American Fighters in the Foreign Legion (Jerner Great War Memoirs Book 1) by Paul Rockwell

Author:Paul Rockwell [Rockwell, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ballacourage Books
Published: 2014-08-07T07:00:00+00:00

Exhausted Legionnaires Sleeping During a Ten-Minutes Halt

'A little farther along, a number of Germans tried to get out of a dugout to set up a machine gun. We drove them back inside their shelter, hastily blocked the entrance except for a small hole, and hurled grenades in on the Boches. We afterwards learned that we killed over sixty Germans in that one dugout.

'In several of the cemented cellars in the village we found sheep, cows, and horses, and in one cellar was a civilian, the sole inhabitant of the place who had refused to leave when Belloy began to be bombarded. He told us that until a few days before about eighty civilians had been staying in their homes. He did not stop long to talk with us, but asked where our kitchens were

and set off to get some food.

'After the fight we counted more than one thousand dead Germans, and we had taken about eight hundred unwounded prisoners — more than the number of valid Legionnaires we had left. The Germans have a great fear of the Legion, but an even greater fear of the Senegalese, who fight alongside us, and they always prefer to surrender to us.

'We fought in the region of Belloy for several days, and then we went out some distance beyond any trenches and were ordered to charge some German earthworks at the foot of a long, rolling hill. Just as we started to advance, my Captain, an extremely brave Annamite [Vietnamese] named Do-Hu-Vi, was shot dead at my side. Many of my comrades fell in the charge. There were two brothers from Luxembourg, who always had been together. One fell with a bullet through his forehead; the other sprang in advance and shouted: "Forward to avenge my brother!" He passed through the attack safely, and was given the War Cross with a fine citation.

'We ran into an awful entanglement of barbed wire, machine-gun pits, and traps of all kinds. We killed all the enemy there, but were held up on the hillside by other machine guns. Our field cannon came up and shelled the Germans, who were strongly entrenched ahead of us.

'Among the dead I noticed one German Lieutenant who had been killed as he was watching us through his field glasses. A bullet had passed through one of the lenses of the glasses and gone into his eye.

'Some of the German dugouts in the region were seventy-five feet deep and arranged as regular underground skyscrapers, only they "scraped" in the wrong direction. Many Germans were buried alive in these cagnas [dugouts] by our shell-fire.

'The Legion lost many men during all this fighting. My battalion chief, Commandant James Waddell, a New Zealander with fourteen years' service and a fine record in the Legion, was one of the few officers to come out of the fighting alive.'

The deeds of heroism accomplished by the Legionnaires were innumerable. At dawn of July 5 the Germans made a desperate effort to recapture Belloy-en-Santerre. Making a turning movement along

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