Don Martin diary entry for Sunday, August 4, 1918:
Bad day so I stayed in. Wasn’t feeling very
well anyhow – liver out of order due to missing luncheon so much and getting
bad food in Meaux. Wrote nothing for New York. Allied advance temporarily held
up at the Vesle although that tiny river has been crossed at many points.
Tonight next to my room they are having a riotous party – Robert Collier, two
of his writers, James Hopper and McNutt; Cameron Mackenzie, Forest of the
Tribune and Ray Carroll. Correspondents trying to get the censors to move
somewhere nearer the front. The censors will probably do so when they find a
town which contains a magnificent chateau for their use.
Don Martin wrote a long letter to Dorothy on August 4, saying it was a “family letter” and “all that about the war is for the
grown-ups.” Here are excerpts including what he wrote about the war.
Meaux, Sunday, August 4, 1918
Dorothy:
...
I judge from letters I receive that [my material] is being printed in many
other cities [besides New York]. You see the Herald has a syndicate and what it
prints the papers belonging to the syndicate publish also. I get letters from
people asking about their sons or brothers and from old friends whom I had
almost forgotten saying that they enjoy reading my articles. Then I get letters
also from people in France – French people whom I do not know – congratulating
me on what I write. The things I print in the Paris Herald are frequently
copied by many Parisian papers and by papers published all over France.
I
am wondering if Nenette and Rintintin have reached you. I’ll bet you don’t know
who Nenette and Rintintin are. I don’t exactly know either. They are supposed
to be guardians of safety against air bombs. They are no good if one buys them
for himself or herself but if someone presents them to you and you carry them,
or hang them over your bed, bombs will never get you. Of course it is just a
superstition but it is remarkable how seriously the people of France take it.
The woman who runs this hotel where I live gave each of the correspondents a
pair. Then someone else whom I do not know mailed me a pair. You see them –
tiny little silk things – hanging to the coat sleeve of French officers – not
all of them of course – and dangling from the back of camions (automobile
trucks) or swinging from the roof of automobiles. They are all sizes and colors.
...
...
I enjoy seeing the French children play with their dolls. I saw a little girl,
very poorly dressed, sitting in front of her little stone home the other day
holding a very ragged doll in her arms and rocking a much worn tiny cradle in
which was another soiled doll, singing away ...
The
war is going along pretty well just now for the allies. We were all surprised
at the extent of the German retreat and the vigor of the allied attack. The
great importance of the present situation is, not the territory regained, but
the placing of the Germans on the defensive. Now the allies have the
initiative. The Germans must be guessing all the time at the next move. It has
always been the other way. General Foch’s and General Petain’s skill as
strategists, backed by the American troops made the allied offensive possible.
The German now has been outgeneraled and out fought. The French did the
outgeneraling; the Americans most strikingly did the outfighting.
But
it must not be thought that the Americans did the brunt of it. Here is about
the way the force was divided. Eighty percent of the entire attacking army are
French and the other twenty percent British and American. So you see it is
still the French fighting for everyone. She could not have done so however were
it not for the constantly increasing number of Americans arriving at the front.
Had she made an offensive and been successful, which she could possibly have
done, she would have used up her reserves and made herself easy prey for
Germany in a few months. But Americans take the place of the reserves.
The
Americans are by far the most wonderful fighters in Europe, No exception need
be made. They are all young men who don’t know what it means to turn back. They
may be reckless. We may suffer heavy losses because of the impetuosity of the
Americans; but it is that “get there or die” spirit and the utter lack of fear,
which has temporarily stunned the Germans and which will win the war. Europe
never saw fighting such as the Americans are putting up. Perhaps Napoleon’s Old
Guard was good but certainly no better than the Americans. Now Germany stands
no more chance of winning the war than I do of being President of France. Her
teeth have been pulled. On the defensive she can fight for years if necessary,
and fight a desperate war, but the crest of her wave has been passed. She is
bound to slip, slip, and slip until she is defeated. And America has made it
possible!
We
have a vast army here now and a vast army ready to fight. Along the roads in a
part of the front now there are more American’s to be seen than anything else.
I ask many of them where they are from. One says Alabama, one Arizona,
Missouri, Michigan, Florida, New York, Ohio, Wyoming – or they come from every
state and all look alike somehow.
Yesterday afternoon, on a hill
overlooking the town of Cierges, I saw 56 Americans buried in a big grave.
