“The worst part was the minutes approaching the time to go into action,” noted twenty-five-year-old Lt. George Butler, who stood six-feet-four when not hunched in a four-foot-deep trench. At Zero Hour, the former Indianapolis attorney and semipro football player had, like other platoon leaders in the second wave, led his fifty men in a hundred-yard scamper from their rear line up into the jumping-off trench that had just emptied of the first wave. Here he and his troops waited for five dragging minutes, watching the first wave disappear across no-man’s-land toward the creeping barrage and into the smoke and dust shrouding the southern end of the village. “We were,” he later recounted, “anxious to have it over with.”
Three miles behind the lines, standing among his 75s and squinting through binoculars into the increasingly bright glare of dawn, Maj. Raymond Austin eyed the first wave of infantry advancing up to the hilltop horizon. “As the line reached the crest and was silhouetted in the morning sun (we face well toward the east here) it looked like a long picket fence.” He watched as the “fence” of doughboys “disappeared over the crest, having crossed the first enemy lines” as Zero Hour for the second wave approached.
At 6:51 a.m., “H + 6 minutes,” the scattered 75mm crews stopped firing, elevation gauges were rolled to the next coordinate, and the firing resumed, inviting the second wave of infantry over the top. By the pre-planned artillery schedule, the protective barrage that had been advancing at a rate of one hundred yards every two minutes would now slow and advance only every four minutes, allowing the second and third waves to catch up with the first.
As the barrage moved, Company K’s Captain Mosher sent his first-wave platoons led by Lieutenants Parker and Drumm out of the first enemy trench, and with the clomping of hobnail boots on rock-hard dirt, they crossed the shell-scarred Cantigny Road. Behind them, the second wave—which included Pvt. Emory Smith, one of the “Three Musketeers” from Denton, Texas—sprinted to close distance with the first. Mosher urged them forward, and unslowed by the creeping barrage, their “advance was swift and unchecked,” one platoon leader reported. Seeing Parker’s and Drumm’s platoons pass the road and charge toward the enemy’s second-line trenches, where Germans could be seen breaking in retreat, Private Smith broke ranks and rushed ahead of his wave, Springfield held ready, eager to enter the action. “The Germans just threw up their hands and ran back,” he later wrote of what he could see up ahead, “some of them firing.”
Private Smith passed over the first trench, still filled with German dead and a few hiding survivors, and sprinted to catch up with the first wave. “I was between the first and second waves and so could not fire,” he noted, “[b]ut then presently I caught up with the first wave and had plenty of chances to shoot and did so.” His platoon leader, Lt. John Mays, a tall, slender thirty-year-old from Georgia, noted, “[I]t was our duty to clean out (‘mop up’ we call it) the German trenches when the first wave had passed over,” but he had to work to hold his soldiers—like Smith—back from joining the fighting up ahead. “When our second wave sighted the Boche running out of their trenches they closed up into the front wave, so as to get a better shot at the enemy,” Mays noted in frustration. “I had to drive the men back at the point of my pistol.”
Parker’s and Drumm’s men had swept through the first enemy line in a hurry, per their assignment, but the platoons of the second wave were equipped with Chauchats to “mop up” the trench of remaining Germans. “Two squads of automatic riflemen ran up and down the parapet,” Lieutenant Mays reported, “pouring their fire into the trench, and at least 50 of the dead were left there.” Mays’s soldiers jumped in and methodically snaked up and down the trench, mopping up the sleep holes and dugouts of hiding Germans. “I myself killed two Boches and took three prisoners,” he later recounted. “[P]erhaps I should have killed them, too, but when they came toward me with their hands up crying ‘Kamerad, Kamerad,’ I just couldn’t do it.”
* * *
On the far left flank, Lt. Howard Hawkinson stepped up on the parapet where Lieutenant Newhall had stepped six minutes before and signaled for the men of Company L’s 4th Platoon to follow. To his right, leading 3rd Platoon forward in the path blazed by Lieutenant Haydock was Lt. Frank Croak. Because the flat plateau before him was, as one officer described, “covered with growing crops, largely grain, which shortened observation from trenches and hid entrenched men from each other,” he could not see the action up ahead, or the expanse of dirt littered with the khaki heaps of crawling injured and motionless dead. The grain obscured Pvt. Carl Fey, still facedown to keep from choking on the blood filling his mouth from his broken jaw, and Lieutenant Newhall, lying on his back half-conscious, bleeding from his shredded arm, and growing ever weaker.
