The Last Casualty part 3
Felix Winternitz
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Now all roads lead to France.
And heavy is the tread of the living,
But the dead returning lightly dance...
—Royal Lance Corp. Edward Thomas, “Roads,” 1917
The liturgy of war has a cadence all its own. The march toward the front was at once halting and hurried—as Budde chronicled in his pocket diary—both funereally paced and, in a sudden heartbeat, impetuously and furiously launched. Troop movements swept his pale battalion through offensive campaigns at Aisne, Champagne-Marne, the Second Battle of Aisne-Marne, St. Miheil and Meuse-Argonne, with particularly ferocious encounters at Belleau Wood and Soissons. Shell-shocked soldiers wandered the bleak landscape. In one clash alone, Meuse-Argonne, more artillery shells were fired (4 million in sum) than in the entirety of the American Civil War.
“I was always glad,” Budde wrote to his parents, “when the various positions we held in the woods had a few holes strewn around into which we could crawl when necessary. The shells were really going over us, and besides, there often was a perfectly splendid ditch alongside the road. … There were hours at a time we would lie while a steady stream of missiles would be going sweetly over our heads, just a continuing humming whir-r-r that can’t be described. Most of the big ones do give notice of their approach most politely, and one generally has time to duck or take cover.”
He described the Western Front, essentially a double line of trenches, as a scene percolated in the hellish imagination of painter Hieronymous Bosch: flies buzzing obscenely over damp earth and purple-black bodies, the air choking with the oppressive odor from pungent explosives. Mustard gas scarred his comrades’ lungs and burned through the foot soles of his field boots. He softened the wording for his mother, speaking of his “elegant blisters.”
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Artillery makes the same old noise; valor is an
attribute of boys
All soldiers hear the same old lies; dead bodies have
always drawn flies.
— 1st Lt. Ernest Hemingway, “All Armies Are the Same,” 1919
Not all of the missiles sailed by safely, though. On June 6, Budde was wounded by shrapnel—a detail he gently described in a letter home.
“Friday night I was assigned to a listening post in front of our lines. My job was to keep a sharp watch for ‘Heine’ and to give the alarm in case of attack. … Soon, the whole line was blazing away [with artillery shells]. It seems I did a funny thing. I chose a position right where one of these big boys was going to hit. It hit alright, I hit, too, and also got hit. Nightfall found me laying out on a listening post, about 50 yards in front of the lines. About midnight the Huns began sending over their high explosives. One came too close. It must have borne my number, because when I got out of there, I was carrying a piece of Heine’s iron with me. … Yes, I am wounded, but it is merely the slightest thing, hardly more than a scratch. We’ve got Heine on the run for good now.”
Truthfully, the jagged metal pieces so deeply imbedded in Budde’s shoulder that doctors feared they would kill him trying to remove them all. He also neglected to clarify to his mother that flying debris mangled part of his face. Taken first to a dressing station, Budde found himself relegated to the Red Cross and the American Military Base Hospital to convalesce. Despite having an excuse to nurse his wounds in a Paris infirmary, he hounded his doctors. He desperately wanted back to the front action and his mates.
“The thing is up with Fritz. He’s on the run now, and we’ll keep right on his heels,” he wrote home. “I will write again as soon as possible, and in the meantime, do not worry. The beginning of the end is at hand.”
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In Flanders fields the poppies blow, between
the crosses row on row …
We are the Dead. Short days ago, we lived,
felt dawn, saw sunset glow.
—Canadian Lt. Col. John McCrae, “In Flanders Fields,” 1918
While news of mutually assured peace spread like wildfire among the ranks, some senior officers chose to conversely intensify their actions. On the eve of Nov. 10, 1918, and repeatedly through the night, word of the impending end to the entanglement was affirmed by radio transmissions to Gen. John Pershing and his command. Pershing dutifully relayed the wonderful confirmation to subordinates, but left his commanders in the field with the decision whether to march on and advance their columns, or to spare their own men further agony and fatalities.
Some ambitious officers may have seen their chances fading fast for field promotions and medals. Lipstick lieutenants and shavetail hotshots, who were anxious to tidy up annoying dents in the map of the Western Front as history would record it on this last full day of action, weren’t averse to losing a few expendable privates.
A few of George’s immediate superiors in the Second Division/Fifth Regiment would take flak for their judgment calls on this day, including Capt. Charley Dunbeck, who favored walking in front of his assembled guard in a jaunty manner, brandishing a swagger stick in one hand and an automatic pistol in the other.
“The story is told that the men of the 2/5 were sensibly reluctant to cross the bridge [at Villemontry],” reads the account in Battle History of the United States Marine Corps. “In fact, they soon had a situation in which Marines were beginning to take off. Charley Dunbeck said something to his men as he stood by the bridge. ‘Men, I am going across and I expect you to go with me.’ … What seems to be a bit unusual (or even stupid?) was to waste so many brave men in an unnecessary crossing of the Meuse River the night before the war ended. Maj. Gen. John Lejeune could have stalled it, if he had chosen to, much like Maj. George Shuler did to save the 6th Marines.”
Lejeune himself recalled the fading hours of the war and his visit to a wounded sergeant in a field hospital during that fateful day: “I asked him if he had heard before the battle that the armistice would probably be signed within a few hours. He replied it was common knowledge among the men. What induced you to cross the [Meuse] bridge in the face of that terrible machine-gun fire? In answer, he said, ‘Just before we began to cross the bridge, our battalion commander, Capt. Dunbeck, assembled the companies around him in the ravine where we were waiting orders, and told us ‘Men, I am going across that river and I expect you to go with me.’ What could we do but go across, too?”
After the war, a secret Congressional panel (referred to obliquely only as Subcommittee 3) convened to investigate the frontline commanders’ decisions during this 12-hour period. They would suggest that, in select incidences, squad leaders crossed the line from “sacrifice” of enlisted men to “murder.”
[Continued]
