Half Crazy, Temporarily Insane
Down in Division Headquarters, orderlies gulped coffee and puffed cigarettes as they transcribed phone messages from the front. General Summerall’s staff officers phoned battery groups with lists of coordinates where German troops were reported gathering, or where barrage flare signals had been observed. Until the noon hour, nearly all battlefield news reaching General Bullard was encouraging, with heartening reports that “[a]ll objectives were taken” and that morning German counterattacks had been repelled, and a late-morning call from George Marshall describing “everything quiet on front.”
But still dislodged from the prized centerpiece of the sector, the mood at the headquarters of the German 82nd Reserve Division was decidedly less assured. Since receiving word just before 8:00 a.m. that “Cantigny is occupied by the enemy,” all efforts had been directed toward retaking the village. The 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Companies of the 272nd Reserve Infantry Regiment, which had held positions in Cantigny until relieved in the hours after midnight, had just dropped their gear for rest after an eight-mile march back to rest billets when, at 8:20 a.m., word came that the Americans had captured the village and they were to remain awake on standby. By 9:30 a.m., after the failure of the first counterstroke, these exhausted troops were ordered to march back to the front for a counterattack. Ordered separately from rest billets six miles away, four companies of the 271st were also marching toward the front to join the effort. The marshaling of manpower would take a few hours, and coordination with neighboring units and corps artillery would take longer still. So the division commander ordered the counterattack for late afternoon. Until then, the “concentrated fire” ordered by Division would pound away at the Americans.
* * *
At the noon hour, George Marshall noted that a “very heavy enemy shelling began on our new first line, together with terrific machine-gun fire.” For the next seventy hours, doughboys hunkered in fresh trenches were to be subjected to what the Division History would later call a “terrific blasting” of enemy fire.
“Along in the afternoon the enemy began to shell us pretty heavily,” Lt. Richard Newhall noted. Sprawled helpless and bleeding in shallow wheat chaff under an unforgiving sun, the thin, bespectacled platoon leader’s helmet covered his face as he grew ever weaker, “longing for unconsciousness.” Earlier, one of his men had tried to evacuate him, but when lifted, Newhall had “fainted with pain.” Now as high-explosive shells detonated all around him, he hoped only to be “killed and not merely badly wounded.” One round hit the slit trench a few yards away, killing a corporal. Though fate spared Newhall a direct hit, he was “repeatedly showered with loose dirt,” and a rock hurled out by one detonation struck him with such force it broke his collarbone. “Another time a tiny splinter hit me in the head,” he later recounted, “but it was spent and merely dazed me for a minute.”
A couple hundred yards away, privates Jesse Gillespie and Willie Drager lay weak and wounded in their wrecked outpost, whimpering for water and praying the German guns would not shift back to the blackened, blood-spattered dirt of their lonely shell crater. “Every once in a while I would loosen the tourniquet a short time to allow some circulation,” Gillespie noted, “and then tighten it again not to lose more blood.”
Behind them in the company’s trenches, amid the bodies of their captain, two lieutenants, and more than a dozen other fallen comrades, the surviving platoon leaders worked to keep their sweating, exhausted, thirsty troops alert to guard their lines. “Heavy shelling commenced at this time,” Lt. John Mays noted. “Large sections of the trench were continually blown in and connections broken.” The smoke was too thick for flare signals, but near Mays was the battalion’s famed “ragtime bugler,” Pvt. Joe Mayuiers, who was serving at the front as a company runner. Mays sent Mayuiers running back with a barrage message to pass on to the artillery, but he made it only a few strides before a sniper’s bullet pierced his heart. “He called out ‘Oh-la-la’ and fell over dead,” a nearby private would report.
Up in the orchard, members of the four Hotchkiss teams under Lieutenant Waltz stood in the strongpoint they had spent the morning hours constructing. Engineers had hauled rolls of barbed wire forward and surrounded the position, and each of the four ends of the cross-shaped slit trench was covered by a machine gun. The strongpoint was fortified for enemy attack from any side except above.
