five
Baptism
La République nous appelle
(The Republic is calling us)
Sachons vaincre ou sachons périr
(Let us prevail or let us perish)
Un Français doit vivre pour elle
(A Frenchman must live for her)
Pour elle un Français doit mourir
(For her a Frenchman must die)
—ÉTIENNE-NICOLAS MÉHUL AND
MARIE-JOSEPH CHENIER,
“CHANT DES GUERRIERS,” 1794
The shelling Noble Sissle heard, after getting separated from the band on the train from Aix-les-Bains on March 20, represented the opening shots of the largest battle in the history of the world: the 1918 German spring offensive designed to break through Allied lines, divide the French from the British, and end the war on German terms. With twenty German divisions transferred from the eastern front, the Central powers had gained numerical superiority on the battlefield and were successfully exploiting it in a campaign that would drive the British Fifth Army back forty-four miles in the Somme and push the French back forty miles at Champagne-Marne, near where the 369th was stationed. The French needed to bring reinforcements forward as soon as possible.
After about three weeks of training in the reserve areas, the 369th moved to the front on April 13, marching from Givryen-Argonne up a gravel road through Heirpont and Herpine to the village of Auve, where the regiment divided into two groups, with the Third and Headquarters battalions marching northeast to the town of Maffrecourt, where they established a regimental base. The British and French diplomats and generals who had petitioned for American aid at the end of 1917 had correctly maintained that troops would learn more quickly in France and would benefit from training by experienced French or British officers. The 369th had been the first American unit transferred to the Allies and ostensibly comprised the best-trained American troops in the field.
Jim Europe was glad to exchange band duties for combat training, no longer hampered by the bigotry that had interfered with training back home; his French instructors and interpreters showed no bias or resentment toward their black pupils. Writing home to Fred Moore, editor of the black newspaper the New York Age, Europe said of the French, “Their broad minds are far and free from prejudice, and you, as a great champion of our people, I am sure will be glad to know that despite their contact, despite the desperate efforts of some people, the French simply cannot be taught to comprehend that despicable thing called prejudice. . . . ‘Viva la France’ should be the song of every black American over here and over there.”
They kept marching, moving forward. The First and Second battalions marched ten kilometers due north just past the village of Hans, stopping at Camp de Peupliers, about three kilometers west of Maffrecourt. They suffered no casualties, even though the trenches before them and the town behind them came under intermittent bombardment. The German shells passing overhead whistled sharply, reminding some of the men of the sound of the brakes on a trolley car screeching down a hill.
Fortunately, the first sector they moved into, Sector CR (centre de résistance) Melzicourt, facing the Hauzy Woods, was relatively quiet, which was why the French had chosen it for them. Their initial task was to familiarize themselves with the labyrinth they were to live and work in. Every sector was different, but the trench system had a basic structure: a framework of three parallel ditches with a support line six to eight kilometers to the rear of the front line and a reserve line eight to twelve kilometers behind the support line, with the three lines connected by a latticework of communication trenches running perpendicular to the front lines. In no case did any of these trenches run in a straight line for more than a few yards; instead, they zigzagged to lessen the damage done by direct hits from artillery shells. The German trenches had roughly the same structure. When not on duty, or for protection during heavy bombardment, men stayed in dugouts, hollowed-out rooms with bunks and rough furniture, and while some were fairly clean and well ventilated, most were dark, dank places and incubators for lice and vermin. French dugouts were relatively crude constructions compared to the German accommodations, which were generally deeper, roomier, and better ventilated. Both French and German lines had salients—shallower ditches used for observation posts or to launch raiding parties—extending out into no-man’s-land, and both had laid long thickets of rusting barbed wire in front of them to prevent easy incursion.
A typical day began with a general morning stand-to roughly an hour before dawn, the time most attacks seemed to come. Each groupe de combat would be roused, with the men taking their places along the fire step, an elevated berm at the base of the front parallèle ’s enemy-side wall. From there, officers and men could see over the sandbagged parapet, watching the German lines through the barbed wire for movement, rifles ready and bayonets fixed. Stand-down came at sunup, once it was clear that no attack was forthcoming. Men would then break down into smaller groups to eat breakfast, the rations having been up the night before, usually strong tea and baguettes, sometimes cheese or bacon fried in the abri over smokeless kerosene or paraffin fires, though sometimes the smoke from the bacon itself was enough to attract the attention of snipers.
After breakfast, the day presented a variety of duties and tasks. Weapons had to be cleaned and serviced. Repair parties set about fixing any section of the parallèles, sapes, and boyaux that might have been damaged the night before by shell fire. Men wrote letters home or took the opportunity to crawl into an abri to sleep. Men inspected their feet for swelling, numbness, or discoloration, early signs of trench foot, and they inspected their hair for totoes. Officers toured the trenches, inspected the repair work, chatted with the soldiers, and made out reports, noting ammunition stocks, supplies, and casualties. Officers used the daylight to read and censor the letters their men wrote, deleting any information that might give aid or comfort to the enemy were the letters to fall into enemy hands during an attack or raid. Officers wrote their own letters as well, either to their own families or to the families of men killed in action.
Evening stand-to came at dusk, a repeat of the dawn’s performance. If no attack came, the men stood down and set about the more serious tasks best accomplished after dark. Wiring parties crawled out into no-man’s-land to repair places where the wire had been damaged by shell fire. Digging parties took shovels and spades and made their way to the end of the salients to extend their trenches a few feet closer to the enemy, sometimes pausing in the night to listen to the sounds of German work parties digging toward them. Transport parties carried materials up from the rear: bread, water, tinned beef, occasionally fresh fruit or vegetables, mail, sandbags, timbers, duckboards, barbed wire, stakes, mauls and pickaxes, corrugated iron, tarps, pumps and drainage pipes, gas masks and replacement filters, ammunition, grenades, and flares. Combat groups manned observation posts or ventured out into no-man’s-land as patrols or raiding parties—by far the most dangerous assignment. Parties from either side would venture out into no-man’s-land at night to take prisoners, gather intelligence, or simply kill as many of the enemy as they could before the alarm sounded, forcing them to scamper back to their own lines. Troops were rotated at ten-day intervals, battalions and companies spending ten days in the support line, followed by ten days at the front and then ten days at the rear.
Horace Pippin was posted as corporal of the guard one night and assigned to enforce a curfew in a nearby town. He witnessed his first casualty when one of his guards shot a man who refused to obey an order to halt. They were about five kilometers from the front, by Pippin’s estimate, but close enough to see the fire from the distant guns, batteries mounted atop far-off hills. Death was near. He was within range, not safe. He’d arrived at a place where men had agreed to kill each other. That first night, Pippin was terrified.
