Donovan

by Richard Dunlop

  From the sheltering trees, Donovan and his men peered across no-man’s-land for any sight of the Germans. To their right the trenches twisted over open ground to the eastern tip of Ancerville, where the regiment set up their machine guns in broken cellars and half-fallen walls. To the rear was a bivouac area where the regiment’s supporting battalion lived in what the men christened Camp Mud. By then they were accustomed to what Alexander Woollcott called the sound of France: “Rain pattering on a steel helmet, while its wearer stands ankle-deep in the mud of trenches.”

  The First Battalion so dominated no-man’s-land that the men boasted they could hang their wash to dry on the barbed wire. Almost every night Sergeant Kilmer and a few men scouted close to the German lines because Donovan, already an officer who understood the vital importance of knowing what his enemy was up to, had an insatiable appetite for information. Sergeant Major Lenist Esler, wounded and home from the front, told a New York Times reporter, “I was supply sergeant at the time, and Joyce Kilmer was a perfect trial to me. He would always be doing more than his orders called for—that is, getting much nearer to the enemy’s position than any other officer would ever be inclined to send him. Night after night he would be out in no-man’s-land, crawling through barbed wires, in an effort to locate enemy positions and enemy guns, and tearing his clothes to shreds. On the following day he would come to me for a new uniform.”

  On the night of April 28, Kilmer and his men scouted as far as a ruined church. Within the church Kilmer worked out a defense in case the Germans surprised the party, and he made mental notes about its location in case it became a possible strong point in battle.

  As the party was about to leave, he said to the others, “I never like to leave a church without saying a prayer.” The sergeant and his men knelt in the broken vault, prayed silently, and then slipped out of the church and into no-man’s-land so they could be back in the American lines by dawn.

  On another scouting expedition into the night, Donovan, Kilmer, and John Kayes crept through the woods to where they had heard a suspicious sound. They captured a German who was attempting to infiltrate the American lines wearing an American uniform. Woollcott visited the Fighting 69th on his journalistic rounds, and he wrote in a letter about Kilmer, “He had become quite an institution, with his arms full of maps as they used to be full of minor poetry, and his mouth full of that imperishable pipe.”

  Woollcott also marveled at Donovan, the commanding officer who would take risks to scout no-man’s-land himself. But at division headquarters, General Menoher was outraged by the commander of the First Battalion, whose conduct endangered his life. When Father Duffy expressed the general’s viewpoint to Donovan, he grimaced. He knew what the soldiers in the trenches thought of generals safe at headquarters. “Donovan says,” wrote Duffy in his diary, “it would be a blamed good thing for the Army if some General got himself shot in the front line.”

  When things were quiet, Duffy found that there was an entirely different Donovan from the man who courted danger and whose men had come to look upon him as their greatest shield against death. Donovan, Ames, Duffy, Kilmer, and other soldiers talked together in the trenches and at the battalion command post, and there was much laughter.

  “Books and fighting and anecdotes and good fellowship and things to eat and religion,” wrote Duffy on May 15, “all the good old human interests are common to us, with a flavor of literature, of what human-minded people have said in the past to give them breadth and bottom.”

  At the time, Donovan’s command post was in what Oliver Ames wrote home was a beautiful place. “Going out of the back door you came into this trench with apple trees and apple blossoms dropping over you, and lilac bushes also,” he told his wife.

  German snipers hiding in houses up on the hills picked off men just outside the headquarters door, but this did not suppress the delight that Donovan and his men took in the natural beauty of the world around them. They did, however, take a dim view of matters when a party of bold Germans invaded a company kitchen and made off with the beef intended for supper.

  On June 10, the Fighting 69th took over a new sector from a French regiment adjoining an area called Rendezvous des Chasseurs, held by the Iowa regiment of the Rainbow Division. A high ridge reached out between two deep valleys choked with woods that led toward the German lines. The French had planted flower beds and strawberries around what now became Donovan’s command post. When the lines were quiet, Donovan and his staff dined alfresco under the trees. An intact generating plant operated in the vicinity, and at night Donovan could lie in his bunk and read a French translation of Caesar’s Commentaries with notes by Napoleon Bonaparte.

