Lt. Daniel Sargent would lament that Wednesday, May 29, began “long before I thought it should have.” He had been ordered back from his observation post after the German afternoon counterattack, and after regaling the members of his artillery battery with stories of what he had seen at the front, he curled up on the same cold turf where he had spent the previous night. But after only a couple of hours—which seemed to him like “but a minute or two after I had closed my eyes”—there was a flashlight in his face and a soldier’s voice: “Wake up. You must go into Cantigny.” It was just after midnight. With heavy eyes, Sargent buckled on his gear, filled his canteens, and dragged himself forward, where a guide led him through Death Valley and back toward the front.
After a tired shuffle through dark, gray fields, Sargent arrived at the first-aid station in the chalk cliff near Colonel Ely’s bunker. “I was astonished to see a couple of French wagons half demolished by shellfire with their drivers face down on the earth beside them, dead, but seeming to be asleep,” Sargent noted. “And there were dead horses with them that were so recently dead, that their bellies were not yet swollen.” He looked around at the “confusion of things”—medics toiling by lamplight in their cramped earthen dugout, dead bodies stacked under blankets, and men heaving wooden boxes filled with ammunition or shouldering ropes strung with dozens of newly filled canteens back into the dark battlefield for their comrades at the front. A few Ford ambulances had made it to the first-aid station and “[t]heir motors were still chugging” as “[t]he wounded, on stretchers were being loaded into them.”
Sargent’s guide led him over to a dark entrance of a “cave” lit only by “several lanterns, which revealed Colonel Ely seated on what seemed to be a horse saddle.” A handful of eager runners and orderlies lined the walls of the bunker, and in the middle of the dirt floor was a dead artillery officer, a manifest reminder of mortality “staring up at the ceiling glassy-eyed.” Unjarred by the conspicuous presence of death lying beside him, Ely “wore a sleepless look,” Sargent observed, “but he had a most calming presence and calming look, and he addressed me by name, which was a calming thing to do.”
“Lieutenant Sargent,” Ely said gruffly, “[y]ou are succeeding the artillery officer that you are looking at. You are to go to the command post of the [1st] battalion of the 28th Infantry in Cantigny, which is not far from here. The battalion commander is Major Rozelle, who may not be expecting you for the telephone wire between him and me has been momentarily cut, so that I can’t announce your arrival. A runner will guide you to Major Rozelle’s command post and you can tell him that I have sent you. Once in the dug-out, you will have the task of relaying requests for barrages from the infantry to the artillery. You will do this by the telephone which will begin to function again shortly.” Ely nodded at Sargent and sent him on his way.
* * *
Ely’s present aim was stationing more artillery liaisons like Sargent up in the regiment’s new front lines to calculate ranges on German batteries, which had, in the small, dark hours of the morning, been maneuvered into new gun emplacements before thundering again. Around two a.m., the scattered single blasts merged into another escalating fusillade, putting the 1st Division’s rear command posts and supply points under heavy fire and gassing artillery batteries. American gun crews on the hilltop near Coullemelle reported that gas shells were hitting every twelve seconds, and within minutes, fifty mustard shells fell around Battery C of the 7th Field Artillery, forcing gunners to work at their 75s blindly in fogged masks. High-explosive shells were mixed in, severing phone lines and disrupting communication among scattered gun groups. Pvt. Barnard Farley was sent by his sergeant to find a break in his battery’s phone line and reconnect it, but “that was the last he was seen or heard of.” Back in one of the gun pits, a gas shell whistled down from the darkness and hit gunner Pvt. Leon Campbell directly, tossing him to the ground dead and hissing out a mustard cloud from his mangled torso.
Down in Division Headquarters, General Summerall’s artillery staff was swamped with reports of German barrages to the north of Cantigny, to the south, and on the field hospital with “patients there who cannot be moved” and a doctor who was “very worried.” Orderlies and staff officers were personally shaken just after three a.m. when the brick cellar shook under the detonation of a 250-pound enemy shell that hit “right alongside the chateau” above, one major noted. By a few minutes past four a.m., the barrage returned to a familiar intensity, provoking anxieties of another enemy counterattack. An artillery liaison from the front lines phoned division to report the “Infantry believe the Boche are preparing to attack,” and up in Colonel Ely’s command post, word came from a front-line commander that the German bombardment was “probably for enemy counterattack.” Ely relayed orders to his battalions to stand ready and dispatched a runner to Company A, which was back in reserve and still under command of the feverish Lieutenant Anderson, to “hold itself in readiness to reinforce front line.”
