The trucks carried us as far as they could go.

Then into the Argonne we marched, in the middle of the night. The American Division was still retreating; they had broken; other soldiers were needed. I was back with the Infantry, and Frank Felbel, a little Jew, was Commander of my company. He was shy. He spoke of art and the opera. I knew little about such subjects and was not very responsive.

War was tearing Frank's nerves. As we marched on, we heard a rattling of equipment. Men were rushing toward us. It was black dark. I yelled at them to stop. They came on, and we threw down two Chau-Chau rifles, little antique French machine guns, and told them we would kill them if they came further, for we thought it was a German trick.

We let one man come up.

"Oh sir, they are killing us," the poor fellow cried. "Out there today I saw six men, crucified upon trees, even as our Lord Jesus was crucified upon the cross. . . ."

"Maverick," said Felbel, interjecting, like a professor, "Did you ever read Le Bon's Psychology of War?

I knew immediately they were Americans and let them rattle by.

"Christ!" I yelled angrily at Frank, "What the hell is this Psychology of War business?"

"War hysteria often causes. . . ."

"Shut. . . ."

A great shrieking noise came, then a dull explosion. Gas! Gas! We put on our gas masks. Soon we marched on, holding hands and marching single file. I stumbled. It was on the body of a dead man. I could see nothing. We were getting lost. I took off my mask. The dead man stunk, and he was soft and rotting and slippery.

We took our position on the line. It was near the village of Exermont. We had orders to attack in the morning. At the last moment the orders were cancelled, because our artillery had failed to move up. It was joyful news, and the sun rose, the rain stopped, and the sky came bright and blue. It was still. Looking out, we saw a clean field. There was no gun fire. A single blade of wheat stood a few feet from me. Zing! A bullet hit it; it broke in the middle, and the stalk fell over. A shell burst close by. It killed one man, and tore a leg and two arms from another. Another shell. I was buried in dirt. It seemed quite funny. I said to myself: "I will not move. I may fall to pieces." But I was not even touched.

Here we stayed, for four days.

October 4, we attacked. Five thirty-five in the morning was the "H" hour. It was thick black dark.

Just before the attack, up and down the lines you could hear the American Lieutenants yelling "God damn it, don't you know we're going over the top at five thirty-five?" On the German side there was an empty silence, a vacuum. We began to think that they had retreated.

Working through some barbed wire, little ditches and mudholes, we were in proper line to advance under our own barrage at the minute of five thirty-five. We started, but the Germans were there. We had reckoned without a German rear-guard action. And no doubt they had heard us telling our men to get ready.

They were soldiers who had trained four years at the front. They had left their lines checkerboarded with machine guns, had left their men in the rear to fight to the death, and had slowly moved out of the heavy masses of troops. Most of us who were young American officers knew little of actual warfare—we had the daring, but not the training of the old officer of the front. The Germans simply waited, and then laid a barrage of steel and fire. And the machine gunners poured it on us.

Our company numbered two hundred men. Within a few minutes, about half of them were either dead or wounded. Felbel was killed outright, and I did not even see his body. A runner came to me and told me he had been killed. I took command of the company. There was not a single sergeant. The last sergeant had been sent back to the officers' training school.

The four platoons were under three corporals and one private, Quinn, whom we had not yet had time to promote, since he had actually deserted from the army—the rear—and had joined us at the front.

At this moment of five thirty-five everything happened that never happens in the story books of war. We literally lost each other. There were no bugles, no flags, no drums, and as far as we knew, no heroes. The great noise was like great stillness, everything seemed blotted out. We hardly knew where the Germans were. We were simply in a big black spot with streaks of screaming red and yellow, with roaring giants in the sky tearing and whirling and roaring.

I have never read in any military history a description of the high explosives that break overhead. There is a great swishing scream, a smash-bang, and it seems to tear everything loose from you. The intensity of it simply enters your heart and brain, and tears every nerve to pieces.

In the darkness we went ahead. I had a walking cane so I could feel ahead of me and avoid the ditches and barbed wire. But it didn't save me. When we came to a ditch, I fell into the water anyway. On the other side, I drew my men up in formation. Then we flanged out, moving slowly, very slowly, in the attack, but it was nothing like what we had been taught in the military schools or in training camps.