Through the creeping moments of the afternoon, each time long-range German artillery fired—sounding like a heavy door slamming—Lieutenant Waltz would watch the sky for shells. “We could look up out of our holes and see them flopping lazily in the air,” he noted, adding they were “whistling a very unwelcome tune.” The 8.3-inch wide, 250-pound mortar shells were filled with a high-explosive charge and lead shrapnel. The men called them “Ashcans.” “They came over so slowly that one, in looking up at them in an endeavor to gauge their line of drift, had too much time for reflection and this condition made their presence very undesirable,” Waltz later recalled. “One of these bombs dropped exceedingly close to my hole and the concussion seemed to create a vacuum within the hole,” he noted. “It also pulled all the air out of my lungs and I had to stand up, lean over and gasp for my breath. My heart ached for some time after that. The terrific concussion had almost finished me.”
Even more unnerving were German biplanes, and at least a half dozen cut figure eights above the orchard strongpoint. Waltz figured they “stood out like a lighthouse in a storm” from above, and periodically a lone plane would swoop down, tilt its nose forward, and strafe the shallow slit trench with fire from its forward machine guns. At one point, Waltz saw the plane dip so low “it looked as though he was going to bury himself in the first fox hole on our left flank.” Soldiers stood defiantly and fired their rifles at the plane’s metal undercarriage, making “sparks fly,” but doing little damage.
Back in the cemetery strongpoint, marble chunks of shattered headstones danced to the enemy artillery’s “unwelcome tune” as 77mm whiz-bangs struck at Hotchkiss teams while they fired torrents of bullets into the distant wood lines. One of these machine gunners was big, husky Pvt. Gaspare Ventimiglia, an Italian immigrant and the only man in the company strong enough to carry two full boxes of ammunition to the front. “I remember when he joined up,” his buddy Pvt. Webb LaPointe recalled, “he could ride the mules in [the] company anyone else in the company could not ride.” But at his Hotchkiss, a German shell hit, and Ventimiglia “disappeared.” Private LaPointe would report that the “shell exploded and buried him.” Another crew member, nineteen-year-old Pvt. George Hutchins, took over the gun and resumed firing, but the dialed-in German gunners sent another well-aimed shell into the same blast hole, killing Hutchins instantly. His right arm and left leg were blown off, and his jaw and lower face were “completely shot away,” but his remains were recovered and eventually shipped home for burial in Hickman, Kentucky. Although the men dug to unearth Private Ventimiglia, no trace could be found, and he is honored on the tablets of the missing.
South of the village, the shellfire was equally relentless and even more accurate, zeroed in on the American lines with adjustments transmitted from enemy planes circling above. The regimental machine-gun company commander, Capt. Adelbert Stewart, found a shell hole where he could establish a small command post with his runner, whom he sent to check the ammunition status of one of his machine-gun squads. “Shortly after entering shell-crater the enemy airplanes were so active that I thought it not advisable to do digging,” he noted, “so [I] laid quiet, the shelling being extremely heavy around there.” Having not eaten since the night before, Stewart reached into his pack and opened one of his two meat rations, regaining strength and hoping a German shell would not find him.
Still digging deeper in trenches down in the ravine just out of the shade of the Cantigny Woods were two of Lieutenant Anderson’s Company A platoons. Pvt. Billie McCombs of New Castle, Pennsylvania, who had most feared “losing our nerve” back at Zero Hour, found holding his low-ground position under shellfire to be the hardest part of the fight. “Going over the top is not so bad as sitting in a dug-out while the enemy is bombarding,” he noted. “It racks a fellow’s nerve to know that the enemy is on the offensive and you have to sit still and take it.” Beside him, Pvt. James Smith of Sargent, Georgia, was thrown clear out of the trench by a mortar blast, but was still alive. With blood trickling from steel puncture wounds to his back and shoulder, Smith was evacuated to a field hospital, where he would die the next day. “I’ll be damned if I see any fun in lying in a ditch watching your friends going higher than a kite [and] never know a second ahead but it’s your turn next,” Private McCombs wrote home. “Going over the top is play compared with this.”
