Monk Eastman by Neil Hanson

Author:Neil Hanson [Hanson, Neil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography, History
ISBN: 978-0-307-59436-5
Goodreads: 9552387
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2010-10-05T00:00:00+00:00

15

MORE THAN BROTHERS

After a week in the reserve trenches, the 106th Infantry began to move forward into the firing line on the evening of August 30, ready for the attack to be launched the next morning. They passed over shell-torn roads, jammed with vehicles and columns of men heading for the front lines, while streams of bedraggled, hollow-eyed men shuffled in the opposite direction. German aircraft bombed the advancing troops and long-range guns continued to rain down shells around them, but the 106th moved on, past Indus Farm and around the bend of the lake, where the “murky sheet of water seemed as silent as death itself.1 Not even a bullfrog croaked from its depths.” They passed an advanced dressing station at Trappest Farm and a casualty clearing station at Esquellec, both reminders of the fate that awaited some of the men moving forward on that late summer night.

On this, the last night before their first taste of an actual attack, despite all his previous “battlefield” experience on the streets of New York, even Monk must have felt the same mixture of curiosity, excitement, fear, and regret as his comrades, together with the closeness, sometimes beyond even that shared with their families, that men felt toward their buddies in the face of war and death. As one of his fellows in that polyglot division wrote that night,

Tonight we are more than brothers, for tomorrow may see things, and we know that shrapnel and bullets are absolutely unconscious of ancestry or creed, occupation or nationality.2 Among others we have Greek, Slav, Spanish, English, Swiss, the ever-present and irrepressible Irish, Italian and a descendant of an American Indian. We have Episcopalian, Methodist, Jew, Catholic, &c, but I feel sure we have tonight no atheist—nor will have until this is over.

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