On the morning after I had been wrestling with this thought, I received validation of my chafing. The pattern of sound around us suddenly changed— shouts, engines, noise— and we began to move out to a train station. After some bumpy hours across wide green countryside, we were disembarked from the train and formed up again.
We began to march steadily forward until we soon meshed with other Americans, and I understood that we had come to the rear of our forward lines. I became enjoyably accustomed to the rhythmic beat of boots marching. After each halt I welcomed the restart and marveled at how quickly the rhythm reestablished itself.
In good time, or so we were told, we reached a broad and deep military encampment, where, I learned, we stood almost three miles east of the enemy front line and, after another march, two miles. The officers beside me gestured to a dense line of trees and rocky outcrops in the distance ahead of us. Somewhere to the south, a church bell began to ring.
We turned our flank to the direction of that church bell and marched down a long slope. I took an opportunity to step out of the line and look back at our troops. Thus I saw, for the first time, an army on the move; that is to say, I viewed an entire military operation. Beige countryside dust rose as lines and lines of men, rows of trucks, and wheeled guns trundled forward; horses toiled as they hauled; some, ridden by officers, pranced.
Our destination soon became known: a village that the men would call Juicy Lucy or Lucy Birdcage, the little hamlet of Lucy-le-Bocage. We halted there with some thought that we might yet have to move ahead to the village of Bouresches, where supplies and medical facilities had already been established. From the tiny square of Lucy-le-Bocage I saw, when I had a moment, my first view of the hill that was known as Belleau Wood, the place that comes back to my mind more than I wish.
I murmur the words crown of thorns when I think of Belleau Wood. The grove sat on a high crag, and the ungainly ragged trees looked like the crown of thorns on Christ's pale forehead above a white cliff that represented His face. My impression was further heightened by the contrast between this painful crown and the surrounding countryside, because Belleau Wood sat above a beautiful wide wheat field, which, that day, smiled in the sun.
The bugle called early on Friday morning, and the colonel asked if I would bless the corps. His tone had changed to somber and efficient. What, I asked myself, did the officers know of what lay ahead? We soon found out. The following two days, Saturday and Sunday, told me some of the answers. On Monday, I lowered myself into Hell.
It will not be possible for me to give an account of every hour of any day. I mean, however, to give a general sense of this intensive action. My activities of necessity reached far beyond the spiritual and took place on what I may truly call a battlefield— that is, a field on which a battle was fought.
Before I went to France with the marines, I imagined that battlefield had a more general meaning, referring to a county or province in which regiments advanced upon each other. Now I have seen and experienced a place that was, truly, a battlefield.
That golden wheat field was full of standing grain, spreading beneath the height of Belleau Wood like a sea beneath a cliff Never was there such a benign and lovely sea; never was there such a death-dealing cliff
Though I am no expert in such matters, my measurement of that portion of the wheat field which faced us was about four hundred yards long and not more than eighty yards wide. My measurement of the grim cliff put it at a hundred feet and more, rising sheer above the ears of wheat. I concede that there may be no accuracy in that measurement, because all proportions altered and went out of shape in the smoke of the gunfire.
Our problems arose in the width more than the length. Our marines had to cross this eighty yards of naked wheat in order to silence the guns that fired at us unceasingly from high in the crown of thorns. It became my understanding that more than two hundred enemy machine-gun nests had been concealed in the wood and ringed its edge. In addition, many enemy snipers had taken up positions in the higher branches of the trees on the woodland fringe.
Crossing that field on foot, climbing that crag, and entering that grove of trees— no other means existed by which our men might take Belleau Wood.
The wheat field waved beautifully in the breeze, but sadly, as I would discover, it also bent under the force of fire, the pressure of falling soldiers, and the weight of their blood on the golden ears of grain, because from dawn on that first day's action, men walked in lines into the wheat field and were shot down in great numbers. This continued without cease all day; we suffered appalling casualties.
I remained, as ordered, behind the lines, with nothing to do but await burial orders. None came through; we had no safe means of retrieving our fallen men. Nor could I exercise any spiritual care, because to speak with the men about to go into that wheat field seemed almost an intrusion; I made myself the purveyor of cigarettes and coffee as I walked among them, wondering which of them I should never see again.
The fall of night, however, altered my position. When gunfire ceased, I, out of curiosity, I must admit, went forward to the edge of the wheat field and crouched there in the dark. What was my motive? I am unable to say. It cannot be an attraction to Death, whom I had already seen in his many, mostly regrettable, forms in my pastoral work. Whatever the reason, I huddled there in the dark, alone, trying to see into the golden sea of wheat.
At that moment my role in that war altered. I was changed not by what my eyes saw but by what my ears heard. Here and there in the night came cries, some loud, some faint. At first I thought them night birds, or the unfamilar animals of France— until I began to discern words. These were the cries of our men, cut down in the field of wheat and unable to move because of their wounds. Sometimes the owls called too, and once or twice— it was an especially warm and balmy night— came the lovely melodic songs of nightingales.