Immediately in front, the Germans threw up beautifully colored pyrotechnics. This, with the bursting of the shells, revealed us now and then as in broad daylight.

Although so many men had been killed, there was nothing to do but to keep on going. But the horror of the thing began to appall me. I remember very distinctly that I held my head down a bit, figuring that a bullet would bounce off the steel helmet—which I thought I was wearing.

Then I figured that at that particular angle if one hit on my chin it would tear my chin off and leave me disfigured for the rest of my life. Then holding my head up, I began thinking that it would hit me and knock all of my teeth out, and probably my eyes, and make me blind. Undoubtedly I was a very selfish soldier, and that was no way for a young man to behave who had listened to the bands play back on the parade ground in Texas.

I suddenly realized that I had no steel helmet at all. I had perhaps lost it during the night, in an excursion with Felbel near the German lines. I had been wearing the helmet on top of my overseas cap, and it slipped off without my feeling it. But this was no time to be worrying about hats.

We had to advance. And in front were dense growths of trees, and barbed wire to keep us from going farther. There was a lane down the middle, and no other way to go ahead. Dead men lay along the lane, all Americans. I felt sure that there was a German machine gun on the other side. I did not want to go through that lane. But the men began to waver a little and I figured it would not be right for me to lay down or stop, so I moved ahead.

Suddenly it came to me as a great enormous, world-covering joke. There we were, human beings killing each other by the dozens, by the thousands, by the millions. A shell burst . . . a shell burst . . . something slashed off the top of my finger, and a little blood trickled down. I looked at it. I felt my head, worried about the helmet I had lost.

I said to myself: "This is one of the finest dilemmas I have ever been in. I must go through that lane, call for my men if I don't get killed and get a hat. I need a hat. I need a hat." So I started on through the lane, and reached down and borrowed a hat from a poor fellow who had no further use for it. But it didn't fit. It was much too small.

"I'll find a bigger one," I said to myself. I got through the lane, and my men came through too, without being killed. Then I looked on the battlefield for a hat to fit my seven and five-eights head, and tried several, and found one. So, with a new head-piece, I reformed my lines. On the other side of the open space I found, as I had suspected, a German machine-gun nest. But the Germans were dead; one of them was hanging over his gun.

Here I saw an explanation of the old time war lie of Germans being "chained to their guns." I found one who had fallen dead over his gun. He had placed a chain around his back in order to keep from vibrating the gun, or rather for the purpose of holding the gun in place. I saw one or two other instances of that as I went on, but I have since corroborated the fact that no German was ever chained by his officers to a gun to make him fight.

We started to advance again. A shell burst above my head. It tore out a piece of my shoulder blade and collar bone and knocked me down. It was a terrific blow, but I was not unconscious. I think it was the bursting of the shell, the air concussion which knocked me down, and not the shell itself. It was not five seconds, it seemed, before a Medical Corps man was dressing my wounds. He cut my coat away from the wound and wrapped up my shoulder in such a way that it would not bleed too much. As he lifted me from the ground, I looked at my four runners, and I saw that the two in the middle had been cut down to a pile of horrid red guts and blood and meat, while the two men on the outside had been cut up somewhat less badly, but no less fatally.

It reminded me of nothing I had ever seen before, except Christmas hog butchering back on the Texas farm. The only difference was that the hog butchering was done methodically, and the liver and lights and hearts were properly saved. In other words, the hog butchering was relatively humane. My orderly, Viateur Baudoin, Maine French-Canadian, was bending over me. Also, I saw a Red Cross on the arm of the Medical Man. Felbel was dead, and there was no officer to take my place. I got up and re-formed the lines again. I collected four more runners, and started out once more.

We kept going for an hour or more. But I was losing so much blood that I was getting weak, and I fell down once in awhile. I could carry on no longer, so I turned the command over to Quinn. He is the private that deserted, and who incidently deserves a book to himself. He was one of the few men I saw who really liked blood-soldiering. Having been a sergeant in the cavalry, he got bored, was busted for drunkness—deserted, and joined us where death was straight in front of him. Behind the lines he had been the army's best crap-shooter. At the front, he was the army's best soldier.

He took command of the company. Leaving the field, I was forced to walk slowly. Suddenly I found I had been walking around in circles. For in clear view ahead, was a German machine-gun nest. I had circled back into the German lines.

