Atlanta semi-weekly journal. (Atlanta, Ga.) 1898-1920, 1918-08-20
ARMY,


w Fighting are usually good natured
w when off duty. l.Iis is odd, but it is fact
Most of the men who for month were blown up
by high explosives and burned by gas and potted
at by machine guns in Belleau Wood chip
per grigs-whatever may be grig-now that
they are at last out of it. But this morning l en-
countered one fighting man who was not running
true to form. He peevish
"So-and-So," said he, naming the man, lis
several sorts of a fool"
The person thus unhappily described is an in
spector of parts There comes a time in the life
of every man who has persisted in the vocation of
inspecting when he is unable to see the mountain
for the trees. 1t was his job to look over the &C
counts and conditions of the heroes of the Bots de
Belleau.
Some of the company officers used too much
ammunition" he reported.
The fighting man 1 am not quoting, because he
became unquotable, asked what the inspector
knew of condition in Belleau Wood certain
unit which under the rules of the censor may no
longer be named had been sent in there to hold
the wood Nothing had been said about the fnan-
cial limit the expenditure of shells. 1t was
simply told to hold the wood. Incidentally, it took
a holy lot of Boche machine guns and several mil
lion-miIlion is the word-rounds of cartridges
and used some of them against the Boche They
might be entitled to credit for this, but they
didn't get it.
And he said our stretchers were bloody said
the fighting man.
Stop and think what that charge amounts to.
The men who have been fighting in Belleau Wood
were at it for close to a month-with one
brief break of rest They felt themselves mighty
lucky to have stretchers at all Every wounded
man who could walk out of the wood did so. The
stretcher bearers carried the others at the great
risk of their lives. Drinking water carried to
Beleau Wood and to the nearby ruins in which
first aid posts established in canteens. No
one had time water-Or the dispositon-to stop
in the midst of the bloodest and most concentrat-
ed fighting in which American troops have yet
been engaged in France to wash up the stretchers.
HE was not to blame" the censor will say.
l know well as though l already heard him just
what the censor will say. He will explain to me
that it the duty of the inspector to inspect,
and that under the system he had no option but
to state facts he found them. So that the men
who took Belleau Wood at loss-I use the mill
tary jargon here-"not disproportionate to the OBJ
jective obtained" must stop in the job of getting
rested up and cleaned UP and quieting their nerves
to explain why:
So MANY bullets were used in killing Boche
Why they did not pause in the task of carrying
out the wounded to wash the blood from the
stretchers.
Some of those stretchers ought never to be
washed. They ought to go back home just as they
are, hard and black and magnificent with blood
that has cotted and glazed, so that Americans
might realize how proud they are of the men who
bled and died upon them. There is nothing hOr-
rible in the powder blackened and blood-stained
battle flags of Antietam and Missionary Ridge.
But thu neevish fighting man l have been tell
ing about mry cheer up Americans learn by
perience, just other people do, even if we do
not learn as rapidly as thought we would
There is a startling lack of care for the sensbili-
ties of worthy but unintelgent officers in this
army that General John j. Pershing is creating
1t takes time to down the unintelligent, but
they are frightfully run down in the end Here's
a story to prove it:
Three Germans were heard dark night in
front of American troops near Verdun, hard at
work cutting the wire Maybe there were more
Germans. The night was too dark for the sentinel
on duty to make sure. He just turned his rifle
loose in the general direction of the noise he heard
out there in the dark and went on shooting. In
the morning a salvage party collected one dead
German on the wire, dying German, and ore
slieAty wounded GERMAN.