No matter how he tried to situate himself, twenty-five-year-old Pvt. Arthur Hansen of Sparks, Nevada, could not find a comfortable seated position in the trench while enveloped in full battle gear. If he tightened the shoulder straps on his pack, his arms lost circulation; if he leaned forward, his legs went numb and his stiff, high-neck collar choked him; and if he leaned back his steel canteens cut into his lower back. Like every other rifleman packed into the trenches shoulder to shoulder on either side of him, Hansen was the picture of cumbersome immobility—an overburdened warrior topped off with a soup-bowl helmet. Two canteens full of water dangled from the back of his equipment belt, and in front his canvas ammunition pouches and cloth bandoliers bulged with forty-five five-round clips of .30-caliber rifle ammunition. The bulky case carrying his gas mask was slung across his chest, and on his back was a tall pack stuffed with two days’ rations, a shelter half, four sandbags, and a flare. The blade end of a full-length shovel stuck out the top, prompting thoughts of his days as a coal shoveler on the Southern Pacific Railroad. And around his crowded waist he carried two hand grenades, a rifle grenade, and a sheath for the bayonet that stood affixed to his Springfield rifle.
A few of the soldiers in the trenches with Private Hansen already knew the sensation of going “over the top,” mostly on patrols under the cover of darkness. Hansen, who had enlisted for Army service the day after America declared war, recently became one of the select few to experience the brief and sudden combat of a raid on the German trenches. “It is a queer sensation when you climb over your trench parapet and wonder if you are ever coming back,” he observed. As he readied himself to enter battle with the first wave, thoughts of that raid helped to bolster his confidence for this morning’s attack as he remembered, “[A]fter you get started you are all right.”
But for many, this would be their first venture into no-man’s-land, and for all this would be their first battle. Lt. George Butler, who just one year before was an Indianapolis attorney, described the emotions churning in his breast just before Zero Hour as “not fear, but a sort of excitement.” Lt. Harry Martin from Kansas felt much the same, later writing in a letter home: “I honestly was nervous and rather excited.” Pvt. Billie McCombs of New Castle, Pennsylvania, who had volunteered the very day his hometown paper published news of the Zimmermann Telegram, struggled to articulate what he felt in these moments before battle: “I can only tell of my feeling and I suppose others had the same. It wasn’t the fear of going ‘Over the Top’—it was the fear of losing our nerve. I would rather be hit—as would others—than to lose my nerve.”
Waiting men each calmed their own nerves in their own way, some in silent prayer, some by smoking cigarettes as if their last, and some by nipping at rum rations or cognac they had managed to finagle from the French. Many found a measure of encouragement in the thoroughness of their training and the detailed battle rehearsal two days earlier. “We had practiced it until each man knew just what he was going to do,” Lieutenant Newhall remembered confidently. For his part, there was no “tense excitement” in the time waiting to jump off, but a feeling that he and the troops in the platoon he led were merely “getting ready to pull off a big demonstration.”
* * *
The well-oiled mechanics of the 4,000-man machine were wound tight, and their unspooling was no longer in the hands of the top commanders—Zero Hour would launch them automatically. This would be a platoon-leader’s battle, and with every second planned and every detail rehearsed, Generals Bullard and Summerall and Colonel Ely were reduced to observers as the launching of the infantry into the breach fell into the hands of the young lieutenants and captains in the front trench. Responsible for leading their platoons over the top at 6:45 a.m. precisely, most of these junior officers had their eyes fixed on their synchronized wristwatches. As minute hands reached 6:40 a.m., the ear-splitting bombardment ended, cueing the 75s to begin the protective barrage.
Staccato slams broke the fleeting silence, sending shells whirring over the waiting doughboys and detonating in a choreographed curtain of explosions out in no-man’s-land. These first shots of the protective barrage signaled that the jump-off was five minutes away. Each of seventy-two guns fired three shots in the first minute, six in the second, then finally twelve shots per gun per minute. The ascending intensity culminated in more than a dozen blasts per second for the remainder of the barrage, scheduled to last until after the Americans had captured the village. As one artillery officer described it: “One by one the batteries dropped their fire into the line, one here and another there, then others would drop in between and link up until along the whole front of the attack there was a perfect, even line of bursting shells a mile long.”
A watching correspondent described the scene out in no-man’s-land caused by such concentrated firepower as “a wall of heavy smoke within which, continuously, burst new geysers of smoke, black or gray or sulphurous yellow.” Even for men accustomed to the incessant clamor of artillery, the sound was staggering. By the final seconds before H-Hour, what had begun minutes before as loud, successive crashes had merged into one continuous roar, which along some parts of the line was constant and deafening. “Our guns made so much racket it was impossible to shout orders,” noted Lieutenant Butler.