I did not know what to do, and I spent a night of great anguish. By dawn next morning I had decided. Without asking permission to attach myself to a detail— it did not occur to me that I should— I went with our first advance of that day's marines into the wheat field. They set out on their frightful work by crawling into the wheat; they carried little by way of kit and no more than one weapon each; most did not even carry grenades, in the interest of traveling light.
Without reference to them, as I did not wish to make them responsible for me, an untrained man, I tried as best I could, working my elbows and knees, to keep up with these magnificent soldiers and was assisted in doing so by the ground's roughness, which kept us all at the same pace. At the time I was not wholly certain why I did what I was doing; I believe now I had the hope I might do no more than visit Holy Rites upon those who fell. At one moment I raised my head and saw that we made a long line, one man deep, and the marines carried their rifles at the ready. I was on the extreme right of that line. Though my heart sank and my eyes blurred with fear, I was at war and it was too late for me to turn back.
Noises of war, I discovered, bear no resemblance to any other sounds of life. It is true that, in the absence of defined expectation, any sound will be different; but I had not expected, on that first day, the sharpness of the whistling sounds or the awfulness of the bullet's finishing thud.
It will at once be understood that I am discussing enemy bullets as, first, they fly through the air and, then, as they find their target. When I saw what such a bullet can wreak, it became at that moment the most infernal sound I had ever heard.
My first casualty came soon as, still crawling on elbows and knees, I found in my pathway what I took to be a crude pile of indeterminable material. It was the body of one of our men who had died the previous day. As I murmured a prayer— he was so shattered that I made no search for anointing points— I heard a fierce cry and raised my head.
Some yards to my left, a young corporal, a fine boy of twenty-two years from Oklahoma with whom I had spoken the previous day, had just been shot in the throat. He was struck so precisely that
it became immediately plain to me that his German assassin— probably another boy of the same age— must have seen him clearly By then many of our men had abandoned concealment and had begun to walk through the waist-high wheat in a steady advance upon the wood. How frightful that was. The enemy gunners merely had to take aim and fire; that was how the Oklahoma boy suffered his fate.
My senior chaplain and I had long agreed that the Last Rites of the Church should be applied liberally owing to the fact that I might not always know whether a fallen comrade shared my religion. In this case, as in so many others to come, I had no opportunity to ask. The Oklahoma boy died as I reached him, with one eye open, one closed. He lay on his side, and a wide globule of blood kept pulsing from his throat.
With my vial of oils in my hand I anointed the five points of seeing, hearing, smell, taste, and touch and spoke the Act of Contrition in his ear.
Then I stood up but immediately threw myself down again beside my dead comrade as two of the chilling whistles came in, one above my head, one beside my ear. The marine directly beside me went down. Almost before I had finished prayers with this first fallen man beside me, I went to the second man. He was also dead; his head had come apart.
This will not be an account of military strategy or battle tactics. I am not a soldier; I do not understand war or the military life; I scarcely knew the name of the brigade to which I had been assigned. My mission in France required that I care for the spiritual welfare of my comrades. I was their chaplain. In the event which I experienced, I believe it was demanded of me, whether I wished or wanted it, to help with their physical needs too.
Nor can I give an account of every day and every hour; I believe I was present for five days; others may have been on that field of battle for up to twenty. My account means to give a general sense of the action at the Bois de Belleau, the wood of Belleau, and I can do no more than meld together my impressions taken from all of my days there.
Matters continued that morning as they had begun. Some yards ahead of me, another large marine went down, his weapon dropped from his hand. I crawled to him and found him lucid. Discovering that he had no fatal prospects, we stood up and began to move, but my zigzag pattern distressed him and he attempted to stop me, as the effect on his wounded legs was proving unendurable.
In any case, I had no choice; as I began to lower him to the ground, a thud of fire, brief and awful, sounded in his body. Now I knew that he was dead, almost by the time I settled his body on the ground. The enemy bullets hit him in the back and passed through into his heart, I presume, and his lungs, because he fell spewing blood. I fell with his body on top of me, and from that position prayed with him and for him. But all his senses had gone. The defeat of this moment was dreadful and immense and remains so.
After that reverse, I edged myself out from beneath my comrade's body and lay low amid the wheat for I know not how long. I saw insects; I even observed a small bird perched and swaying on an ear of wheat. Under the sun the ground grew hot as a baker's tray. I saw blood trickling down a golden stalk of wheat.
As I lay there I determined to try and analyze the rhythm of the battlefield. Soon I wished that I had not. A pattern of sound existed— it comprised a short burst of fire from far away and a shout or a scream nearby. Then came a series of the dreadful stammering metallic sounds and many screams.
This caused me to raise my head, and I saw that some of our men who were still on their feet had now stripped to the waist and were moving steadily forward, advancing on Belleau Wood, firing their weapons and shouting as they went. Most were mown down as I watched; they spun or toppled almost as though playing a game in which they had agreed to abide by the rules. Some few made it to the shelter of the crag's overhang and began to climb.
I determined to press on too, hoping to find men who could be helped, if wounded. By now I think I must have determined that rescuing wounded men was more important than Last Rites. On all fours I made my way down the line— or where the line had been, because I would, in time, come to body after body after body.