Strangely enough a German clergyman from Milwaukee, conducted the ceremony. Of
course he is an American and I judge from what he said, a very good one. These
men were killed by machine gun while capturing a woods where the Germans were
strongly intrenched. I wrote quite a story about the fight for the woods. On
the field adjoining I saw dead Huns all over; in the woods there were scores of
them. Around a little farm of ten acres, known as Bellevue Farm, I counted 72
dead Germans in a trench and could have counted more than a hundred in a quarry
nearby if I had cared to do so. I was there the day after the battle occurred.
The farm house was banged all to pieces but the old couple (I mentioned them in
a story I wrote last night) were back trying to do something with the ruin. I
could not help but feel that it is a fine thing to have someone come in and use
your house and farm for a battlefield. I went along the entire wake of the
retreating Germans; saw the fires at night, caused by burning ammunition dumps,
and heard the constant booming of our guns which were dropping shells on the
roads over which the fleeing Germans were going. The scene along these roads is
not a pleasant one.
...
I hope the people at home are reconciled to the fact that United States will
pay a heavy price in lives to win the war. It can’t be helped. It seems a
terrible thing but the blame must be put on Germany. And how the Americans hate
the Germans! The spirit runs all through the army. The Germans are tricky and
unfair, as the newspapers have told you. The men at machine guns keep shooting
at the enemy until they see they are bound to be captured, when they put up
their hands and cry “Kamarade,” meaning they want to surrender. One man with a
machine gun can kill or wound from 200 to 1,000 soldiers and the theory of the
Americans is that a German who has done everything he could to murder and then
asks for mercy, should be treated with a bayonet or a rifle bullet – and that
is precisely what happens. The Americans however never disregard any cry of
Kamarade when the soldiers give up in an honorable way. The truth of the whole
situation is the Germans have found a foe that can lick them every time they
meet, and Germany is worried.
From
Dad
Here is the dispatch, dated August 4, referred to in the letter. It was published in the New
York Herald on August 5.
SUPERIOR ARTILLERY WORK AND SPIRIT AND VIGOR OF AMERICAN ATTACK BREAK
THE HUN DEFENCE
Don Martin, Travelling with the Pursuing Army Toward the Aisne, Sees
Abundant Evidence of Skill of Yankee Soldiers in Style of Fighting the Enemy
Adopted—Talks with Civilians Who Already Have Returned to Homes
By DON MARTIN
Special Correspondent
of the Herald with the American Armies in France
[Special Cable to the
Herald]
WITH THE AMERICAN ARMIES IN FRANCE, Sunday
The German hordes have been forced
back by the victorious advance of the allied armies until now they are
retreating across the Vesle. Present indications are that the enemy is in a
worse plight than at first thought. Indeed, so hard are the allied forces
pressing them that they are getting no rest. It is now likely that the enemy
will be compelled to retire all the way to the Aisne River.
Briefly, this means a tremendous
victory for the Allies, one reason for which lies in the fact that their
artillery now is for the first time far superior to that of the Germans. Add to
this the vigor and the vim, the unconquerable spirit, and the determination to
win that the Americans have shown and you will understand the underlying causes
of the defeat that had proved so disastrous to the armies of the German Crown
Prince.
I have just visited the scenes of
the fighting by the Americans in the regions of Cierges, Sergy and Seringes,
where I saw many evidences of the deadliness of the methods employed by our men
when they were fighting in the open and even in the very face of the terrible
fire of the machine guns, which the enemy is more and more bringing into use. I
went over the entire ground where the American troops crossed the sloping field
to capture Cierges Wood.
Debris in Field Pits
In scores of pits dug on the crest
of the hill and commanding the woods I saw many German dead. Overlooking the
village of Cierges I came on more than twenty pits, all of them five feet deep
and at intervals of ten yards, but now they are filled with the wreckage of the
battlefield, with machine guns and with ammunition and with the personal
effects of the Huns who occupied these pits while they pumped a stream of lead
into the advancing lines of the Americans.
It is strange, but it is a fact,
that the Americans lost few in killed here, although many of our men received
wounds. I am glad to say that most of them will recover and, due largely to the
excellent physical condition of all our men and their indomitable spirit, they
soon will be back in the fighting. On the other hand, there was left alive no
German to tell of the fighting here at the edge of the wood.
A quarter of a mile off the Huns
had hundreds of hidden machine guns, some of them were in pits, while others
were concealed with their crews in the brush. Practically every one of them was
wrecked and German dead were piled around them in heaps and lay in the
intervening spaces between their machine gun nests.
Nearly every one of them had stood
his ground until our men were upon them, and the bayonet wounds, gaping wide,
in the bodies of our enemies told how our men had conquered them and won the
day.
I talked to an American chaplain
who saw the fighting from a distance and who went there to-day to bury the few
Americans who were left dead on the field.