I was wearing only my breeches and shoes. My undershirt had been cut off and the torn blouse had been thrown over me like a cape. Because of the wound, my left arm was useless. But I had an automatic in my right hand. I decided to get heroic and kill a couple of Germans. There were six or seven of them.

Their helmets stuck up a little above the smoke on the battlefield. The place where I stood had been thoroughly shelled and was still being shelled. There was no wind, and the smoke lay close to the ground. As I remember it, one of the Germans was standing, but the others were close down, and plugging away. So I thought it would be a swell idea to take a crack at them. I cocked my pistol and got ready.

But I realized that my automatic pistol would not even reach them. They were out of my range. But I was in the range of their machine gun; if I had shot, they would have heard the pistol, turned, and knocked me off. So a spirit of good humour, or good sense, came over me.

It was then I remembered the words of Captain Bill Tobin, Fire Chief of the great city of San Antonio, who came to me as I left for France, and said with a solemn face: "My son, remember this: 'It is better to be a live son-of-a bitch than a dead hero.'" And so I turned around. It was the smartest thing I ever did in the war.

But just as I turned, another shell burst, and I was knocked flat and unconscious. I woke up, and saw American machine gunners coming up with their guns. I called out, and asked for help on my wounds. They were not much interested, but I pointed to several dead soldiers, who had their bandage packets on their belts. They tore them off, and bandaged me. But I was just another bleeding soldier to them and they were irritated at postponing the shooting for nursing, but I demanded attention and got it.

Then with a stick one of them gave me, I started walking over the hill. A sort of woozy, funny feeling come upon me. I kept getting weaker as I went on. The pads which were on me got soppier, and every now and then I could feel a little warm blood trickling down my cold flesh. The weather was cool.

I will never forget the French batteries as I walked up these hills. They were shooting over my head. The Frenchmen ran out and helped me up the hill and they made me sit down by a battery and gave me some red wine and a little shot of cognac. I passed the French batteries. American troops began coming up. Here and there I got along by sliding down one side of a ditch and crawling up the other.

It was then I saw two deserters standing behind a lone tree. I yelled at them, and asked what they were doing. They came out, both with pistols on their belts, and said that a shell had burst and broken the breathing tubes of their gas masks. I saw the holes and apparently they were cut with knives. There was nothing the matter with those two. They were not wounded, and ought to have been at the front. I conceived the idea that they would just as soon kill me as not, and if they had, nobody would have known the difference. They stated very positively that they were not going up to the front to be killed.

I suppose by then that I had the mind of a wolf with no thought but survival. So I thought up the dirtiest, meanest scheme that I ever conceived in my life. I said to them: "I am very weak and I wish you would help me along." If I had ordered them to the front they would probably have killed me, because my first suggestion to that effect had not been taken very warmly.

There was no reason why they should assist me to the road. But they were not going to the front, and I thought I might use them, to save myself from kicking the bucket. I was staggering around, losing more blood, and getting weaker. As for the deserters, I had an idea that some combat unit would pick them up anyway—or I could just turn them over—which I later did, and thought no more of it.

I finally got to the field hospital. I passed out, and don't remember what happened for a time, except in a vague sort of way. But when I did wake up it was to open my eyes in a great tent, an emergency tent. The Germans were shelling the place, and stone from a house nearby would occasionally fall on the tent. Soon I was taken on my stretcher to the courtyard, and transferred to an ambulance.

Roaring out, we came to an ammunition dump which was burning and popping. It was by the side of the road. "Shall I take a chance and rush by the dump?" yelled the driver. "Hell, yes," the four of us in the ambulance yelled back, "take a chance."

When I came to from the operation I was in a ward for the severe cases. I was vomiting something that smelled like ether. There were ten of us, three Germans, seven Americans. A German, quite close to me, had most of his face shot out. He would sip a little milk. But the blood would trickle down into his stomach and he would puke blood and milk. From him I first learned of old age pensions and social insurance. He said they had been started under Bismarck. It was very difficult for him to talk, but he spoke English.

"If I do not die," he said, "I will take a long vacation and get well. The surgeons are now great. They make new faces." I saw a twinkle in his eye.

"I will visit my brother in Milwaukee." He continued: "Will you tell him for me that I shall soon visit?" But within an hour, with horrible paroxysms, he died.