Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [183]
The instant they stopped to regroup, the 5th and 6th Marines went on to the offensive. I watched them run at high port in line after line and disappear over the ridge.
Inside Belleau Wood ... that tiny space was honeycombed with a hundred or more German machine-gun nests, dug in behind boulders, hidden in jungle-like thickets. Our job was to flush them out, nest by nest, with grenades and bayonets.
I was on a four-day cycle.
Day one, I drove casualties back to a base hospital about ten miles away and returned with supplies.
Day two, I worked in the field hospital treating the wounded and assisting in surgery.
Day three, I did battlefield duty, finding the wounded, treating them, and taking them back by stretcher.
Day four was my “rest” day. I was given four hours’ straight sleep, checked the inventory, and caught up with the reports. One, two, three, four, around the clock without respite.
The worst of it was the field hospital. The wounded were coming off the field so fast we couldn’t get to half of them in time. Gangrene set in quickly and some of the arms and legs turned slimy and green and scarlet and lots of bare bones were sticking out. Our medication was primitive. Fever, give them castor oil. Iodine on open wounds, or peroxide. The smell of gangrene ... ugh ... I can still smell it. Infection, aspirin. Mustard gas wounds, we just washed them with water. Lot of screaming, moaning, dying. Thank God we had morphine and codeine.
In the operating theaters the floor always had a half inch of blood and the surgeons and assistants like myself slipped and fell and were drenched in blood a half-dozen times a day.
In those days, we didn’t know how to type a man’s blood. If he needed blood, one of us would volunteer, and as often as not, the Marine died on the spot because we were different blood types. I gave blood twice during the battle.
Our offensive went on day after day. Our gains through Belleau Wood could be counted in yards. Most of the European armies rotated their troops off the front every five or six days, but we didn’t have the experience and we didn’t have the replacements. The Marines went on, day and night, for fifteen straight days until an American Army unit came in and relieved us.
They generally sent the troops back about six or seven miles behind the lines, out of German artillery range. The first thing was to get deloused. They’d boil their clothing in acid and shave their hair off and give them a sheep dip. Then they’d usually sleep for twenty to thirty straight hours. After that, they’d get their one hot meal and march back to the lines and rotate again.
As I said, we didn’t get relieved till two weeks into the battle. We were in back of the lines for only five hours. Five stinking hours, after fourteen days of constant battle. The unit that replaced us were green and it began losing all the ground we had gained, so ... after five hours we had to march back to Belleau Wood and continue the fight.
Baltimore
WHEN I HAD finished, I couldn’t tell whether Gideon was entranced or horrified. I did something then I had never done before. I always wore a high-necked undershirt to hide my wound, even when I went swimming. No one had ever seen it but Simone and my doctor. I took my shirt and undertop off and showed it to him. It was a hideous scar filled with little black