The barrage churned two hundred yards in front of the trenches, and beneath the resounding thunder, in the center of the line where 2nd Battalion faced Cantigny head-on, French tanks slowly rumbled forward across the trenches through paths marked by stakes, their engines barely audible above the boom of the barrage. The handful of supporting French infantry and their diminutive tank commander, armed only with a walking stick, led the way on foot, standing out in pale-blue uniforms. Apace with them, ten Schneiders lumbered out into no-man’s-land and stopped, their engines idling and billowing smoke, waiting for the line of explosions to leap forward.*
Hunkered in a trench behind the tanks, Lieutenant Martin did his best to mind the countdown: “I would look at my watch and when it read five minutes more, every minute after that seemed an hour.” Waiting in the second parallel with the men of his machine-gun company, Capt. Adelbert Stewart noted the silence in the trenches around him: “While waiting for H-hour the men never seemed quieter or more collected.” In the northern stretch of trenches with 3rd Battalion, Lt. Si Parker’s attention was on his men, squatted in a long line beside him: “This was our first real attack and naturally everyone was not chatting as if at a dinner party; however, everyone was in good spirits and waited anxiously for the minute to hop over the parapet.”
All was set. Zero Hour would be marked by the barrage wall advancing and the shouts and whistles of platoon leaders signaling their troops to jump off. Senses were plainly heightened, but waiting for battle induced no inner philosophers or poets. If men counting down these last few seconds were compelled into any mortal contemplation, words mostly failed them. Preoccupied with grave thoughts, twenty-four-year-old Pvt. Frank Last, a former mail carrier from North Dakota, spilled his own mixed feelings into his diary: “Everybody seemed to be more or less excited or anxious … or something. I don’t know if one can exactly explain the sensation.” He noted that “[e]verybody seemed jolly enough, but we all did a lot of thinking.” Private Last recalled a veteran French soldier once remarking that explaining one’s feelings while waiting in the trench for Zero Hour “would be like a young man trying to express his feelings when he proposed to a young lady.”
* * *
Nearly three miles behind the front lines, twenty-eight-year-old Maj. Raymond Austin stood on a leafy hilltop among two dozen 75s of the 6th Field Artillery which were, along with the 7th Field Artillery and two French artillery regiments, firing the protective barrage. With cotton stuffed in their ears and rumpled soft caps atop their heads, the three-man team at each gun—like all the guns of each battery and all batteries of the group—worked as one, a display of united action that was causing devastatingly impressive results.
Once a shell was fired, the gunner pulled open the breech hatch and with a hollow clink the empty white-hot shell casing would fall atop the growing pile. The loader would slide another shell in the breech and the gunner would quickly close it as the loader rechecked the gun’s elevation while both stepped clear of the recoil. Eyeing his pocket watch—his head bobbing sharply as he counted the seconds off to himself—the leader would again signal to fire, the gunner would pull back the sprung lanyard and release it, and with a loud slam another shell was on its way. Then over again the process repeated every five seconds—nonstop—at each of the seventy-two guns.
Gusts of white flame shot from each gun barrel, lighting the gray clouds of acrid smoke that more and more shrouded the hilltop. A choking scent of cordite carried on the morning air. Major Austin eyed his wristwatch, and as the second hand clicked onto 6:45 a.m., he watched with wonder as the crews manning the separate guns of the barrage groups simultaneously stopped, quickly adjusted the elevation wheels of their 75s in precise unison, and resumed firing, moving the protective barrage one hundred yards forward and inviting the infantry over the top. In an age before instant wireless communication or digital solar clocks, the impressiveness of such celestial precision cannot be overstated. Major Austin recounted the scene with no small amount of awe: “[A]t 6:45, as though by the command of a single officer, although in reality each battery worked independently by prearranged schedule and synchronized watches, the barrage moved forward.” The moment was now—Zero Hour had arrived.
* * *
His elevated position near Rocquencourt afforded Major Austin an Olympian view of the launching of the attack, and he watched through his binoculars as the first wave of men brandishing Springfields with fixed bayonets climbed out of the trenches and began the advance. “At the same time as the barrage left the line of departure (our first line trenches) the infantry suddenly appeared on the slope of the ridge close behind our barrage.” From nearly three miles away, they appeared to him as “a long brown line with bayonets glistening in the sun” that “seemed to have sprung from the earth.”
By this moment, Colonel Ely had left his command bunker and positioned himself closer to the front to observe his men emerging from the trenches. He could not but be impressed with the scale and coordination of the scene before him. “The jump-off at dawn,” he would later recall proudly, “was the most dramatic thing I have ever seen. I stood in a position to see my men go over and the French, very much impressed by the attack, took pictures from our vantage point.”
In the face of a rising sun on such a clear morning, the first wave of the American attack must have offered a splendid spectacle. What Major Austin and Colonel Ely could each see on the plateau before Cantigny was a horizon-filling tide of khaki-clad American soldiers, advancing side by side with three to four feet between them, stretching to a width of over a mile. Just as with the synchronized firing of the artillery, the dozens of individual infantry platoons making up the whole emerged from the trenches and moved forward as one. As one staff officer observed, the soldiers all at once simply “started up from the earth and began their advance.”
