April 28, 1918 - Don Martin depicts American soldiers' exasperation with 'patient warfare'

Don Martin diary entry for Sunday, April 28, 1918: 

Almost within sight of German lines and within hearing of guns, I saw on a plateau overlooking Boucq and a wide valley, a French General decorate the 104 Regiment (Massachusetts) and give Croix de Guerre to 117 members of the regiment for gallantry at Apremont on April 10, 11 and 12. It was a splendid spectacle. Cabled short story to N.Y.; sent long story to Paris. First American regiment to be thus decorated. Had about a two mile uphill walk to scene but it was worth it. Went over with Gregg [St. Louis World] and [F. J.] Taylor [United Press].

German Picardy offensive lessening in intensity.

Weather warm but wet.

        Don Martin, using his personal interactions with soldiers, depicted their exasperation with 'patient warfare', in  an extended dispatch dated Sunday, April 28. It was published in the New York Herald on Monday, April 29, 1918.

“TEXAS RED” SYMBOLIZES DESIRE OF AMERICANS FOR MORE ACTION

Men in Pershing Force Want Fight 
Where They Can “Lick or Be Licked.”

TROOPERS RESTLESS AT SLOW WARFARE

But They Take Careful Instruction 
for Trench Duty Just the Same

By DON MARTIN

[Special cable to the Herald]

WITH THE AMERICAN ARMY IN FRANCE, Sunday

          “This is no kind of war for me,” said Texas Red. “Down home I can lick any three men in the county—but here I’ll probably get croaked by some insignificant little Heine I could step on and kill, and I’ll never see him at that.”

           “The kind of war I’d like to go to is where you go out and meet your man fair and square and lick him or be licked. You never know here whether something is going to happen or not. When you think something probably is, probably doesn’t. When you think something probably isn’t, it probably does, and there you are. The chances are you may be just starting a game of seven up with a bunch when a shell comes along an’ busts up the whole party. Maybe one o’ the boys is singing one o’ those good old ‘Some Poor Ol’ Mother’ songs when a whizz bang lifts the lid off your dugout. Maybe you’re walking around for air five miles back o’ the line. A shell probably won’t hit you, but then, again, maybe it will.

           “An’ the worst of it is gettin’ shot up or killed when nothing particular is doing. A fellow wouldn’t mind going around all his life with one leg or one arm or none at all if he could say he got winged at a Waterloo, a Sedan, a Marne or a Ypres, but most of the shot-up boys get it when there was nothing going on at all. I can’t say I like this sort of fighting. We never did things like that in Texas.”

           I was talking with Texas Red in a small town which at the moment was being shelled.

           “Did you bring anything to drink?” asked Texas Red.

           “Sorry, we didn’t.”

           “That’s hell—me an’ the colonel here all alone, being shelled and not a drop to drink.”

Red “Pals” With Colonel

           The particular town was wiped off the landscape a few days later. Red is still around shedding philosophic wisdom, and throwing a little sunshine into the life of the Colonel, whose particular cronies these days are Red and a Bluegrass mare named Sal. Sal, by the way, can tell a gas shell from a “crump” every time, and there are plenty of soldiers who can’t. Like Red, Sal won’t leave a shell swept town unless the Colonel leaves. 

           Red summed it up pretty well. It is a war of waiting and unexpected happenings. It has wrought a complete change in the American’s idea of war. The successful soldier is not now the man who can wave his sword with a “Come on, boys!” and sweep across the parapet of his foe’s embattlements. True, that happens once in a while, but the successful soldier is the boy who can sit patiently in the dugout or trench day in and night out, knowing that death hovers over him every second, and that he may be killed, and never see a Boche. The American hasn’t had his turn yet at the patient warfare which has taken place along the line for going on four years. He already has demonstrated that in a dash and a swift conflict, man to man, he is the equal of any soldier in Europe. But what he will do when it comes to waiting, waiting, waiting, in a wet, smelly, possibly vermin lined, trench and dugout, has yet to be demonstrated.   

           I have seen the Americans at every point along the line. I saw them in a battery wearing gas masks, when shells were falling all about them. They were told to go into the dugout near by if they wished. A dugout is perfectly safe unless a large shell strikes directly over it; then the thing may collapse. These particular men said they preferred to stay where they were, giving the Boche shell for shell, and they did. Not one was hurt.  

