The Family (13 page)

On the evening of April 27, German shells started landing with such deadly accuracy that Captain Quesenberry decided to move his men to a safer position. It was either move or get blown up. Around eight o'clock that night, the men were engaged in digging a new trench in a less exposed position when the shell with the captain's name on it came in. Quesenberry had listened to a thousand shells whistle and detonate—but this one was different.
The shriek was directly overhead; the flash was blinding; the concussive blow immediate, deafening, and suffocating. On contact, the high-explosive shell casing disintegrated into a thousand hot splinters of steel. Some of these splinters tore into Captain Quesenberry's arm and leg.

“We held our position,” wrote Hyman, “but Captain Quesenberry, the idol of our outfit, was hit and severely wounded.”
A soldier with Company K who saw Captain Quesenberry fall testified that “he was taken away in an ambulance and I understand died on the way to the hospital, from loss of blood.”
But Hyman gave a different account:

Four of us carried him into the church basement of the town, which was now a field hospital. We found many of our men lying there waiting for first aid and evacuation. The medics seeing the captain attempted to give him first aid. He refused treatment and ordered the medics, “don't touch me until all my men are treated.”

The army's Graves Registration Service recorded that Captain Quesenberry died of shell wounds on April 28, the day after he was hit. The
twenty-three-year-old captain was buried in the temporary American military cemetery at Bonvillers, though later, at the request of his father, his remains were disinterred and returned home to Las Cruces.

The men of Company K carried on without their beloved captain. For a month they endured ceaseless pounding outside of Cantigny. Then, on the morning of Tuesday, May 28, they were ordered to take the village. It was Hyman's first taste of combat. At the dot of 5:45
A.M.
, the combined French and American artillery opened up with everything they had and blasted away for an hour. When the guns fell silent, whistles shrilled up and down the line and the infantry moved out in waves toward the German stronghold. By 7:20
A.M.
, the Big Red One had taken Cantigny.
The hard part would be fending off the inevitable German attempts to take it back.

Hyman's unit was supposed to form “working and carrying parties” to supply ammunition and water to the units at the front of the assault. Hyman remembered it like this: “Our company was ordered to get to the top of the hill and dig in. Make no advances. Just dig in and defend our position. Our company reached the assigned positions. We lost many of our buddies while digging under fire.” These heavy casualties occurred during the ferocious counterattacks that German forces began mounting around 9
A.M.
—seven counterattacks that went on for two days. Company K's carrying parties made easy targets as they tried to run supplies to the front; their losses mounted quickly.

“We were under continuous fire,” wrote Hyman. “The German Army tried to retake the position, but our regiment held on. Cantigny was ours, and remained so.”

Though it looked like an insignificant knob on the map of the Western Front, Cantigny was a jewel much prized by the German high command because it represented the westernmost point on their line—the deepest they had penetrated into French territory. Paris was a mere seventy miles away. A German victory there would not have significantly altered the course of the war, but it would have dealt a stinging blow to American morale. The First Division made sure that that did not happen. They paid a stiff price, but in the end, the Americans fought off the ferocious German counterattacks and prevailed. Captain Quesenberry was dead, many of his men were killed or wounded in the course of the battle, but Hyman and
the boys who remained held their position—and the Big Red One held Cantigny.

When new recruits were rotated into Company K to fill the places of those who had fallen at Cantigny, Hyman had bragging rights. He had been there first. He had acquitted himself honorably in the first major American engagement of the war, and the first victory of the First Division. A decade earlier he had been tinkering with watches in the Russian Pale. Now he was a warrior.

—

Two months later, the 18th Infantry saw action again at Soissons. It was Hyman's last battle in the Great War.

