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Show The War at Clot Range Described in a Re- r- markabU Series by an Officer of the Mar turn f Editor's Note: This story Is a cross section of the war. As Captain Thomason Is a marine officer, naturally natur-ally the actual names, dates, and places mentioned will bear a definite relation to marine activities In France; there is no Intention, however, how-ever, to overshadow the rest of the fighting American units. This story Is a Marine story, because the author Is only familiar with the combat experiences ex-periences of his own men but every doughboy who saw service in the war will recognize these experiences and encounters as similar to his own. INTRODUCTION Seven years after the war, across the world from France, I met a major of the American general staff, who was on the Paris-Metx road that last week in May, 1918, and saw the boys going In. "They looked fine, coming In there," he said. "Tall fellows, healthy and fit they looked hard and competent. We watched you going In. through those little tired Frenchmen, and we all felt better. We knew something was going to happen " and we were silent over Chilean wine, In a place on the South Pacific, thinking of those days and those men. . . . There Is no sight in all the pageant pag-eant of war like young, trained men going to battle. The columns look solid and businesslike. Each battalion Is an entity, 1.20C men of one purpose. They go on like a river that flows very deep and strong. Uniforms are drab these days, but there are points of light on the helmets and the bayonets, bayo-nets, and light In the quick, steady eyes and the brown young faces, greatly daring. There Is no singing veterans know, and they do not sing much and there is no excitement at all ; they are schooled craftsmen, going up to Impose their will, with the tools of their trade, on another lot of fellows; and there Is nothing to make a fuss about. Battles are not salubrious places, and every file knows that a great many more are going In than will come out again but that is along with the job. And they have no illusions about the job. There Is nothing particularly glorious glori-ous about sweaty fellows, laden with killing tools, going along to fight. And yet such a column represents a' great deal more than 28.000 individuals mustered Into a division. All that Is behind those men is in that column, too: the old battles, long forgotten, that secured our nation Brandywlne and Trenton and Yorktown, San Jacinto and Chapultepee, Gettysburg, Chickamauga. Antietam, El Caney; scores of skirmishes nearly every year in which a man can be killed as dead as ever a 1 chap was in the Argonne; traditions of tilings endured and things accomplished, such as regiments reg-iments hand down forever; and the faith of men and the love of women ; and that abstract thing called patriot-Ism, patriot-Ism, which I never heard combat soldiers sol-diers mention all this passes into the forward zone, to the point of contact, where war Is girt with horrors. And common men endure these horrors and overcome them, along with the Insistent yearnings of the belly and the reasonable promptings of fear; and in this, I think, Is glory. They tell the tale of an American lady of notable good works, much esteemed es-teemed by the French, who, at the end of June, 1918, visited one of the field - hospitals behind Degoutte's Sixth French army. Degoutte was ngnting on uie lace oi me .uurne sui-leut sui-leut and the second American division, then In action around the Bols de Belleau, northwest of Chateau Thierry, was under his orders. It happened hap-pened that occasional casualties of the Marine brigade of the Second American division, wounded toward tlie flank where Degoutte's own horizon-blue infantry joined on. were picked up by French stretcher bearers bear-ers and evacuated to French hospitals. And this lady, looking down a long, crowded ward, saw on a pillow a face unlike the fiercely whiskered Gallic heads there displayed in rows. "Oh," she said, "surely you are an American !" "No. ma'am." tlie casualty answered. an-swered. "I'm a marine." The men who marched up the Paris-Metz Paris-Metz road to meet the Boche in that spring of 1918. tlie I'if'h and Sixth reiriincnts of United States marines, were gathered from various places. In the big war companies. 2."0 strung, I you could find every sort of man. I from every sort of call inn. There were northwpsterners with Traw-col- nred hair that looked white against J their tanned skins, ami delicati-ly i spoken chaps with the stamp of tiie I eastern universities on them. There ; were large-boned fellows from Pacific coast lumber camps, and tall, lean j southerners who swore amjzincly In centle. drawling voices. There were j hi:sky farmers from the corn-belt, and ; youngsters who had sprung, as It j wre. to arms from the necktie c.icn-I c.icn-I ter. And there were a!s a niKnher i of diverse peopie who ran curi.uisly . to typo, wiili drilled shoulders and a J bone-deep sunburn, and a tolerant scorn for nearly everything on earth, j "rheir speech was flavored with n:'vy i words, and words cul'ed from all tli."1 j folk who live on tlie seas and tlie j ports here our warships g . In easy j hours their talk ran from the Tartar i wall beyond Pekin to tlie southern Islands, down under Manila ; from J Portsmouth Navy yard New Hamp-1 Hamp-1 riire ano very cold to obscure bush- n a .-kin 3 in the West Indies, where CapL JOHN W. THOMASON, Jr. OfcuJ W U. fna SUcki bit m at hoUfeU) & br th BeU Smdlemt. Inc.) Cacao chiefs, -whimsically sanguinary, barefoot generals with names like Charlemagne and Chrlstophe, waged war according to the precepts of the French revolution and the Cult of the Snake. They drank the eau de vie of Haute-Marne, and reminisced on sakl, and vino, and Bacardi rum strange drinks In strange enntinas at the far ends of the earth ; and they spoke fondly of Milwaukee beer. Rifles were high and holy things to them ; they also talked patronizingly of the war, and were concerned about rations. They were the Leathernecks, the Old Timers; collected from ship's guards and shore stations all over the earth to form the Fourth brigade of marines, ma-rines, the two rifle regiments, detached from the navy by order of the President Presi-dent for service with the American Expeditionary Forces. They were the old breed of American regular, regarding re-garding the service as