Lieutenant Croak, twenty-seven and a graduate of St. Louis University, who worked at his father’s retail clothing business until America’s entry into the war, was in only his second month as platoon leader. Gripping his pistol and walking ahead of his men, the hot churn of fear and pump of adrenaline drove him forward, his senses stirred by a scene far more imposing than that facing Haydock only minutes before. The protective smoke curtain and reassuring roar of the creeping barrage had moved off uncomfortably beyond reach, and carrying back over the wheat surface were the ominous sounds of pitched battle. Every step toward the German trenches drew the chorus of rifle pops and Maxim chatter louder, nearer. With no pace to set, he and Lieutenant Hawkinson to his left began a slow run, urging their second-wave platoons forward faster and faster. “The 2nd lines rapidly closed on the 1st,” Colonel Ely would later report.
* * *
The racket of small-arms fire echoing from four hundred yards ahead was the sound of Lieutenant Haydock and his platoon fighting their way to the second German line. They had cleared the length of the first enemy trench in their path, killing a Maxim gunner with rifle fire and the rest with grenades and automatic rifles. With the barrage having advanced past the Cantigny Road, Haydock led his doughboys sprinting over the dirt road and into the tall grass of the plateau beyond.
As his men ran to the edge of the second trench and began clearing it with grenades, Lieutenant Haydock noticed an enemy machine gun about fifty yards to his left firing across his front. This was the nettlesome Maxim from Lieutenant von Vegesack’s 10th Company that had wreaked so much havoc on Company M’s first wave to the south. Its muzzle flashed a strobe of white flame from behind a rotted pile of harvested beets, and Haydock ordered his men down while, as one of his privates would later recount, “[t]he Lieutenant walked from one end of the platoon to the other cautioning repeatedly, ‘Men keep lower for your own sakes.’” They implored him to take cover as he stood, pistol in hand, straining for an angle on the gun and devising a plan to direct his platoon’s fire and overtake it. “Lieutenant you keep low,” one of his soldiers yelled; “they will get you.”
“They can’t kill me,” Haydock responded. The sweep of the gun’s typewriter stutter shifted, and with a gut-punching thump, Haydock fell flat. “He was hit by a machine-gun bullet and died instantly,” the same private later recalled.
For his men, the loss of their leader was a heavy blow. He had led them since the Seicheprey sector, where “he won the highest respect of every man in the platoon,” one of them recounted, and “never asked a man to do a thing or take a chance that he wouldn’t do or take himself.” For his actions, George Guest Haydock, the first American officer killed in the battle, would be posthumously awarded the Silver Star. In the words of the citation, he “displayed qualities of coolness and gallantry which inspired his entire platoon; he was killed while attempting, almost single-handed, to take a machine-gun.”
With their leader now lifeless on the edge of the enemy trench, the platoon was, as Five Lieutenants author James Carl Nelson explains, “rudderless.” Twenty-seven-year-old Sgt. Eller Fletcher of Ohio reorganized the troops, directing them to enter and organize their newly won trench line. But the enemy machine gun, defiantly unconquered, traced their movements, and before Sergeant Fletcher could take cover he was shot in the head, falling on the dirt floor. The bullet had grazed him, wounding him severely but not fatally. He would survive, later awarded the Silver Star for “gallantry in action … while supervising the consolidation of his position until wounded.” While a few soldiers tended to him, others moved up the trench, rustling Germans from dugouts and sleep holes, and the rest set up their Chauchats along the rear trench wall to cover the plateau and thick wood line beyond. Another sergeant found a corner of the parapet to angle fire on the stubborn Maxim that had felled his lieutenant, but without success.