Take Places With Veterans

           While the firing was hottest, a half dozen Americans came through the danger zone with ammunition. There is nothing remarkable about this. The French and the British have been doing it for years. But, nevertheless, it is worth noting that the young Americans who were brought up to believe that war would never come are taking their places with the bravest veterans of the great world war and are making but one complaint—that they are not permitted to get into the veritable maelstrom where they can match their prowess with that of the enemy.

           Exuberance is a manifestation one would hardly look for on a cold, rainy, windy day in France, with the sticky mud an inch deep. Yet it is to be seen among the American soldiers when they read that General Pershing had offered the American army in France to General Foch to be used as he saw fit. The idea of being used to hold the line far from the spot where the fate of the world was hanging in the balance depressed the Americans.

           And so when they heard again that they might be used in the great battle they smiled despite the cold and the rain. In a little town in Northern France I saw 600 trucks roll through on their way to somewhere. Each was filled either with American soldiers or supplies for the division.

           “How long have you been traveling?” I asked one of a group stuffed in a ponderous motor van.

           “Forty hours, and wet to the hide,” was the quick but sprightly reply.

           “War is hell, isn’t it?”

           “Surest thing you know, but we’re on our way to the front, so what do we care?”

           As the big vehicle lumbered on its way a dozen American heads, each topped with an iron helmet, stuck from the rear, and from the inside came a chorus singing “We’re here because we’re here, because we’re here, because we’re here.”

           Then, “So long, ol’ top. Give our regards to Broadway.”

Moving in Mud All Night

           A little later an American battery jarred along the muddy roadway. Then men on horseback—or muleback—were clad in iron helmets, raincoats, puttees and heavy shoes, and were drenched. All night they had been moving along an inky black road in a driving rainstorm.

           “Where are you going?” I asked a young chap, who said he was a clerk in a New England post office.

           “Search me, but I hope it’s up to where there’s something doing.”

           “If you get where the big drive is going on you may never come back,” I observed, with a consoling smile.

           “Nothing to that. What’d we come over here for—to take part in reviews or to fight?”

           The battery stopped on its way through a town. A rosy cheeked youngster, the pupil of other Americans, stepped to the curb and saluted. Only three and a half years old, he made an impression on the Americans. One of them got off his horse, picked the youngster up and put him on the animal’s back. A ride up the street and back delighted the youngster and seemed also to have pleased the horse, which stuck his nose out to be petted by the little boy.

           “Great horse this,” said the soldier, a lad from Nebraska. “He likes children better’n I do, an’ that’s goin’ some. Too bad, though, the poor animal’s got the mange. We’ve been in the trenches fifty-four days and it couldn’t be helped. Finest horse I ever owned, but I guess he’s about finished.”

           Sleeping in the trucks or on their horses’ backs, resting as best they could on the machine gun trucks and taking their meals on the go, these Americans were having a little touch of the actual hardship of war. But they were not discouraged. They are only sorry that they have not been a more vital factor in the great war which started on its most furious phase late in March.

Learn as Apprentices Must

            The men realize that they are an almost infinitesimal factor to date, but they know that, man for man, they can do their part. They have learned many things. They have found that the soldier of to-day must serve his apprenticeship just as a mechanic or a bricklayer must. Because a man can shoot straight and lick “his weight in wildcats” doesn’t mean that he will be a good soldier. To be an effective part of an army in these days a man must take a course in training and then a post graduate course. If he steps into the line before he knows all about gas, about grenades, about trench bombs, about the best ways to guard against shell attacks, he is as useless as a baby. But the Americans who came over here last summer know all these things now.

           They have not come in contact with the British. Their instructors and their side companions have been the French. Many French officers have told me that the American physique and adaptability excels any other soldier in Europe, but an army of a few hundred thousand men is of no more importance in these days of gigantic warfare than one hundred men would have been in an attack on the Army of the Potomac.

           The stupendousness of the present war has been deeply impressed upon the mind of the Americans. It was borne in on them with particular emphasis when, at the beginning of the great Hun attack south of Cambrai, the French, through one ordinarily quiet section of France, moved in forty-eight hours more men and supplies than America has in all Europe. And this in view of the fact that the major portion of the French army already was in the neighborhood of the section where the drive was going on.

           The French everywhere have the highest admiration for the Americans. They believe they will save Europe from the ravages of the Hun, but they believe that before the turn in the tide has definitely set in the drain on French manhood will be enormous. They are reconciled even to that.