* * *
Back in Colonel Ely’s bunker, a morning filled with triumphant reports of success was replaced by an afternoon of alarming casualty numbers and urgent calls from the front lines for water and ammunition. A runner from 1st Battalion arrived with a message reporting 30 percent casualties to both Companies B and D, who “will have to be reinforced or relieved.” A few minutes later, Captain Huebner reported that 2nd Battalion “has had three officers killed and 2 wounded about 80 killed, wounded, or missing.” And after a few more minutes, from 3rd Battalion came a message forwarded from Company K: “Capt. Mosher and Lt. Drumm have been killed. The casualties of the company are about 30%. We are digging in, but it would be mighty hard to check a counterattack. Can this company be relieved tonight? If not, strong support.”
At 2:17 p.m., Colonel Ely picked up his field phone with a message for Division. He reported one company in his right battalion had lost all its officers and a third of its men, another two officers and a third of its men; that the commanding officer of his center battalion was wounded and eighty men killed or wounded; and in his left battalion the casualties were “not much less.” Ely stopped short of asking for relief, but closed with a grim forecast: “Casualties continue from m.g. and shell fire and by morning will be serious.” Hearing these reports of “extremely heavy losses in officers and men,” George Marshall concluded “that resistance against a strong counterattack was practically impossible.”
* * *
A strong counterattack was at that moment being planned by the German 82nd Reserve Division. The infantry assault would consist of the rest and support battalions of the 271st and 272nd Reserve Infantry Regiments, along with surviving remnants of the combat companies driven from Cantigny’s front lines. To this force, Corps added a company of the 270th Reserve Infantry Regiment to the north and two companies of the 83rd to the south. Each infantry company averaged about fifty men and ten NCOs led by a single officer. All told, the attack force would total just over 1,000 riflemen, half attacking from the l’Alval and Framicourt woods to the northeast and east and half from the Fontaine Woods to the southeast. Supporting this would be artillery from three divisions, the 82nd Reserve Division and the ones to the north and south. These guns would fire a brief preparatory bombardment on the American troops in their new lines as well as a standing barrage on their former lines to prevent reinforcement.
Initially, the infantry attack was scheduled for 5:00 p.m., but with delays in getting the scattered companies of exhausted soldiers into position and coordination issues caused by lack of centralized control, it was delayed to 5:45. Throughout the afternoon, reports reached Colonel Ely’s command bunker from neighboring units and observation posts of enemy troops marching or concentrating behind the wood lines, whole companies here and small groups of two or three men there. Coordinates were phoned back to artillery batteries and supporting machine-gun crews, and massed fire was directed on each location, further hampering German efforts at organizing for the assault. Although the twenty infantry companies from four different regiments were not yet in place—most with officers who did not yet even know of the start time of the planned counterattack—the German artillery still commenced its bombardment at 5:00 sharp, having not received word of the forty-five-minute delay.
German batteries that had spent the afternoon hours zeroing their large howitzers on the strongpoints in the cemetery and orchard now united in hurling well-aimed mortar shells into their targets. In their orchard strongpoint, Lieutenant Waltz’s men could hear a salvo of ashcans whooshing toward them. “This was the high-angle stuff that the foxhole could not protect one from,” Waltz noted. Soldiers dove to the dirt floor, but it did little good. A single shell wiped out Cpl. Bernard Gill and his entire gun crew. The only survivor, Pvt. Sandusky Lynch of Marion, Kentucky, who turned twenty-one the day before, lay breathing but unconscious on the trench floor, blood covering his head. He was evacuated to the field hospital, but shell fragments had cracked his skull, and he would pass quietly from his wounds three days later, having never regained consciousness.
