Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [182]
On the Western Front, the British and French faced the Germans on a static line. No one had been able to really dislodge the other for three brutal years. It was a stagnant, filthy line of trenches, a line of horror, set in eternal palls of smoke, poison gas, and barbed wire, and the forests and fields were destroyed with deep craters and muck. Men lived in corrugated tin and sandbag underground cities sharing their lot with millions of rats and billions of lice.
The battles were ferocious. Take one day at the Somme. The British had sixty thousand casualties. Twenty thousand of these men were killed ... in one day. By the time the Yanks had gotten there, the toll was over ten million dead on both sides and twice that number wounded.
Well, the German staff and their commander, Ludendorff, didn’t evaluate the Yanks too highly. When they were able to transfer divisions away from the Eastern Front after Russia sued for a separate peace, they massed a decisive edge in guns and troops. Their aim was to first knock the British out of the war, then break through to Paris.
To punch a hole in the French lines, they organized forty-two divisions of infantry and ten thousand pieces of artillery. No man who has ever been through a bombardment ever forgot it. Well ... Ludendorff got his hole against the French Sixth Army at a place called Château-Thierry, a little town on the Marne River.
The French Sixth had been torn to shreds and was in full retreat. This opened the gates to Paris. German patrols could actually see the Eiffel Tower through their field glasses.
In order to avoid crossing the Marne River, the Germans decided to bypass it west of Château-Thierry where it took a big bend.
After three days of confusion and conflicting orders, the Marine Brigade drove part of the way and marched part of the way and we reached our destination without having slept for almost three days. It seemed like all of France was fleeing in the opposite direction, women hitched up to carts, old people, cattle filling the road. And the fucking mud
We reached the line on May 30, 1918, and let the French Sixth Army pass through us and continue their retreat. It was a lovely spring day. The Marne Valley was magnificent. Rolling fields of wheat swayed like sensual women, dancing in rhythm to the kisses of the winds. The wheat was young and still green and the fields were speckled with thousands of blood-red poppies.
The countryside was interspersed by a number of small woods of silver-barked birch and second-growth scrub and thickets. One of these stands of trees was Belleau Wood. It lay on a hillock west of Chateau-Thierry. The wood was about a mile in length and several hundred yards deep, flanked by five lovely little farming villages. Before the war, Belleau Wood had been the private hunting preserve of a wealthy Frenchman.
The German offensive had swept forward so rapidly it had outrun its artillery and supplies and had to stop to consolidate in Belleau Wood.
To outflank the Marne River, the Germans had to strike right through the middle of a thin line held by the 5th and 6th Marines. We were green, untested troops, but we had been trained well and we were not war-weary as the French were.
My unit set up in a field hospital in the cellar of the church of one of the villages, Lucy de Bocage, just a few hundred yards to the rear of the front lines.
When the artillery fire opened, we had never experienced anything like it and the rest of the battle seemed like a surrealistic play, seen through a gauze ... a haze ... exhaustion ... smoke ... and we listened to voices and gunfire like they were distant echoes. We were there and functioning, but we were not there, if you know what I mean.
During the course of the war, the snipers from all of the armies had eventually been killed or crippled. The emphasis was now on massive fire, mostly by machine gun. The Germans did not realize that the Marines were the best rifle shots in the world. When they came out of Belleau Wood, our men started picking them