39
our barrage opened up than he laid down a counter
barrage with artillery and M.G.’s. right on our
trench. Well, I have been caught in some pretty heavy
shell fire since I have been over here but never in my
life have I ever seen anything to equal that. Of course,
we were right in the open trench and it is miraculous
to me how any of us got out alive. I was command-ing
a battery of six guns and had to keep going from
one gun to the other and was expecting every step
to be my last but really at the time I didn’t think of
that. One time I was caught in a bay between two
streams of M.G. fire, the parapet had been blown
down on either side of the bay and “Jerry” had one
gun shooting thru’ one side and one thru’ the other,
so there was nothing to do but squat down and wait
until he shot one of his belts out, which I did, and
then made a run for it and had gone about twenty
yards when a whiz bang bursted on the parapet and
a piece of shrapnel hummed by my face and clipped
a little nick in my nose. Well, when I finally had a
chance to reckon up, I found that I had had three
guns knocked out and had lost only twelve men.
Capt. Gause was away at the time at school so I
was commanding the Co. and believe me I had my
hands full, but finally succeeded in getting all my
wounded to an Aid Post and the dead put in a shel-tered
place until we could get a chance to get them
www.wrightsvillebeachmagazine.com WBM
buried, then we sat and waited for orders… AFTER two days rest his company
moved forward again. This portion
of the letter to the younger Hardin
describes the liberation of towns held by the
Germans and first mentions his hospitalization.
So we were not ordered forward until two days later and then we caught H--- again. We drove
the Boche back steadily for ten days and liberated the towns of Premont, Bohain, Busigny, Bellicourt,
Brancourt, St.Souplet, Mazinghein, and many other smaller villages, all of which had been held by
the Germans since 1914.
There were thousands of civilians in these towns who have been held captives and you should have
seen them greet us when we came through chasing Fritz. It was on the night of Oct. 17th that my cel-lar
was blown in and I got knocked out. I was sent in to the Aid Post and after getting treated felt so
much better that I went on forward and rejoined the company and stayed with them until they were
relieved on the 21st. I was so sick by that time with the combination of German gas and influenza
that I couldn’t make the hike back with the Company so had to go to hospital…
The “Ole Hickory” Division has certainly made a name for herself over here and we’re all mighty
glad to belong to it. We have been cited in official orders on several occasions. On the whole, our Com-pany
has been fairly fortunate. Out of a fighting strength of 98 men and six officers, we have gone
through four months of active service on the front and have lost only two officers and about forty men.
Many of the companies which went in with fighting strength of from 150 to 250 men came out with
one or two officers and between 15 and 50 men.
Top: Acres of barbed wire
cover the terrain near
Massiges, France. German sol-diers
can be seen in the dis-tance
surrendering to French
troops. Above: Both sides
used poison gas during the
war. It was first used on April
22, 1915, when the Germans
fired 150 tons of lethal chlo-rine
gas against two French
divisions in Belgium. British
Vickers machine-gun crew
firing their weapons during
the Battle of the Somme in
September 1916.
NATIONAL ARMY MUSEUM REUTERS/COLLECTION ODETTE CARREZ