by Theo Emery
Fries’s wedding anniversary was only a few days away, just close enough that he joked to Bessie in a letter that the promotion would be his anniversary gift to her. It was finalized about ten days later, when another telegram reached him at Hanlon Field with notice that the promotion had gone through. He took the oath that morning and added a general’s star to his uniform.
As he rode back to headquarters, Fries couldn’t stop smiling to himself—his good fortune seemed too good to be true. News from the front continued to be positive. He had met with the military attaché from Switzerland, who told him that morale among the Germans had plunged. For the first time, Fries wrote to Bessie that he might be home sooner than he thought. “The Bosche is learning what it is to retreat and from many signs it appears he doesn’t relish it. He is going to get it steadily from now on until the end.”
As if to punctuate the regiment’s rising status, the Hellfire Boys gained a new name as well: the First Gas Regiment. They were no longer an adjunct to the war machine, one regiment among hundreds. They were the first and only of their kind, with the name to prove it.
The progress reported in the newspapers and toasted in the mess halls didn’t diminish Fries’s ardor for chemical warfare. Just the opposite; he was more convinced than ever that chemical weapons must play a decisive role in Germany’s eventual defeat. “The Bosch [sic] is steadily falling back, but he is far from being down and out. We have got to gas him until he wishes he had never heard the word, and we are out to do it,” he wrote to Bessie.
About a week after the start of the Amiens drive, Fries presented his case to Pershing for a more muscular Chemical Warfare Service. Pershing had approved another regiment, but it wasn’t enough, Fries insisted. Instead, there should be two more regiments of six companies each. That would total eighteen companies—adding 600 officers and 14,500 men, tripling the number of troops already in the First Gas Regiment. He wrote to Pershing:
The experience so far had with our own gas companies and a careful study of the operations of the British gas troops leads to the conclusion that a continuous and extensive use of special gas troops along the entire front will be one of the most effective means of establishing the superiority which is essential to win the war without exceedingly heavy casualties.
He also recommended sharply increasing the amount of gas used. By September 1, at least 25 percent of artillery should contain gas or smoke material, he wrote, increasing to 30 percent by January 1, 1919. Eventually, gas-manufacturing facilities in the United States should prepare to supply enough chemicals to fill at least 50 percent of all shells.
To help convince Pershing, Fries sent a dossier of facts and figures to support his proposal, using evidence gleaned from the Hellfire Regiment’s battlefield experience. He cited the high American gas-casualty rate—the thousands of American soldiers gassed in June and July—as evidence of how effective gas was as a weapon. He also pointed out the usefulness of mustard in rendering equipment and territory unusable because of its persistence.
But his most powerful arguments were not his; they came from American division commanders whose comments he had collected from battlefield reports. Some were specific observations, such as from the Twenty-Sixth Division commander who recommended that half of all munitions contain gas, writing that “my conversion to this instrumentality is so strong that I believe we cannot win this war unless we meet fire with fire and to the fullest extent develop this frightful agency.” Fries emphasized one of the commander’s statements with asterisks: “I believe it is our duty to waste not a moment in developing this gas warfare to the limit,” the commander wrote.
Fries had cherry-picked comments of generals who agreed with him. But not all did. Other members of the army general staff opposed more gas troops, believing that there were already enough. “I do not see, at the present time, any necessity for an increase in the number of regiments,” Lieutenant Colonel V. D. Dixon wrote to the assistant chief of staff, a West Point classmate of Fries’s named Fox Conner. Another member of the general staff felt the same, and said so. Their arguments failed to sway Conner.
Fries had a dim view of Conner, believing him to be a hard worker but something of a lightweight. They were on the same side on this issue, though, and Conner pushed Fries’s recommendations for the expansion up to the AEF’s chief of staff for approval. The chief of staff quickly approved it, Conner sent a draft cablegram to Fries, and on September 5, the chief of staff made the request to the assistant secretary of war in Paris, with General Pershing’s blessing.