  “I enjoy being with Donovan,” wrote Duffy after a night chat in the command post. “He is so many-sided in his interests, and so alert-minded in every direction, and such a gracious attractive fellow besides, that there is never a dull moment with him.”

  Father Duffy also observed how devoted Ames and Weiler, Donovan’s two lieutenants, were to their superior. He wrote,

  Ames takes me aside periodically to tell me in his boyish, earnest way that I am the only man who can boss the Major into taking care of himself and that I must tell him that he is doing entirely too much work and taking too great risks and must mend his evil ways. I always deliver the message, though it never does any good.

  Just now I am not anxious for Donovan to spare himself, for I know that he has been sent here because in spite of its sylvan attractiveness, this place is a post of danger, so situated that the enemy could cut it off from reinforcements and bag our two companies unless the strictest precautions are kept up.

  When a German gas attack struck neighboring French troops, Donovan visited the French to observe how effective the attack had been and how the French had countered it. He was indeed doing all he could to take precautions against anything the Germans might do. For the moment, his command’s most formidable foe was Spanish influenza, which struck in epidemic force on June 15. Donovan went about sympathizing with his sick soldiers as if he were a father of a group of boys back home.

  Sergeant O’Neill, 20 years old, found himself commissioned and placed in command of a company. Donovan congratulated him.

  “O’Neill,” he said, “these are great soldiers; they’ll take hell with bayonets if they’re properly led.”

  The long stalemate on the western front was about to end. German Gen. Erich Ludendorff had massed 200,000 men for a last offensive, and the 42nd Division was withdrawn from Chasseurs to become part of Gen. Henri Gouraud’s Fourth French Army, which was fated to meet the onslaught. The 77th Division, which had been raised in New York City, was to replace the 42nd. As the men of the Fighting 69th, marching by night over moonlit roads to escape German observation, met units of the relieving troops, they recognized old friends from home, and traded insults and badinage. One of Donovan’s men saw his brother among the troops heading for the front. The two men rushed into each other’s arms, sobbing and laughing at the same time.

  “Take care of yourself, you old son-of-a-bitch!” cried the soldier in the 69th as his brother went swinging away toward the Germans.

  The soldier stood there as his fellows marched through the night, until Donovan, who had watched the emotional encounter, put an arm around his shoulders. “Come on, son,” he said in the soft voice that never failed to strike home to the hearts of his men, “the Germans would not dare to harm a hair of an Irish lad’s head.”

  The men from New York marching both to and from the front sang together in soft voices as they passed each other: “East Side, West Side, / All around the town. / The tots sing ‘Ring-a-Rosie,’ / ‘London Bridge is falling down.’ ”

  On the first day, the 69th hiked to Noyement over hilly Lorraine roads. By June 22 they were at Marieville, and then at Châtel-sur-Moselle they took a train. The next day they transferred to another train and continued their circuitous route around the German salient, transferring from one train to another to Nancy a
nd down to Neufchâteau, and northwest again to Bar-le-Duc. On June 24 they detrained at Coalus, south of Châlons-sur-Marne. They were quartered in five villages along the River Coole in the province of Champagne, where white stone houses roofed with gray tile stretched along shady roads.

  Only two nights later they left the villages to hike along the dusty road. The men jested and sang as they marched into Châlons with its cathedral and houses of chalk stone. Cobblestones were hard beneath feet used to mud. Soon they were out of town, marching through villages to Bois de la Lyre, situated on a plain and seeming too open to enemy attack to men who had grown accustomed to the hills of Lorraine.