* * *
Behind the German lines, five or six hundred yards up the plateau to the east, machine-gun teams from two support companies in the dark cover of the l’Alval Woods had a clear angle on the second and third waves of the American infantry rushing up the wheat field. These were some of the “[m]any machine-gun positions” that 3rd Battalion commander Lt. Col. Jesse Cullison noted “had not been touched by our artillery.” One by one, the German gunners angled their Maxims up to dial in the distant targets and opened fire, their aim adjusted by binocular observation. Lieutenants Croak and Hawkinson were unknowingly rushing their platoons into a buzz saw—the interlocking fire of more than a half dozen enemy machine guns.
Lt. Frank Croak had made it two hundred yards into no-man’s-land and toward the sounds of battle when the hail of bullets chopped him down, killing him instantly. His slide beneath the grain surface was so abrupt it went unnoticed by most of his men, who kept rushing forward until they too were bowled down, one by one, by the sweep of machine-gun fire. Twenty-seven-year-old James Coleman, a short, red-haired private from Philadelphia. Twenty-eight-year-old PFC Patrick Fox, a two-year veteran from Brooklyn. Twenty-three-year-old Pvt. Joseph Boyland of San Francisco. Twenty-year-old PFC William Mitchell of Portland. Like their lieutenant, all slipped beneath the wheat and into eternity, their bodies never seen again. All are honored on the Somme American Cemetery’s tablets of the missing.
On the far left, Lieutenant Hawkinson’s 4th Platoon soldiers pushed forward as the spray of bullets slued side to side, mowing down more men with every pass. Pvt. Nick Beltman of South Dakota, struck square in the face, was killed instantly, thrown back flat in the dirt as if punched. A few more steps, and Pvt. Michael Sprangers dropped. More steps, then Cpl. George Davidson. Then PFC Wesley Keller. Every stride forward brought another friend’s final moment, death that came too easy at the hands of the maniacal “tat-tat-tat.” Finally, the Maxim fire drove the entire platoon into cover in the wheat. Still in the lead, Hawkinson crawled forward on his elbows beneath the invisible canopy of zipping rounds, gripping his pistol and keeping his compass heading while yelling for his surviving men to follow his voice.
At least a hundred yards behind him, the four machine-gun teams and carrying party in the third wave, heaving gun tripods, ammo boxes, and coiled barbed wire, proved easy targets for the enemy fire. PFC Edward Lutz of Buffalo, lugging a sixty-pound Hotchkiss, “advanced 20 yards when he was seen to fall,” a nearby private would report. “Mechanic Lockwood ran over to him and picked the machine-gun out of his arms,” carrying it forward, believing Lutz to be dead. The bloodletting continued for the ragged line of doughboys still upright, their pace slowed by heavy loads, here and there falling midstride into the wheat as if taken down by some invisible force. Twenty-year-old Pvt. Meyer Sereysky, an immigrant from Poland who had volunteered the previous summer, dropped forward dead. Pvt. Noel Troncy, in just his fifth day with the unit, fell dead. Pvt. Julius Kahn and PFC Lazard Landry, hauling an ammo box together, simultaneously dropped the box and fell in a heap, neither to be seen again.
Sprinting to catch up with the survivors of the second wave, Pvt. Joseph Belanger of Lowell, Massachusetts, was shot through his right knee, sending him to the dirt in screaming agony. He was carried out of the killing field and back across the trenches to a field hospital, where the doctor was forced to amputate his leg. For the next forty-eight hours, Private Belanger lay on a cot in misery soothed only by morphine until growing feverish from infection. On May 30, he lapsed into septic shock and died. He was buried in a makeshift cemetery, but after the war, due to loss of accurate burial records, his remains could never be found. Together with PFC Lutz, whose body was never seen after his machine gun was pulled from his limp arms, Belanger, Troncy, Kahn, and Landry are all honored on the tablets of the missing.