* * *
The previous night’s counterattack was just one of many the German 82nd Reserve Division Headquarters would organize, each with the objective of retaking the village. Until the next assault was announced, the regiments displaced from Cantigny were left with standing orders to continue pressing the Americans. The “rest” battalions of the 271st and 272nd Reserve Infantry Regiments were holding the front of their new, pushed-back German lines east and south of Cantigny, loosely manning wooded foxholes, where they had retrenched after being thrown back the previous night. American artillery kept the supply routes behind the woods under heavy shellfire, preventing soldiers there—just as their doughboy counterparts a few hundred yards away—from getting water or food.
Most of these Germans had not slept for thirty-six hours, and in that they time had marched sixteen miles; been ordered into an uphill, near-suicidal frontal attack across open ground; then held exposed lines through the night under heavy machine-gun and artillery fire. Many companies no longer had a single surviving officer in their ranks, and one—the 11th Company of the 272nd—could only muster seventeen men. Now, before dawn, their battalion commanders were about to order them forward against the Americans again.
The present gas and high-explosive bombardment on American rear positions was the German artillery’s attempt at a preparatory bombardment supporting another infantry assault. Between two and four a.m., German Corps Artillery and guns of the 82nd Reserve Division sent more than 1,000 high-explosive and gas shells on Summerall’s battery crews, augmented by more than 600 mustard shells hurled by the 25th Reserve Division supporting from the south (they avoided gassing Cantigny itself because they planned on recapturing it). Then at 4:00 a.m., more than 100 German guns from two divisions unleashed a bombardment along the entire American front.
* * *
A half mile from the German lines, in Company E’s position just east of the village, Capt. Edward Johnston had lost all his lieutenants and was the only remaining officer. His four platoons—all under the charge of sergeants—had spent most of their night digging and resting in alternating shifts. Abruptly, thunder carried from German gun pits, blasts and screams broke the silence, sheets and splashes of orange and white flame lit the darkness, and lead and steel again invaded the shallow foxholes and trenches crammed with doughboys. Johnston sent signal flares fizzing skyward, and his soldiers with heavy eyes and blistered hands grabbed rifles, threw on helmets, and peeked flinchingly over their earthworks to defend their line for the third straight morning.
Whistles pitched louder and lower through the darkness, and doughboys froze in place, yielding to the bleak embrace of fate. Pvt. Robert Darr was blown to bits, leaving only a helmet and rifle in the trench where he had been standing. The same blast killed Pvt. Herbert Dobson beside him, leaving his body unscratched, killed by the concussion alone. Another whiz-bang hit the parapet in front of twenty-six-year-old Pvt. James Burns, blowing his helmet away with the top of his skull and killing him instantly. Burns had left his pregnant young wife, Mary Catherine, back home in Wisconsin when he enlisted the previous fall, and he had spent the past few weeks bragging about the apple of his eye, his daughter, Elaine, born in December, whom he now would never meet. His brother, John, a member of Company L, had survived the previous day’s carnage in no-man’s-land and was currently back holding the old jumping-off trenches with the few survivors of Lieutenant Newhall’s platoon. John would carry the grief of his brother’s loss until mid-July, when he would himself be killed by artillery fire at Soissons.
Shell fragments tore through the living and defiled the dead. Without officers to keep them in place, soldiers’ hold on the front lines threatened to last only as long as their grip on their own sanity, eroded more and more by each blast. Were it not for the effective leadership of the two front-line platoon sergeants, Henry Johnson and Stephen Palaschak, Company E’s front lines might have folded and withdrawn. But in actions for which they would each be awarded the Silver Star, both men—as with the fallen Lieutenant Curry and injured Lieutenant Avery in whose place they now stood—ran up and down their lines, redistributed ammunition, and kept their troops “in position under extremely heavy fire.”
