Hellfire Boys Page 24

  And yet there were constant reminders of why the regiment was there. Humes was on a road and rail line, and all day long, an endless procession of muddy soldiers and guns and trucks streamed past the village toward the front, where the Germans were amassing for a new spring push toward Paris. When the fighting would begin was anyone’s guess.

  On March 17, the battalion was still settling into their billets in Humes when Amos Fries arrived in Tours, France, the new headquarters for the gas service. The service was still an orphan within the army, and so Pershing had put Fries’s service under an army department called the Service of Supply, which was headquartered in Tours. His limousine rolled to a stop at 6:00 p.m. on his birthday after a two-day trip from general headquarters. His new office was in a former barracks about 150 miles southwest of Paris and 240 miles from his gas experimental field and general headquarters in Chaumont, hardly in close proximity to Pershing and the seat of the AEF. Fries didn’t grouse to Bessie about the distance—in fact, he assured her that it would take him even farther away from the dangers of the front—but he would soon grow weary of the endless commute by train and car between far-flung corners of his jurisdiction.

  The barracks building that would serve as the gas service headquarters was crude at best and needed rehabilitation work. Still, the offices hummed with activity, thronged with dozens of orderlies, officers, and as many as fifty stenographers—all of them men, Fries carefully pointed out to Bessie.

  Fries managed to make his office somewhat comfortable, laying rugs on the linoleum floor. Unlike his work space, his new living quarters were luxurious, a stone house with five bedrooms filled with mahogany furniture, a parlor, a billiard room, and a live-in maid. It was an unusually modern house for France, with two toilets, gas and electricity, and fireplaces in every room. He even had a private writing room where he could peck out his letters to Bessie each night. It was only about a mile to his office, a walk that became part of his daily constitutional.

  A few days before his move to Tours, Fries had been in Paris for a five-day interallied gas conference—the second since fall of 1917—to strategize and share information about chemical warfare with representatives of the Allies. He left a few days before Secretary of War Newton Baker arrived in Paris after crossing the Atlantic in the same convoy with Companies C and D of the Hellfire Regiment. While the secretary was still in the capital, German’s massive cannons—the so-called Paris guns—had sent shells tumbling onto the city from sixty miles away, a distance so vast that it seemed like science fiction from a Jules Verne book. Fries gloated a bit over the fact the city was shelled while Baker was there. “Paris was bombed again last night and I guess gave the secretary a chance to say he had been under fire,” Fries wrote home.

  Fries expected to meet soon with Baker, but it was even more urgent that he meet with another passenger who accompanied Companies C and D: Colonel Atkisson was finally on French soil after coming across with the convoy. Sending the first two companies ahead to France without Atkisson had been “an awful bonehead piece of business on someone’s part,” Fries groused, and the colonel’s arrival was a relief for Fries. He had great respect for Atkisson and expected him to ease the burden of day-to-day management of the gas and flame regiment. After Atkisson landed, the two men had met up briefly in Chaumont before Atkisson left for the front and Fries headed south to his new headquarters. “I certainly do need him,” Fries wrote home. Back in the United States, a third Hellfire Battalion, Companies E and F, was training at Fort Myer and would soon be coming across as well.

  Atkisson’s arrival lightened Fries’s responsibilities, but there were still myriad other tasks to attend to. In mid-March, he was consumed with plans for reorganizing his service. Like the allies before, the American service was growing. When the French and British gas services were in their fledgling stages, both countries had failed to anticipate the huge expansion ahead. Fries had no intention of repeating that mistake. During the Paris gas conference, Fries had consulted with his British and French counterparts about restructuring his service into three divisions: military, technical, and production and supply. The Military Division’s task would be to care for problems related to gas offense and defense, as well as intelligence. The Technical Division, like the Research Division back in the United States, would be in charge of research at the experimental field and the laboratory. The Production and Supply Division would provide equipment.