Fries also began to think about more-abstract issues—public relations and image. In an effort to boost its public profile, the service had claimed some famous draftees. The baseball greats Ty Cobb and Christy Mathewson had been assigned to the chemical regiment, along with several well-known college athletes. “We are going to put them all through about 6 weeks training course before sending them into the field,” Fries wrote home. In addition to prominent soldiers in its ranks, he wanted a more suitable symbol for the service. In late 1917, the chemists had adopted an insignia for the regiment: two crossed retorts, long-necked laboratory glassware shaped like teardrops used for distillation. Fries had tinkered for some time with a symbol that was “a little more warlike”: two crossed gas shells superimposed over a dragon, a fire-breathing embodiment of might and destruction. He convinced Pershing, and the commander in chief recommended the new insignia. The War Department snuffed out the idea with a sharply worded response that officers needed to concentrate on the war, not fiddle around with insignia changes. For now, the symbol of science and laboratory work would remain on the collars of the Hellfire Boys.
As summer turned to fall, the war’s momentum had shifted. After the Germans’ ferocious springtime offensive had sputtered into stalemate once again, the Allies had taken back ground with the successful counterattack at Château-Thierry. Now Pershing was laying groundwork for new attacks with the French and the British, planning a great grinding push before winter set in and the armies retrenched until spring. On September 12, an American offensive was to begin at Saint-Mihiel, in the Lorraine region near the German border. The attack was to straighten and stabilize the front line to eliminate a salient that bulged westward into Allied territory. The plan came in Army Field Order No. 9, which instructed the American I Corps and IV Corps to attack on one side of the German line and V Corps on the other, swing inward, and pinch off the salient around Saint-Mihiel. Fries anxiously awaited word of the start of the attack. When it came, he was not disappointed. “The big American push near Verdun started today and I heard a short while ago that it was going so far like a house afire,” he wrote.
Addison was asleep when his bunkmates roused him a few minutes after midnight on September 12, amazed that he was slumbering as the American offensive was about to start. The sleepy chaplain roused himself and reached for his razor. In the daytime, the billet’s elevation gave a spectacular view of the French countryside stretching for miles to the east and west, but as Addison began to shave, the sky outside was dark and still.
And then at 1:00 a.m., as if a switch had been flipped, the night turned to a sea of flame. Addison stood midshave, transfixed by the sight. The entire horizon, dark one moment, flared the next with the pulsing incandescence of roaring howitzers and the quick glow of smaller guns. Even from miles away, the chaplain could hear the deep and continuous percussion in the distance, the unmistakable thunder of the American artillery. The sky glowed with the heat and light of the guns, as if the countryside had been set ablaze.
Addison watched for a time. In the small hours of morning, he went up to the regiment office to join Colonel Atkisson. Together, the two waited for the 5:00 a.m. zero hour when the regimental show would begin, signaling the start of the infantry advance. All of the gas companies except for Company B had roles to play, throwing mortar barrages to create smoke screens and heave thermite onto the Germans. Projector shows, too, were planned, to lob high explosives at machine-gu
n nests as well as fake shows producing nothing more than a flash and a boom, to draw attention away from actual attack locations.
As Addison stood beside Atkisson at the window looking east, the colonel was distant and tense, drained of his usual warmth. The strain of battle had taken its toll; a few days earlier, he had almost collapsed with exhaustion in the mess hall. At 5:00 a.m., the regiment’s work illuminated the sky anew as the projector batteries thundered. Addison watched as the searing light of thermite cascaded down in a molten wave of pyrotechnics, and thick banks of smoke billowed toward the German lines, lit with the glow from the guns below and liquid fire above.
Saint-Mihiel was neither a decisive battle nor a very hard-fought one—the Germans were preparing to abandon the salient anyway when the Americans attacked—but was an important milestone that rolled back the German line and gave the Americans their first victory without assistance from their allies. In the aftermath, the American First Army began to move once again, a lumbering pivot from Lorraine to its next target.