A shell blast left nothing but a pile of dirt where Pvt. Emmett Smith of Montana had been, and it instantly killed PFC Marion Thompson, leaving his comrades crammed in the ditch with his “badly mutilated” remains throughout the bombardment. But grisliest of all was the fate of twenty-four-year-old Pvt. Cyrus Adcox, the third of nine children from a farming family in Rockfish, North Carolina. Mortar fragments ripped off his right shoulder, left arm, left leg below the knee, and shattered his right leg. Without any head wounds, he died hard, screaming in agony and sliding into shock. Stretcher bearers evacuated him, and his remaining limbs were such a mess of blood and shredded khaki that his sergeant presumed “both arms and legs were torn away.” Improbably, Private Adcox somehow clung to life long enough to make it to the first-aid station, where his protracted death throes faded and he finally succumbed to his wounds.
The three surviving Company K officers struggled to keep their troops in position under a torrent of steel that plastered nearly every inch of dirt. Privates Arnold Kuester and Teodore Miglas both disappeared in a spray of web gear, khaki twill, and crimson. “The enemy barrage had cut us off and there were only 12 survivors,” Lieutenant Mays would report of his platoon. Survivors shriveled in fetal bunches under their helmets, each blast eating at their psyches until a single word became audible up and down the line: “Withdraw.” It was a welcome directive for men caught in the killing field all day, many of whom were close to breaking.
The “order” persisted, with growing emphasis in desperate tones, man to man. “Lieutenant says to withdraw.” No one asked what lieutenant, and possibly no one wanted to know a name, or what many suspected was the truth: that it was a phantom order, constructed fiction, a product of overstretched nerves and the spreading condition on the battlefield Colonel Ely would later describe as “half crazy, temporarily insane.”
“[T]he order was passed down from the right that the company was to retire to the support trench,” platoon leader Lt. John Mays later reported. “I had a non-commissioned officer confirm this order and he said that it had been passed down from the right of the sector. He could not tell from whom the order came.” Throughout the other front-line platoon led by Lieutenant Si Parker, the rumor spread that a “Lieutenant Ward” had given the order. “Not knowing who Lieut. Ward was or with what authority he gave such an order,” Parker later reported, “I ordered my men to stand fast and stand guard for an approach of the enemy.” He then ran through the shellfire to the right, finding Lt. Irwin Morris.
Morris had already noticed “some of the troops on my left going back into the original front line” behind him. Parker arrived in a hunched scamper and Morris said they should “hold on” no matter what the rest of the company did. Parker agreed. “I consulted him and we decided to remain in position until something more serious happened or we had the proper authority to withdraw.” But then the troops to the right fell back, leaving Morris with “five men, three of whom were wounded.” And when Parker returned to his platoon’s trench, he “found that someone had led the company to the rear, without calling in the outposts.” He ran up to the outposts, each packed with soldiers “discharging their duties faithfully, with some dead and some wounded” in improvised shell craters “in full view of the enemy.” Parker explained that the entire company had withdrawn, but he was going “to find it and bring it back into the original position.” He ordered the men “to hold out until the wounded were evacuated,” and in case of enemy attack, “not to abandon the wounded until it was impossible to save them without all being captured.” Then he and Morris and a handful of men ran back three hundred yards to the old front trenches and reported to their battalion commander.
From his strongpoint, Lieutenant Waltz could see the German shells “plow into our line of resistance just to my left front and it wasn’t long before a wave of men started back in groups.” The momentum of retreat snowballed, and the trickle of men to the rear became a pell-mell rush back across former no-man’s-land away from the shellfire. “Those who were able to do so out-ran the barrage and got back to our lines safely,” wrote Pvt. Emory Smith, still struggling with a bullet wound to his chest. “Although badly wounded I managed to get to my feet and run with the rest of the men.”
