by Neil Hanson
Monk and the rest of the 106th Infantry entered the reserve line at 4:20 that morning, with Mount Kemmel “looming up like the rock of Gibraltar on our right, while the shell-torn aspect of Ypres and the famous Passchendaele Ridge could be seen to the left.”3 During their spring offensive, the Germans had dislodged the British from Mount Kemmel and Wytschaete Ridge, positions of great strategic value, and the Allied lines were now under close observation from there and subjected to artillery fire by day and night, inflicting a daily toll of casualties. In case any American troops had failed to realize it, orders reminded them that whenever they could see Mount Kemmel, the Germans could see them, and it was essential to use every scrap of cover when moving to or from the front lines. Although Monk and his fellows had experienced plenty of sporadic shelling before, this was their first taste of concentrated artillery and trench-mortar fire. It was an unnerving experience for all. Because the front line here was a salient—a tongue of Allied-held territory, surrounded on three sides by German positions—shells rained in from almost every direction, and men in the firing line often believed that they were being shelled by their own artillery when the firing was actually from enemy guns on the flanks or even in the rear.
The Second Battalion had remained in the reserve lines while their comrades took their first ten-day turn in the firing line, but at 9:15 on the night of August 2, along with the rest of the Second Battalion, Monk and his fellows in Company G received the orders “Action East Pop Line.”4 They at once moved forward, accompanied by one limber carrying each company’s ammunition and water. They brushed shoulders with the soldiers they were relieving—men gray with fatigue who did not even raise their eyes to acknowledge them as they passed—and as the Americans slipped and slithered through the mud, they had their first encounters with the omnipresent dead, stumbling over a body or a skeletal limb protruding from the floor of the trench like a tree root in a dark forest. As they approached the firing line, their progress was even slower. Every few minutes the Germans fired off a Very light and the Americans either “stood stock-still with our heads bent down so as not to expose our faces, or fell to the ground and froze, if there was time, until the light burned out.”5
The Second Battalion reached the front lines just before midnight, deploying behind the Wippenhoek Line, with two companies in the line and two in reserve. During their first days and nights in the firing line they were attached to the 18th Brigade of the 6th British Division. Working parties were formed every night from those in reserve to build shelters and dugouts, install rifle pits, and lay lines of cables. Like all fresh arrivals, the men in the firing line were also put on immediate sentry duty, to familiarize them with their surroundings and accustom them to being under fire. One sentry was permanently on watch, facing forward. “They do not turn about when spoken to by an officer or anyone, but answer the questions asked and still keep looking constantly to the front.”6
Spies were said to be a constant and real danger, and sentries were warned to arrest and turn over to their officers any strange officers or soldiers, regardless of their uniforms, if they did not show a proper written pass or identification card or give the password of the day. Sentries were relieved every two hours by day and every hour at night, when the strain of staring into the darkness could quickly play tricks on the eye and mind. Those awaiting their turn on sentry duty were permitted to sleep but kept their rifles close by, and for an hour around dawn and dusk there was a stand-to when “all men should be at their posts.”7 Not all of them had to man the fire step, but all had to stand by.
The morning stand-down came when full daylight was reached. Monk and his comrades then had to clean their small arms, ammunition, and grenades to remove any trace of dirt, mud, or rust before the morning inspection by platoon leaders, who checked the dugouts, trenches, gun emplacements, latrines, and their men’s arms, ammunition, and gas masks, and also the disposal of trash and human refuse. This was not simply a matter of hygiene. If even small quantities of empty cans, wastepaper, and other trash were allowed to accumulate, they could provide a reference point for enemy shell fire. Empty bags for trash were placed near every dugout, and the waste was then dumped in a shell hole and covered with earth if necessary, though there were plenty of shell holes with enough water to cover the refuse. Latrines were another serious problem. Sometimes it was possible to dig a latrine trench, and buckets were also used, but more often, especially in the front line during the daylight hours, men were “compelled to urinate or defecate almost in the exact spot where they must stay until darkness.8 The best that can be done in this regard is to clean up and disinfect thoroughly at night.”