home and war as an occupation ; and they transmitted transmit-ted their temper and character and viewpoint to the high-hearted volunteer volun-teer mass which filled the ranks of the Marine brigade. It Is a pleasure to record that they found good company in the army. The Second Division (United States Regular was the official designation) was composed of the Ninth and Twenty-third Infantry, two old regiments regi-ments with names from all of our wars on their battle-flags, the Second regiment of engineers and engineers are always good and the Twelfth, Fifteenth, and Seventeenth field artillery. artil-lery. It was a division distinguished Going Over. by the quality of dash and animated by an especial pride of service. It carried to a high degree esprit de corps, which some Frenchman has defined de-fined as esteeming your own corps and looking down on all the other corps. And although It paid heavily In casualties for the things It did In five months , about 100 per cent the Second division never lost Its professional pro-fessional character. In 1917, when trained soldiers In the United States were at a premium, the navy offered a brigade of marints for service in France; it was regarded regard-ed desirable for marine officers to have experience In large operations with the army ; for It Is certain that close co-operation between the army and the navy is a necessary thing In these days of far-flung battle lines. The British distress at Gallipoll Is a crying witness to this principle. In a navy transport, therefore. United c-te Shirt Hpnderson. the Fifth rpe- States Ship Henderson, the Fifth regiment reg-iment of marines embarked for France In June, 1917, with the first armed American forces. The Sixth murines followed. The two regiments constituted the Fourth brigade, and served in the Second division. United States Regular, until the division came home, in August, 1919. About :0.000 marines were sent to France; some 14.000 of these went as replacements replace-ments to maintain the two regiments of the Fourth brigade. A brigade musters some 7.500 officers and men ; tills brigade tool; part in some very Interesting events. Hereafter I have written of the marines in the war with Germany; how they went up. and what they did there, and how some of them came out again. Being a marine. I have ' tried to set forth simple tales without comment. It is unnecessary to write what I think of my own people, nor would It be, perhaps, In the best taste. And I have written of marines In this war because they are the folks I know about myself. Those battlefields battle-fields were very large, and a man seldom saw much or very far beyond his own unit, if he had a Job In hand. As a company officer, I always had a Job. There is no Intent to overlook those very gallant gentlemen, our friends, the army. Their story Is ours, too. JOHN W. THOMASON, JR. CHAPTER I Attack,. In the flelcs near Marigny marines of the First Battalion of the Fifth found an amiable cow. There had been nothing in the way of rations that day; there were no prospects. Al! hands took thought and designated I a robust Polish corporal as excutlon-er. excutlon-er. He claimed to have been a butcher In a former existence. He was leading the cow decently away from the road when a long gray car boomed up, hat-ed hat-ed with the touch of swank that Headquarters chauffeurs' always affect, af-fect, and disgorged a very angry colonel. "Lieutenant, what are you doing there " he yelled. , "Sir, you see, the men haven't had anything to eat, and I thought, sir we found this cow wanderin' around we couldn't find any owner we'd like to chip In and buy her we were goin' to " "I see, sir, I see ! You were going to kill tills cow. the property of some worthy French family. Tou will bear in mind, lieutenant, that we are in France to protect the lives and property prop-erty of our allies from the Germans-Release Germans-Release that animal at once! Your rations will be distributed as soon as possible carry on " The colonel departed, de-parted, and four or five 77s crashed into a little wood two hundred yards up the road. There were more shells in the same place "Hi ! Brother Boche must think there's a battery over there!" "Well, there ain't " the marines ma-rines sat down In the wheat and observed ob-served the cow. abandoned by a vanished van-ished French family. "I was a quartermaster sergeant once, sir," said the platoon sergeant dreamily. "I remember just what tlie cuts of beef are. There'd be fine sirloin sir-loin on that cow-critter, now. . . . Mr. Ashby (another flight of 77s burst In the wood), if we was to take that cow over an' tie her In that brush she oughten to be out here in the open, anyway might draw fire . . . shell's liable to hit anything, you know, sir " "Sergeant, you heard what the colonel said. But If you think she'd be safer I'd suggest volunteers. And by the way, sergeant, I want a piece of tenderloin the T-bone part " The cow was duly secured In the wood, men risking their lives thereby. there-by. The Boche shelled methodically for two hours, and the marinen were reduced to a fearful state of nerves "Is that dam' heifer gonna live forever? for-ever? " Two of three kilometers away fighting was going on. Tne lieutenant, lieu-tenant, with his glass, picked up far. running figures on the slope of a hill. You caught a flicker, points of light on the gray-green fields baronets. Occasional wounded Frenchmen wandered wan-dered back, weary, bearded men, very dirty. They looked with dull eyes at the Americans "Tres mauvals, Ia-bas Ia-bas ! Beaucoup Boche, la " The ma rines were not especially interested. Their regiment hnd been a year In France, training. Now they, too, were dirty and tired and very hungry. The war would get along ... it always had. A week ago. Memorial day. there had been no drills. The Second Division, Divi-sion, up from a tour in tlie quiet Verdun Ver-dun trenches, rested pleasantly around Bourmont. Rumors of an attack at-tack by tlie First division, nt GatiHg-ny. GatiHg-ny. filtered in. Cantigny was a town up toward Montdidier. Notions of geography geo-graphy were tlie vaguest hut It was in the north, where ull the heavy fighting was. It appeared that the Second was going up to relieve the First. . . . "Sure! we'll relieve 'em. But if they wanted a fight, why didn't they let us know In the first place' We'd a -showed 'em what shock-troops shock-troops can do !" (TO PE CONTINUED.) |