After two weeks, the orders came to move up. Though shocked to see how miserable the actual trenches were, Pippin figured if the French could live in them, so could he. The first dugout he found had wooden beams so waterlogged he could squeeze them like sponges. “I had a candle so I lit it and it went out. I tried it again and it did the same so I cut off the stem thinking I could get it to burn. I could not. I seen others do the same thing so I knew that this dugout were too damp for a candle.” There was no opportunity to get clean or dry off, and the only article of clothing he removed for twenty days was his helmet, which he used as a pillow.
He made his first foray into no-man’s-land shortly after that. A lieutenant, or “looey,” asked for eight volunteers, and everybody’s hand went up. The patrol was to leave at midnight. The lieutenant led them amid shells bursting “fast and plenty,” one close enough to knock them off their feet, though it did no further damage. They heard bullets whizzing past in the darkness. They searched their sector for enemy raiding parties, tried to listen but heard only bullets and shells, and found no Germans. “We were in one of the worst places that any one ever went in,” Pippin concluded. “We are in a bad place at that time . . .”
On April 20, General Le Gallais turned Sector CR Melzicourt over to the First Battalion, though for the first rotation, the 369th shared duties with French troops. Forty kilometers east of Reims and ten kilometers north of Maffrecourt, Sector CR Melzicourt was bordered on the right by the Aisne and on the left by the Tourbe, with the Hauzy Woods lying in between, on the western edge of the Argonne forest. The 4.5 kilometers assigned to the 369th represented 20 percent of all American-held territory at that time. In front of them was the German Third Army under the direction of Gen. Karl von Einem and the German First Army under Gen. Erich von Below.
All along the front, the Germans were pressing harder and harder, racing the clock and the calendar, aware that the Americans were slowly but surely joining the battle. American troops from the U.S. First Army suffered heavy losses seventy kilometers to the east of the 369th’s position. Two hundred kilometers to the north, the German Fourth and Sixth armies pushed the British back twenty miles along the formerly intractable Flanders front south of Ypres, part of a colossal German drive to end the war. Along the Somme, between March 22 and April 16 the German Seventeenth and Second armies seized forty miles of British-occupied territory along a fifty-mile line, stopping fifty-five miles northeast of Paris. At the beginning of May, the German Seventh Army under Gen. Hans von Boehn advanced to the Marne, stopping a mere forty miles from Paris. No one doubted the French when they claimed the situation was dire.
Gen. John Pershing hesitated. American losses at St. Mihiel had convinced him that his troops were not ready (Lloyd George called their performance “wholly amateur”) and that loaning them out piecemeal was “frittering away” his resources. General Le Gallais was nevertheless thankful for the “resources” Pershing had loaned him and, having seen for himself how his “leetle black babbies” handled themselves in training, trusted them to protect a sector the French deemed vital in preventing the Germans from making a southward thrust toward Paris’s eastern flank.
Col. William Hayward told his men that their task was to hold the right flank against the German attack, should it spread to the east of Reims. During their first weeks at the front, the men of the 369th adopted a largely defensive posture, facing daily shellings of varying magnitudes and minor German offensives in the form of small raiding parties. Some days it seemed like the greater enemy was the myriad of rats that overran the sector, getting into the soldiers’ personal gear and food supplies, sometimes climbing over them as they slept. With the spring thaw came yet more rain that made the trenches even muddier. Puddles overflowed the duckboards and sometimes poured down into the dugouts where the men sheltered. They were miserable, unaware that the worst was yet to come.
Jim Europe, after ten days in the support trenches and ten days at the front with the Third Battalion, came into reserve and asked to see his friend Noble Sissle. Sissle found Europe in his barracks.
“Hello, Siss,’” Europe greeted his old friend. “How are you?”
“All right, mon lieutenant,” Sissle replied. “How are you after twenty days in the mud?”
“Man, listen—old man mud turtle himself has never tramped in as much mud as they had us living in,” Europe told Sissle. “Whatever man started this trench stuff, he must have been the meanest man in the whole world. Wonder where that orderly of mine is? Taylor! How that boy ever got in the army, I don’t know. Lord, he’ll drive me crazy.”
Europe sometimes referred to his orderly, Private Taylor, a small, animated, cheerful, and somewhat featherbrained kid, as the “disappearingest boy in the army,” one of the youngest in the regiment and a boy who never took anything seriously, but who had proven one of the finest sharpshooters with the Lebel rifle, which some considered more effective as a club than as a gun. Taylor entered the room with a broad smile on his face.
“Hello, Sergeant Sissle,” he said.
“Hello, Taylor. How are you?” Sissle asked.
“I’ll tell you how he’s going to be,” Jim Europe interrupted, “if he don’t bring me some water so I can bathe. The Germans ain’t got anything up there that will run him as fast as I’m going to run him.”
Taylor laughed and grabbed a bucket to fetch water.
“That boy ain’t worth a nickel as an orderly to me,” Europe said, “but he is so young. I feel sorry for him. I could not stand to see him out there on the firing line, but I have to watch him, or he’ll be right down in the post line. He’s always looking for the ‘Bush Germans.’”
“Bush” was the men’s pronunciation of the French word for their enemies, Boches.
“What’s going on up at the front?” Sissle asked, adding that he’d heard heavy artillery firing.
“Let me tell you what happened this evening, when I was bringing my section out of line. We started about dusk, and as we were walking slowly through the woods, an Austrian eighty-eight shell explodes. Whizz-bang! You never in your life saw such scrambling for cover, so sudden was our departure in different directions.”
Europe had asked if anybody was hurt, calling his scattered men together. One of his men asked what that sound had been.
“‘It’s a Whizz-bang, but they never land in the same place twice,’ I said, thinking I was dispelling their fear. Siss, you’d have split your sides if you had seen that boy,” referring to his orderly, Taylor, “running back to the spot over which that shell exploded. ‘What’s the matter?’ I said, thinking something was after him. ‘Nothing,’ he answered, all out of breath, ‘but you said those shells never land in the same place twice, so I thought that the safest thing to do would be to run back to where the first one landed.’”
“Siss, I stretched out and howled. If another shell had come, I could not have moved for laughing.”
Europe had a more harrowing tale to tell. The men and officers of the 369th had yet to initiate any offensives on their own and were still fairly green where tactics were concerned, but they had, in increasing numbers, accompanied their French counterparts during raids or patrols. Envious, or perhaps just anxious to prove himself, Jim Europe found himself “talking biggety” to his French counterparts, as he explained to Sissle.