The direction of the attack was due east, and the morning sun was shining directly in the face of the attackers, though its harshest light was still shrouded by a dissipating wall of white smoke, the fading remains of the first barrage wall. As the smoke cleared, it revealed the new curtain of flame now roiling one hundred yards beyond the first. Toward it, the men “walked steadily along behind our barrage,” Major Austin noted, as they followed the “tanks which buzzed along with smoke coming out from their exhausts and their guns.”
Between this line of attackers and the protective barrage lay a vast, open plateau that ascended uphill toward the village. Its fields of knee-deep wheat were still largely untouched, save for clustered craters caused by the bombardment. One correspondent present on the morning’s attack described it as a “beautiful plateau … a clean and virgin No Man’s Land untainted yet of the terrible stench of mortal man, carpeted with flowers, with grass, with wheat, with red poppies, yellow buttercups, and purple thistles—the ideal battlefield of an ideal battle.” Combining such a setting with the sight of the Americans advancing, he declared himself unable to “give with words even one millionth of the splendor of the spectacle.”
One officer in the front lines shared this view, effusing over the sight of the initial advance: “It was a wonderful sight—really the most wonderful sight I have ever seen.” Pvt. Ralph Loucks from Indiana watched the first minutes of the attack from the right in the Cantigny Woods, where he and his platoon from Company A waited to swing out and join the first wave. “I will never forget it as long as I live,” he soon wrote home. “It was a great sight to see all those bayonets shining.” Twenty-three-year-old Pvt. Chester Hinner of Sidell, Illinois, would paint the image of the morning attack in a letter home: “It was a wonderful picture when we went over the top at Cantigny. We went over in two waves just as the sun was coming up over a misty, dew-laden No Man’s Land.”
* * *
But up on the far northern end of the assault line, leading his platoon slowly into the attack, Lieutenant Newhall took a less romantic view of the moment. “Zero Hour itself consists merely of blowing your whistle, climbing up on the parapet, and calling out ‘Come on second platoon’ and they all came,” he remembered dryly. To his right was his good friend Lt. George Haydock leading 1st Platoon. Together they comprised the first wave of Company L, the far left side of the attack.
Company L’s task, as its commander, Capt. Francis van Natter, explained, was “to act as a sort of pivoting unit swinging out from the recently constructed trench system.” The ground over which Newhall and Haydock led their first-wave platoons was flat, slightly inclining up toward the Cantigny Road and opening into a wider plateau beyond, ascending to the horizon’s dark wood lines of the l’Alval and Framicourt Woods. The Germans occupied trenches before and after the Cantigny Road, and Company L’s first-wave platoons were to conquer both. Their mission, in Newhall’s words, was “to reach the German trenches and hold them, while the other two platoons [of the second wave] were to dig in on the new line to be established.” They had what he called, in his customary understatement, “a plain ordinary frontal attack to make.”
As 6:45 a.m. came and the barrage moved forward, Lieutenant Newhall stepped up on the dirt and signaled for his men to follow, and he could see that “the whole 1st line down toward the right came on too, and moved forward at a walk.” For a brief moment, as he looked to his right and watched the line of soldiers “as far as the eyes can reach” topped off with “the gleam of the bayonets,” the Army officer gave way to the history PhD, unable to ignore the historic significance of the moment: “It is impossible to imagine a sight more thrilling, an impression of power more imposing, a feeling of more intense, exultant, enthusiastic excitement. It is America going into battle.”
To his right, beyond Haydock’s platoon, the first wave of Company K was being led from the front by the commander, Capt. Henry Mosher of Falconer, New York, sporting a pistol in one hand and walking cane in the other. A West Point dropout, Mosher had earned his officer’s commission as a civilian two years earlier, and took charge of the company in the cold mud of the Seicheprey sector. Beside him was Lieutenant Parker, who noted of his platoon: “Everyone was on his toes and when the second came around to go ‘over the top’ every man sprang out of the trenches.” The men immediately spread into a line and moved toward the barrage as they had practiced in rehearsal. “Attack formation was quickly taken up and we began moving off in proper order,” Parker observed.
Also with Company K was Pvt. Emory Smith, one of the “Three Musketeers” from Denton, Texas. Like the others described by Lieutenant Parker, Smith was on his toes in the seconds leading to Zero Hour, fortified by a shot of cognac he had downed at first light. “[W]e went over the top cheering at the top of our voices,” he later wrote, remembering with relish the eagerness of the men who jumped off with him.
As this first wave of doughboys began the attack, unbridled enthusiasm swept from one end of the American front to another, and the air itself seemed charged with excitement. If the men bore any fear or anxiety, they cloaked it, whether from themselves or the men to their right and left. A private jumping off with the first wave remembered going over the top with a cigarette in his mouth, but after his swift thrust into the fighting that followed, he admitted, “after that—well, I thought a little more about it.”