In the Face of Death
“Wonderful was the unconquerable
spirit of our men,” he said to me. “They wee told to cross the field here and
they knew that Death soon would play its stream of hate upon them. But they
went ahead with as firm a step as man ever knew, did our boys.”
“Some of them were workers in
lumber forests, others came from every walk of life, but not one of them
flinched under this awful ordeal. They kept going straight ahead and they met
the savage fire of the foe as freemen would meet it, and they at last reached
their goal.
“If we failed before to understand
the very heights to which these noble, unconquerable spirits soared, we now
know it. They were wonderful!”
From there I went to Bellevue Farm,
which also was the scene of viscous fighting. It is just outside Cierges. The
farm consists of ten acres of ground and had a dwelling house, a barn and some
outhouses, all of which are now wrecks of what they once were. A hundred yards
east of where the farmhouse stood is an abandoned quarry which the enemy used
as a nest for his machine guns. He must have had at least fifty of these
instruments of death there, but our men captured most of them before the Huns
could get away, and as I wandered through this place, abandoned by all living
things, I counted seventy-two German dead.
It was with never faltering step
that our men marched upon this old quarry. When the Huns tried to make a stand
back of their guns our men rushed them. They sprang upon the enemy with
bayonets and with rifle butt and in this way did they effectually dispose of
the Boche.
Fighting the Bavarians
Do not imagine that the enemy did
not fight. The German forces in this old quarry were composed of Bavarians, who
are supposed to be as good soldiers as the enemy has in his ranks. Then there
were others of them in the old farmhouse, a hundred yards away, and still
others in a trench seven feet deep and a quarter of a mile long. Here the Huns
waited the coming of our men and when the Americans came in sight the Bavarians
climbed on boxes in their trench and with their rifles blazed away, meanwhile
throwing many hand grenades, as our men plunged into the trench.
The appearance of this trench now
shows what happened to them, when our men came to a hand to hand grapple with
the foe. I saw German dead piled up in three places, where they had come
together to stand united against us. Every German body there bore unmistakable
signs that death had come to him in a hand to hand encounter.
I talked with Private Goodby, of
Wisconsin, who was in this fight, and who told me that the Americans lost not a
single man in the trench. He declared that the Bavarians there were terrified
and that their grenades were bad and went astray. The American troops, he among
them, he added, walked from end to end of the trench, killing every German.
Owner of Farm Sees His Home
The fighting in the vicinity of the
farmhouse was the severest of this battle. While I was there the owner of the
farm, Charles Publier, and his wife, each of them sixty years old, returned to
their old home. He is a stalwart Frenchman whose black, bushy beard and hair
are beginning to be streaked with gray. Both of them looked with amazement at
their home, which they left on June 2. Now there are holes in the walls of the
house—great gaps torn by shells—and the interior seemingly is a hopeless mass
of débris. The walls of the living room were decorated with vulgar German
pictures, although some of them were works of art.
I wondered what their feelings were
to return to their home and find that it had been a battleground. I asked Mr.
Publier what he would do.
“All that I and my wife can do will
be to straighten things up and start all over again,” he said. “Anyway, the
Germans will not come back here, for the Americans are now here and our wheat
is safe. We will begin again tomorrow.”
Such optimism as I found in this
couple as they stood in a scene of desolation wherein their home was wrecked,
their furniture ruined and the walls of their home tottering to their fall was
most amazing. Mrs. Publier stared at it all in dismay, for she could not decide
where first to begin her work of restoration. With fortitude and magnificent
courage as last she declared that they would find somewhere and somehow a place
to sleep.
Within a stone’s throw of the house
were more than a hundred German dead. As Mr. and Mrs. Publier picked their way
through the shell torn field to their old home a fox terrier sprang from the
ruins and ran, yelping with joy, to them. He frolicked around them and jumped
up against them out of very joy to see them.
“He belonged to our neighbors,”
Mrs. Publier told me, “and now he is gad to see us. He remained here while the
Germans held this place. Good dog, we will keep you now.”
The terrier almost leaped to the
shoulders of the aged couple, and all the time I was with them he continued to
leap up at them and to run around in his expression of wildest joy at their
return.
In Cierges Wood I saw many trees
which the Germans had used as machine gun nests. Boards had been placed in the
crotches of the branches and I saw many leather straps which evidently had been
used by the machine gunners to hold themselves in the trees. The straps were
dangling from the limbs and tree trunks, having been shot away by the
Americans’ rifle bullets. I saw twenty such trees where this kind of rifle
shooting by our men was in evidence, and under each of them there was one or
two dead Boches.