Up ahead, Lieutenant Hawkinson kept low-crawling until the wheat cover shortened into a clearing, affording him a good view of the Cantigny Road and the German lines still manned by Lieutenant von Vegesack and the stubborn defenders of 10th Company, who had not yet spotted him. To his right, there was no sign of Lieutenant Croak’s platoon, or any Americans at all. Crackling through the grain stalks behind him came a dozen of his men, clutching rifles and hunching to keep their helmets down below the wheat tops. Hawkinson organized a small patrol to run to the right to find and link up with the rest of the company, and asked for a volunteer to run word of their position back to the company commander, Captain Van Natter. An advance forward into the open would be suicide, so Hawkinson ordered the rest to drop their packs and start digging where they were, pinned down short of their objective on the far left flank, where they might at long last find some small refuge from the onslaught.
On the left flank, Marshall’s battle plan was dead, a casualty of the proverbial contact with the enemy. Although Company L’s commander, Captain Van Natter, would later report “the company reached its assigned objective and consolidation commenced,” this was untrue. Lieutenant Haydock’s platoon had indeed reached and occupied the German lines in their path, but they never reached their objective line beyond. And neither Lieutenant Newhall’s platoon nor Hawkinson’s that followed reached even the first German trench facing them.
After just ten minutes of fighting, over fifty men from the three waves of Company L and its attached machine-gun teams lay wounded or dead in no-man’s-land, every one of them felled by Maxim bullets. The scene framed a grim contrast to the other companies of 3rd Battalion and all of 2nd Battalion in the middle, where the second and third waves were now traversing the plateau to catch up with the first. “The advance was made at schedule rate of march, and experienced no difficulty,” an officer in 2nd Battalion noted, where all was clicking with the battle plan just as in rehearsal, and where not a single soldier would be killed by enemy fire while crossing no-man’s-land.
* * *
In the center of 2nd Battalion, leading Company E’s second wave toward the northern end of Cantigny, was young Capt. Edward Johnston, only a day removed from the previous morning’s deadly raid. He could see his first-wave platoons up ahead trudging along with the ambling tanks, led on the left by Lieutenant Curry and, with Charles Avery still recovering back at a field hospital, on the right by a sergeant with only “skeleton squads.” They “followed the barrage through Cantigny,” Johnston reported, “moving competently and cannily from hole to hole about 30–60 yards behind the inner wall of explosions.” His second-in-command, Lt. Irving Wood, likened the advance of the second wave to “a football rush, only less rough.” The progress of Company H on their right flank directly toward the village was just as trouble-free, as the company commander would report: “From the time we left our jumping off trenches everything seemed to go along smoothly, without incident.”
Following closely behind was the third wave, which in the middle comprised all of Company G along with a blend of machine-gun teams, engineers, French infantry strapped with flamethrowers, a large carrying party, and signalmen unspooling phone lines from Colonel Ely’s bunker. Also sprinkled in were a handful of war correspondents wearing khaki with white armbands and armed only with pencils and notepads. At General Bullard’s specific invitation, these reporters had gathered at Division Headquarters the night before and, in George Marshall’s words, “were given the complete plan and full liberty as to their own movements” on the condition of strict secrecy.
Among them was James Hopper of Collier’s, who had won renown for his eyewitness account of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. The night before, he had pressed Marshall for the exact limits of “full liberty,” to which Marshall responded that Bullard’s only rule was correspondents “should not precede the first infantry wave into Cantigny.” Now, following the third wave across no-man’s-land, Hopper’s pencil described the scene: “The sun, which had risen above the barrage smoke, beat down on us hard, and under our feet were plowed fields, sudden shell holes, and high grass in which the telephone wires, run quickly behind the attack, lurked like traps.”
Out front, a single, tall, commanding figure led the second and third waves toward the village, clutching a Colt .45 and walking with a square-shouldered, upright sureness that bristled with military virility. This dignified, dark-haired figure with a perfectly groomed wax-tip mustache was the highest-ranking officer—and the only battalion commander—to personally participate in the attack, Lt. Col. Robert Jayne Maxey. A forty-five-year-old West Pointer from Montana, Maxey was a veteran of the Philippines and Mexico, and had instructed at Fort Leavenworth and officer-training camps in France. Though only in his third week commanding 2nd Battalion, he had hurled himself wholeheartedly into preparations for the attack, studying on his map every enemy trench, bunker, and machine-gun position, then plotting not only the most effective location for a strongpoint, but also the best avenues of approach for the French tanks and four infantry companies of his battalion to sweep through the village. If the right and left flanks of the operation were platoon leaders’ battles, then the middle would be Maxey’s, and for the doughboys marching apace toward Cantigny, his was an affirming presence through such a trying passage.