But the eagerness of the day was not all naïve bravado or juvenile fantasy of illustrious death in battle, especially given the equally enthusiastic attitude of the men of Company E, already baptized in the carnage of war in the previous day’s raid. They had seen a platoon leader buried alive, a sergeant ripped in half by shell fire, and over two dozen of their comrades killed, yet they still attacked with fervor equal to the rest of the regiment. “They went over into the fighting singing, laughing, joking, absolutely unafraid, uncaring,” Lt. Irving Wood later wrote. “They couldn’t move forward fast enough, and some who were wounded struggled to their feet with smiles on their faces and kept going.”
* * *
Lt. Harry Martin, leading a platoon in the first wave of Company H’s attack, was gripped by the same unbounded confidence at Zero Hour: “I took my men, for the first time, over the top, all smiling and with the determination that all Heaven and hell couldn’t beat us.” Martin’s platoon formed the right side of 2nd Battalion, the center of the attack line. Jumping off from lines back in the deepest part of the salient and having an objective beyond the village, this battalion had the farthest to go—parts faced an advance of a mile. Martin’s men, together with the remainder of the platoon on their left (at half strength and led by a sergeant after the raid the day before), were to follow the tanks across the field to the edge of town, and then proceed into the remains of the northern half of Cantigny itself.
The first wave of 2nd Battalion moved forward slowly behind the ambling Schneiders. From his observation post, Lt. Daniel Sargent observed, “The tanks looked like haycarts (horseless),” noting that the wave of riflemen trailing behind “looked like haymakers that carried rifles instead of pitchforks.” A few of the men, as a correspondent observing the advance later described, “followed the tanks over, and ran ahead of them in their enthusiasm.”
Even in their zeal the soldiers labored to keep their line straight, maintaining flanks with the man on either side just as they had during the battle rehearsal. “The formations were the same as those of the practice maneuvers,” one officer noted, “and the movement was equally precise as it kept to the time-table of the barrage.” The straightness of the line continued through the segment of 1st Battalion advancing on the far right. One officer observing the advance noted, “Their line was perfect and they looked as if they were taking part in the drill movement.”
All along the length of marching khaki, lieutenants kept a step or two ahead of their men, setting a constant pace toward the barrage wall, now and then waving their Colt .45s to urge the line ever onward. Their forward movement was steady but not hurried. The “creeping” protective barrage was actually staggered, sitting stationary for two minutes before advancing a hundred yards, then again loitering for another two minutes, then advancing, and so on. “The barrage proceeded as we went ahead in waves,” one private later remembered. “It is a slow process working with a barrage and there is not the real charge that one imagines. You simply run ahead a few yards and lie down waiting for the barrage fire to lift, and can only go as fast as it does.”
Advancing a few steps ahead of his platoon, Lieutenant Martin could see the doughboys working to keep a forward pace to his right and left. “All the men were walking with a firm step, rifles with bayonets fixed and at a high port, walking over no-man’s-land with worlds of artillery fire over our heads,” he wrote just days later in a letter home. In places where the green brush or wheat had grown especially high, soldiers struggled to maintain the line. One correspondent observed them “trampling with high steps, tearing themselves loose with vigorous twisting movements, their rifles held high above their heads as though they were wading a stream with water up to their necks.”
* * *
The barrage wall between the Americans and Cantigny stood tall and thick, impenetrable in some places even by the bright morning sun. Facing the soldiers in no-man’s-land was not a waiting enemy but a roiling blend of fire and smoke, a protective curtain of mayhem produced by their own artillery. At that moment, it concealed a village reduced to rubble and ruins, smoldering piles of twisted timber and stone filling space once occupied by Cantigny’s homes, a grim testament to the effectiveness of the preparatory bombardment.
Most of the Germans in the two companies holding the village itself who had managed to survive the hour-long bombardment remained underground. And as the creeping barrage passed, many stayed below to ride it out rather than ascend to man observation and machine-gun positions. “The rolling barrage was extremely accurate,” Colonel Ely observed, adding that beyond concealing the infantry attack, it kept “practically all elements of the defense under cover and deprive[d] them of all aggressive action.” As his counterpart, the German regimental commander Maj. Hans von Grothe later complained of his own men: “[T]he commanders, as well as the men … lost their heads somewhat and in any case forgot all about observation during the brief but intense bombardment.”
Many of the Germans in 12th Company in the northern half of the village attempted to go up and monitor to effectively defend their position, but they were prevented from doing so by collapsed stairwells and entrances. One of the three officers in the company, Lieutenant Kuntze, had already attempted to observe the American line during the bombardment but was killed by shrapnel. A crew was sent out to man a machine gun, but there was zero visibility for the thick dust and smoke. As the company commander, Lieutenant Kokok later complained, these impossibly difficult conditions combined so that “[a] defense could not be undertaken against the enemy at the proper time.” In the southern half of Cantigny, if any part of the 1st Company of the 271st Regiment emerged to defend, there is no record of it. In the German combat-strength report the next day, it was reported “destroyed.”