Enemy machine-gun fire began strafing the parapet, and one bullet hit Cpl. Anthony Dicello in the head, killing him instantly. In a shell-crater outpost a few dozen yards in front of the company lines, three automatic-riflemen—PFC Edward Pitt, PFC Clarence Fields, and Pvt. Fred Marshall—spotted the Maxim’s distant muzzle flashes and directed their Chauchat fire at it. The three burned through ammo, silencing the Maxim and killing its six-man crew. But their own muzzle flashes made their isolated position a target, and a German 77 shifted its fire and dumped shells into the crater, killing Pitt and Fields and wounding Marshall.
Back in the company line, Pvt. Jay Antes and PFC Emory Mahafey, two medics who were “repeatedly pass[ing] up and down the front trenches rendering first-aid under heavy machine-gun fire,” noticed the shell blast in the outpost. Private Antes climbed over the parapet and “left the security of the trenches in order to render first-aid” to the wounded Private Marshall. But as well aimed as the first, another enemy shell whistled into the crater, killing Private Antes. His fellow medic, PFC Mahafey, darted over the top and jumped into the hole to give Antes first aid, but like clockwork, another shell struck and killed Mahafey. Improbably, Private Marshall was still alive, and he fired all his remaining Chauchat ammo before finally being evacuated.
To their left, Company F’s soldiers were enduring the same pounding. The only remaining officer, twenty-six-year-old Lt. Foster Brown, a congressman’s son and VMI graduate from Tennessee, became the third to command the company in just the past eighteen hours. Like Captain Johnston to his right, Brown shot up a flare signal and struggled to keep his men in position under the cannonading. Twenty-three-year-old PFC William Wear of Rome, Georgia, and thirty-nine-year-old PFC Ernest Many of Newburg, New York, were killed side-by-side by a single shell. The rattle of a German machine gun sounded, and a sweep of bullets struck nineteen-year-old PFC Joseph Rountree of Kinston, North Carolina, who “died instantly.” Cpl. Joseph Jindra climbed out of the trench and ran forward to man a Hotchkiss that had been abandoned under the previous evening’s counterattack, but “while advancing was killed by shellfire.” Lieutenant Brown jumped from his trench and ran up and down the lines, between the zipping Maxim fire and flying dirt, yelling to the men at his feet to keep a watch across the dark plateau for an enemy attack. With flat understatement, Brown would later report he was “fortunate enough to escape injury.”
Summoned by Johnston’s and Brown’s flares, Sitting Bull’s artillery opened up with a reassuring rumble, sending shells humming over the hunkered doughboys and falling in splashes of flame in the German-held woods. More landed farther off, hitting enemy artillery positions in orange explosions silhouetted behind hilltops and splintered tree trunks, until all German artillery fell silent except for the typewriter tapping of a few Maxims and the lonely door-slam of a solitary 77mm.
* * *
A few hundred yards away, German soldiers—as exhausted and hungry as their American counterparts—were ordered to fix bayonets on their Mausers. At 4:10 a.m., they pulled themselves from their foxholes and edged forward across the dark plateau. Lt. Rudolph Koubsky, the sole remaining officer in Company M’s bent-back lines hugging the north of the village, noticed the “heavy bombardment of artillery” that had been pummeling Company F’s and E’s positions to his front-right, followed by an infantry attack. “As the smoke cleared away 3 waves could be seen advancing to our front and left front, attempting to envelop our left flank.” All along this stretch of the American front lines, officers and NCOs ordered their troops to open fire over open sights at the waves of gray figures scarcely discernible in the faint predawn light.