  Blue skies in the days that followed looked down on violets and poppies. For the time being, Donovan’s battalion was being held in support. On July 4 he stood on the ancient Roman road that led toward the battle line and thought about his nation’s independence and of the fate of nations whose time had come and then gone. The man who read Caesar’s Commentaries in search of age-old insights into battle was deeply moved. He knew that one of the Great War’s most decisive battles was about to begin and that his battalion would be in the thick of it.

  “I don’t expect to come back,” he wrote to Ruth, “and I believe that if I am killed it will be a most wonderful heritage to my family.”

  It is probably just as well that Ruth had no opportunity to reply to such a grim letter as she waited in her Buffalo home, stricken by the terrifying events in Europe in which her husband was playing such a dangerous role. And it is just as well she did not know that French commanders expected only token resistance from the still green American troops. They anticipated that the Americans would stand against Ludendorff’s veterans only a few hours and then would fall back shattered. The pursuing Germans would lunge after them and fall into a trap to be sprung by the French. The Americans were to serve as little more than the bait to tempt the Germans into the trap.

  Donovan studied his maps and the terrain. He read General MacArthur’s orders with considerable anger. MacArthur, who understood the French strategy, had instructed the regimental commanders to post only a few men in the first trench line, which would easily fall. Most were to be positioned in the second line, from where they were also expected to withdraw as the Germans swept ahead.

  On July 15 at 12:04 A.M., the German artillery commenced one of the war’s most tremendous barrages. When at 4:30 A.M. the artillery stopped firing as suddenly as it had started, the silence over no-man’s-land was dreadful. The first Germans appeared wraithlike, running toward the American lines through the morning mist. Minenwerfers suddenly rained down on the defending Americans, and machine guns chattered death. The Americans who escaped the first charge scrambled back to the second line.

  The Germans found themselves in full possession of the American first trenches; they thought they had won. They shouted and cheered and broke into song. Then the American barrage opened up on the trenches. Since each piece of artillery had been carefully zeroed in on the trenches when they were still in American hands, the accuracy of the gunfire was uncanny. Some of the crack Prussian Guards still managed to reach the second line of trenches, but they too were repulsed, after bloody hand-to-hand encounters. The Germans broke off the attack.

  To Donovan’s disgust, the Germans resorted to subterfuge. Four Germans, each with a red cross emblazoned on his arm, carried a stretcher up to the lines held by the 69th. When they were close, they yanked a blanket from the stretcher to reveal a machine gun, with which they opened fire. The Americans shot them dead. Still another group tried to infiltrate the American lines one night wearing French uniforms. They too were shot. All told, some breakthroughs were made, but the German attack had been halted by the Americans. They had not been defeated as the French battle plans had expected they would be. After three days of battle, the Germans began to pull back, except from the Château-Thierry salient.

  Donovan was jubilant, and he wrote to Ruth, who could scarcely believe her good fortune in having escaped widowhood: “America is now magnificent—beyond anything I expected. Her ideals clearer, her purpose higher than all the others. Another thing. Have you considered that before long America will be the strongest nation, with her fleet, her industries, her Army, all organized? I wonder if, as these increase, envious eyes may be cast upon her. I hope the war won’t end that way.”

  After a week, the Fighting 69th was moved to the vicinity of Château-Thierry in the now familiar 40-and-8s. When they arrived in Château-Thierry, they discovered that the town had been wrecked by the fighting only a few days before. Donovan and his men knew that they had been pulled out of a victorious battle to spearhead an attack on the German salient, which still thrust deep into the French countryside. It promised to be a bloody business. The night of July 24, Donovan and Ames walked out into the country along the Marne to a place called La Fère, where Donovan waited patiently for his adjutant to write a letter to his wife.

  “We missed our automobile ride and had to walk home,” Donovan wrote later on. “We knew that it was going to be a hard fight that we were going into, and that our battalion would be picked for the most difficult job. I told him that we both had to consider that we might finish there.”

