I Will Hold by James Carl Nelson

Author:James Carl Nelson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-08-18T12:03:44+00:00

DEAD MEN

PRIVATE LLOYD SHORT was only barely a marine on that day. Twenty-eight years old, he’d left employment in Welch’s Café, which his father owned in Watertown, South Dakota, a year before and traveled to Montana, where he tried to enlist in the navy, but had been rejected; he then tried the army, but was again rejected.

Moving on to work in the Washington shipyards, he ultimately was allowed to enlist in the picky Marines in March 1918.

They must have seen something in Lloyd Short that the navy and army missed.

After enduring Parris Island and Quantico, Short was in France with his replacement battalion in mid-June; by July 15, he was serving with Cliff Cates in the 96th Company, just one of the scores of replacements who wondered now at the “constant roar of the big guns,” not foreseeing what that roar would mean for them.

By the morning of July 19, all knew, including Short. By the morning of July 19 when the eager recruit stepped out into the wheat, which was convulsing and frothing blackly now under a thunderstorm of shot and shell, Lloyd Short and the other replacements to the 96th Company understood all too fully, if too briefly, what war was, what this war was, an awakening that for many would come too late.

Cliff Cates by then understood, but what he knew didn’t faze him. He was as alive as ever; invigorated by his surroundings, he remained in an abandoned trench with about twenty men from his own and scattered companies, his pants blown almost wholly off, his knee emblazoned red with a shrapnel wound, his shoulder oozing blood from a machine-gun bullet. He had little idea who else was around, and he wanted to find out.

But doing so could—would—be suicidal; machine-gun bullets continued to play just above the ground all over that field, where the few marines that weren’t already dead or wounded had finally, sensibly, gone to ground.

Major Robert Denig had, like Cates and the others, finally gotten the memo that the attack was over.

“It happened for me about this way,” he would write. “I noticed the Battalion H.Q. start running towards the enemy; men would jump and disappear.”

Denig, wanting to learn just to where they were disappearing from that hellish field, “gathered speed, made a record jump and landed in a shallow ‘fox hole.’”

Thomas Holcomb soon joined him, but refused in the best tradition of the Marines to turn his back to the German lines. “I had my back to the enemy while he sat facing them,” Denig remembered.

Farther south, the 97th Company’s Corporal Havelock Nelson was trying desperately to scratch some sort of cover from the hard-as-concrete French soil in a field facing Tigny. His shovel had proved useless, so he resorted to his bayonet, which gouged two inches at a time. These, he laid in front of him; “I had scarcely laid one of the larger pieces to the right of me before it jumped a few inches toward me as something thudded into it.

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