With the popping of Springfields and chatter of automatic rifles, doughboys mowed through the front line of German attackers even as enemy Maxims lashed the American parapet with covering fire. Company F’s Cpl. Joseph Cely emptied his rifle and while crawling to a nearby shell hole to secure a fallen soldier’s ammunition, he was pelted by machine-gun bullets, one blowing his kneecap off. Although pulled back into the trench by comrades who dressed his wounds, Cely could not be evacuated and would eventually lose consciousness, dying of blood loss within a few hours. In Company M’s front lines, Sgt. Maniphe Stonecipher “showed remarkable coolness and disregard of danger” while directing his platoon’s fire at the attacking Germans “although his casualties were great and his ammunition exhausted.” When two of his men, twenty-one-year-old Pvt. Alex Morley of New York and twenty-three-year-old PFC Emory Cohron of Kentucky, were both struck down to the trench floor dead by machine-gun bullets, Stonecipher grabbed five-round clips from their ammo pouches and passed them out to his surviving soldiers as they fired to stop the attackers. The ammo shortage desperate, Stonecipher crawled over the top to collect the clips from the pouches and bandoliers of the fallen, returning to the trench to redistribute them, somehow unharmed, actions that inspired his platoon into ever more defiant action. “I never saw a braver man in all my life,” recounted one of his privates admiringly after the war. For his actions, Sergeant Stonecipher was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross and Silver Star, but six weeks later at Soissons, in actions exhibiting equal courage, he would be killed in action.
As for the German attackers, “They were beaten off with heavy losses again,” Lieutenant Koubsky noted. The predawn counterattack—the fourth attempt by von Hutier’s soldiers to retake their high-ground prize—had failed. German records would reveal that most rifle companies were not notified to organize for the attack until five minutes before jumping off, and regimental command would again blame failure on a lack of coordination with artillery and a “weakness in the organization.” But woven through the reports of both attacking regiments is a common refrain: that troop progress was impossible because of the “powerful fire opposition” of not just American artillery, but machine guns and rifles. The 1st Division Journal would credit “the combined fire of our artillery and infantry.” And in Colonel Ely’s bunker, this success against yet another enemy attack was phoned up the chain of command: “Enemy infantry started across but never reached our lines neither did they return. All quiet now.”
* * *
The sun broke above the horizon on the dawn of another clear, gorgeous spring day, and for the first time, these doughboys did not awake in the cast shadow of Cantigny. For Lt. Richard Newhall, still flat on his back out in the dry, wheat-stubbled dirt of no-man’s-land, dawn shattered any fading hopes of rescue. “When it began to get light I managed slowly to edge myself over to the little trench and to slip into it,” he later recounted. He shuffled with his heels and hips and one good arm across the hard dirt, dragging his shredded, bloodied arm until he poured himself into the corner of the small ditch. “I couldn’t lie flat because of the dead corporal in the other end,” which he added was “fortunate because I never could have got to my feet from a prone position.” So Newhall sat, thirsty, hungry, but seated awkwardly upright behind some cover, blood finally flowing through his numb back and stiff muscles once again and “slowly thinking about how I would get myself back that night.”
In the blackened and churned-up outpost where privates Gillespie and Drager lay the entire night fighting thirst and hunger and shooting pain, the morning sun warmed the cold dirt beneath them. Drager’s shattered legs were numb, the pulpy mass of muscles gashed through with splintered bones concealed by blood-wilted pants. Any attempt he made to reposition his torso sent sharp reminders of the bullet in his back. Gillespie continued loosening and retightening the tourniquet on his leg, and at first light he reached into his tunic pocket and pulled out his soldier notebook and stubby pencil to follow his morning habit of crossing off another day at the front. “I shall always remember checking off May 29, because I had good reason to believe the final entry was being made.”
Up in Cantigny, Lieutenant Sargent crunched through the charred cinders coating the village walkways among dew-glossed ruins following his guide toward Major Rozelle’s bunker. “I found Cantigny all ashes as I had expected,” he observed, “but the ashes had a more sulphorous stench than I had foreseen.” He passed houses that were now only the “fragments of four walls” sheltering clutches of wounded soldiers waiting for stretcher bearers. Sargent followed the runner down into “a black hole that stared out of the ashes,” and as he got halfway down the steps, a rasping voice yelled up from inside: “What fool is it that is coming down here in broad daylight … and showing where we are to the Germans?” Sargent hustled down the last few steps into the dimly lit, vaulted stone cellar and saw a handful of French officers and battalion staff seated on benches against the walls. Seated in the corner was the short, hatless, red-haired Major Rozelle, waiting for an answer to his question.
