The Remains of Company D by James Carl Nelson

Author:James Carl Nelson [Nelson, James Carl]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781429940344
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

12

“Kamerad!”

As such life-and-death dramas raged across the plain, Company D was still struggling to the front. Having started its march some six miles farther to the west at Pierrefonds-les-Bains, and with but one map and no guide, Huebner wrote that the 28th’s 1st Battalion was “forced to make its long march over roads that were congested with almost every kind of military transportation and equipment.”

The battalion was still several kilometers from the front when the crescendo of the Germans’ preemptive bombardment—and the subsequent cannonade heralding the 1st Division’s attack—echoed across the countryside. “All was quiet and every one was tired out,” Wilbert Murphy wrote. “All of a sudden there was a snap as if something broke and every gun in the valley—there must have been a thousand of them—broke the stillness with a tremendous roar. It seemed like one continuous roar of thunder. It was a terrific drum fire and it served it’s purpose to surprise the Jerries.”

The men stumbled across fields toward the sound of the guns, lost, “exhausted from the fatigue of the long march forward and . . . badly in need of rest,” Huebner wrote. Finally, “the Brigade Adjutant found the battalion and ordered its Commander to move his command forward in the regimental zone of action.”

A small record of the company’s presence that morning survives in a few lines in the Second Brigade’s records:

5:00 a.m. Lt. Braunston reports with 1 platoon of D Co. 28th Inf. Claims Major Roxell ordered him to go towards artillery firing. No further orders. (Brigade commander is of the opinion that this officer was scared.)

5:30 a.m. Lt. Sorenson D Co. 28th with his company outside of Brigade P. C. Absolutely lost. Had no maps.

5:30 a.m. Adjutant reported whole 1st Bn. 28th lost in woods La Fosse Trure. They did not know what to do or where to go. I ordered them forward at once.

(Lloyd Bronston would put the lie to 2nd Brigade commander general Beaumont Buck’s opinion of his spine, winning a Silver Star for bravery before the five days of Soissons had passed.)

Once he had his bearings, Soren Sorensen led his men to the shallow jump-off trenches from which the 28th Regiment’s second and third battalions had moved out an hour before. “We rushed past the artillery and into position on the crest of a hill from which we were to jump off,” Murphy wrote. “Bayonets were fixed, rifles loaded—ready to fire when we should run across the Jerries in our advance.”

As had their predecessors, Company D’s men surveyed the fields before them and wondered what the day might bring—and how they might hold up in the certain trials to come. Murphy settled in next to his twenty-year-old squad leader, Corporal Clarence A. Butts, from Rocky River, Ohio.

“We each rolled a cigarette and started to smoke—it helped our nerves, in fact I am sure it helped mine, for though I was rather weak in the knees I tried to brace up and be as brave as he was,” Murphy recalled.

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