While on the front lines, Monk and his comrades huddled in trenches, dugouts, foxholes, or saps—short trenches used as forward observation posts, roofed with “elephant iron” (corrugated iron) and camouflaged with bags or burlap painted to match the surrounding ground.9 Pieces of turf, stones, dirt, small plants, and bushes were also added to make the cover look as natural as possible. The saps were barely wide enough for a man to enter, and only long enough for two men if they sat with their legs drawn up. Many of the American troops were almost paralyzed by fear. One sat with his back against the end of the foxhole, his legs pulled up under his chin and his arms and hands “clamped like a vise” around his shins. His whole body went into a muscle spasm. “I shook, I trembled, my teeth chattered. I was enveloped in a tremendous fear. I was beyond any ability to exert muscular control. The noise was deafening as the Niagara of shells, bullets and stones descended upon us … I tried to speak but I could not form any words, nor would a sound emerge from my mouth.” As the fear abated, it was replaced by fury. “This kind of warfare in the filth and muck of the trenches (like a lot of woodchucks or rats) … This was no way to fight a war. It was un-American. Why don’t we get out in the open and slug it out the way two men do?”
General O’Ryan made an inspection of the First Battalion of the 106th on August 2, 1918, immediately after they had been relieved by the Second Battalion, and fired off a complaint that what he saw was very unsatisfactory. Rifles were not cleaned, a Lewis gun was very rusty, and others were in little better condition.10 Many men, including some officers, were unshaven, a very serious issue; a daily shave was a military order because gas masks did not fit tightly to the faces of bearded or unshaven men, with the consequent danger of gas seeping around the edges of the mask. There were also complaints about the state of the men’s clothing and boots, though in trenches that were often inches or feet deep in mud and water, that was scarcely surprising.
These new arrivals on the front lines, lacking the acquired knowledge and survival instincts of more experienced soldiers, often suffered a disproportionate number of losses, and casualty reports were now a part of the 106th’s daily ritual. On August 4, two men from Monk’s Company G, Private Errol K. Price and Private George Beliuk, were reported as missing, and the company’s second lieutenant Frank P. Ulrich was wounded in the jaw by shrapnel. Three other men were also wounded. A battalion commander of the 106th Infantry stated that the casualties were unavoidable except for two, which were due to carelessness—one of them, Private John Foster, shot off the middle finger of his left hand while cleaning his rifle.11 Such accidents were always closely scrutinized, for some men deliberately wounded themselves in the hope of escaping the front lines and returning home. Enough cases of self-inflicted wounds occurred to suggest at the least “a surprising lack of care in the handling of rifles and pistols.” Orders were given that every involuntary discharge of a weapon was to be assumed to be caused by carelessness and would inevitably lead to trial by court-martial. Any soldier convicted of willful self-wounding was to be sentenced to hard labor, to be served in “the most dangerous places where soldiers are required to perform labor”: the front lines and No Man’s Land. If the soldier had wounded himself too badly to serve his sentence at the front, he would instead receive a long jail term. Soldiers convicted of deliberate self-wounding were als
o forced to wear a brassard bearing the initials S.I.W. (Self-Inflicted Wound).
There was never any danger of Monk wearing such a brassard. Despite his age, he was always the first to volunteer or put himself in the line of fire. Herbert Asbury, also serving with the A.E.F., dismissively remarked that “the gangster invariably became a first-rate soldier, for his imagination was seldom equal to the task of envisioning either himself or his victim experiencing any considerable suffering from the shock of a bullet or the slash of a knife,” but there was much more to Monk’s bravery than that.12 The same determination that had raised him from a lowly dance-hall bouncer to the leadership of “the toughest gang of ‘gorillas’ that ever swaggered along the Bowery, kept him in the forefront of the battle” and he was praised by his commander for his bravery under fire. Bullets didn’t bother the man who had acted as a forward fire controller in the Battle of Rivington Street beneath the Allen Street arches a dozen years earlier. As bullets flew around him at Kemmel Hill, Monk coolly directed fire. “When his comrades asked him what he thought of the war, he curled his lip and said he had fought the battle of New York,” and afterward he was heard to say that “there were lots of dance halls in the Bowery tougher than that so-called ‘Great War’ of theirs.”