  The sheer volume of ammunition needed—whether it was artillery shells, mortars, grenades, Livens drums, or gas cylinders—was mind-boggling. Fries estimated the AEF would need roughly 17,000 gas-filled cylinders each month for cloud attacks, about 150,000 Stokes mortars filled with phosgene, thermite, white phosphorus, and other chemicals, and about 87,000 Livens drums packed with phosgene and other chemicals.

  Fries wanted an organization so efficient it ran itself, like a self-playing pianola. But his machine was not yet complete. Fries needed every officer he had, and yet he had to fight to prevent other army departments from poaching his officers for their outfits. Fries had another recruitment problem: officers assigned to the gas service had already been commissioned in their own departments, so there was nowhere to advance in Fries’s operation. As a result, officers actively tried to avoid an assignment in the gas service, seeing it as a dead end. Fries wanted only loyal and dedicated staff, and he judged them for their hustle or their ineptitude, as either a help or a hindrance to his vision. He rewarded the former with praise, while the latter rarely lasted long in his office.

  As Fries pushed to reorganize the service in March, he saw the effort as only a step toward an even more ambitious goal: an independent Gas Corps, a separate, autonomous branch of the army, like the Ordnance Department or the Quartermaster Corps. Making the service into an independent corps would put gas warfare on permanently solid footing, a position of power commensurate with the growing importance of chemical warfare on the battlefield. It would also allow Fries to vastly expand the service to thousands of gas troops and hundreds of officers.

  Fries’s forceful nature and his impatient personality defined his new service, and his endless enthusiasm for this new type of warfare propelled the enterprise forward. Had Pershing put another man at the helm, chemical warfare might have gone in a very different direction. In February, the International Red Cross had appealed to all the belligerents to stop using poison gases. Fries had scoffed at the notion that the Central powers would ever agree to such a thing. It would likely be a ruse if they did, Fries felt, and he had no interest in such a detente either, calling it “unthinkable from the point of view of the allies.

  “I would be glad to see it stopped for I know the peculiar and extensive h that the gas game is,” he wrote to Bessie at the time, using a mild expletive. “But it like some other things must go on to the end.”

  The Germans rejected the appeal. After the war, Fries claimed the Germans themselves later sent a Swiss intermediary to the Americans with an overture. This time, the Germans proposed that all sides stop using poison gas. Pershing asked Fries for his opinion.

  Fries thought little of it. He remained adamant that gas needed to remain part of the American arsenal. He was utterly confident in his mission, impatient with skeptics, and driven in his zeal to achieve it. The Americans were preparing to produce and deploy enormous quantities of chemical weapons, and the momentum behind Fries’s efforts had turned his gas service into a juggernaut, gathering speed and size as it moved forward. Had that progress slowed or ended, everything he had done would have been in vain. The Germans’ increasing use of gas reinforced Fries’s faith in the importance of chemical weapons. To Fries, they had become as indispensable as bullets and high-explosive shells. Tallies of American casualties at the front began to reach Fries at headquarters. Fries took note but was not overly concerned. “Bad as they are they are no worse than the mine horrors all too frequent in the U.S.,” he wrote to Bessie. But it was only a taste of what was to come.

  Ab
out 260 miles to the northwest, Higginbottom was training with the British in the Lens sector. Higgie and his platoon from Company B had arrived from Helfaut on March 1, after a snowy drive in the back of a truck. His billet was an old brick factory in a village called Sains-en-Gohelle just outside Lens and only a few miles from the front. The brickyard, he called it. His platoon slept on the second floor on beds made of chicken wire, while B Company of the British Special Brigade occupied the rest of the building. Their British compatriots told them the camp was within range of the German artillery, but shells rarely landed near them. The buildings were wired with explosives in case the Germans broke through. At night, artillery lit up the sky.

  Companies A and B were learning the work of gas warfare at the front, training with the British Special Brigade in digging projector batteries, running detonator wires, laying smoke screens, and setting Stokes mortars. The earlier training at Camp American University—the drilling on the parade ground and the demonstrations in the fields—was little more than a faint prelude to the training they received on the front beside the British.