Lieutenant Sargent quickly dropped Colonel Ely’s name and explained he was sent as an artillery liaison, to which Major Rozelle responded: “Come in, Mr. Artilleryman”—stretching the syllables out with no small amount of scorn—“and sit down.” Enemy shells were again pounding the village above, shaking the brick ceiling and filling the space with clouds of dust. Rozelle calmly filled a cup of cider from the spigot of a hogshead and passed it to Sargent, who learned his assignment would be passing messages from infantry to artillery and listening to calculate the angle and direction of German batteries by rough acoustic ranging. This would occupy the rest of Sargent’s day, and with “duties to perform,” time passed faster than the dragging hours of the previous day spent in his observation post hoping to survive. But sipping his cider and monitoring the phone, he could not ignore the “incessant bombardment” continuing above: “Being in it all was like being in the crater of an active volcano.”
* * *
On the surface up above, the “active volcano” of German artillery fire continued throughout the day, and any doughboys moving over open ground were targets. Twenty-two-year-old Pvt. Wiley Croswell, the youngest of five children to a farming family back in Felicity, Ohio, was lugging Marmite cans of food toward the front lines when a shell blast killed him. His body was never found. Outside Colonel Ely’s bunker, Cpl. John Baumgarten and Pvt. Mirko Ivosevich of the 7th Field Artillery had come nearly a mile from their artillery battery to reconnect phone lines. “We were fixing one of F Battery’s lines when a 5 inch shell fell about three yards from us and instantly killed Pvt. Ivosevich,” Corporal Baumgarten reported. “When my pal was hit we called for a first-aid and a doctor came to his rescue but it was too late as he was taking his last breath.”
Across the uneven, cratered open fields around Cantigny, single soldiers darted and sprinted up into the village and back again with messages, regularly attracting German machine-gun fire that followed them in trails of soil bursts at their feet, or whiz-bangs that exploded on all sides in dirt showers. Given the high casualty rates especially during daylight hours, front line commanders would often send two runners with the same message to the same rear command post to ensure at least one would get through safely. Pvt. Dozier Wren was running a folded field message back to Colonel Ely’s bunker when a shell detonated alongside him, knocking him unconscious into the wheat. Fellow soldiers carried him back to the first-aid station, but he would die by the next morning.
Because of the lack of phone lines in the new positions and likelihood that artillery would slice up any wire that was laid, extra runners had been marshaled for the battle, mostly drawn from volunteers. “I felt I was helping to win the war by being a runner,” twenty-one-year-old Pvt. Frank Groves of Oregon later noted with pride. “I felt I was saving more people and helping to end it sooner. Carrying the messages made me feel effective and important. I moved all the time and saw a lot. I picked up lots of watches from dead Germans and gave them all away to other soldiers.”
Most messages carried by winded runners back and forth across no-man’s-land contained pleas from front-line officers for food, water, and most pressingly, ammunition. Capt. Clarence Huebner, never one to request relief or reveal any hint of anxiety, scribbled a message on a slip of paper to be run back to Colonel Ely: “We are in pretty bad shape, the men are worn out from continual fighting and no water. Our losses in front line have been very heavy.” Rifle companies in all three battalions were so desperately short of Springfield, Chauchat, and Hotchkiss ammunition that they would be unable to fend off another German counterattack.
Spotting the front-line ammunition shortage as dire, one of Captain Huebner’s officers, Lt. Vinton Dearing, a twenty-two-year-old son of Baptist missionaries and a graduate of Colgate University, wasted no time taking action. He climbed out of Huebner’s command-post cellar and ran back through the village, from one strongpoint to another, recruiting two dozen men to join him for a sprint back to the regimental ammo dump. Using the compass his little sister, Peggy, had sent him—which served as a talisman as much as a directional aid—he led the “carrying party of inexperienced men through heavy shell fire to the regimental dump,” to be followed by a four-hundred-yard sprint hauling boxes back across no-man’s-land.