Before Maxey, the Schneiders and first wave of his battalion had slipped past the smeared remnants of the enemy front lines, in many places without firing a shot. “Nobody was running,” Lieutenant Sargent witnessed from his observation post; “or I should say no American soldier was running, for some Germans had come running out of Cantigny toward the tanks with their arms raised in surrender.” On reaching the steep edge of the village, the Schneiders turned left to skirt around the town’s northern end through the orchard, as riflemen drove straight forward “climbing equally steadily up the slope” when the barrage jumped ahead once more, exposing the absolute destruction of Cantigny. “And our soldiers were entering Cantigny,” Sargent observed, stunned to see that “the smoke was drifting away from Cantigny and revealing that its buildings were no more.”
“Cantigny had not a wall left standing when we went through,” one private soon told his diary. The hour-long bombardment had reduced orderly rows of homes to mounds of smoldering ruins. Stone buildings—to include the church—had been smashed into unstately piles of bricks and masonry chunks; wooden dwellings into unrecognizable twists of matchsticks. “Cantigny is completely wrecked,” a war correspondent noted. “Only the skeletons of buildings remain.” Every pile of splintered timbers masked another cellar or basement, each one a possible bunker filled with Germans, presenting terrain congenial to defense and ambush.
Through streets clogged with rubble and German dead, Lt. Harry Martin led his platoon, their senses amplified by a labyrinth of brick caves filled with a hiding enemy. “I tell you, you can’t tell when you are going to get yours and it is one mean sensation, too,” he soon wrote home. Fingering triggers of their Springfields, the doughboys darted through town, flicking grenades into any cavern or opening that might conceal lurking Germans. Walking with his pistol drawn through Cantigny’s pinched streets, Martin spotted a German soldier walking toward him. “I raised my pistol on him and with his left hand in the air yelling ‘Kamerad,’ I saw him reach with his right for his gun,” Martin soon wrote home. “Fortunately I was a trifle too quick for him and I gave him two bullets.”
Martin’s men and the other three platoons of Company H swept through the left half of Cantigny and into the open plateau on the far side, where they were to establish a new line facing the German-filled wood lines on the distant horizon. “The town was hit at the correct places,” their captain reported, “and my company went through the town with as little delay as possible throwing grenades in any places that by any chance there might be some enemy and went on to the consolidation line.”
* * *
Amid the engine thrum and exhaust fumes of ambling tanks, the troops of Companies E and F trooped around the left side of Cantigny, a track of advance over the flattened remains of isolated houses, then into an orchard lined by trees and hedgerows, believed by division intelligence to be a haven for snipers and machine-gun nests. Escorted closely by squads of riflemen, two lines of Schneiders edged forward like floats parading into town. Their armor-plated noses angled up and over the piled spoil of enemy parapets and their metal treads crunched over barbed wire and broken timbers of destroyed dwellings before leveling off to cross the Cantigny Road and flat orchard beyond. The short French tank commander, in his Adrian helmet and pale-blue tunic, led the way on foot, described by Lt. Welcome Waltz as “strutting among them and displaying a shining bamboo walking stick as his only weapon.”
Collier’s correspondent James Hopper wrote that Schneiders “charged in a straight rhinoceros line; then, now and then went waddling off to one side or the other, meticulously fast, in some strong nest of boche resistance.” Lieutenant Waltz reported that “these tanks got in some good work by firing on enemy groups, mostly machine-guns, which were maneuvering for position.” Inside the cramped, noisy steel boxes that reeked of gas fumes, seven-man crews worked practically blind, eyeing the battlefield through fogged periscopes and slit peepholes. Gun barrels angled and twirled out the sides of each tank like awkward appendages, flushing frightened Germans out of hiding, where they were shot or taken prisoner by the American infantry.