Europe had taken a moment from his duties to visit with a gathering of four French officers in the next section over. They welcomed him with what he sensed was a degree of skepticism. The difference between an untested newcomer fresh on the scene and a seasoned veteran who had survived months or years of combat would have been nearly as great as the gap between a soldier and a civilian. Yet, the veteran soldiers knew that they depended on these new arrivals and could not win the war without them. Europe had developed a true affection for his French comrades. He may also have wanted to see action as a way of honoring his friend, Vernon Castle, who had been killed, Europe had recently learned, in an accident in the skies above Fort Worth, Texas, and Benbrook Field, where Castle had been serving as a flight instructor. Castle had flown more than one hundred reconnaissance missions over the German lines with the Royal Flying Corps, shot down a German plane, and been awarded the Croix de Guerre for bravery, before being shot down himself, after which, relieved of combat duty, he had served by training younger pilots. Castle was British to the core but, like the French, unbiased toward blacks, “one white absolutely without prejudice,” Europe had said in a letter to Eubie Blake after hearing the news, asking Blake, “Can you imagine my grief? My one real and true friend, gone.”
Europe’s French comrades offered the American lieutenant a cup of wine and continued trading war stories with each other, now in English for the benefit of their guest. They had all been in service since the war began and were veterans of the Battle of Verdun, where the French had lost a number of men approximately equivalent to one-quarter of the population of Paris. Each Frenchman was one of only two or three men left from his original company. Entering his third month at the front, Jim Europe knew he had little to add to the discussion but felt expected to say something. He told Sissle, “I thought that a word expressed on my part as being desirous of wanting to witness the thrills of modern warfare would boost my stock and, being an American soldier, I thought also I should uphold the valor of the American army.”
He shot his mouth off, telling his new friends, “One thing I wish to do is go on a raid. The general doesn’t think we’ve been on the line long enough to pull off a raid.”
“Bravo,” one of the veteran officers said, jumping up and patting Europe on the back. “We are going on a raid tonight, and you can go with us. Just get permission from your colonel.”
Europe realized at once that he might have spoken in haste, though now he couldn’t take his words back. He wanted to go on a raid, true, but perhaps not so soon, not this way, not just yet. He worried that in the excitement of combat, his compatriots would begin speaking French, a language he didn’t know, at a time when fully understanding what was going on around him would be crucial. He worried that when the order came to retreat, he wouldn’t understand and would get left behind. His only hope was that Colonel Hayward would deny him permission, but Hayward was altogether too willing to let Europe acquire the experience.
At 7:00 P.M., Europe reported promptly to the French officers’ abri, where he was given a French uniform to change into. He was told to leave behind all his personal belongings and anything that might be used to identify him, should he be captured. That unnerved him, as did the Frenchman who handed him a cloth cap to wear in lieu of a helmet, explaining that helmets made too much noise in no-man’s-land. A bottle of wine was then passed around, and Europe noted with surprise how the Frenchmen drank with great zest. They seemed unconcerned about the mission they were about to undertake, though of course they’d been on many raids before and were no doubt used to such endeavors.
“They were happy as larks, just as though they were going to a picnic.”
Europe wondered how it was that a man could actually get used to risking his life. He did his best to laugh and smile but could only force a pained grin.
As men readied themselves all around him, checking gear, cinching belts, retying bootlaces, Europe prepared himself.
“Lieutenant,” a French officer said to him, interrupting his reverie. “The time has come to go.”
The French officer handed him an automatic pistol, about the size of a child’s cap gun. The Germans, Europe knew, had a gun the Allies were calling Big Bertha, a cannon the size of a red-wood tree that had been shelling Paris from seventy-five miles away. If that was the biggest gun in the war, Jim Europe was sure he held the smallest. Even so, he gladly accepted the pistol and hoped it would prove sufficient.
The raiding party consisted of about thirty men. Silently and in single file, they moved forward down the boyau toward the front line. It was unfamiliar territory to Europe, who found himself stumbling frequently in the darkness. As he moved forward, following an officer, he passed dark forms huddled in the corners, waiting to take their place in line. It was eerily quiet. He wished someone would clear his throat or make some kind of human sound. He would have made a sound himself, but his mouth was bone dry, without enough saliva to lick a stamp. For a brief moment he felt like he was asleep, and this was a nightmare from which he couldn’t awake.
Eventually, they reached the jumping-off point, the place, an officer whispered, where they would go over the top to venture into no-man’s-land. As they waited for the rest of the raiding party, Europe looked up into the sky and noticed that it was one of the most beautiful nights he’d ever seen; there was no moon but a vast array of stars, with the Milky Way stretching from horizon to horizon, each star twinkling with an apparent mirth, as if none of this was happening. Europe worried that there was too much starlight—perhaps the raid should be postponed for some darker night. He whispered as much to one of the French officers, who whispered back that there was quite a bit of brush growing in front of the trenches to provide cover, and they’d be able to cut their way through their own wire undetected. Once they were upon the Boches, the officer explained, it would be to their advantage to have light to observe signs of resistance, should any be encountered. It sounded both logical and at the same time crazy. If it were darker, Europe reasoned, it would be harder for him to see the Germans but harder still for them to see him.
“I was not overanxious to see Mr. Fritz,” he confided to Sissle, “and I was certainly most anxious that none would see me.”
“S’il vous plait—step to one side,” an officer whispered, and then, one at a time, the raiding party went over the top, moving quickly but quietly. Europe waited his turn with trepidation, frightened anew to see that the last two poilus to go over were carrying a stretcher. He was certain that he would be returning on it and asked himself again why he’d invited himself into this mess.
“Let’s go over, Lieutenant,” the French officer whispered, scrambling out of the trench. Europe followed. He crawled on his belly, hugging the earth, uncertain of how far he’d come until he reached a gap prepared in the French wire. He crawled through the gap and into the place he’d been hearing about for years, no-man’s-land. He was soaked from crawling along the wet ground but too nervous to feel cold. He saw shadows, shell holes, blasted trees, brush, wire, men lying prostrate, and still the brilliant stars above. During the days he’d noticed the buds opening on the trees, the yellow and white flowers poking through the greening earth. He had no such appreciation in no-man’s-land. Following his guide, he crawled past the soldiers lying to the side of the path like so many human railroad ties until they came to the place in the German wire where a preliminary raiding party had cut a hole the night before. There was always a chance that the Germans had discovered the hole and set a trap, a machine gun just on the other side, ready to rip apart anybody foolish enough to crawl through. The Frenchman indicated that there was no danger.
No danger?
A soldier crawled forward, carrying a large ball of white tape. The French officer whispered in Europe’s ear, explaining that the man would go ahead of the rest, using the tape to mark the shortest route to the German trenches and, of course, the shortest route back once the raid was over. Just as the tape layer returned, Europe heard a series of booms from the rear—the French light artillery opening up—and then watched as a half dozen shells burst not forty yards in front of him. He dove for cover.
