Bisbee daily review., 1918-08-25
AMERICAN TROOPS IN FOUL SECTOR IN
 ONE FIGHT
THOUGH THERE HAVE BEEN sEV- ERAL OTHER ENGAGEMENTS TANKS HOLD THAT XlVRAY BATTLE WAS ONLY REAL ONE THEY HAVE BEEN IN AS YET
CBy Review Leased yvirel

 IN FRANCE, June 9.-(COrrespOnd- ence of The Associated Press) - Though the American troops have had three engagements in the Toul sector during the past three months men in the division say there has been just one fight"
 The big raid on Apremont in April they call the Apremont affair."" they refer to the attack on Seicheprey, ten days later as the Seicheprey thing; but, the morning of June 16 at Xiv ray" they say, there was a fight.
 This distinction does no wrong to the defenders of ApremOnt and Sci cheprey. The men did their best there, and that best was as good as could be expected under the circumstances, but their best then was not so good as their best at Xivray. That is the sig nificance given to the distinction by French officers. They say that it was at Xivray the men holding the sector showed they had learned how to do what must be done in the front line.
 Xivray has a similar meaning to the Germans in that sector if the evidence of prisoners may be trusted. The men captured there show increased resper, for the fighting qualities of the Amer jeans and betray a deeper awe of the American machine gun.
 It is now disparagement of the work the ordinary rifle did there to say that the quick-firers decided the issue Two companies of infantry, without dugouts to shelter them held their grounds on the right of the position through heavy artillery preparation and kept the enemy from bringing up endorsements throughout the fight Meanwhile, in the center at Xivray and on the left, the machine gun ners did the rest.
 The enemy's plan according to pris- Oners, was to force the village, destroy the defence works, make the place un- tenable and take prisoners. The effort was well organized and might have succeeded but for the work of the quick-firers.
 Six hundred men advanced to the attack in no less than a dozen diff ferent columns, led by 200 picked Ba- varian storming troops. They came up on the right flank, on the left and on the center under cover of smoke, making a dark night still darker. They crept up the ravines and slipped through the hollows. The sharp ears of sentries alone prevented a total surprise.
 Their guns laid down a heavy box barrage that prevented the reinforc- ing of the front line. One platoon, led by Lieutenant Doan. from Maine, got through the first curtain of fire. Doan even went through the second with some volunteers, but that was all the help that could be sent to the 2Z5 men that were holding the line attack ed. They were only one to three but they fought in way to surprise and dismay the 600 Germans.
 One machine gun section in the vil- lage was reduced to two men. Monfort Wyckoff and John Flynn. Their gun damned and Flynn kept the Germans off with his revolver while Wyckoff got the quick-firer going again. They held their ground to the end. Two other men, unable to get a sight at the Germans from their trench climb ed the parapet and stood there erect firing their automatics from the shoulder. Two infantrymen crawled out of a shell hole to get better aim.
 The Germans had lost a third of their 500 men when growing daylight impaired the effectiveness of their smoke screen and they began to re- tire. The fifty odd unwounded Amer jeans left out of 225 went over the top after them.
 Two hundred is a conservative esti- mate of the German losses for our men buried forty-seven of them on the field and there were more corpses in the tall grass facing the position, out of reach. Thus the Germans lost nearly as many me as they had fac ing them during the fight
 One of the heroes of the day was a cook who had been dismissed from the service on account of loose habits with respect to drink When sober he was possessed of an astonishing amount of perseverance. He had foiled all efforts of the officers to put him out of the division. He left one regi- menI to appear in another He passed from one company to another until he had reached the last one. If he was thrown out of that it was all over with his soldering. He was one of the volunteers that went through both bar rages and he stayed through the fight giving first aid to the wounded under the sharpsst fire from the assailants.