the Australian artillery supplied a barrage.
O’Ryan’s plan called for the 106th to leapfrog the 105th during the advance, but the 106th was now so numerically weak that it could not assume that responsibility. Instead, Monk’s Second Battalion was merged with what was left of the 105th Infantry, and they went over the top together toward La Jonquière Farm on the morning of October 18. Their battle orders predicted that the farm, occupied by a full German unit, strongly entrenched, would be a major obstacle, occupying a commanding position, with extensive cover surrounding it and concealed approaches on the enemy’s side.
It was another gray, mist-laden morning, and barely light enough for observers to distinguish the trees outlined against the skyline from the groups of men moving like ghosts through the smoke and mist. A barrage was put down at 5:30 but was answered almost immediately by a furious enemy counterbarrage, and in “one of those unfortunate military miscalculations which result in the infliction of greater losses upon your own men than upon the enemy,” the targeting for the Allies’ barrage was so inaccurate that the 105th and 106th Infantry’s sector was deluged with shells from their own guns.25
In a system of warfare dependent on cooperation between different units and synchronization of their movements, sometimes even to the minute, potentially disastrous mistakes were inevitable. This was one such occasion. As a result of a delayed or misunderstood order, the barrage that should have fallen two hundred yards in front of the infantry began fifty yards behind them, and when it lifted and began to creep forward, it swept right through them. Desperately seeking whatever cover they could find, many men huddled against the eastern bank of the road, but some companies didn’t know whether to go forward or back or remain where they were.26 When the barrage had passed, their handful of officers and NCOs managed to reorganize them and get them moving forward, but they had been nearly annihilated by their own fire and left behind many wounded or dead comrades.
As they advanced under heavy machine-gun fire, the Phantom Division, with a paper strength of almost 15,000 men, had been able to field no more than 850 rifles, and that included the cooks, orderlies, and other noncombatant troops who had been pressed into action.27 Most of those 850 were suffering the effects of previous wounds or gas attacks before they even began advancing. Held up once more by hidden machine-gun nests and repeated counterattacks supported by artillery, the attackers lost touch with the 30th Division on their flank and had to dig in until contact could be reestablished. The First and Third Battalions of the 106th meanwhile offered what feeble support they could to the attack, but no further advance was made or attempted, and the day’s fighting ended with the front line pulled back a little to a road on the eastern slope of the ridge above the Saint-Maurice River. The 106th Infantry had lost another eighty-one men to wounds during the course of the day, and among them was Monk, who had again been hit as they pressed home their attack. Once more, he was treated at a British field hospital, and once more he returned immediately to the firing line.
That evening, determined to squeeze the last ounce from his exhausted men, O’Ryan issued orders for another advance, and in the latter part of the night and the early morning, the attack was resumed. It met no opposition, except from La Jonquière Farm, where the 106th had to make a bitter advance attack to capture or destroy enemy machine-gun nests.28 There had been such a heavy dew during the night that it looked like frost, and the men of the 106th, lying in the long grass as they waited for the signal to attack, were soaked to the skin, but at a whistle blast, they rose from the grass and the shouts of “Let’s go! Let’s go!” were answered by their battle cry: “MINEOLA! MINEOLA!” Although they were weary to the core of their being, they summoned the energy to attack with renewed ferocity, storming the machine-gun nests and wiping out gun crew after gun crew. One badly wounded German “begged to be put out of his misery; he was accommodated on the spot.”
When the Second Battalion reached the Mazingheim road, they found their way blocked by a high stone wall. The road was exposed to enemy fire but they crossed by rushes, breached the wall with pickaxes, and then pushed on again, covered by the First and Third Battalions. They crossed an orchard, marked on the map as a danger spot; the splintered trees and trampled hedges gave evidence of the fierceness of the fighting as they eliminated yet more nests of machine guns and snipers, and occupied La Jonquière Farm. As they cleared the farmhouse, they found two badly wounded American soldiers, lying on stretchers. They had been treated by enemy field-ambulance men, and when the Germans were forced to retreat, they left the wounded Americans in the farmhouse with water and rations within reach. Monk could have been forgiven for thinking that the care the enemy had given to the two men was a return for the mercy he had shown to the boy soldier from the same German unit a couple of days before.
The 106th Infantry’s own casualties from shelling, machine-gun, and sniper fire continued to mount. Under covering fire from their own Vickers machine guns, patrols went out, crawled to within throwing range, and then bombed the nests of snipers and machine gunners with grenades; several more of their own men were killed or wounded as they did so. Intense bursts of shelling continued throughout the night, and once more the men of the 106th Infantry were forced to endure the cries for help from their wounded comrades in No Man’s Land, without being able to help them. At five o’clock the next morning, the enemy again shelled their positions.
The Second Battalion of the 106th now held a line along the west bank of the Saint-Maurice River, though enemy snipers and machine guns remained active. Patrols destroyed four German machine-gun nests and killed several snipers, but the 106th were driven back by heavy machine-gun fire. They regrouped and advanced again, and by nightfall they had achieved all their objectives. Fourteen hundred German soldiers had been taken prisoner, and by degrees the enemy had been driven back, incurring heavy casualties every time they tried to make a stand, and forced to abandon ammunition, machine guns, trench mortars, and rifles as they fled for their lives.
Once more the enemy had been driven out of strong defensive positions by the sheer aggression of the American attackers. Many more German troops had been killed, wounded, or taken prisoner, and the remainder were now so debilitated and demoralized that when the 106th Infantry pressed forward in two waves in one final attack, they met practically no opposition at all. Many of the officers described it as “the prettiest fight of our war”; it also proved to be the last.29