But if the Germans hiding or trapped in the remains of Cantigny offered little resistance to the attacking American infantry, those defending the lines to the north and south of the village gave plenty. Because the hour-long preparatory bombardment focused primarily on Cantigny and the woods concealing the reserve units to the northeast, east, and southeast, the Germans defending the trenches extending north of the village facing the left flank of the American assault were still fully capable of observation and effective defense.
Tenth Company of the 272nd Reserve Infantry Regiment was the northernmost unit in the German sector and occupied the two lines of trenches the doughboys of Company L were to conquer. At Zero Hour, Lieutenant von Vegesack, an officer with the company, noticed “a heavy barrage” in no-man’s-land (the American creeping barrage which he mistook for a defensive bombardment fired by German artillery) and the bombardment of the woods to his rear. “At the same moment,” he later reported, he could peek through the barrage smoke sufficiently to see when “American troops came out of their trenches in dense successive waves.”
The khaki figures Lieutenant von Vegesack spotted walking through the wheat toward his company’s position were the doughboys of Company L’s first wave—the platoons led by Lieutenants Newhall and Haydock. Up to this point, the whole length of 3rd Battalion had moved forward with what the commander would call “an utter absence of confusion” as “every detail had been worked out.” But the defiant Germans of 10th Company were soon to add mortal reinforcement to the earthly proverb “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.”
On Lieutenant von Vegesack’s order, German riflemen and Maxim crews fired blindly through the barrage wall, dosing the Company L doughboys with a “heavy infantry and machine-gun fire” and inflicting on the Americans their first casualties of the battle. The one to first suffer “contact with the enemy” was twenty-year-old PFC Anton Jurach of Texas. Wading through waist-high wheat, Company L’s first wave had not made it very far from the trenches when Jurach was struck by a machine-gun bullet and collapsed beneath the soft cover of grain, dead. The rattle of the Maxim quickened the pace of the men beside him, and Jurach was left where he fell. Exposed to the hours and days of enemy shell fire that followed, his body was never seen again. PFC Anton L. Jurach is honored on the tablets of the missing at the Somme American Cemetery, his chiseled name undistinguishable as likely the first American soldier killed in the attack.
With a tempo hastened by enemy fire, Sgt. Harry Klein of New Jersey rushed ahead, urging his squad to keep up, but was struck by the same machine-gun fire and killed instantly. The bullet tore through his chest, cut through the contents of the pack he was carrying, and spun out the back in a grisly display of blood and sparks as he slumped forward. A private about fifteen feet behind Klein “saw flame come out of his back when he fell.” Another bullet knocked Pvt. Herbert Smith of Milwaukee out of the column and to the ground. He lay unconscious and bleeding for hours, hidden in the wheat. He was finally found and evacuated by stretcher-bearers back to a field hospital, but died midafternoon.
As if the wheat itself was tugging men down, one by one the doughboys dropped out of sight, each with the gut-punching sound of a bullet hitting flesh. Newhall and Haydock, with pistols drawn, could only urge those still afloat to keep moving forward. There was no target at which they could return fire—the bullets were cutting through a faceless wall of smoke. And there was no way out but forward, closer to the barrage. Each demented “tat-tat-tat” of the Maxims, sharply audible over the thunder of the artillery, meant the spray of bullets was still coming. An occasional echoing “ding” evidenced a round hitting the steel of a shovel or pick on someone’s back; a dull “plink” meant a hole through another helmet. Some men were shot mid-stride in the knee or foot, falling and writhing in pain. Many dropped where they were and a few kneeled, gingerly straining for a line of sight above the wheat tops to find a target through the smoke: a muzzle flash from the German lines, something—anything—to shoot at and make it stop. Some who were shot were able to roll into nearby shell craters for cover, and others found the strength to crawl back under fire, a long and slow hundred-plus-yard journey to the safety of their former trenches. Many of the injured and dying lay helpless, left to yell desperately for medics to find them and pull them back behind the lines for first aid. Most of those not felled by bullets ran forward closer to the barrage wall and lay flat, hugging the dirt tightly and waiting for the barrage to move forward again, where they might finally see the German trenches and return fire.
* * *
A half mile away, in the center of the attack directly in front of Cantigny, the scene was starkly different. With the two companies of Germans in the village either killed or still taking cover belowground, the response from the defenders during the advance there was, one officer noticed, “very feeble.” It was, in fact, so “feeble” that 2nd Battalion had yet to suffer a single casualty. Two minutes of steady, adrenaline-filled walking had brought the platoons in the first wave to within about forty yards of the barrage wall, where they waited, some kneeling and others lying flat in the grass. Abruptly, with the same coordinated timing as before, the explosions stopped. Before the echo of the final blasts faded, the barrage erupted another hundred yards forward. Tanks popped into gear and began edging ahead once more, and the men stood and resumed their steady walk onward.