Encounter after encounter proved futile— again and again I received the impression of mere piles of rags. In each case I anointed the dead man and traveled on. I was running out of the holy oils. Then I found a boy of nineteen, who had been hit in the shoulder and who had spirit. I asked him, “Can you run?” and he said, “I can try, sir.”
Our cover behind us, from which we had set out, stood perhaps twenty-five yards back; this was the farthest distance that I had yet penetrated the wheat field; that gives a measure of the enemy fire. On my count to three we rose, linked arms like husband and wife, and began to zigzag in a half trot, half gallop. I heard the deadly mechanical rattle, then several rattles; mercifully, nothing struck my young comrade, and we made it to cover.
Numbers of marines awaiting their turn for battle saw us, and all their training failed to control their delight at seeing a surviving comrade. They cheered him as though he had carried the day. Such is the true human spirit that shows through the inferno.
An adjutant to the colonel had come to that meeting point. He ordered me to return with him, not to Lucy-le-Bocage but to Bouresches, where we had our nearest quarters. In the field hospital there I was given coffee. Soon, I was taken before the colonel and after some discussion I was allowed to resume my little operation. With new supplies of the oils, I set out again.
For that day and the next three or four days (I still find it difficult to count), I made several forays out onto that wheat field. Often I believed that the enemy gunners must have guessed that my presence did not threaten them, because their shooting was haphazard and never greatly endangered me.
On my hands and knees, on those terrible days, I continued to meet only those who had paid the fullest price. Three, four, five, six— ten bodies in a row bore heartrending testament to the accuracy of the gunners against us. My estimate is that few of the fallen men exceeded twenty-five years in age, boys in fine condition and wonderful training, who had now been made as nothing. The whole field became a place of “rags,” as I now perceived their gallant fallen bodies. The word Haceldama kept ringing in my mind, the field of blood of the Scriptures.
Impressions persist. On one stretch of this grueling crawl along our line, I encountered a living soldier. He twisted himself this way and that on the ground, and I put out a hand to subdue him, telling him that a friend had arrived. With great force he grabbed my arm and hauled me to him, cursing and swearing. The sight of my chaplain's tabs did not cause his language to abate— but my grip on both his hands did. Such fire as had struck him had taken away the strength of his legs; I discovered later that he had been shot in both knees, apparently by one bullet. Such are the strange vagaries of a battlefield.
We lay on the ground together, heads close, and I began to speak to him, to reduce his terror. He told me that he had put up his head to look for help and had seen his captain cut down a few feet away. I told him I knew; the captains was the body I had just then anointed. I helped him reach for his supply of water and waited until he had drunk; now his anguish was beginning to subside.
He asked as to the state of the battle and I told him that we seemed to be in a lull; it was now close to noon and the heat was rising fast. When we had spent maybe fifteen minutes alongside each other, I proposed to him that we try to get back to our lines, trusting to the good luck I seemed to be having. His movements, with no power in his legs, proved clumsier than I had anticipated, yet I nevertheless managed to get one arm around him and then hauled him up, half astride me on one shoulder.
As I looked, I saw a sergeant flap a hand at me like a flag: Down! Down! I sank. In that position I spent a half hour and more, taking care to keep the blood flowing to my knees by sliding carefully across the field, hauling my injured comrade.
On another occasion, I had better fortune. This man had fallen, his knee destroyed, but he was light and slight and no great burden, and not one shot whizzed near us as I carried him from the f
ield.
Not all my memories offer such reward; the abiding impressions are of disturbance and pain. Any human being who has not witnessed war has no understanding of what it feels like. The human body, when killed or terribly wounded in such circumstances, acquires an unexpected looseness of limb, a sagging of flesh. Bodies fall apart more easily than we realize when we are inhabiting them. A limb gets torn off in the blink of an eye, an eye bursts out from a head under the dreadful force of a bullet or a bomb. Policemen know this, and forensic doctors, as do soldiers who have been on active duty; they have all shoveled loose human flesh into bags, rough caskets, and graves.
Those of us who returned safely to our lines were, naturally, those of us who could. This starkly obvious fact did not strike me for some time, at least not until we had come back down into our own encampment and reached for water or coffee or whatever we had been offered.
Confusion dominated much of the event. We had— and could acquire— so little information. No runners could be used to carry messages; they would not have survived. The officers and men questioned us when we returned: What was happening out there? Were we retreating or regrouping? What were our casualties? I was now ordered to stand down.
That day, however, a larger question emerged and began to dominate: What had become of most of our number? Were we assuming that all who had not returned had been fatally wounded? This thought had not occurred to me and I asked for permission to return to the field and find those of our comrades who still breathed. I had to ask many times. Permission was denied.
I waited until night fell and I could not be seen, and then I went back out into the wheat field and by good fortune was able to find my way to those who called out.
To summarize: My battle, if I may call it that, had begun on a beautiful summer day in June. Our soldiers fought from one stalk of wheat to the next. To get anywhere near the machine-gun nests on that crown of thorns, they had to cross a wide field of grain, and they had to cross it over and over. Even when they did get into Belleau Wood on the other side, every rock outcrop had, we learned, an enemy machine gun behind it.