However, the slow attrition of daily life in the trenches—the steady trickle of deaths from shrapnel, trench mortars, and sniper fire—was now whittling away at the men who had been Monk’s constant companions for almost a year. One minute they were there, vital young men honed by months of training and outdoor living, and the next they were gone, just another khaki bundle of rags awaiting burial. The 27th Division’s own ambulance companies and field hospitals were not sufficient to deal with the casualties, and they were often treated by British medical personnel; units of the East Lancashire field ambulances aided them throughout their time at East Poperinghe and Dickebusch Lake.13
After a week of operating under the wing of the British, the Second Battalion of the 106th Infantry was left alone in the firing line for the first time on the night of August 10, 1918. While he was on the front lines, Monk’s horizons were limited to the trench and the narrow slit of sky directly overhead. “How far above us it seemed … like a narrow, blue-black band of velvet ribbon, it was, studded by ten million stars.”14 To raise his head even for a second would invite a bullet from one of the ever-alert German snipers, and, like all frontline soldiers, he had to come to terms with the paradox that, unless an attack was ordered, although he was no more than a hundred yards from the enemy, he might go weeks without seeing a German soldier at all.
On some nights he was ordered forward after dark to take his turn in a sap out in No Man’s Land, observing the German lines. Keeping low to avoid being outlined against the night sky, he and his fellows rolled over the top of the trench wall and then crawled from shell hole to shell hole until they reached the cramped sap. There they would remain for twenty-four hours, through the cold of night and the burning heat of the day, before being relieved the following night. There was no room even to straighten their legs, and any stretching or movement might be their last; in No Man’s Land movement meant death. Yet even here, in a dirt hole between the lines, each man shaved using his razor and a mug of his precious drinking water, to ensure that his gas mask would fit tightly to his face; if it did not, he would be dead in a gas attack.
Their overcoats were welcome during the night, but the sun beating down on their cramped quarters made the daytime conditions almost unbearable. They sweated “until we could feel the clammy dampness of our heavy underwear.15 We stunk because we were dirty.” When they had emptied their water cans, they made use of them as latrines, and the stench compounded their misery. When finally relieved after dark, they could barely crawl out of their sap.
The men of the Second Battalion spent a torrid ten-day tour of duty, with Monk’s Company G holding the hottest section of the line, and they suffered heavy losses before being relieved by British troops, the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry, on the night of August 12.16 The men of the 106th then withdrew to Abeele Station to rest, Company G arriving there at 12:45 a.m. Reliefs were always carried out in secrecy, and infantry were not informed of the timing until shortly beforehand, but, as one British officer wryly observed, while the infantrymen might not know anything about their relief, every girl in the estaminets in the district would already have complete information about it.
While the Second Battalion had been on the front lines, King George V of England had inspected the rest of the 27th Division in the reserve areas. Reflecting the deep-seated hostility that still soured relations between the long-standing rivals who were now allies, the American troops paraded without their weapons because of British fears of an assassination attempt.17 A few days later, a further inspection was made by the United States General Read, who left disappointed, feeling the American troops were still defective in map-reading, scouting, patrolling, and rifle and hand-grenade practice.
There were also perennial complaints about lack of discipline in the 106th Infantry.18 The commanding officer of Monk’s battalion noted that discipline might have been better had his men been paid since their arrival in France, and when challenged about their lack of “smartness in dress and manners,” he testily pointed out that they had just emerged from a torrid spell on the front lines.