This exposed the soldiers in the first wave to the enemy outposts and trenches skirting the village, and it gave the German defenders their first unobstructed view of the attackers. If the spectacle of the mile-wide attack wave of rifle-wielding Americans didn’t give them pause, the slowly stampeding Schneiders outright panicked them. It was the first time soldiers of the kaiser’s 18th Army had ever seen these new tools of warfare on the battlefield. As General von Watter later admitted, the surprise of the American attack was “enhanced by tanks, which our men had never seen before.”
Second Battalion moved forward at a quickened pace to overtake the surprised and shell-shocked enemy. Lt. Welcome Waltz, advancing with his machine-gun company directly toward the village, had seen “one big howitzer shell after another” roar into the German trenches before Zero Hour and didn’t expect much effective defense from the survivors. As he and the rest of the line neared the enemy trenches, the sound of enemy fire, clearly audible before the bombardment, diminished “until all one could hear was a feeble burst now and then.”
Twenty-one-year-old Pvt. Earl Simons of Altoona, Pennsylvania, advancing behind the tanks with Company F toward the north end of the village, described 2nd Battalion’s advance as “a complete surprise to the Huns.” The Schneiders lumbered forward steadily as sporadic Mauser rounds pinged like marbles off the armored hulls. Enemy crews manning two Maxims “surrendered immediately,” spooked after being fired on by a 75 from one of the tanks. Another Maxim crew, perched in the broken remains of a house out near the German trenches, was shut down quickly by another approaching tank’s machine gun. On reaching the German trenches, Private Simons recalled, “We captured about all of them. I did not see one German infantryman fire.” When Lieutenant Waltz reached the trenches, he noted that the preparatory bombardment “had erased them from the terrain,” and he could only make out where the line was in some places from the bodies of the German dead: “I noticed an arm here and a leg there protruding from the churned up ground.”
* * *
Back up in the far northern end of the first wave, Lieutenant Newhall resumed leading the forward pace of his platoon as the barrage advanced beyond the Cantigny Road, exposing him and his surviving troops to the first line of German trenches, manned by the stubborn defenders of 10th Company. The Maxim’s menacing rattle continued, punctuated more and more by the pops of aimed Mauser fire from the German trench. Waving his men forward with his pistol, Newhall was shot through his right armpit. “The force of the blow knocked me over,” Newhall noted. “My first reaction was astonishment that it hit as hard, but the next and immediate reaction was rage which, being accompanied with the realization that I wasn’t really hurt and not at all disabled put me into violent action.”
Although hit, Newhall “jumped up and resumed the advance” with his platoon. Bullets zipped through the air past him and his men, and he managed only a few steps more before he was struck again, this time in the left arm. “That knocked me over again,” he later remembered. “I think there was a sniper in front of us picking off the officers.” This one drilled through his upper arm, breaking the bone above the elbow. As Newhall lay stunned in a clearing of shallow wheat, he made an easy target on the open ground, and he was hit again. This third shot “dazed” him, and he later described the resulting wound in painful detail: “The bullet struck my left arm at an angle, broke the bone again, flattened, and tore its way out through the muscles of the upper arm leaving a wound about seven inches long and two wide.”
With his arm torn to shreds, Newhall lay on his back with his helmet over his face. “[W]hat went on after that I only know by sound,” he later wrote of the moment. Yells of his men and the crisp sounds of their boots trampling onward through the cracking wheat grew more distant, leaving him alone with only unsettling bursts of gunfire to break the loud and sustained din of the barrage. “I never lost consciousness,” he later remembered, “but it was some time before I began to take an interest in things.”
The men of his platoon tried to keep advancing without their leader, but with every step forward, enemy fire grew more severe. The charge was spearheaded by eighteen-year-old Pvt. Carl Fey of Schuylkill Haven, Pennsylvania. Thirteen months prior, Fey had secured his mom’s permission to leave his job as an ironworker on the Reading Railroad and enlist just days after turning seventeen. Now, after a long year of service, the teenage private was out front, leading by a few firm paces the first wave of his country’s first attack. Bullets had been hissing past his ears, dropping his buddies into the wheat behind him, and his own luck ended just a few yards from the German lines. With a jarring pop, his head snapped back and he tumbled forward. Dazed, seized with fear and gripped by numbing adrenaline, he moved his hand up to his face and felt warm, oozing blood. With his tongue, he sensed through the copper taste of blood only a gaping hole where his right upper molars once were. The bullet had torn through his cheek and shattered his upper jaw, knocking several teeth out. “I got shot in the right jaw,” he later wrote to his mom, adding, “I got a hole through my right cheek.” A comrade behind him saw him get “[s]hot in [the] head by rifle or machine-gun bullet” and believed him dead. In shock but alive, facedown in a pool of blood and teeth, Fey was too close to the German lines to be evacuated even had the men of his platoon not already given him up for dead.