  Because of the First Battalion’s superior conditioning and lightweight equipment, upon which Donovan insisted, it was counted upon to drive ahead in battle. Donovan’s fighting spirit was already a legend in the American Expeditionary Force, and his superiors knew he would lead his battalion against the Germans with a dash that would be essential if the Fourth Imperial Prussian Footguard were to be defeated.

  On July 25, the battalion climbed into French trucks driven by Vietnamese, brought from Asia by the French. The trucks wound their way among the ruins and out into the country. “The road was crammed with all kinds of marching troops,” wrote Donovan to Oliver Ames’s wife, “huge artillery and supply trains, and the air was filled with airplanes and balloons. It was like a country circus, and Oliver was like a youngster at it, enjoying every minute. That night he and I crawled in under the bare boards of an old ambulance and managed to get two hours’ sleep.”

  Donovan and his four company commanders made a reconnaissance toward the German lines while Ames marched the battalion into its billets and prepared it for action. The First Battalion was to lead the American attack, and Donovan, true to character, wanted to know what the tactical situation was. Upon their return to the American lines, Donovan and his officers found themselves under heavy shelling.

  “In the afternoon,” he wrote, “we ran into a terrific fight, very hot and bloody. Two of my commanders were wounded, and a shell mixed with high explosives and gas hit the roof over my head. A rain of rocks and dirt and tiles fell about me, and I got a beautiful mouthful of gas. Back at the chateau a doctor gave me some sniffs of ammonia and fixed up my eyes with boric acid and laid me down on a billiard table to rest.”

  With Lieutenant Buck wounded and Lieutenant Hutchinson gassed, Donovan, suffering from the gas himself, remained at his command post in the château. Conflicting orders came from General MacArthur at division headquarters directing him to advance, then to wait, then to advance. When he was told that the original orders were to stand, Donovan got up from the billiard table, buckled on his helmet and gear, and went out to lead his men into action. The battle was fierce.

  That night Donovan and Ames, as Donovan put it, “made relief, finishing about three o’clock in the morning of the 27th, and at eight o’clock, we found the Germans retiring. Of course there was a great scramble and very much to do and a general pushing forward of the line.”

  Ames and Donovan, despite their sleepless nights, led the pursuit of the Germans. On the afternoon of July 27 they passed east through a thick forest and came out on a hill crest overlooking the tiny Ourcq River. As they advanced, German artillery laid down heavy fire to cover the withdrawal of their infantry from the woods. Donovan, realizing how exposed his men now were, quickly extended his lines to make contact with
the Iowans on the right.

  “After a day of pursuit, we came in front of Sergy about seven o’clock that night,” wrote Donovan after the battle. “We sustained a heavy bombardment and some losses.” Ames was all over the field, he continued, “spreading cheerfulness wherever he went, and brave—very brave. That night on the edge of the wood, we managed to lean against a tree together and got an hour or two of sleep.”

  Between nine and ten on the next morning, Donovan, with Ames at his side, advanced his entire battalion of a thousand men down a hill and across the Ourcq River on a narrow plank. He had been ordered to come to the relief of Company K, which, having followed the retiring Germans across the river, had encountered deadly resistance. He lost no time.

  A young soldier, looking at the sluggish little stream beneath the plank, spat into it. “It needs all the help it can get,” he explained.

  Donovan’s men never did get the hang of the French name and persisted in calling the plashy little stream the O’Rourke. Six men were killed during the crossing. Father Duffy came upon young Jack Finnegan, dying beside the river, and offered him his canteen.

  “And what do ye have, Father?” the boy asked.

  “Well, water, my boy.”

  “Water, sure, give it to the Ourcq. It needs it more than I do.”

  Once across the river, the men charged up a steep hill in Bois Colas and routed its German defenders. Donovan made no effort to hold the entire hill but contented himself with keeping the Germans from establishing it as a machine-gun position. He spotted his automatic riflemen and sharpshooters in a nearby wheatfield to harass the Germans, and positioned most of his men under the lee of a high inner bank of the river road.