Hyman had always admired square-jawed, starched-collar, old-line WASPs—and his new boss was a prime specimen of the type. Six feet tall, ramrod straight, broad chested, and steely eyed, Colonel Frank Parker, commander of the 18th Infantry, was a son of coastal South Carolina, a graduate of West Point, a gentleman and a scholar who spoke fluent French and taught young soldiers the art and science of modern war. He was also, apparently, one hell of an inspiring leader. Colonel Parker certainly inspired Hyman on the morning of July 17, when he stood in a clearing in the Compiègne Forest surrounded by his regiment—3,500 strong—and exhorted his men to fight and die:

Men, tomorrow we go over the top. Back home the war is a fight for the survival of Democracy. You just forget it. Tomorrow you and I fight for our own lives. Those of you who have no will or desire to live can start out by giving your life away. My advice is to go out and fight for your life and the lives of your buddies alongside of you. Starting tomorrow the whole world will be watching our activities. God be with you.

Hyman had no idea on that July morning that he was about to be marched into the battle that turned the tide of the war. “You in America know more about the war in one day [from reading the newspapers] than we soldiers find out in a whole month,” Hyman wrote the family back in Brooklyn. Men on the ground are seldom aware that they are making history, but history would be made in the wheat fields at Soissons in July 1918.

During their spring offensive, the Germans had punched a salient—a bulge—in the line between Soissons and Reims, from which they hoped to storm the Allies' ranks and march on Paris. At this weary stage in the conflict it was little more than a desperate gasp of hope and both sides knew it. But the Marne Salient had been stuck like a thorn in the Allies' side. The longer it remained, the more it goaded them. In July, the Allied command decided the moment had come to extract the thorn and start pushing the Germans back to their own borders. The First and Second American Divisions, along with the First Moroccan Division (which included the French Foreign Legion), were handpicked to do the job. Parker's 18th Infantry would spearhead the push. “
No more glorious task could have been assigned to any troops,” one of the regiment's officers declared.

Hyman set out for the front with a full pack at dusk on July 17. Within minutes it was pouring down rain. Men, horses, mules, and transport vehicles became snarled in an epic jam on the narrow muddy French roads:

Blinding flashes of lightning illuminated the countryside momentarily and gave the moving columns of men glimpses of a scene such as they would witness only once in a lifetime. Every road, every track and every field was filled either with trucks, wagons, artillery or moving columns of men. Here and there the French cavalry could be seen threading their way through the maze of tangled men, trucks and animals. . . . Clothing, packs and equipment of all kinds were soaked until they added many extra pounds for the men to carry. Strange oaths of the Orient mingled with those of Europe and America.

In one burst of lightning
the serene neoclassical façade of the royal Château de Compiègne appeared at the end of a long straight line of trees and then vanished: a glimpse of heaven in the midst of hell. The sky cleared before dawn and by first light Hyman stood blinking and shivering in the crossroads village of Coeuvres—two intersecting streets packed almost wheel to wheel with rows of French artillery. There was to be no preliminary shelling. It was so quiet Hyman could hear birds heralding the dawn. At the dot of 4:35 a French artillery captain gave the signal to lay down the first salvo of the rolling barrage and two thousand big guns opened up
simultaneously. The divisions to the south did the same thing at the same time. A thirty-mile wall of fire blazed, died, and blazed again.

Hyman understood that his time had come. Crouched like a boxer stepping into the ring, he gripped his Springfield rifle in both hands and moved out. About a thousand infantrymen fanned out in the first wave. Once Hyman cleared the scrubby woods around Coeuvres, he was in open wheat fields—fresh golden waist-high grain swaying in the morning sun for mile after mile on rising ground. A beautiful sight to behold if it weren't for the sudden flash of machine-gun fire and the black fountains of dirt that spouted where German shells detonated. Every now and then Hyman heard a cry and then a pockmark appeared in the wheat where one of the men fell and bled. By noon the wheat in every direction was speckled with dots of moving khaki and littered with pockmarks. Hyman kept moving ahead. The German fire was too intense to evacuate the wounded—as for the dead, they swelled and blackened in the summer sun until the battle was over and the chaplains and burial details could tend to them. Hyman didn't stop; he tried not to look at the wounded or hear their pleas for water. His orders were to go forward into the bullets and bombs. He fired his rifle when he had a target, ducked his head instinctively at every explosion, crawled on his stomach through the wheat when a burst of bullets came, and rose again to put one foot in front of the other. Even though every fiber of his being wanted to turn and run, he advanced. He had had no sleep and precious little food for thirty-six hours. Adrenalin kept hunger and the dull ache of sleeplessness at bay—adrenalin and fear. “
No man is fearless in battle,” wrote one of his comrades of that day, “but most well-trained soldiers hide their emotions.” Hyman had lived through Cantigny. He hid his fear and pushed on.