Under a tree on the slope near
Cierges I saw the bodies of eight German soldiers and one German officer. Five
of them had been killed by rifle shots and four of them had died by the
bayonet. All of them had operated machine guns in a pit which had been
especially constructed with a view to harassing the Americans while they were
fighting to obtain possession of Cierges Wood, a thousand yards away. The
German dead tell the tale of the fighting in this region.
South and east of Fere-en-Tardenois
the Germans built a narrow gauge railroad to transport ammunition and war material
to the forces southward of that place. Also they carried with them the material
necessary to extend the line. Of this construction material twenty carloads of
ties and rails remained on the ground and fell into our hands. It now is
evident that the Germans intended to make this region the base for a large
operation.
The retreating foe now is taking
food at every village through which he passes. In the village of Cohan there is
a French woman eighty years old whom I called on to-day. She had remained in the
village constantly while it was in the zone of the fighting. First the village
was shelled by the Germans and afterward by the Americans. She told me that she
was safe from the shells and fairly comfortable in the cellar of her home. The
Germans started to go north eight days ago, she said, and last Thursday they
took all the food there was in the place, including hers. When the Americans
reached the place she was hungry. At once she became the centre of a
sympathetic group of our men, all of them offering her money, food and
everything that she might need.
And here is the article dated August 4 written for Paris and published in the Paris
Herald on August 5.
Americans Met With Very Slight Resistance in Final Dash to Vesle
Proof of Enemy’s
Precipitate Flight Is Seen in Abandoned Villages—Congressmen Visit
Front and See War at Close Quarters in Danger Zone
(Special Telegram to the Herald)
By Don Martin
With The American Armies, Sunday.
Pausing to take stock and learn
something of the intentions of the enemy for the immediate future, Americans
with the French on both sides of them halted to-day in their trek north after
the retreating Huns.
The advance of the Allies has
temporarily stopped, but it is due not to any resistance of the Germans, but to
the fact that caution must be exercised in so extensive an advance as the
Allies have made in the last few days.
The Germans were using artillery
last night and to-day, indicating that they intend to make a stand between the
Vesle and the Aisne.
The Vesle is a very narrow river.
In the United States it would be called a creek, and only a small creek too. To
cross the stream itself would be very simple, but the sides of the river are
swampy and marshy for a distance of half a kilometre.
Americans who have kept abreast of
the French met with practically no opposition in the last laps of their dash to
the Vesle. The Germans had very evidently made a swift rush for the river and
in doing so had taken a large part of their equipment and supplies with
them. The fact that the Germans have gone
back to the Vesle is a humiliating defeat for them. They may rally new
divisions after a week or two for a new offensive, but the day has passed when,
as on March 21, they can strike a gigantic blow and force the Allies back
almost at will.
Signs of Precipitous Withdrawal
On a trip through many villages and
small groups of farm buildings along the line of the retreat I found many
evidences of German haste. In some places apparently their dead were hurriedly
buried. In one place which I shall not name the Germans had buried their dead
in a French cemetery and had taken the floral decorations from the French
resting places and placed them on their own.
In a little town there is an
elderly woman who stayed in her home all through the bombardment of the place
both by the Germans and later by the French. She was sitting in front of her
partly demolished home yesterday when an American asked her if she were not
afraid. Shells were then dropping in one end of the village and nearly everyone
was hurrying to cover. She said she was not afraid.
“Didn’t you live in the cellar
while the heavy shelling was going on?” the American asked her.
“Oh, no,” she replied. “Cellars are
damp and cold and unhealthy.”
German signs forbidding the use of
drinking water at certain troughs showing the direction to their various
headquarters are to be seen in scores of villages and hamlets.
Congressmen J. B. Thompson and T.
A. Chandler, of Oklahoma; Senator W. H. Thompson and his secretary, Mr. S. A.
Luttrell, visited the American front to-day with an American lieutenant who occasionally
accompanies visitors. They are eager to see everything it is possible to see.
The distinguished visitors went within a mile of the German line. They had a
box déjeuner under trees while shells were breaking a few hundred feet away,
and they saw American infantry advancing in skirmish formation toward a spot
where Germans were thought to be. They were in the danger zone much of the day.
Congressman Thompson said on this point:--
“I guess if good American boys can
go out there and fight for their country, American Congressmen ought to be
brave enough to go and take a chance.”
Four dispatches were published in the New York
Herald on Sunday, August 4, 1918 under a banner headline “WITH DON MARTIN AT THE AMERICAN ARMY’S FRONT IN
FRANCE.” Two
of these were included in the posting on July 12, and one each on July 15 and
16.
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