The Abbeville press and banner. [volume] (Abbeville, S.C.) 1869-1924, 1919-03-11
SURVIVORS OF ARGONNE
GIVE INTIMATE VIEWS
Doughboys Sit With Ward Greene
and Tell How the Boch Was
Driven From His Stronghold

night in the little town OF Larrette,
France. We had come in out of the
muggy, sloppy darkness and poked
up the fire in the decrepit stone CRATE
under the high French mantel. Some
body tossed some fresh faggots on the
embers so that the flames leaped
high. Somebody else got real ex-
travagant and bought real bottle
of real champagne. And then we
sat there and toasted our toes and
slipped our wine and talked.
Or rather, the others talked. The
bows who had been with the Allan
erican division through the Argonne
and Meuse, who had seen it all and
suffered it all and come through it
all alive, began to tell of it. And as
one reminiscence led to another, as
their eyes sparkled at one incident
and their teeth set at the memory OF
another, those days were pictured as
never they could be on paper.
It's a pity there wasn't dicta-
phone handy to take record of that
conversation, with all its "Do you re-
member whens" and all it's when
we were at Sommerance", and the
rest. For it would come nearer be-
ing the real story of the Argonne
than anything that could written.
It with other conversations fired by
memory, held in the long winter
evenings throughout the division.
Strange what things men remember
of a battle. In that one hour l heard
Of how the fever gallops through
the fighters veins until his hardships
are as nothing in that supreme mom-
ent when the Boche breaks, the Boche
fees, the Boche goes galloping across
the land ahead like some grtat lum-
bering bear;
Of how man, knocked silly by
a shell, leaped from his litter as ne
was being borne to the rear, simply
because he dimly realized that a Ger
man was near at hand; and Of haw ne
set upon his prisoner, beating him
with his bare fists;
OF a Boche who let an American
doctor dress his wounds and then,
as the latter turned, threw a hand
grenade at him;
Of ap Indian in the division who
sat on the brink Of the parapet when
the machine gun bullets were whis-
tling by his head, sitting there, stole,
impurturbable, like all his race, gaz-
ing out across "No Mans Land".
Of how the poles and the Italians
and the other men of foreign birth
fought, with a ferocity and heroism
that won the undying admiration of
their American buddies;
Of men who had not an atom of
fear, leading charges against the
enemy with the gusto of the quarter
back of football eleven trotting on
the field before the game;
Of other men who were scaerd
trembling down to their toes, yet
conquered their fear and fought on
-white-faced and tight-lipped-Ger-
mans and themselves as well, dou-
BILE battle;
Of men wounded who refused to
be taken to the rear; of men so hor-
ribly nauseated from gas that
they were dizzy with vomiting, yet
fought the friends who would have
made them 60 back to the doctors.
And these were only come of the
stories. Some of them were grew
some, too horrible to tell. Some were
heroic. Most of them were funny,
for even in the blind heat of battle,
things happen that send men into
convulsions of laughter. and some
how, after it is all over, it is those
things, the humorous things, which
men prefer to relate.
Mostly the things they remember
ed were little things, just glimses that
were impressed on their brains like
the snapshot is caught on the cam
era's film. One had an indelible
picture of a big German rising out of