July 18, the first day of the Battle of Soissons, was long and grueling. German resistance stiffened through the morning hours. Enemy machine guns spat at them from every rise and from behind every stone farm building.
Casualties mounted. In their few months of combat, Americans had learned to hate German machine gunners. Word was that
Boche
officers ordered their machine gunners to chain themselves to their weapons and keep shooting until they were killed. They mowed down your buddies in perfect rows and then, when you were about to take them out, they jumped
up with their hands in the air shouting “
Kamarad
!
” Even though artillery killed more men in the Great War, machine guns aroused more fear and rage among the troops.

Through the endless hours of daylight, Hyman listened to the peculiar “zeep-zeep” of machine-gun bullets whizzing past him “
like insects fleeing to the rear.” That night, he bedded down in a shell crater for a few hours of sleep, and the next day he and the other guys who had made it through were up and at it again.
Captain Robert S. Gill, who had replaced Joseph Quesenberry as commander of Company K, told his men they had advanced farther into hostile territory than any other unit in the sector. Now they had to do it all over. Their objective—the heights of Buzancy, south of Soissons—was still seven miles away.

The second day, July 19, went badly. Resistance was ferocious, forward motion painful. Those German machine gunners were living up to their reputation. Hyman and his comrades in Company K were now so far out ahead of the rest of the division that they were taking
horrific flanking fire from the left. Cover was all but nonexistent in the wheat. By day's end, 60 percent of the regiment's officers were gone—dead, wounded, missing, captured—and nearly all the noncommissioned officers (the corporals and sergeants who were in charge of the individual platoons) had fallen. Even doughty Colonel Parker, shaken by the number of casualties, begged to be relieved. Another officer complained that his men were “
so exhausted . . . that it was often necessary to take hold of them and shake them to get their attention.” But First Division commander Major General Charles P. Summerall was implacable. The assault continued.

July 20, the third day, fell on the Sabbath. Hyman was still in the wheat. He was still being savaged by machine-gun and artillery fire. Sometime in the course of that bright hot summer day Hyman's luck ran out. He was gassed with mustard.

They called it mustard because it reeked of garlic and mustard, and they called it a gas, but in fact mustard gas is a thick oily amber-colored liquid like toxic molasses that volatilizes above freezing. Of the three types of poison gas introduced during the Great War, mustard was the most insidious, the most excruciating, and by far the most lethal. It was delivered in glass bottles packed inside artillery shells: when the bottle burst, the
mustard escaped and transformed itself into a heavy vapor that crept along the ground and oozed into trenches and dugouts. By the time Hyman smelled the reek and got his gas mask on, it was too late. Mustard, as Hyman quickly discovered, did not have to be inhaled to inflict pain and injury and death: the gas ate at any piece of flesh it came in contact with, inside or outside his body. The vapor fixed itself to the sweat on Hyman's neck and raised excruciating blisters that swelled and broke and wept plasma for days and refused to heal. Had he not been wearing his mask, the mustard would have blinded him and flayed away his bronchial tubes. Men who inhaled it vomited and bled internally; they choked and gagged and gasped for breath. The pain was so intense that victims had to be strapped to their beds or they would tear at themselves or bash their head against the wall. The oily vapor saturated clothing and refused to dissipate, so doctors and nurses were gassed with mustard when they treated soldiers who had been gassed. Those who died suffered for a month or more before death released them.

Hyman never talked about the agony he suffered. “On the third day, we were attacked with mustard gas,” he wrote later. “I became a casualty. Taken to the field hospital, put in an army ambulance to a railroad station; put in a hospital train and sent to a French hospital in the city of Angers, far from the front.”