The night broke open in a storm of explosions and fire, with shells thundering all around him, 77s and 105s and mortars, guns of varying caliber pouring down on the German trenches. Europe hugged the ground, dug his fingers into the clay, and tried to pull himself closer as the bombardment swept the enemy lines. He heard shells whizzing overhead before they exploded, and when shells exploded prematurely overhead, a rain of shrapnel fell on him.
After about two minutes, he heard the report of a flare pistol. The officer next to him had fired a Veery pistol into the air, the red flare signaling to all that it was time to attack. Every man in the raiding party jumped to his feet, crouched low, and scurried forward through the hole in the German wire. They formed a line on the other side of the wire, and when the French officer fired a second flare, they leapt to their feet and made a mad dash for the enemy trenches.
“Come with me, Lieutenant,” Europe’s French officer shouted. Europe slipped through the wire, gripping the tiny pistol in his hand. He followed the tape until it ended, then jumped down into the German trench. Lights filled the sky, flickering and flashing, like some Fourth of July fireworks display. The French artillery had continued advancing, pushing back the Germans, who were either retreating or preparing a counterattack. Europe heard men yelling as French soldiers dashed to and fro in the trench, throwing hand grenades into any dugout they found until every nook and cranny, shadow and recess, had been blasted to bits. Europe expected a counterattack at any moment but instead saw only the French soldiers going about their deadly business. He saw no prisoners, no Germans surrendering with their hands over their heads, saying “Kamerad, kamerad!” Had the Germans anticipated the raid and abandoned their trenches? Were they lying in wait? Had they perhaps slipped back in behind them, blocking their retreat?
Then, the French officer fired a green flare into the sky, signaling the end of the raid. Though not three minutes had passed since he’d fired the red flare, it seemed to Europe like an eternity. One by one, the soldiers hurried back to the exit marked by the white tape. Some of them had scavenged the German trenches for souvenirs: pieces of paper, letters, a German coat, a helmet, anything that might have intelligence value, an insignia, a medal, discarded food rations, photographs. None of the raiders had taken any prisoners. Europe was startled to see the stretcher bearers return carrying a wounded man.
He climbed out of the German trench and ran for the gap in the wire. Where the surreptitious advance had been furtive and orderly, the retreat was loud and chaotic, every man for himself, a mad dash back across no-man’s-land for the hole in the French wire. Europe ran like he’d never run before, glad not to be carrying a heavy rifle, which would only have slowed him down. Soaked with sweat, he dove into the French sap and was still running when the German return fire opened up on the French lines. Europe flew down the duckboards, hurling himself into the first abri he found to wait out the shelling, which lasted a full fifteen minutes. It took Europe’s heart that long to stop racing.
When certain that the shelling had stopped and that he had his wits about him once again, Europe made his way to the French officer’s abri to collect his things and thank the French soldiers for inviting him on the raid. Saddened to see that only two of the four brave officers had returned, he learned the next morning that the two absent officers had been seriously wounded in the bombardment following the raid.
“Goodness gracious, Lieutenant,” Sissle said after his friend had finished his story. “It’s all right to go where duty calls, but you are too valuable to go flirting with death like that.”
“Don’t worry,” Europe replied. “I ain’t lost nothing more out in no man’s land. I found everything last night that ever existed out there. Next time I go, they will have to read orders to me with General Pershing’s name signed to them. And re-signed.”
Colonel Hayward got word of Lieutenant Europe’s bravery just as he was composing a letter to Emmett Scott, special assistant to Secretary of War Norman Baker, who was in charge of tracking and documenting the performance of colored troops. Hayward wrote,
Dear Scott,
Am writing this from away up on the French front where the “Fighting Fifteenth,” now the 369th U. S., is really fighting in a French Division. . . . I have two battalions in the trenches of the first line and the third in relief at rest just behind our trenches. The three rotate. Our boys . . . have patrolled No Man’s Land. They have gone on raids and one of my lieutenants has been cited for a decoration. . . . Two questions of the gravest importance to our country and to your race have, in my opinion, been answered.
First: How will American Negro soldiers, including commissioned officers . . . get along in service with French soldiers and officers . . . ? Second: Will the American Negro stand up under the terrible shell fire of this war as he has always stood under rifle fire . . . ?
We have answered the first question in a most gratifying way. The French soldiers have not the slightest prejudice or feeling. The poilus and my boys are great chums, eat, dance, sing, march and fight together in absolute accord. . . . As I write these lines, Capt. Napoleon Bonaparte Marshall and Lieut. D. Lincoln Reid are living at the French Officers’ Mess at our division Infanterie School, honored guests. . . .
Now, on the second question, perhaps I am premature. But both my two battalions which have gone in have been under shell fire, serious and prolonged once, and the boys just laughed and cuddled into their shelter and read old newspapers. . . . They are positively the most stoical and mysterious men I’ve ever known. Nothing surprises them. And we now have expert opinion. The French officers say they are entirely different from their own African troops and the Indian troops of the British, who are so excitable under shell fire. . . . Do you wonder that I love them, every one, good, bad and indifferent? . . .
Brother Boche doesn’t know who we are yet, as none of my men have been captured so far, and the boys wear a French blue uniform when they go on raids. I’ve been thinking if they capture one of my Porto Ricans . . . in the uniform of a Normandy French regiment and this black man tells them in Spanish that he is an American soldier in a New York National Guard regiment, it’s going to give the German intelligence department a headache trying to figure it out.
The German spring offensive continued to ramp up, with more shelling and more raids. Pvt. Herbert White had moved up with the Third Battalion on April 20 and was picked a few days later to be part of a platoon that was going over the top, toward the Hauzy Woods, where Jim Europe had gone. White considered himself “one of the lucky ones.” At 3:00 A.M., he climbed off the fire step and over the parapet, looking for the opportunity to take prisoners or gather information in other ways. German sentries discovered them five minutes into the foray and opened fire on them, machine guns screaming. White and the others went to ground, laying still for ten minutes before they were forced to move for better cover when the Germans shelled the area. White crawled into a hole, where he found himself in the company of a French lieutenant and four comrades. They waited out the barrage. The shelling lessened around 4:00 A.M., just as a hard rain began to fall, and perhaps because of it, the German artillery stopped. White and his mates crawled back to their own lines and fell into their bunks to sleep in wet clothes.
A clash of greater significance transpired on the evening of May 15, two days after Maj. Arthur Little’s First Battalion had rotated back to the front, on a night when Albany, New York’s Henry Johnson stood watch at Observation Post 29.