Indifference to basic hygiene was a concern, though it could not always be blamed on the men of the 106th. The commander of the Third Battalion listed some of the problems they had encountered on arrival at a farm site where they were billeted. The previous occupants had left fly-infested burlap bags full of rotten meat lying around, and an open pit in the backyard was two-thirds full of stinking ration tins, decomposing rabbit carcasses, bread, bacon rinds, potato peelings, and other food waste, all swarming with flies. The corrugated-iron latrine was left full to overflowing, and the American officers who had previously occupied the building had urinated on the floor of their quarters—“evidence plainly remained.”19
While Monk and his fellows alternated between further training and spells of duty on the lines, their wives, friends, and relatives at home, including Worthy, waiting in Presidio, Texas, had no idea whether their men were in action or in reserve, nor even whether they had yet deployed to the battle zone at all. Letters home were censored, and any more specific information than “somewhere in France” was crossed out in thick black ink. Relatives had to decipher what clues were offered in the censored news and propaganda that was published in the papers, or in the telegrams advising of deaths or wounds in action that were now arriving with increasing frequency at New York and Brooklyn addresses.
Between August 9 and 20, the three battalions of the 106th Infantry in turn had occupied the lines at East Poperinghe, and in that time they suffered steady losses that had already begun to seem routine. Twenty-six men were killed in action or dead of wounds, a further seventy-four men were wounded, and six more were gassed. Like the British, whose resignation, cynicism, and lack of ambition had so shocked them only weeks before, perhaps some of these American soldiers were now also coming to regard whether they lived or died as a whim of fate beyond their control. Had General O’Ryan himself not acknowledged in a bulletin issued as they prepared to enter the lines for the first time that “losses will result at times and in particular places from rashness, from timidity; from over confidence, from lack of confidence; from the exercise of good judgment as well as poor judgment”?20 What was that if not a reflection of the old soldier’s fatalistic belief that “if a bullet’s got your name on it … ”?
O’Ryan had also noted that the most effective and valuable officers in peacetime sometimes disintegrated under the stress of battle, while others who had seemed mediocre in garrison or camp became real leaders in war.21 His comments must have resonated as the 106th Infantry’s first frontline experience led to a series of changes among the NCOs. On August 19, even while they were still serving at the front, one corporal from Monk’s Company G ha
d been demoted, and two days later, immediately after they came out of the lines, another three corporals of Company G were reduced to the ranks and a private and three privates first class promoted in their place. Other companies of the regiment saw similar changes; no explanation was recorded for the demotions.
Whatever the merits or demerits of his NCOs and fellow soldiers, Private First Class Edward “Monk” Eastman’s appetite for combat was undiminished by his early experiences on the front line. Determined not to “miss any of the big doings at the front,” he had even insisted on remaining on the front line when his company was relieved. As his comrades made way for another company, Monk refused to leave.22 He first applied for transfer from the 106th Infantry to the Machine Gun Battalion, in order to stay in action, and when that was refused he approached the regimental surgeon, Major Larsen, and asked permission to remain with the relieving troops as a stretcher-bearer. Larsen agreed, and when his company withdrew to rest in the reserve areas, Monk stayed on duty in the frontline trenches and made constant forays into No Man’s Land to rescue wounded men and carry them back to the dressing stations in the rear.
One wounded soldier offered Monk a fat cigar for helping him get to a field hospital. When Monk asked him: “Youse get this from a Boche?”23 The soldier said, “No, I was in Lieutenant Herbert Asbury’s platoon on the Vesle front. He is like you, cares about us doughboys! A guy from the Y.M.C.A. came to La Pres Farm laden with boxes of cigars and wanted ten cents for each cigar. We had no money because the platoon had not been paid in months and Asbury asked the guy to give the cigars to the soldiers and look to Heaven for payment. When the guy refused, Asbury took his cigars away and kicked him in the pants. We all got two cigars, I saved one.” It was a strange quirk of fate that Asbury should have made that unwitting, indirect gift to a man who ten years later would feature in the defining book of Asbury’s literary career: The Gangs of New York.