On the night of the Saint-Mihiel offensive, Higgie slept soundly more than one hundred miles away. He awoke at about 5:30 a.m. knowing nothing about the attack. Company B had been excluded from Saint-Mihiel, but now they were moving up to join the other battalions close to the action. He spent the day marching some twenty-five miles toward the front, stopping midday for a dinner of hot coffee and hash before continuing on toward Mézy. A thunderstorm hit midafternoon, pelting them with drenching rain and marble-sized hailstones before the sun emerged and dried them out. He ended the day back near Château-Thierry, camping under a tree, and had the next day off to go into the town on a pass to explore the elaborate German tunnels, one of which burrowed down beneath the Marne River. With the city’s liberation from the Germans, residents had begun returning to pick through the rubble and ruin. Higgie got chocolate and cigars from the Red Cross and ambled through the town, peering into shopwindows.
In the days that followed, there was heavy work loading artillery shells at the train head and marching them into position under the moonlit sky. On September 15, he was ordered to move up again, and he clambered into a crowded boxcar with sixteen other men. They spread hay on the floor and fell asleep, the sky ablaze with antiaircraft fire as the train clattered toward the front. They were on the train two days before they disembarked and continued on foot. When they reached their camps at the end of each day, the men played card games late into the night. Higgie ate doughnuts for supper one night and wrote letters by candlelight. As they marched, townspeople handed champagne to the men. At night, they cheered at dogfights spiraling overhead, and watched airships roar to the earth in flames.
Jabine had an even easier time of it than Higgie. While the rest of Company B traveled toward the front, Jabine got time off and a pass for Paris. He had commanded a successful gas operation on August 28, firing phosgene, chloropicrin, and thermite at the German-occupied village of Courlandon. “Our company is ‘on the move’ and while waiting for moving orders I got a chance to be civilized for a couple of days,” he wrote home. He got a room at the Hotel Continental across from the Tuileries. He took luxurious baths, savored meals in restaurants, and had a celebratory night on the town, taking in a show with his friend’s sweetheart, a Red Cross girl from Minneapolis. “Not bad for one day with some other fellow’s girl!” he wrote to his mother. He would be holing up in winter quarters soon, and there wouldn’t be much fighting then, he assured his mother. There was nothing to worry about. “I explained in my last letter how comparatively safe a job this was and I want you to regard it that way,” he wrote.
His respite was brief. New orders transferred him from Company B to Company C, peeling him away from Higgie and his other friends to take charge of a platoon he’d never led, into a cadre of officers he’d never fought with. Soon Jabine was in a boxcar on his way to the front. While he waited for the train to move, a lonesome weight pressed down on him. He had been with Company B since Christmas Day, when they had marched from their barracks in Washington into the whirling snowstorm, when they were still green and the war was far away. If it meant he could have stayed with Higgie and the other boys, he would have taken a demotion to private. “I must try and get along in ‘C’ Co,” he wrote to his mother, waiting for the train to begin its creaking passage back toward the front.
On September 15, orders went out to all companies to withdraw from Saint-Mihiel. Headquarters was already working on its next target: the Meuse-Argonne sector. With the French and the Americans in the south, the British to the west, and the Belgians to the north, the Allies planned a massive attack sweeping the length of the entire western front, a coordinated push against the Germans at every point. The American objective was to sever the Germans’ main supply and communications line. If the trunk line could be choked off, the kaiser’s troops up and down the front would be marooned and helpless.
Unlike in Saint-Mihiel, the push in the Argonne would be a brutal, punishing battle. The Argonne Forest was a vast natural barricade, a dense arboreal wall wrapped in miles of barbed wire, with multiple defensive trench systems and gunner nests tucked into the hills.