  A few days before Higgie had arrived, the Germans had carried out their first projector attack against American troops. The nighttime barrage on February 25 took place close to the Bois de Remières, near Toul. Masked by high-explosive shells, about two hundred German gas drums rained down on the Americans, releasing phosgene and chloropicrin. Even though the clang of hammers and other sounds from the German side pointed to an impending gas attack, the Americans sustained huge numbers of casualties, largely due to poor training. About three-quarters of the casualties were the result of soldiers removing their masks too soon.

  Now signs indicated a major German offensive in Higgie’s sector. On his second day at the front, the British brought his squad closer to the lines. They piled into a truck and drove to the end of the road before a long hike to the forward dugout. They walked two by two, with a single British soldier as a guide. Guns fired all around, and Higgie could see shells break in the distance. The ruined landscape around him was a moonscape of shell craters and husks of barely standing buildings. He had never seen such a sight in his life. As darkness fell, star shells burst overhead in incandescent cascades.

  Their dugout was an old wine cellar. The British cautioned the Americans to stay under cover during daytime. The dugout was damp and cold, but they started a fire as they curled up to sleep.

  German shells boomed through the night, and a blanket hung over the dugout entrance to keep out gas. At 5:00 a.m., Higginbottom was shaken from sleep for his watch, and he pushed aside the dugout blanket to take his post. The day brightened, and mist wreathed the trench, thick and damp. A few minutes into his watch, Higginbottom began sneezing. He thought he had caught cold until he heard the men behind the gas blanket in the dugout sneezing, too. Sneezing gas, courtesy of the Germans. Not concentrated enough to merit gas masks, but enough to tickle their noses.

  In the afternoon, the British engineers brought Higginbottom’s squad into a warren of trenches that led right up to the line, where they helped install Livens projectors for an upcoming attack. It would be Higgie’s first show, when he would launch gas shells from projector batteries that he would dig himself. The mist lingered all day. The German artillery stayed silent, their targets hidden in the fog. After the weather cleared, the German guns returned to life. Several times Higginbottom dove for cover when shells flew over. Every shell sounded as though it was going to land on him.

  Everything was new, and a lesson in survival. One morning, deafening artillery fire shook Higginbottom from his sleep. The Germans had attempted a raid, coming over the top and charging British and Canadian trenches, but Allied machine guns repelled them. At daybreak, corpses of German soldiers hung all along the barbed wire separating the two sides.

  That same afternoon, Higginbottom saw his first air battle. It lasted just seconds, long enough to bring down a German plane, which burst into flames as it crashed into a nearby cemetery. The soldiers scrambled to get pieces of the plane, and Higginbottom salvaged a piece to send home to his brother.

  Higginbottom grew accustomed to the sound of shells streaking toward him through the air. He learned to tell the difference between the types of incoming shells, to gauge their distance, and to listen for the distinctive pop of a gas-shell fuse. He practiced how to duck for cover when the bright overhead flares known as Very lights illuminated the battlefield. As he made his way through the trench one morning, he smelled for himself the faint odor of mustard gas and learned that, when the trenches were wet, the gas lingered for days.

  On March 15, he got another grim lesson. One of the British soldiers was putting a charge box down into a projector when the box stuck in the tube. When he used a wooden stick to ram it down, the charge exploded. It tore the man’s arm off at the shoulder. He did not live long.

  Higgie shuttled back and forth between the brickyard, the advance billets, and the dugout. At mealtime, the squad leaders meted out loaves of bread with cheese or jam. Sometimes it was hash or corned beef. One supper was just a piece of bread and a boiled onion. There was never coffee, only tea. One day, Canadian soldiers brought bread, cheese, jam, and a large chunk of bacon to share with Higginbottom and his squad. At night, the Americans laughed and joked before they went to sleep and sometimes could sleep as late as they wanted before getting up for drilling. Even at the front, there were small comforts, like a well-stocked YMCA that was open at night, the windows covered tight to smother the light from inside.