Lacking Lieutenant Newhall’s guiding hand and under increasingly deadly and accurate enemy fire, the soldiers of 2nd Platoon began to splinter off in search of cover or a way through. Fear and courage were in play, indistinguishable. A few, paralyzed by a sense of helplessness, flattened themselves in the dirt. One small group of three or four fell back beside their broken and semiconscious lieutenant and began digging in. Some fired single shots with their Springfields aimlessly toward the sounds of enemy fire in small acts of defiance. Others escaped the killing zone by wading blindly in a hunched scamper through the wheat chaff to the right, parallel with the German lines. There they linked up with Lieutenant Haydock and his men, who had reached, cleared, and entered the loosely held first parallel of enemy trenches in their path after flicking grenades over the parapet. Looking out from the German lines, Lieutenant von Vegesack could see that his company’s rifle and machine-gun fire had pinned a part of Newhall’s platoon down in the wheat directly in front of him, and he watched as “a part ran back to the trenches, while another part evaded our barrage and invaded the adjoining company (9th) to the left.”
These invaders to the south were the men of Haydock’s platoon and beyond them the Company K platoons led by lieutenants Si Parker and Clarence Milton “Milt” Drumm. The enemy lines in their pathway were manned by the Germans of 9th Company, and unlike 10th Company on the northern end, its soldiers had sustained heavy casualties during the preparatory bombardment and were offering only sporadic resistance. On the approach, Company K was able to move swiftly and suffered no men killed—Lieutenant Parker later reported that his platoon only “lost one or two men wounded by the advance by machine-gun fire.” He and his men had not advanced far before they noticed that the Germans manning outposts “began jumping out of shell holes and beating it for the rear.” A few of Parker’s soldiers paused mid-stride, raised their rifles, “let out a terrible ‘rabbit-hunting’ yell and began cutting them down.” In this manner, Parker reported, “many of the enemy were killed.” The Americans swarmed, and the Germans in the first line of trenches offered no more fight. One later recalled, “I saw your infantry coming, I knew it was all over.”
Lieutenant Parker and his troops rushed to the edge of the enemy trench and began pouring in rifle fire. A dozen survivors who hadn’t run back to escape death or capture dropped their Mausers and raised their arms in surrender, wearing looks of submissive fright and shouting “Kamerad!” repeatedly to avoid being shot. Parker ordered them taken under guard back across no-man’s-land to the American trenches. Together with three more captured by Lieutenant Drumm’s adjacent platoon, these would be the first 15 Germans marched back to the American lines as prisoners—a number that would climb past 250 through the course of the next two and a half days of battle.
* * *
Leading the platoon directly to Company K’s right was twenty-five-year-old Lt. Wayne Schmidt from Martinsville, Indiana, where his father was mayor. He had served four years in the Indiana National Guard, and when America entered the war, he left his studies at Indiana University and volunteered for officer training. Leading the platoon to his right was twenty-three-year-old Lt. Gerald Tyler, who had been a draftsman and a student at Clemson College in his native South Carolina when he volunteered for officer training, like Schmidt, during the first month of the war. Together, their platoons formed the first wave of Company M’s attack.
Like Company K, their initial advance after jumping out of the trenches had been smooth and swift, aided by the French tanks advancing with 2nd Battalion to their right. “The French tanks were right along with us,” Lieutenant Tyler noted as his platoon and Schmidt’s “moved forward encountering little resistance.” About halfway to the objective, Lieutenant Schmidt, leading his men with his pistol drawn in one hand and his compass in the other, was shot through the right thigh. Two of his men carried him back across no-man’s-land to a first-aid station, and the rest halted, adrift and unsure about the direction of advance or even whether they had yet reached the objective.
When word of Schmidt’s evacuation made its way over to Lieutenant Tyler, he left his men under the command of his platoon sergeant and ran to check on Schmidt’s platoon. “I went over there and could see no connecting troops on the left of that platoon, but saw that its left flank was exposed,” he noted, thinking that Company K “had not moved forward or had not kept up.” In fact, Captain Mosher’s men had made it to the German front line, which in their assigned path was only about two hundred yards from where they jumped off. They were now still clearing the trenches and sending back prisoners, a process that held up their further advance, creating open ground a hundred yards or so ahead of them when Schmidt’s platoon came to a halt, distracted into disorder by his shooting.
Realizing he was now in charge of Company M’s entire vanguard, Lieutenant Tyler ordered the men to fan out to the left into the open flank and move forward again as he ran back to the right to catch up with his own platoon still being led forward by Sgt. Carl R. Sohncke. It was at this moment that German lieutenant von Vegesack, up in the trenches on the far northern end and facing no more threat from Lieutenant Newhall’s troops pinned down to his front, ordered his men to turn their rifles and machine guns south and open fire on Company M’s flank. The doughboys between von Vegesack’s position and Company M—those platoons led by Haydock and Parker and Drumm—were down in the subterranean cover of the German trenches, safe from the enfilading fire. But the upright khaki figures of Company M—particularly Schmidt’s men still slowed by confusion—formed a distant but easy target for von Vegesack’s gunners, and as the German lieutenant later reported of his American adversaries, they “suffered heavy losses” as a result.