At five foot seven, Private Johnson had a harder time seeing over the parapets than some of the men in his company. He stood on his toes, leaning against the dirt wall, his rifle ready, his eyes straining against the darkness for any sign of enemy movement. At nineteen, he knew less than some of the other men about the geopolitical forces that had converged to start the war; yet, coming from the “wrong side of the tracks” in Albany, he knew more about fighting than they did. Born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in 1898, he was the son of tobacco farmers, but he’d run away from home at the age of twelve, following the rail lines north past New York City to Albany, where everyone said there was lots of work to be had. At the time, he weighed only about 130 pounds, but he grew strong and muscled handling baggage for the New York Central Railroad. Between trains, Henry and some of the other baggage handlers liked to drink whiskey and play dice on a blanket on the floor. He was a charmer, a ladies’ man, and a gambler.
He stood on his toes again, peering into the darkness.
Nothing.
The first time Henry Johnson stood watch through the night, the sound of a man’s footstep on a loose duckboard or the wind rattling the barbed wire was enough to set him shaking. The second time he stood watch, he was a bit calmer, and the third time he was calmer still. Now, on his second tour in the trenches, he considered himself something of a seasoned veteran, nothing compared to his French babysitters but nevertheless hardened to false alarms, a professional soldier at not yet twenty-one years of age. He was a member of Company C, and his immediate superior officer was Lt. Richardson Pratt from Brooklyn. Pratt was well liked and capable, but when he’d suggested taking a squadron of inexperienced men with him into the forward observation posts, Johnson objected and volunteered to go in their stead. Inexperienced men fired their weapons and shot their Veery flares into the air if so much as a moth fluttered past. They made a lot of noise, drew attention to their location, and made everybody nervous.
Johnson rested his Lebel rifle on the parapet before him. As a weapon, the Lebel was a cut above throwing stones at the enemy, a “peashooter,” the men called it. With only three bullets to a clip, you spent as much time reloading as firing, though to be fair, the Lebel was reasonably accurate at a range of ten or fifteen feet. Johnson gazed out across no-man’s-land looking for any movement, listening for any sound, a twig breaking, the snip of a wire cutter.
Nothing.
The moon was waning, shedding enough light to make out shadows and shapes. Sometimes the moon was so full he could almost read a book by it. Other nights, when there was no moon, and no stars shone down, it was so dark he couldn’t see to tie his shoe or read a pocket watch, and dawn took forever to come. It was worst just before dawn because then you knew that whatever was going to happen would happen soon.
Not normally an early riser, he’d never seen so many sunrises since joining the army.
He heard a sound.
He raised his rifle and held his breath, listening. He scanned the horizon, moving only his eyes.
Nothing. He lowered his rifle.
He thought of the men of the Second Battalion, back in Maffrecourt, enjoying ten days of rest. Johnson had been in the trenches at Montplaisir on his first rotation, sharing the battlements with French soldiers from Battalion Josse, but they were on their own for this tour. He was glad to be on familiar ground. In the dark, it was easy to get turned around.
Johnson looked to the rear, even though the German lines were in front of him. Two nights earlier, they’d been harassed by sniper fire, which was particularly worrisome because the snipers had somehow gotten behind the regiment’s observation posts. Major Little had sent a squad on an inspection tour the next day. The inspection turned up the dugouts the snipers had used, as well as points along the front where the enemy could have slipped through. Rather than plug the gaps, they’d sent out three parties that night to lie in ambush where the line had been penetrated, hoping to meet the enemy and take prisoners when the Germans came back. The ambush parties had failed to make contact.
An illumination rocket went up to his right, but it was too far off to cast much light on the field before him. His station was Combat Post 29, fifty yards to the east of Post 28, where half a platoon waited under the command of Lieutenant Pratt. To Johnson’s left, the Tourbe river ran high with the spring rains. To his right stood a line of trees forming the edge of a wooded copse, part of the Bois d’Hauzy. Before him, a field sloped gradually down to the northeast, part of Melzicourt Farm, the farmhouse about half a mile away, just up from the Aisne, which wound south.
Johnson strained to listen but heard nothing. Quiet was good. Three ambushes had been set again tonight, but none near Post 29, which lacked automatic rifles and consisted of a central dugout where two men and a corporal slept underground, safe from shelling, with a pair of lightly fortified listening salients radiating twenty yards into no-man’s-land on either side. Each salient had a dugout of its own in case of shelling. Johnson stood sentry in the post on the left. On the right, to the east, his friend Needham Roberts from Trenton gazed out over the barbed wire.
Johnson turned his collar up against the cold. The temperature was still dropping into the forties at night.
The Germans came through at about 2:30 A.M., moving through a gap in the line and passing to the west until they were 150 yards to Johnson and Roberts’s rear. At around 2:35 A.M., Johnson heard a noise and spun about to see Needham Roberts with his finger to his lips, indicating the need for quiet. Roberts gestured for Johnson to follow him.
When they reached Roberts’s observation salient, the two men peered over the top, rifles ready.
Roberts pointed in the direction of the sound he’d heard a few moments before.
Johnson braced his rifle with his left hand, holding a Veery pistol in his right, ready to send an illumination rocket five hundred feet into the sky at the first provocation. He looked over his shoulder to locate a case of grenades resting next to the dugout door.
“There!” Roberts whispered.
“What?”
They waited again, staring in the direction of the field of barbed wire protecting the enclosure from the rear. Johnson’s heart pounded in his chest, and it was hard to swallow.
They heard it again, the distinct clipped, metallic sound a wire cutter makes when the blades meet.
Johnson fired the rocket as Roberts began to yell.
“Corporal of the Guard! Corporal of the Guard! Corporal of the Guard!”
As the flare rose, Johnson saw the top coils of wire flash against the black sky and then something like birds taking to flight. It was a barrage of incoming hand grenades, or “potato mashers,” as they were called for their distinct shape. Each German grenade carried ten grams of gunpowder ignited by a percussive cap set off when the handle plunged into the canister. Sometimes when a German grenade landed perfectly on its side, it failed to detonate.
Johnson hit the dirt and covered his head as the grenades landed, each the equivalent of a tenth of a stick of dynamite. His eardrums thundered as dirt rained down all around him. He felt a sharp stinging pain in his left leg, another in his side. When he sat up, he saw that Needham Roberts was hurt, bleeding from a head wound, but still throwing grenades out into the darkness from where he sat propped against the dugout door. Blood ran down the left side of his face; his left leg was soaked with blood from the waist down. Johnson had stood watch with Needham before and considered him a friend, above and beyond the bonds of common soldiers. Needham needed help. Johnson knew he was the only one in a position to render immediate assistance.
He called out “Corporal of the Guard!” again, even though the Germans were between the salient and the central dugout. The corporal and the two relief men waiting in the dugout with him were of no use, cut off by the raiding party.