Predictably, German artillery observers had spotted them, and as Dearing led his column of men back into the open, the shells began to fall. In the rear of the column were three men, twenty-three-year-old PFC Oscar Bolinger, nineteen-year-old PFC Raymond Pichotta, and twenty-six-year-old Pvt. Leo Monien, shuffling close together. Like the rest of the detail, their forward progress was slowed by their loads, with arms pulled groundward by the heavy ammo boxes they were lugging. Private Monien, missing two fingers on one hand from a saw-mill accident back home in Wisconsin, had difficulty lugging even one. Ignoring the enemy shells dropping in their pathway, a “shell struck directly in front of [Bolinger], blowing him into pieces.” Monien and Pichotta, likewise, were each “killed instantly” by the same blast. Dearing and others ran back to check on them, but the three were dead. After hauling the ammunition up to companies in the front line and strongpoints, Dearing led a few men back to retrieve the dropped boxes. After darkness that night, soldiers in the orchard strongpoint came and retrieved the three cold bodies—or pieces—and buried them by the nearby hawthorn hedge.
* * *
By early afternoon, from his foxhole behind the barbed-wired slit trench in the middle of the orchard, Lt. Welcome Waltz was shocked at the number of German shells falling on the strongpoint. “I fully decided that our position was going to be pulverized and all of us churned up with it,” he would report. “Such a deluge of shells, I never thought possible.” Two German long-range howitzers had pinpointed the strongpoint’s position with a sniper’s accuracy, hurling pairs of ashcans with unrelenting frequency. “We’d hear its report & watch that molasses-can-size bomb as it howled upward, end over end, then head down,” one corporal later recounted. “We became very proficient in our footwork.” Lieutenant Waltz timed the shots with his Ingersol wristwatch, shots that sounded like “a great roar in the air … like a mountain was on the point of smashing us”—hitting every four minutes. Each pair of shells totaled 500 pounds of high explosives, and the resulting “concussion and shock was terrific.”
One pair of detonations caved in an entire length of the trench, and PFC Leslie Venters and Pvt. David Wright disappeared. As the smoke cleared, soldiers flailed at the charred dirt to unearth their comrades, but when they pulled the two out, both were dead. “Their faces had turned black,” the platoon sergeant noted. After each double blast, the cringing, shaking, and sobbing men cowering in the cross-trench then had four minutes to evacuate the wounded or dig buddies out from under caved-in trench walls before the “great roar” sounded again. “This type of stuff is what makes men go insane,” Waltz observed.
The insanity must have possessed the platoon leader in the foxhole beside him, Lt. Thomas Watson, who, Waltz observed, “thought it was his duty to be constantly running over to his men.” Driven by a “hopped-up battle condition,” Watson was “even taking his pistol and shooting at our runners, from the front line, that were coming back to the strongpoint.” Waltz worried that Watson’s frantic movements were attracting enemy attention and “bringing a large amount of additional fire on us.” “I tried to keep him down,” Waltz noted, “but it was no use.” As more shells hit the strongpoint, Watson again “ran forward to see something or somebody and one of the big fellows ranged alongside of him and that was the end of a very brave officer.” From near a village command post on the orchard’s edge another battalion officer, Lt. Jim Quinn, saw Watson get blown to the ground and sprinted to his side. “[A]pparently the burst of the shell was over Lieutenant Watson, and he was killed simply from concussion,” Quinn observed. “There were no marks on his body that we found, except the thin skin directly under each eye was broken, and the blood was gushing from each one of these wounds as if it were being forced out with pressure … the Medical Corp[s] men could not revive him.” That evening after midnight, Quinn and a burial detail buried Lieutenant Watson in a shallow grave near the hawthorn hedge with the bodies of two other lieutenants now over a day gone, John Curry and Wilmer Bodenstab.
* * *
The ranks of 1st Battalion troops holding the trenches southeast of the village were still thickened with the battalion reserve company and the engineers, and a rifle company from Major Roosevelt’s 26th Infantry battalion still held the southern anchor in the Cantigny Woods. At 5:00 p.m., German artillery fire—uncomfortably steady all afternoon—picked up into another sustained bombardment, and the Cantigny Woods’ canopy of foliage-thinned treetops and splintered trunks gave Roosevelt’s doughboys no cover from the rain of shrapnel and high explosives. Pvt. Gustave Tack’s chest was caved in by an explosion, killing him instantly. Shell fragments from another blast struck Pvt. Elmo Ridges in the face and Pvt. Torgei Roysland in the back. As a nearby corporal would report, Roysland was killed “instantly,” and Ridges “only lived a minute or two afterward.”