Troops ran back to their old trenches, where one lone officer ran forward to try to stem the tide of retreat and turn the men around: Lt. George Redwood. A few minutes prior, the injured intelligence officer had finally made his way to the first-aid station, where he was tagged for transfer to the field hospital. But after hearing the heavy bombardment, he ran back up to the front lines and rushed in against the waves of retreating men even as enemy guns traced their movement, urging them to turn back. He spotted a wounded sergeant and helped him to the rear through what the sergeant described as “intense machine-gun and intense artillery fire.” Redwood then turned and “attempted to reach the lines again, in order to lead a retreating company up to their line of resistance,” the sergeant noted. “While doing so a high-explosive shell burst near him killing him instantly. You can imagine my sorrow to see the man killed, who a few moments before had saved my life.”
For his actions, George Buchanan Redwood was posthumously awarded the Silver Star and a second Distinguished Service Cross. On hearing the news of his death, a French officer reportedly remarked: “I would rather have that man Redwood alive than to have taken Cantigny.” After the war, in his hometown of Baltimore, German Street would be renamed Redwood Street in his honor.
* * *
Back at the front, even the handful of survivors of Lieutenant Haydock’s Company L platoon surrendered their small purchase of enemy trench and joined the withdrawal. The khaki tide flowed back through the wheat and thickened as it was joined by scattered men who had been curled in shell holes or frozen prone in the wheat since morning. The half-conscious Lieutenant Newhall, still flat on his back, sensed the rush of men past his position when his platoon sergeant broke from the pack and crawled over to him: “Lieutenant, the company has fallen back to the old line and the Germans are forming for a counterattack.” Newhall replied, “If the company has fallen back, you’d better get back as quickly as you can.” The survivors from the slit trench near him “crawled out of their trench and made for the rear on their bellies,” but Newhall was still helpless to move. “It was impossible to take me. I couldn’t move without pain and couldn’t possibly crawl.” Newhall again ordered his sergeant to evacuate.
The sergeant kissed Newhall’s hand twice, promised him he would return at nightfall, then ran the three-hundred-odd yards back to the old front lines, where the rest of the unglued survivors of Companies L and K huddled, directionless. Attempting to cast the episode in a favorable light, Company L’s commander, Captain van Natter, would later claim that a “number of small detachments remained on the assigned objective,” but this was untrue. The company had not achieved its objective, and its only soldiers to remain out in no-man’s-land were the wounded and dying. And although the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Jesse Cullison, would report that “the two companies withdrew in an orderly manner by echelon,” this was also untrue. The troops of half his battalion had returned in haphazard clusters, most without their platoon leaders. “The withdrawal was,” one officer noted, “a disorganized retreat.”
Still holding their lines up front just past the cemetery strongpoint, Company M’s men were enduring what one officer described as “the full force of the German preparation and counterattack.” Though waves of their comrades off to the left could be seen receding, Lt. Gerald Tyler, lying bleeding and thirsty, directed his front-line troops to hold under the bombardment. “The way [the enemy] shelled us for two hours was a fright,” Tyler later recounted. “I lay in the bottom of the trench and wished for a chance to fight him on an even basis, knowing that I was helpless as a drowning rat in a cage.”
Fragments from a shell blast tore into the gut of PFC John Warren of Wisconsin. He was evacuated but would die the next morning, one year to the day after enlisting. Most shells fell in or around the trenches in booming splashes of white and orange flame, but the whistle of one round—an apparent “dud”—fell silent and hit Cpl. Edward Gray, a former pipe fitter from St. Louis, with a muffled thump and knocked him to the trench floor. “I was right alongside of him when an [un]exploded shell took his left arm off,” a private wrote. “If it had exploded it would have killed him and about twelve others that were around there.” Gray was evacuated to the field hospital, where he would hang on for two painful days before passing.
* * *
German soldiers assigned to make the counterattack from the east and northeast of the village had just arrived in the l’Alval and Framicourt woods, where they waited for the bombardment’s end—the cue to assault. Many were part of the “rest” battalion and were operating on fumes, having been awake for over twenty-four hours and having marched sixteen miles since midnight. Despite being underneath thick tree cover, they had been spotted, and American artillery hurled heavy fusillades of shells into the woods, smashing trees into splinters and sending the men by the score into full flight. By the time the shelling ceased and German officers managed to regather their troops, it was after 6:00 p.m. When the tired, confused companies of riflemen were ordered from the wood lines, their preparatory bombardment had ended and American troops were manning parapets, ready for action. As the German War Diary would report, they “thrust against an enemy fully prepared for the combat.”