Johnson got to his feet, raised his rifle, and fired at a shape in the night. Something moved to his left, so he fired at it too. He saw a German soldier rushing him from the right. He swung the rifle around quickly and fired his last bullet into the German’s chest at point-blank range. He looked up and saw a half dozen Germans moving toward his right flank. To the left, he glimpsed an even larger group, perhaps ten or fifteen total.
“Corporal of the Guard! Corporal of the Guard!”
Another grenade landed and exploded harmlessly behind him. Needham was hurt badly but still pitching grenades into the darkness from a sitting position. Johnson looked up and saw a second German bearing down on him, firing a Luger pistol. There was no time to reload. A bullet caught him in the thigh just as he reversed his weapon to grab it by the barrel. He swung the Lebel in a three-quarters overhead motion, catching the German squarely on the skull with the rifle’s butt. Like the French, the Germans also didn’t wear helmets when they went on raids, lest the metal of the helmet brush against an unseen branch or strand of barbed wire and make a telling sound. Instead, they wore soft, gray-wool forage caps stitched in red. The Luger went off one last time. The bullet hit Johnson in the foot. The stunned German stood a moment, dazed, and managed to say, in perfect English with an American accent, “The little black son-of-a-bitch has got me!” before falling next to his slain comrade.
Johnson didn’t know what to make of the fact that the man had spoken English with an American accent, but there were stories of Germans who’d grown up, lived, or gone to school in America and returned home to fight for the kaiser.
“This little black son-of-a-bitch’ll get you again if you get up,” Johnson replied. He called for the corporal again. Where was everybody? There were Germans everywhere. He heard shouts both distant and near: “Vorsicht! Gerade aus! Zurück!” He heard gunfire and grenades, accompanied by flames, smoke, and more shouts. Then he heard supporting machine gun fire from somewhere to the rear.
“Corporal of the Guard!”
He turned to see how Needham Roberts was faring and filled with rage. One German knelt at Roberts’s feet, holding him by the ankles, while another knelt at his head, his hands clasped across Needham’s chest with his arms hooking beneath Needham’s armpits. They were about to carry him off as their prisoner. Needham was unconscious, unable to defend himself. There had been talk of what the Germans might do if they ever captured a black soldier. You would be better off dead, everybody said.
As he ran to help his friend, Henry Johnson unsheathed the bolo knife he carried in a canvas scabbard on his belt. With a nine-inch blade sharpened on one side and at the tip, the knife was more than a quarter-inch thick at the hilt, a three-pound piece of black steel as heavy as a meat cleaver with a wound leather grip. Bolos were more commonly issued to machine gun companies and used primarily to cut brush, but Johnson had always appreciated the heft of the thing and kept his sharp with regular honing. He leapt at the German who had Needham by the armpits. He raised the knife high in his right hand, adrenaline pumping through his veins, gave a scream, and brought the knife down on the German’s head, driving the blade through the crown of the enemy’s skull all the way to the hilt.
Blood spurted skyward as the man fell, staining Johnson’s coat. He rolled off the body, withdrawing his blade, and struggled to his feet. Where was the second German, the one who’d had Needham by the feet? He heard shouts in the distance and gunfire from somewhere down the line. He felt no pain despite his injuries, too infused with the heat of the moment to notice anything else. He felt fear, yes, but not the kind of panic that might make a man take flight.
He looked at Roberts. He couldn’t tell if he was still breathing. He was all alone now, and for all he knew an entire company of Germans was closing in on him.
He strained to catch his breath.
He heard a shout behind him. The German he’d clubbed with the butt of his rifle had recovered, a smear of blood running down the right side of his face. The German charged, smiling and firing his Luger. Johnson hated the man for the way he smiled. He felt a bullet strike him in the shoulder, another in his thigh. He fell to his hands and knees. When the German closed in, still firing, Johnson took the bolo knife in both hands and lunged, thrusting the knife upward into his enemy’s abdomen. He twisted the knife, thrusting again to inflict the greatest damage, nearly lifting the Boche off his feet. He turned the point of the blade down and ripped at the German’s bowels until the knife came free.
The man fell to the ground. Johnson thrust the knife in one more time, then withdrew it. He knelt over the man, ready to deal another blow, but saw that it would be unnecessary.
He stood again. The enemy patrol was in a panic, fully exposed behind enemy lines and taking casualties. Johnson saw Germans everywhere, swarming like the rats that lived in no-man’s-land. He heard support coming from behind him but doubted it would arrive in time. He looked to the gap where the enemy had cut through the French wire and saw two Germans helping a third onto a stretcher, the injured man evidently a victim of one of the grenades Needham had thrown. If he was going to die, Johnson wanted to die fighting. He found the grenade box and threw one, then a second, then a third. The French had been impressed at how far the men from Harlem could throw hand grenades; Capt. Hamilton Fish had explained that most of them had at some point in their lives played baseball, several professionally, in the Negro leagues in fact. Johnson emptied the box, and when it was empty, he threw the box as well.
He listened. He heard words shouted in German, others shouted in English, and the boom of distant artillery.
He fell to his knees. He had nothing left—no strength, no ammunition—except the resolve not to be taken alive. He took his knife in his hand and sat back, leaning against the wall of the trench to wait for the Germans to come for him.
But the Germans had fled before American or French support troops could make their way down the trenches. When Lieutenant Pratt arrived from Combat Post 28, Needham Roberts was unconscious. Henry Johnson leaned against the side of the trench. He managed to say “Corporal of the Guard” one more time before collapsing into unconsciousness.
Medics loaded Johnson and Roberts onto stretchers and dressed their wounds as best they could, sterilizing them with tincture of iodine and packing them with clean gauze pads soon soaked through with blood. There was, in that sector, a rail line with mule-drawn flatcars used to move personnel and supplies to the front and, when necessary, to carry casualties to the rear, where a dressing station was set up just beyond regimental headquarters. While Johnson and Roberts were being moved, a Sergeant Major Hooper woke battalion commander Major Little from a light sleep at 3:30 A.M. to tell him of the regiment’s first hand-to-hand combat. There was no official report as yet, Hooper related. The injured men were waiting for ambulances to take them to the hospital. Little threw on a pair of boots and a bathrobe over his pajamas and ran to catch up to the cart.
He found Johnson and Roberts at the dressing station. He’d been told they were both near death and probably wouldn’t last much longer, so he was quite pleasantly surprised to see them awake and alert, talking as they lay on their stretchers. Capt. Seth B. MacClinton had given them each a cup of rum, something each company commander kept on hand for just such medical emergencies. The doctor at the dressing station told Little that his men’s prospects were good, all things considered. Roberts had taken shrapnel when a grenade exploded near him and been shot as well. Johnson had twenty-one wounds, the majority caused by gunshots.