Lieutenant Colonel Maxey strode surely among the platoons of his battalion, his eager men rushing up ahead of the tanks closer to the barrage wall. Along the way, narrow corridors formed by the town’s rubble hosted a few instances of hand-to-hand fighting. A bayonet duel between an undersized doughboy and hefty German caught Lieutenant Waltz’s eye: “They seemed to be off to themselves and it was almost funny to see that small doughboy jumping around the big, slow German, playing for an opening. But very shortly the smaller one saw his opening and I saw him give a quick lunge forward, dropping his opponent with a jab to the stomach.” Perhaps this was Pvt. Levy Wilson of Company E, the smallest of the “Three Musketeers” from Denton, Texas, who wrote his sister two days later: “Tell Ruth Uncle Levy killed her a big fat one; tell her I surely greased my bayonet good on him.”
The barrage wall slowed the parade of tanks and infantry to a stop, with second and third waves bunching up on the leaders like a traffic jam. An off-pitch whistle sounded—the telltale sign of a shell falling short—but before any of the men could duck, it hit with a whiz and a bang and a hiss of spraying shrapnel. One soldier, just a step from the blast, collapsed. Rifles dropped as men grabbed arms and legs and fell to the dirt. Nearby was Corporal Suchocki, the combat engineer with a bandage still wrapped around his arm’s shrapnel gash from the quarry blast three hours earlier, who noticed doughboys all around him “falling down.”
More incoming shorts added whistles to the din of the creeping barrage. Maxey ordered the rest of his troops down, but the fratricide continued. “[A] shell burst about ten feet in front of me and exploded,” Suchocki would recall, adding that a “lump of dirt or chunk of rock struck me square in the chest knock me down on my back.” Shrieks of pain and burning whiffs of cordite carried through the wild confusion and swirling clouds of dust and smoke. “I could not see farther than 100 feet around me,” Suchocki noted. Lieutenant Colonel Maxey ordered a white flare shot up, the signal for the artillery to “lengthen the range.”
Lying motionless in the dirt was the man nearest the first blast, twenty-three-year-old PFC Willford Wethington of Kentucky, the middle of three sons who had volunteered the day after President Wilson’s speech to Congress the previous April. His corporal would report: “[T]he shell exploded directly in front of him, he died instantly.” When his family received word of his death one week later, both of his brothers would leave their civilian jobs and enlist, and each would serve in France before the Armistice. After the war, at his widowed mother’s request, PFC Wethington’s body was shipped back for burial in Arlington National Cemetery.
Litter-bearers ran forward, throwing limp men onto stretchers and disappearing in hunched sprints back into the smoke of no-man’s-land, leaving comrades to gather dropped rifles and fallen helmets from the crimson-splattered dirt. Field Hospital No. 12 received the wounded—improbably casualties of their own artillery. Most survived, but Pvt. Frank Malone—his left hand, right forearm, and right leg flayed open by shrapnel—did not, passing the next afternoon.
Finally, the barrage moved again, and Maxey yelled, “Forward!” Following only three men away, Corporal Suchocki could not miss the “tall man” so clearly in command, “with a revolver in right hand and stretching arms leading the 1st Division into victory.” About two hundred yards of orchard, lined with a few scraggly trees, opened up before them, bordered to the left and front by a tall, thick hawthorn hedge. Stepping over a barbed-wire fence, Corporal Suchocki jumped as the fencepost beside him splintered with an enemy bullet. Before him, enemy Maxims concealed behind the hedgerow opened fire, and in what was becoming a tragically familiar sight of the morning, doughboys fell in heaps as they were raked with machine-gun bullets.
Twenty-year-old Pvt. Earl Simons of Altoona, Pennsylvania, advancing in Company F’s first wave on the far left of the battalion, who had been surprised by the lack of enemy fire in his crossing of no-man’s-land, was stunned at the “violent machine-gun fire” that stopped his platoon’s charge into the orchard: “The only ones in action were the machine-gunners. There was some hard fighting in the wood to the right of me the Germans concealing their machine-guns about 200 yards above us.” In his best English, Corporal Suchocki noted, “there stop us of some kind [of] unknown power, many boys fell on both sides of me.”