Doughboys holding 2nd Battalion trenches in the plateau east of the village spotted the Germans as soon as they drifted from the woods. With pops of Springfields and the chatters of Hotchkiss guns, American soldiers defended their new lines. One of these gunners was thirty-year-old Pvt. Daniel Edwards, the lone survivor of a machine-gun team in a foxhole fifty yards in front of Company F’s trenches. He had been bayoneted by an enemy soldier in the morning charge through Cantigny, but he refused evacuation and bandaged the wound himself. Now among the bodies of his three dead comrades, Edwards grabbed handfuls of ammo strips from the open boxes and fed one after another into his Hotchkiss, spraying bullets at the field-gray figures rushing across the open ground. Riflemen standing in the shallow trenches behind him sniped German after German, and the attacking wave was ultimately cut apart and thrown back.
In Company M’s trenches to the north, a platoon leader noticed “a number of Germans … advancing across no-man’s-land” toward the lines abandoned by Companies L and K, and he sent barrage flares hurtling skyward. As field-gray waves of enemy infantry edged into the open plateau, surviving doughboys up in Company K’s outposts, entirely isolated but pumping with the adrenaline of kill-or-be-killed, burned into their remaining ammunition and chewed through the attackers. Troops holding Company M’s lines and the strongpoints back at the cemetery and orchard did the same, bowling Germans into the weeds wounded, dead, or for cover. “All were beaten off before reaching our line of observation with heavy losses, by our rifle and auto-rifle fire,” an officer would report.
Sitting Bull’s guns responded quickly to the flare signals, unleashing salvos against the l’Alval and Framicourt wood lines. Shells “smothered” the second and third waves of German infantry, and though the attackers in the first wave had advanced clear of the barrage, most were cut up by small-arms fire while the rest fled north, where many were able to retake their vacated trenches without resistance.
Fighting desolate emotions and sheltered from the hostile battlefield by the helmet over his face, Lieutenant Newhall heard Germans shuffling back into their trenches just a few dozen yards away. “I now expected to be taken prisoner (it never occurred to me that since a battle was going on I was much more likely to be bayoneted where I lay),” he would recount. “But the German attack never got to me.” Though still clinging by a thinning tether to life and without water, Newhall was spared capture. But nearest the German lines, Pvt. Carl Fey—jaw-broken, teeth shot out, hole in his cheek, half-conscious and still in shock—was not. Yells in German and boot steps in dry dirt grew nearer and surrounded him, then tugs at his arms and legs lifted and carried him forward, down into the terrifying foreign world of the enemy lines. Like Lt. Judd Kendall, the engineer officer captured three days before, 1st Division reports would soon list Private Fey as missing, and within days, he would be reported “killed in action.”
* * *
Down along the south edge of Cantigny, in a dark, vaulted cellar below the rubble of a flattened tavern, the commander of 1st Battalion, Maj. George Rozelle, monitored reports of a heavy bombardment on his own troops. The short, red-haired, thirty-nine-year-old West Pointer had advanced with the third wave of his battalion into the village, and when his men discovered this basement, he made it his command post. Wires ran down the concrete steps to a single field phone, which sat on a wood shelf crowded with empty mugs, and cider barrels tapped with spigots lined the far wall. Just as elsewhere, the heavy German bombardment had been thundering down here since 5:00 p.m., rattling the mugs and stirring up dust in Rozelle’s underground lair. During a rare moment when phone lines were working, Rozelle had called Colonel Ely to report the bombardment was “increasing steadily” on his troops, and with one frantic runner after another bringing Rozelle grim reports from his front lines, he sent warnings of a probable counterattack from Fontaine to the southeast.