Little interviewed the men and jotted down notes for the report he would have to write the next day. There were some inconsistencies that were hard to explain—Johnson was conscious when Pratt reached him but couldn’t account for the fact that the Germans had managed to evacuate their dead, who, by Pratt’s calculation, numbered at least four. Little knelt beside their stretchers and took their stories, finding their feats more remarkable with each added detail. When the ambulance arrived, Little stood to make room for the medics. Johnson propped himself up on one elbow and gestured to Little to come closer.
Little knelt again by Henry Johnson’s side.
“Sir, Captain, Sir,” Johnson began, using the form of address he’d been trained to use when speaking to a superior officer. His voice was hoarse. He smiled gently. “You don’t want to worry about me,” Johnson said. “I’m all right. I’ve been shot before.”
Little made an inspection of Combat Post 29 at first light. The Germans, in their hasty retreat, had left a considerable amount of material behind. Little found forty potato masher hand grenades, seven long-arm wire cutters, three forage caps, and three Lugers. One of the gray-wool forage caps had a two-inch-long slit piercing the top, with a hank of hair matted to the inside by dried blood. Marks in the damp clay beyond the wire indicated where the Germans had set down two stretchers during the raid. There were numerous footprints in the clay as well. It was understood that German raiding parties ordinarily carried one long-armed wire cutter for every four men. Extrapolating from the number of wire cutters found at the scene, in addition to the stretcher marks, the footprints, and the fact that the Germans had evacuated at least four casualties, Little estimated that Henry Johnson and Needham Roberts had fought off a minimum of twenty-four Boches.
The trail left by the retreating Germans was relatively easy to follow. There were footprints, more abandoned equipment, and marks where stretchers had been set down to give the bearers a rest; most of all, there was blood. At the opening the Germans had cut in the wire, they found an unidentifiable pulp of flesh and tissue, a tatter of cloth from a German coat, and a blown-apart first aid kit. A hole in the ground where a grenade had landed was about the size and shape of a small washtub and nearly filled to the top with blood, so much that it took a week for the clay to absorb it. There were other pools of blood, blood smeared on trees and logs, and discarded, blood-soaked handkerchiefs and bandages for almost half a mile. The trail ended at the Aisne, where the raiders had crossed.
Little returned from his inspection and dictated the report from his notes. He recommended that both Roberts and Johnson be awarded medals for honor and valor.
Two weeks later, on May 31, the First Battalion was relieved and rotated back to the town of Maffrecourt, where they underwent a week of open-field warfare training, crawling on their bellies through the tall grass and learning infiltration techniques. Major Little found an opportunity during the battalion’s respite to ride to the hospital where Johnson and Roberts were recuperating. Both men were out of danger, but it was evident from the severity of their wounds that both would be crippled for life. Little learned that the doctors had been forced to replace the shinbone in Henry Johnson’s left leg with a silver tube where the tibia had been completely shattered; several of the metatarsal bones in his left foot had been crushed as well.
Johnson and Roberts both smiled as Major Little approached their beds. When he asked how they were feeling, they said they were feeling fine. The major tried to make small talk, but he found conversation difficult as their lives and backgrounds were too different to provide much common ground.
“Tell me then,” Little asked. “How has it come to be that you’re so proficient with a bolo knife?”
Johnson had to smile. It was no secret among his men that Little prided himself, if that was the word, on his associations with soldiers whose civilian pasts included criminal activities—lock pickers, brawlers, thieves, and the likes of Sergeant Bayard with his own private paddy wagon—though the men knew Little was not quite as “uptown” as he liked to believe.
“I mean,” Little persisted, “have you ever been mixed up before in a fight where you used a knife?”
Johnson looked at Roberts. Roberts looked at Johnson, who tried not to laugh but failed. He tried to answer the major’s question but had a hard time forcing words to come from his lips as he suppressed a guffaw. Laughing in an officer’s face could be seen as insubordination.
“Sir, Captain, Sir,” he said. “You want to know if I ever fought with a knife?”
Roberts laughed again from across the room. That set Henry off. The two men laughed at Little’s naiveté, chuckling at first, but the laugh kept building, until both men roared. Johnson was laughing too hard to say another word.
Little laughed too, probably without a clear idea as to what was so funny:
My question had been too ridiculous. . . . The walls of that hospital ward echoed with the sounds of revelry, as we all joined in laughter—the Americans, in appreciation of the comedy of the moment—the French nurses and patients, in sheer contagion.
It’s impossible to pinpoint exactly when the more colorful name “Hellfighters” was first applied to the 369th, since the enemy gave them the name, a fact ascertained after a German prisoner told his interrogators that his comrades were particularly wary of confronting colored American troops. The moniker was adopted and popularized by American newspapers carrying the story of what they called “The Battle of Henry Johnson.” The account that brought Johnson to national attention was entitled “Young Black Joe,” published in the Saturday Evening Post on August 24, 1918, and written by Irvin S. Cobb, whose presence was both serendipitous and planned. By some measures, Colonel Hayward worked as hard for his regiment as its public relations agent as he did as its military leader, and he had arranged, well in advance of the Battle of Henry Johnson, for a press junket to come to the front to write stories about his colored regiment. He could hardly have staged a better performance by one of his men for them to report on and review.
The morning after the battle, Colonel Hayward arrived on the scene with Cobb, Martin Green of the Evening World, and Lincoln Eyre of the New York World in tow. Of the three, Cobb was the best known, described in the Saturday Evening Post as “one of America’s chief assets. . . . More people read him than any other contemporary writer—to be both amused and informed. He may not be the funniest man in America, but if he isn’t, who is? . . . He skimmed the cream off the European War in the first three months, and has made nearly everything written since seem dull and trite.” Cobb made his first tour as a correspondent for the Post in 1914, then returned for a second tour and paid a visit to the 369th at the invitation of Hayward, where Cobb, Green, and Eyre toured the trenches and attended a band concert. Cobb was morbidly obese and ugly by his own account (he’d written a humor piece entitled “The Advantages of Being Homely”), with a cigar often lodged amid his jowls and eyebrows bushy as a machine gun nest. Hayward had arranged both a reception and a band concert for his visitors on the night before Henry Johnson went to work with his bolo knife. At the concert, in the town square, Noble Sissle, standing in for Europe who was at that time stationed in the front trenches, determined that the band would play a selection of songs familiar to the famous Southerner. They began by playing “Stars and Stripes Forever,” then a medley of “plantation melodies,” including Stephen Foster’s “Old Folks at Home” and “Way Down upon the Swanee River,” which Cobb later wrote made him want to cry. For an encore they played “Dixie,” softly at first, building to a dramatic finish, while a brilliant full moon shone above the shell-shattered steeples of Maffrecourt.
