First Over There by Matthew J. Davenport

Author:Matthew J. Davenport
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466860278
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

CHAPTER 11

A Pack of Bumblebees

Though hundreds of German soldiers were still hiding or trapped beneath Cantigny’s ghostly ruins, the village was once again in Allied hands. For the 1st Division, the heft of numbers, speed, and metal had won the hour. Though stymied on the flanks, seven of the nine infantry companies forming the attack vanguard had reached their objectives, and among doughboys in the process of furrowing out fresh trenches and remapping their small stretch of the Allied lines, a new confidence took root. With Cantigny in their tenuous grip, overall victory in the battle felt within reach.

But the day’s drama was still unfolding, and this was only the first act. Biting off a chunk of enemy territory gave no assurance of success, no promise that it could be held. Armies up and down the Western Front had tried and tried again, and most had failed. For the Americans, the advantage of surprise was quickly evaporating, and with French artillery batteries exiting the battle, the weight of steel was about to tilt decidedly in the Germans’ favor.

* * *

“The pick or the shovel, when the objective is reached, is mightier than the gun,” one officer would later remark. More than three dozen platoon leaders along a fragile new mile-and-a-half-long front plotted imaginary lines on the ground where their men were to establish trenches in the shell-cratered dirt. Troops shed packs and ammo bandoliers, grabbed picks and shovels, and commenced the big dig. As with the initial attack, the two flanks saw the heaviest fighting. For the doughboys Company K, the immediate danger was their open left flank.

“Just as the digging began, a machine-gun barrage was put down,” Lt. Si Parker, establishing his outpost up near the haystack, would report. Maxim fire came in torrents from Germans on the left flank and the distant l’Alval Woods. Pvt. Emory Smith, chasing a German he had spotted out in front of him “dodging from one shell hole to another,” leveled his Springfield and fired just as the wall of machine-gun fire knocked him back. “Just as I fired at the Dutchman [sic], being in an erect position, I was shot in the breast and for a moment everything was black,” he would recall. Smith fell into a shell crater and lay dazed while the company dug in behind him. Though Smith was far forward in a position raked by automatic fire, Captain Mosher made his way up to the crater, kneeled to check on him, gave him an aspirin, and told him to hang on until dark, when he would send a stretcher forward to evacuate him.

All along the line, upright, digging doughboys proved easy targets. Pvt. Amedeo Gialanella was “taking an entrenching tool from comrade’s pack when shot thru [his] head with a machine-gun bullet, killing him instantly.” Digging an outpost with his squad, twenty-year-old PFC Charles Harsch, “a quiet fellow” from Brockport, New York, was shot in the forehead. When hit, “he fell backwards and said, ‘My God Mother,’” then died, a watching corporal would later relay.

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