This bore all the unmistakable earmarks of a preparatory bombardment for yet another German counterattack. Down in Major Rozelle’s cider cellar, Lieutenant Sargent noticed the bombardment above was getting “unusually intense,” and the “aloof and in command” Rozelle sifted through panicky reports from his front lines of another enemy infantry attack, of contact being lost with 2nd Battalion to the left, and even more false rumors of German tanks. He sent a runner darting through the village ruins over to Captain Huebner’s command post to reconnect and determine 2nd Battalion’s status, but the runner was wounded by shellfire on the way. And although Rozelle deemed the reliability of these reports “unsatisfactory,” he again worried his line might break. To be certain, he sent orders to Company A back in the old jumping-off trenches to move forward and “reinforce center and right” of the battalion.
This would push Lieutenant Anderson and his men right back into the deadly crossfire of the ravine, where they had already suffered casualties to a third of their company. Weak and feverish and caught in the tightening grip of the Spanish flu, Anderson shuffled through his company trenches, platoon to platoon, directing his men to gear up, fix bayonets, and prepare to head over the top. He then drew his pistol, climbed up on the parapet, and ordered the remains of his company to follow him forward across no-man’s-land. His only two remaining officers, lieutenants Jim Hartney and Martin Williams, each led their platoons—only numbering about thirty men each—forward in columns. “We had to traverse the ground over which the attack had passed the morning before,” Lieutenant Hartney noted, “an advance of more than a kilometer through a section which had been swept almost clear of cover.” As they entered the ravine, into the line of sight of German machine gunners in the wood line to the front-right, bullets tore through their ranks. “The 3rd and 4th platoons encountered heavy enemy machine-gun fire from right front shortly after moving out into open,” Lieutenant Hartney would report.
A few paces out in front of his company, Lieutenant Anderson was hit. “He was shot through the calf of the leg and the groin,” Cpl. Gust Behike of the lead platoon would report. Anderson fell, grabbing himself in a futile attempt to stop the excruciating pain. “He spoke only a few words,” Behike noted, “saying ‘That he knew that he was done for, but I did it for Old Glory.’” With machine-gun fire still sweeping the dirt all around, Behike picked Anderson up, and in actions for which he would be awarded the Silver Star, “displayed courage and fearlessness under machine-gun fire while carrying his company commander to a place of cover.” It is likely Anderson lost consciousness in his journey back across the plateau, and though his corporal got him safely to the field hospital, Anderson died an hour later. For “leading his command forward in spite of artillery and machine-gun fire,” Lt. Robert Banks Anderson was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Cross and the Silver Star.
Back up at the front, Maxim fire and confusion continued tearing through Company A’s ranks. Pvt. George Austin, thrust into the role of squad leader by the previous day’s casualties, spotted some defilade in the open ground up ahead, and while leading his squad toward it, he was hit. “His death was almost instantaneous,” his platoon sergeant would report. Lieutenant Williams led his platoon forward toward a line of shell craters for cover, and when turning to urge his men toward him, enemy fire pelted him in the back. He was still conscious, and two of his men carried him back to the field hospital, where he would linger for two weeks before dying. For “attempting to get his men under cover” in the face of such heavy enemy fire, Williams was posthumously awarded the Silver Star.
The company’s only surviving officer, Lieutenant Hartney, and his 1st Platoon soldiers had reached the high ground on the ravine’s left, where he led his column forward to cross the road toward Company B’s lines. To his right, Hartney could see the other two lead platoons—being led only by a corporal and a sergeant—trapped in the ravine’s low ground. He sent a runner, Pvt. Stanley Mullins of Detroit, sprinting across the gun-swept, open ground with orders for them to work their way through the heavy fire over toward the cover of the Cantigny Woods to their right. “[A]bout 15 other casualties occurred before the platoons got under cover,” Hartney noted. But as Mullins ran back, an enemy Maxim followed him until it found its mark. He managed to stumble forward up to Hartney’s platoon, and with the resignation of a man accepting his fate, said only, “Tell my sister I was not afraid.”