The reception for Cobb, Eyre, and Green did not go as well. Many of the regiment’s noncommissioned black officers made themselves scarce or refused to shake Cobb’s hand. Several turned their backs to him, avoiding eye contact. Sissle’s selection of plantation music was a conscious effort to “soften his views such that his poisoned pen would be at least modified, if not stilled forever.” The men were aware that before the war, Irvin S. Cobb had been one of the foremost perpetrators of racist stereotypes, a Southern “humorist” from Kentucky writing essays and portraits of life in America and in the reconstructed South. He had published in such places as McClure’s, American Magazine, and the Saturday Evening Post, writing in a “Southern” prose style that might charitably be compared to Mark Twain’s, with long, winding sentences, self-congratulatory vocabulary choices, and a tendency to delay getting to the point for as long as possible. His essays frequently included condescending caricatures of black people, ridiculing their speech and culture. To be fair, it was much the norm for white writers, and black writers too, to transliterate African American dialects, using “dems” and “does” and “I’se gwine.” A commentator named Robert H. Davis wrote in the May 1917 issue of American Magazine, “It is a safe wager that there is not a man living today who has ever heard Irvin Cobb utter a disagreeable phrase about any human being, among either the quick or the dead.” All the same, when the 369th’s noncommissioned black officers turned their backs on him, they had good reason to do so.
Cobb asked if Little could think of any interesting experiences his readers might enjoy reading about. Little allowed, coyly, that things had been rather dull of late, with a few amusing anecdotes from time to time and constant shelling and sniping more or less all the time.
“We did have a little fight this morning that was good while it lasted. If you’re interested in that sort of thing. A couple of our boys had a real pitched battle, for a few minutes. I’ve just finished writing the report—I’m trying to get them the Croix de Guerre. Would you care to read it?”
As soon as they read the report, the visiting journalists knew they had one of the better stories of the war. When they asked to have a look at the grounds to get a better sense of what had happened, Little said he’d be delighted to show them. Making their way to Combat Post 29 was difficult. The day was warm enough that the portly Cobb was soon winded and asked three times to stop to catch his breath, mopping his brow with his sleeve. Little was particularly eager to show them the grenade hole full of blood. Cobb and the others were duly impressed. From there, Little indicated the path the Germans had taken to reach the river and described what they’d found along the route, though to travel any further was surely to invite a sniper’s bullet.
At lunch, back at Major Little’s command post, Cobb had a question.
“I know it’s against your rules to talk shop at the table,” he said, “but how much special training for this trench fighting did Henry Johnson have before he licked those twenty-four Germans?”
“Same as the rest of the regiment,” Little replied. “No more than three weeks. In theory. In practice, taking away the time spent changing stations and the ordinary routine of our early days with the French, I’d guess the special training our men have had would equal about a week of what the draftees are getting in the cantonments back home.”
“Seems to me,” Cobb replied, “that if he’d had the normal training our men at home are getting today, by tomorrow night Henry would have been storming Potsdam.”
A few days after their visit, an article by special correspondent Lincoln Eyre appeared on the front page of the New York World describing what Eyre called “The Battle of Henry Johnson.” New York’s evening papers quoted from or reprinted Eyre’s story later that day. By the following morning, the Associated Press had syndicated the story of the first two colored American soldiers to receive the Croix de Guerre from coast to coast, the phrase “The Battle of Henry Johnson” proving rather catchy. The story offered a modicum of good news during a month in which American papers had carried mostly bad, giving accounts of the German spring offensive, which to that point had been fairly successful. It also provided Harlem with its first African American war heroes, as mothers read to their sons and daughters accounts carried in the black newspapers of Johnson’s inspiring heroism.
“Your husband,” Colonel Hayward wrote to Edna Johnson in Albany, “Pvt. Henry Johnson, is in my regiment, the 369th United States Infantry, formerly the Fifteenth New York Infantry. He has been at all times a good soldier and a good boy of fine morale and upright character. To these admirable traits he has lately added the most convincing numbers of fine courage and fighting ability. I regret to say that at the moment he is in the hospital, seriously but not dangerously wounded. The wounds having been received under such circumstances that every one of us in the regiment would be pleased and proud to trade places with him.”
Hayward told her the details of the battle without getting too graphic, saying, “Henry laid about him right and left with the heavy knife.” He told her that Gen. Henri Gouraud had offered one hundred francs to the family of the first man to be wounded heroically. Accordingly, he was sending her half the reward, the other half going to Needham Roberts’s family. “It is my hope and prayer to bring him back to you safe and sound.”
The story gained national attention after “Young Black Joe” appeared in magazine racks from coast to coast. It was the first mainstream article to treat the experience of black American soldiers in full, describing their courage and discipline, rather than resorting to the minstrel-show jokes and comical anecdotes other journalists found themselves compelled to use. Running a full three pages, between ads for Mennen’s shaving cream and the Ceebynite (“see-by-night”) compass with its luminous, radium-coated needle and dial that soldiers could read in the dark, Cobb’s story, illustrated with a half-page photograph, limned the experience to the best of the writer’s ability, quoting a “stumpy private with a complexion like the bottom of a coal mine” as saying, “Henry Johnson, he done right well, didn’t he? But say, boy, effen they’ll jes gimme a razor an’ a armload of bricks an’ one half pint of bust-haid licker, I kin go plum to Berlin.”
“They’re all like that boy with the bolo, and some of them are even more so,” Hayward was quoted as saying.
“If ever proof were needed,” Cobb concluded, “which it is not, that the color of a man’s skin has nothing to do with the color of his soul, this twain then and there offered it in abundance. . . . They were soldiers who wore their uniforms with a smartened pride; who were jaunty and alert and prompt in their movements; and who expressed as some did vocally in my hearing, and all did by their attitude, a sincere heartfelt inclination to get a whack at the foe with the shortest possible delay. . . . I am of the opinion personally, and I make the assertion with all the better grace, I think, seeing that I am a Southerner with all the Southerner’s inherited and acquired prejudices touching on the race question—that as a result of what our black soldiers are going to do in this war, a word that has been uttered billions of times in our country, sometimes in derision, sometimes in hate, sometimes in all kindliness—but which I am sure never fell on black ears but it left behind a sting for the heart—is going to have a new meaning for all of us, South and North too, and that hereafter n-i-g-g-e-r will merely be another way of spelling the word American.”
Cobb’s article was picked up and widely reprinted in the black press, giving the story a second life after its initial run, to the extent that Cobb was astonished to find African American porters and redcaps, waiters and servants, coming up to him upon his return home to thank him for telling Henry Johnson’s story. Gratitude from black Americans was not something Cobb was used to. He had created a hero, perhaps intentionally; unintentionally, by virtue of his being read by more people than any other contemporary writer, he had seeded a myth.