The flurry of bullets came all at once, one slicing through the neck of PFC Harvey Fahnenstalk of Michigan. With a pop and a spray of blood, Fahnenstalk collapsed to the dirt and, a nearby sergeant would note, “died instantly.” The ragged line of riflemen advanced quicker as the Maxim chattered loudly from the left. With a dull thud, Pvt. Thomas Larsen was struck in the stomach in full stride. Falling forward, he also died “instantly.” Remaining doughboys lunged forward in a mad dash to the cover of German front lines, which in this stretch had been largely abandoned by the enemy for the bombardment and the sight of approaching tanks.
Running and within sight of the defilade of the trenches, Pvt. James Caskey of Loveland, Kentucky, was hit. Two men ran back and drug him into the trench to give him first aid, but he never regained consciousness. Although evacuated to the field hospital, he died the next day, one week after his twenty-seventh birthday. Two years later, at his mother’s request, Private Caskey’s body was shipped back home to Kentucky to rest in the Caskey family plot.* But like the fate of so many whose bodies were left out in no-man’s-land where they fell, the remains of PFC Fahnenstalk and Private Larsen were never found. Their carved names on the tablets of the missing at the Somme American Cemetery serve as their single memorial.
Down in the unfamiliar surroundings of the hastily abandoned German trenches, freshly churned up by the barrage and littered with dropped Mausers, dirt-covered blankets, and ration tins, Lieutenant Tyler and the wide-eyed soldiers under his charge were finally safe from the unrelenting Maxim fire. A few peeked over ragged parapets while others hugged the dirt floor, waiting for the barrage beyond the enemy lines to leap forward again, the signal for the start of the second wave’s advance behind them. Likewise, in the lines to the north and south the fighting remains of the first wave waited.
Its shape now formed by action in the fog of war, dented here and there where German resistance was the stiffest, the straight line that had reminded a watching officer of the perfection of a “drill movement” was no more. In the five minutes since Zero Hour, the thousand-odd men along its length had been thrust abruptly into manhood. Some like Lieutenant Newhall and Private Fey lay bleeding, flat in the dirt in painful submission to gunshot wounds, hoping for a medic or comrade to drag them out. Many hunkered down in captured enemy trenches filled with a fresh confidence found somewhere in their journey across no-man’s-land. Others lay in shallow shell holes, seeking sanctuary from the death around them, waiting for a pause in the volleys of rifle and machine-gun fire to sprint forward and join their platoons. And still others kneeled between idling tanks at the edge of the charred, skeletal remains of the village, ready for the barrage to move again and open a pathway into more unknown peril.
* * *
Thus, in the glorious early sunshine of spring, the first American attack of the World War was successfully launched. Up near the front in Colonel Ely’s bunker, Lieutenant Colonel Marshall noted that “everyone was enthusiastic and delighted” with the progress. Tanks and infantry had disappeared up the incline into the dust and smoke shrouding the village, and with clusters of frightened German prisoners with arms held high led back across no-man’s-land at the bayonet tips of rifles held like cattle prods by doughboys, the success of the first wave of the attack was apparent.
Generals Bullard and Summerall and their staff back in Division Headquarters hung on every piece of news dribbling in from the front. The battle was just five minutes old, but so far the few broken bits of scattered reports indicated that all was progressing as planned. One minute into the attack, a phone call from Colonel Ely’s command bunker had reported that “the infantry has gone over the top and that the barrage looks fine.” Another minute later, a call from a watching artillery captain reported “very little enemy fire.” Now five minutes into the fighting and for the first time in history, United States Army riflemen were successfully sweeping into German positions, step by step, reclaiming for the Allies territory held by the enemy.
With the gears of the division machine turning successfully, there was nothing for Bullard to do but wait. He silently grabbed his gas mask, climbed the steps from his basement lair, exited the manor house and walked down the cobbled street to a nearby orchard. There he paced for nearly an hour, strolling among the lined trees and puffing on Lucky Strikes in solitary thought as the distant, sustained din of artillery evidenced his men giving battle. Even for a man already accustomed to the isolated, brooding moments of command, these must have been his loneliest.
As Bullard paced outside, the phone down in his headquarters rang with a message from brigade: “First line went over led by tanks … 2nd and 3rd line appear ready to jump.” These were the infantry and machine-gun teams of the second wave and the engineers and carrying parties in the third wave. The crews at each of the 75s spread over the countryside toward the front were still burning through shells—one shot from each gun every five seconds—laying down the creeping barrage. Battery officers eyed their watches waiting for 6:51 a.m., Zero Hour for the second wave. The attack was far from over and the final objective still unreached, but the Rubicon had been crossed.