Hartney led his platoon in two waves across the road and up toward the American trenches they were to reinforce, but German machine guns traced their movements and they dropped and hugged the dirt, grouping behind patches of tall grass. “The first wave crawled the remainder of the way to the trench and as it was crowded with men the second wave was disposed in shell holes about fifty yds. in rear,” Hartney noted. One of his automatic-riflemen, twenty-three-year-old Pvt. Joe Graham of Mississippi, set up in one of the shell craters to fire on the German machine-gun positions, but “was struck thru the neck by a machine-gun bullet and died a few minutes later,” his corporal would report.
* * *
A heavy German bombardment continued punishing the American defenders up in their crowded trenches, and every doughboy expected another infantry attack to follow. At 5:45 p.m., out to the front-left of 2nd Battalion’s trenches northeast of the village, German riflemen could be seen pushing out from the l’Alval and Framicourt woods. “[S]everal of the infantrymen, two or three at a time,” were observed exiting the woods and attacking the American lines “very doggedly.” Captain Huebner’s doughboys again cut the attackers down with small-arms fire, and flare signals brought shells from Summerall’s 75s down in a curtain of fire, forcing the rest back into their wood lines. “Never at any time did any [enemy] troops reach our wire,” Huebner would proudly report.
In the wood line facing 1st Battalion down south, a few enemy Maxim teams could be seen moving out and setting up, but no attack ever formed. “We reached our objective but did not have to fight,” Lieutenant Hartney noted. “It was simply a matter of enduring the shelling and keeping out of the way of the machine-gun bullets after that.” Capt. Clarence Oliver later reported that his Company B troops were shelled “heavily” but “[n]o infantry formation for counterattack was seen.” Lieutenant Sorensen had his Company D troops prepared to defend against a counterattack, especially after a runner from 2nd Battalion reported an enemy tank attack forming. But as he would dryly report: “none seen.”
The afternoon’s only significant German infantry attack, fought off by 2nd Battalion troops northeast of Cantigny, had been launched by the surviving remnants of the 272nd Reserve Infantry Regiment. The assault force was beefed up with a few companies from the reserve battalion, but even these soldiers were by no means rested or fresh, having spent most of the day back in low ground under a heavy gas attack at the hands of Summerall’s batteries. As with previous attempts to retake the village, this one had been hastily thrown together, rifle companies were notified and assembled late, and failure was owed as much to the attackers’ exhausted state as to American fire.
By 6:30 p.m., word of success against yet another enemy counterattack made its way back to General Bullard’s headquarters: “Everything O.K. counterattack completely checked.” By 6:50 p.m., the artillery officer in Colonel Ely’s bunker reported, “All is quiet along our lines.” Even the German artillery was at last taking a momentary break, its gun crews gradually accepting a new reality now muscling its way through the consciousness of von Hutier’s 18th Army: American soldiers would not be dislodged from the high ground of victory.
* * *
For Lieutenant Sargent, the damp darkness of Major Rozelle’s small wine cellar had been a small pocket of sanity in the midst of all the madness, but for the constant ringing in his ears left by the counterattack’s unrelenting shelling, he almost missed the rare quiet outside. “I did notice that about sundown the German guns ceased,” he would later write. “I couldn’t help noticing it; it was so remarkable to have a silence.”
Down the wooden steps came another artillery officer and a runner, giving Sargent the news he was finally relieved. As he said his farewells to Rozelle and his battalion staff, Sargent walked up the stairs and through the rubble into the night’s “novelty of silence” and thought of the admiration he had quickly developed for “the rasping and honest voice” of Major Rozelle: “It was good to have someone in command, enthroned beside the cedar barrels, who was always the same.” Barely lit by the failing light of dusk, Sargent walked out of Cantigny’s ashen ruins and down the slope of what was once no-man’s-land. “It was good to feel the grass under my feet instead of the ashes,” he would later recall. “And how good was the silence!”