Holding shallow lines facing the Fontaine Woods, the doughboys of Company B had been under sporadic fire all afternoon when the bombardment erupted. Twenty-three-year-old PFC Roman Dzierzak, a Russian immigrant only five years an American citizen, was thrown from the trench, his body so mangled he was identified only by letters found in his pocket. A shell fragment tore through the face of twenty-five-year-old Pvt. Ira Hawley, killing him instantly. A comrade would write Private Hawley’s mother back in Idaho, lamenting that “he was hit by a shell and all that could be found was a tag.”
Half the company’s front surveillance line was held by the soldiers of 2nd Platoon, leaderless since midmorning when their wounded lieutenant, James Lawrence, was evacuated. For them, the fog of war was proving especially murky. Heavy shelling was replaced by an enemy barrage edging forward from the woods, hitting advance posts and front lines just as panicky, exaggerated rumors burned through the ranks of an impending enemy tank attack. Like Companies L and K up north—but without even a false withdrawal order as a pretext—men began springing from their shell craters and shallow ditches and breaking for the rear. “My line of surveillance withdrew without orders from me,” Captain Oliver would report. To his left, Company D’s front lines also receded under heavy machine-gun fire, opening a wide gap and spurring more rumors of withdrawal. “[H]earing that everybody had left the sector,” Captain Oliver “placed the third platoon in ‘D’ Company sector,” then dispatched a runner back into the village to Major Rozelle’s cellar.
An entire platoon fled the front, back across the road and down the slope into the ravine toward the jumping-off trenches. From his shell-hole command post, the regimental MG company commander Capt. Adelbert Stewart spotted “infantrymen retreating and what I took to be a rolling barrage about fifty yards away.” He estimated they numbered “about forty men,” and they sprinted past him so quickly he could only stop three or four, who told him “they had been ordered to retreat by their sergt., that their officer had been killed and that the whole line was retreating.” Stewart chased the horde all the way through the ravine and across the old no-man’s-land, stopping them in the jumping-off trenches, where he sent a runner to Colonel Ely’s bunker that “the line was reported as retreating.”
Back in the village, the bleak—and half-inaccurate—report from Captain Oliver’s runner worried Major Rozelle, who immediately sent a message in his hurried cursive to Colonel Ely: “D company has vacated sector … Bn sector otherwise intact.” Ely sent instructions back to Rozelle to reinforce with Company C, the battalion reserve. But knowing that would take time and worried about a breakthrough, Ely ordered his engineers company forward at once to reinforce 1st Battalion’s lines against counterattack.
* * *
The day’s casualties had cut the engineer company down by a third, and the hundred or so remaining men had been huddled back in the jumping-off trenches since returning from the battlefield around noon. “At 6:00 p.m.,” the company commander was, as he would report, “given orders to take his company out and hold a part of the front line.” The company’s only remaining platoon leader, Lt. Moses Cox, noted the “company was called upon to reinforce the infantry for counter-attacks. This meant a heavy loss to the engineers as they had not been trained that way.”
Cpl. Boleslaw Suchocki and Sgt. Carl Thoete—a bandage and dried iodine on his neck still covering shrapnel wounds from the predawn shelling in the quarry—and other veterans of the morning’s fighting buckled their gear back on, grabbed rifles, and ran across the shell-scarred plateau toward the front. As Suchocki passed through Cantigny’s skeletal remains with the company, he noticed “several dead German bodies” lying outside a smashed house, and other burnt corpses “hanging over the beams pinned down by the falling roof.”
The engineers trotted in two columns down a dirt road through the village toward the loudening cackle of pitched battle beyond. Up at the front, thinned ranks of Companies B and D now held a single line of trenches against the enemy assault. With outposts and front lines in both company sectors withdrawn, German machine-gun squads rushed their Maxims forward into the wheat to provide covering fire for the infantry attack. In an all-too-familiar sight of the day, Maxim bullets sliced through the wheat, keeping the doughboys down behind the cover of their parapets. Emerging from the town’s rubbled edge behind the American lines into a storm of zipping enemy bullets, the engineers hit the open plateau in a dead sprint for the cover of the trenches.