German Maxim fire perforated the tide of khaki surging through the open ground of the orchard. In a hunkered charge toward the hedge, PFC Eddy Sledge’s head snapped back from a bullet to his skull, and the twenty-five-year-old fell on his back, instantly killed. Back home in Asheboro, North Carolina, his mother, Martha, widowed when Eddy was only eight, would ask that Eddy’s remains be buried in Arlington.
Comprehending almost at a glance that his infantry alone could not overcome the well-positioned German machine-gun nests, Maxey dropped to one knee, calmly signaled the tanks toward the hedge, and yelled for the troops surrounding him to “lay down.” Pvt. Bernard Kavanagh of Sandwich, Illinois, was one of many who dropped for cover in the same instant. Collapsing dead beside him was eighteen-year-old Pvt. Joseph Leiter from New York City, “the first man in Co. F that was killed,” Kavanagh noted. Shot in the shoulder, Pvt. Frank Moran began walking back for help before feeling faint from loss of blood. A comrade helped him back to the field hospital. Pvt. William Hall and PFC Ralph Carpenter both squirmed on the dirt in pain, Hall grabbing his leg and Carpenter clutching his right biceps tightly in a futile effort to stop the spurting blood. With the help of a comrade, Private Hall made it back across no-man’s-land, where he was carried by stretcher to the field hospital. Two soldiers tied PFC Carpenter’s arm up in field dressing and carried him back to the same hospital as Moran and Hall. Private Moran would die of blood loss midafternoon. Both Hall and Carpenter would succumb to their wounds the next day.
Finally, two of the chugging Schneiders reached the hedgerow and slammed a few 75mm rounds into the foliage while their machine-gun barrels swept its length until the enemy Maxims fell silent. Surveying the carnage in the orchard, Corporal Suchocki could see “only six of us left, the rest killed or wounded.”
* * *
The left flank of 2nd Battalion kept adjusting rightward with the tanks on a heading that hugged the north side of the village, widening the gap Lt. Gerald Tyler was trying to cover with his two Company M platoons forming 3rd Battalion’s right side. When the barrage moved, Tyler had led his hundred-odd men forward from the torn-up German trench line that had given them welcome refuge from machine-gun fire. Still unable to spot Company K to his left, Tyler continued to spread his men out as they advanced, then he shuffled to the right through the advancing column to link back up with his platoon sergeant, Carl Sohncke.
Minutes before, Lieutenant Tyler had left Sohncke, a three-year Regular Army veteran from Long Island, with instructions “to watch closely the compass reading as he advanced” and act as a “right guide” for the company while Tyler checked on Schmidt’s platoon to his left. Now Tyler discovered that Sergeant Sohncke, one week shy of his twenty-fourth birthday, “had been killed by shell fire” when crossing no-man’s-land, likely by another artillery short. As with most who died in the battle, Sohncke was the first from his hometown killed in the World War, and at his father’s request his remains would be shipped back home for burial nearly three years later. In his hometown of Woodside in Queens, the small, enclosed park where Roosevelt and Woodside Avenues meet Fifty-Eighth Street is called “Sohncke Square” to this day.
Unable to see either 2nd Battalion to his right or Company K to his left, Lieutenant Tyler ordered his two platoons to continue spreading into what he called “a fan shaped forward movement,” an unplanned adjustment that he later admitted caused him “great alarm” as “they were now occupying a frontage ordinarily held by two or more companies.” They had not yet passed the Cantigny Road, but Tyler, somewhat wary of his thinly spread front, ordered his men to stop and “dig in” where they were.
* * *
Back in his command bunker, Colonel Ely sat on his horse saddle sifting through phone calls from observation posts and messages from platoon leaders and company commanders brought back by frantic, wide-eyed runners. Trying to piece together the status of a battle he could hear but not see, Ely had no way of knowing his regiment’s left flank was wide open, and though he had heard his artillery liaisons mentioning “shorts” falling on his men, he was encouraged by the growing clutches of enemy prisoners being ushered back by his proud troops. Finally, a few minutes delayed, came the report he had waited to hear: “Our men have entered Cantigny.”