Addison was told he could join Company C near Ville-sur-Cousances, about eight miles southwest of Verdun. The French held the sector; but shrouded in darkness, the American First Army quietly moved artillery, soldiers, and supply trains in among their allies. Army troops and trucks swarmed the roads between the Argonne Forest and the Meuse River, and American platoons scattered in invisible billets throughout the front—in crowded dugouts the French had just vacated, in crude warrens nestled among the forests and hacked into muddy embankments, and in tents tucked among the trees. Scouts conducting reconnaissance wore French uniforms to maintain the illusion that the French held the region. Completing the subterfuge, only a thin line of French soldiers held the front.
In preparation for the attack, the engineers rushed to set mortars. The woods teemed with hungry, anxious American soldiers. Nerves were raw. No one slept. On September 25, heavy rain drenched the gas platoons tucked into their posts in the forest. Addison motored to the front with extra rations and cigarettes for the soldiers. After a slow trip back on the traffic-choked roads, he ended the day at brigade headquarters. The artillery would begin at 11:00 p.m., with zero hour for the gas platoons at 5:30 a.m. The push was on. As the uneasy night wore on, Addison headed to the ammunition depot in the woods, where regimental officers gathered in a canvas tent next to stockpiles of shells. The officers spread out maps and pored over the attack plans and division orders. An officer ducked into the tent and announced that all of his projectors were ready. Addison sat up next to a lit candle, and waited. At the front, the rain had turned the trenches into a slippery mire. Higgie’s platoon slithered through the water and mud as they splashed toward their dugout, a deep hole packed with muddy, stinking soldiers like muskrats burrowed into a riverbank. He huddled in the dugout, eating crackers and jam, until the artillery began.
At 11:00 p.m., the thunder of howitzers cracked open the darkness in a deafening roar, lighting up the forest with their glow. A few minutes later, the sharp bark of seventy-five-millimeter rounds began, flinging gas shells toward the German positions. The Germans returned fire. Inside his cold, candlelit tent, Addison listened to the deafening thunder outside. As he and the other officers waited, a howitzer shell exploded nearby. The rush of air snuffed out the candle, plunging the tent into darkness.
As the deafening firestorm quaked around Higgie, the platoon ducked from the dugout to set their Stokes mortars. It was slow, slippery work—every time he scooped dirt from the trench floor, water promptly filled the hole. It took him about two hours to set his gun, then he returned to the crowded dugout and slept for an hour.
Toward daybreak, Higgie got the platoon ready. A cold, creeping fog hung in the air. The artillery began again as he struggled in the mud for the start of the show. Just before zero hour, he heard high-explosive shells arch over the top of the trenches to
shred a path for the infantry through the maze of barbed wire in no-man’s-land. At five-thirty, Higgie’s platoon let their guns go with a roar, sending white phosphorus shells northward toward the German positions to create a smoke screen. He reloaded and fired again, then again. The concussion from the third shot pounded the gun so deep that it disappeared into the mud and water in the trench. Higgie plunged his arms into the freezing mire, thrashing under the surface to pull the heavy, slippery gun back up to be fired again. In the darkness, the red glow of Livens projectors bathed the forest in an infernal glow, the Stokes mortars and bright curtains of thermite lit up the sky like the Fourth of July, and the fog mixed with banks of smoke and clouds of phosgene in a cloak over the battlefield. The bellowing cannonade even frightened the American infantrymen waiting to charge the German positions, as if the ground had opened under their feet and the devil himself had galloped forth.
After all his shells were fired, Higgie hoisted the mortar up out of the trench, shucking the baseplate from the mud, shouldering the barrel, and clawing his way over the top. No-man’s-land had disappeared into an impenetrable fog and smoke, but somewhere in the haze, the high explosives had blasted a route forward.
Sitting atop the trench, folded in a blanket of smoke and mist, Higgie lit a cigarette and waited. Soon, the second wave of infantry would emerge from the fog. Dawn was coming. The Battle of the Meuse-Argonne had begun.