“[W]e rushed to the trench, and when we got there we found a place to take shelter,” one engineer noted. “German machine-guns were sweeping the place and they got seven of our men within a radius of 10 yards around me.” Sergeant Thoete stood tall on the rear lip of the trench “directing the men of his section into position” when he was struck in the chest by a machine-gun bullet, a soldier observed. “Sgt. Thoete was unconscious from the time he was hit and died within five minutes.” Thirty-four-year-old PFC Daniel Miller of Norristown, Pennsylvania, was cut down just steps from the safety of the trench. “When I saw him he was falling to the ground behind the trench,” his platoon sergeant later recounted. “He was killed before he reached the trenches by an enemy bullet.” The same fate met thirty-year-old Pvt. William Loftis of San Francisco, who was thrown down as he charged forward. His sergeant saw him “laying on the ground … killed before he reached the trench by an enemy bullet.”
Corporal Suchocki sprinted up to the trench and found it “very narrow and shallow and also full of men.” He jumped in a portion formed from a wide shell hole, packed with his fellow engineers, Company B soldiers, a man getting his shot-up leg bandaged, and Sergeant Thoete’s lifeless body. Though bullets sifted through the air and sprayed the dry dirt of the crater’s rim, Suchocki stood trying to spot the enemy until a man warned him, “you better get down.”
Before a single German rifleman appeared, American shells whizzed over the front-line doughboys and fell in a curtain of explosions on the far edge of the wheat field and enemy-infested wood line beyond. German squads marching by column into the rear of the woods had been spotted and reported to Summerall’s gunners by observers in Major Roosevelt’s battalion of the 26th, holding the southern half of the Sector. Company A machine gunners opened up heavy fire on their flank from the Cantigny Woods, and the bulk of the attack force and Maxim crews were chewed apart by the hailstorm of 155 shells. The few small clusters of German fighters who managed to squeak through the bombardment were thrown back by the engineers and members of Companies B and D, who stood in shallow trench lines, aimed their Springfields, and picked off targets one by one. Major Rozelle would proudly report: “An enemy counter-attack at this time broke under automatic, rifle, and artillery fire.” German reports would admit that “the attack came to a standstill at 250–300 meters east of the road,” and “great losses” at the hands of American defenders made further progress impossible.
* * *
This first concerted German attempt to recapture Cantigny had failed. It is likely that more than 50 percent of the soldiers making the afternoon counterattack became casualties. At least two commanders were killed at the head of their companies, and some companies could now not muster even a dozen men. Regimental commander Major von Grothe would blame defeat on “the exhausted state of the troops and the heavy losses of officers and leaders.” But the Americans had also been reduced by debilitating casualties through the day and had been awake by this point for well over twenty-four hours, and they fought for their ground with unshaken courage, at times even with fervent defiance. German battalion commanders would more accurately attribute their failure to a splintered effort, lack of coordination between their infantry and artillery, and “entirely too insufficient time for the preparation of a united command.”
Von Hutier’s 18th Army had hurled what it could at the doughboys, but the day’s disjointed counterattacks by a makeshift force of exhausted, disoriented soldiers resulted only in heavy losses and near-total failure. Though a handful of German troops had recaptured a short 200- to 300-yard stretch of trenches north of the village, the prize of Cantigny remained unmistakably in the 1st Division’s grip. The lacerating sum of pinpricks all along the American lines was a tragic toll of human loss and an escalating mix of fatigue, thirst, hunger, and shell-shock—all proving insufficient to break Bullard’s soldiers. The initiative was swinging back to the doughboys holding the high ground, and their afternoon was best captured by a 7:55 p.m. phone call from an observer to Brigade: “Situation fine—enemy beaten off.”