  The days went by. Again and again weather delayed the projector show. Two nights in a row, Higgie slogged his way out into no-man’s-land, ducking into tunnels and craters to escape shells, only to have the show called off at the last minute. One night while they waited for trucks back to the brickyard, the Germans launched another raid. Machine guns chattered all around them, and signal rockets flared across the night sky before the British and Canadian artillery opened up with a roar. Higginbottom stared up at the pyrotechnics overhead—it was a beautiful sight, he thought. A hard rain pooled in the trenches, turning into a limestone paste that clutched at Higgie’s boots like glue. His mates played endless dice games in the billet.

  Artillery fire shook Higginbottom from his sleep at 5:30 a.m. on March 21. Finally, the skies had cleared. If the wind was right that night, the attack would go forward. There was nothing to do until 11:00 p.m., the zero hour when the attack was to start; the projector batteries were all set, and the charges were ready. More soldiers came up from the brickyard for the attack. Higginbottom loafed around the whole day, waiting to see what would happen. In the afternoon, the wind shifted favorably for the British and the Americans. The show was on.

  At 9:00 p.m., Higgie made his way up to the projector batteries. Two hours to go. As the glowing hands on his wristwatch ticked toward the start of the show, he darted through the shadows, unspooling the wires two hundred meters back to the Livens-projector batteries. He took cover, crouching behind an old building. A few minutes before 11:00 p.m., he connected the wires to the exploder. Then he waited, clenching the handle of the detonator.

  Everything was quiet. All the guns were still. Nothing came over from the Germans, and in the thick darkness near the front, time seemed to stop. There was only a minute to go. In the sudden stillness, the ballooning silence seemed to fill everything. Higgie had a strange feeling, as if his own heart had stopped beating. He waited in the quiet, perfectly calm, his own internal clock at a standstill. And then he pushed the handle down as hard as he could.

  A flash, and night turned to day. All around Higgie, the exploders blasted, and five thousand gas shells tumbled into the sky toward the German lines. Stones and dirt showered down on him behind the building. In the noisy aftermath of the projector show, a rainbow of multicolored flares blossomed over the German trenches, warning of gas and calling in artillery to counterattack. Higgie darted from behind the building up to the projector batteries to begin respooling the wire but quickly re
treated as machine-gun fire began to hammer thick and fast around him. He was back in the trenches when the big shells started coming over from the Germans. They lasted for a while. As Higgie returned through the trenches, the sludge of lime and mud sucking at his boots, he kept his head down, a hail of machine-gun fire whining over the top of the trench. He retreated farther back through the British trenches, and the bullets followed—the German machine gunners knew exactly where the main trench was and showered an exposed section with a hail of bullets. Higgie dashed through, and he got in safe.

  At twenty minutes before midnight, forty minutes after the projector show began, the British and Canadian artillery opened up with the thunder of a thousand guns going off at once. In the cyclone of noise and fire around him, Higgie sprinted back to the wine cellar and the company of the other Americans. When he reached the billet, he was finally able to slow down and ponder what had happened in that moment of pure silence just before he pushed down the plunger on the detonator. When the projectors roared and sent six hundred pounds of gas at the Germans, he felt he was in the war at last.

  Chapter Ten

  “Science and Horror”

  The mud was six inches deep and getting deeper. The rain came down hard and fast, and German gas shells tumbled to the ground with it. Higginbottom crouched in a sloppy trench near Bully-Grenay outside Lens. No light pierced the darkness as he and his bunkmate Shap sat waiting for gas cylinders to arrive on the supply train. Other soldiers waited in the sodden dark around them, cursing the rain, cursing the Germans, cursing the war. After an hour, the train creaked up the tracks, and the men clambered out of the trench. Then, heaving and sliding in the incessant rain, they pushed the ammunition cars farther up the track. When the cars had gone as far as they could, the men unloaded the stacked gas cylinders, which weighed more than one hundred pounds each. The tanks were heavy and slick. Shap and Higgie lowered one into the trench, threaded a pole through the handles, and then hoisted the pole up onto their shoulders. With the tank slung between them, they joined the supply line of men splashing through the darkness toward the front.