It was two in the afternoon before the fog began to thicken. The zero hour was at hand!
Although we had marched many weary miles, had lain motionless in the mud for five hours, and had meanwhile tasted neither food nor drink, we did not mind it. One ignores bodily needs under heavy mental stress. I carried a little meat and bread in my pocket, which, that noon, I shared with good Father LeMay.
At two-thirty, when the sheltering fog was thickest, quietly the word was passed down the line "Get ready." At that moment I was near the western end of the column near a stone quarry, strongly defended by the enemy with machine guns and automatic rifles.
Promptly the boys made ready, slipping off packs, many even their blouses. It was to be a bayonet rush up that hill, and the idea was to feel as cold and shoulder free as possible. The pain of mustard gas is not so intense if one's body is cool and dry. Officers as well as men were lightly clothed; their only weapons, automatics. I substituted a sweater for my blouse. All felt the tense strain, and throats grew dry and temples throbbed.
At that moment was given a final General Absolution and Blessing.
Sharply, along the crouching line like a flash of fire, boomed the command to advance--"Guns and bayonets now, boys, and give them hell!" Instantly leaping forward, the men hurled themselves up the hill. Helmeted, masked, their bayonets flashing, like the crested foam of some giant wave they swept forward.
We had not advanced fifty feet when over the hillside there burst a hail storm of lead. The enemy hurled into our faces every manner of destruction; bullets and steel fragments screamed through the air, "thudding" into every foot of ground!
The first boy to fall was Riorden of New Jersey, who pitched forward, terribly torn, shortly to my right. Onward and upward swept the line. As I paused a moment beside Riorden to absolve him, Walsh of Syracuse, New York, running some thirty feet in advance, waved his arm for me to hurry. "Holy Joe" was the name given the Chaplain. I never knew its origin, but it was the title most generally used and always with the utmost respect.
Even then could be heard the horrible crash of steel on steel, hand to hand bayonet contact, screams of terror and pain, when the blade dripping blood was withdrawn from its human scabbard. The advance soon reached the hilltop and the gray-clad Germans resisted desperately. The most terrible, horrible, and indescribable of all sights and sounds were now before me. Wild-eyed, panting, fiercely visaged boys in American khaki and German gray, feinting, parrying, and madly lunging with glittering bayonets--the crash and shrill metallic stroke of steel on steel, and Oh! the grunt and scream of agony when the blade sank to its hilt in a blood-spurting human breast! Each boy, in that moment of deadly shock, was fighting for his own life--it was destroy first or be destroyed, and the first to get in a fatal blow survived. No alien soldier lives however, who can withstand that most terrible and supreme of all fighters--the American Doughboy! Hands were being raised and cries of "Kamerad" heard from every side. The grim heights of Rembercourt were ours; but, my God! see the price we have paid for that eight minutes of struggle.