Grand Forks herald. [volume] (Grand Forks, N.D.) 1916-1955, 1919-03-20
Ambulance Company
Did Excellent Work
tBy Earle II. Tosteyin.)

!. The earth trembled under the bat
tering of countless batteries Of heavy
gCns. 1t was a r~ip-roaring picnic Of
war. and North Dakota boys were
main celebrants.
Major Whittlesay. commanding the
unit OF the nth infantry. now his
torically known as the Lost Bat
talon" had been fighting off the
Germans who practically had his 700
men in ambush. He had told them
to go to He'll"
On either side Of the wooded valley
in the Argonne other soldiers OF. the
United States We're battering and
hacking away. And directly back of
the point where the Lost Battalion
was fighting the combined forces Of
cold and rain and death and bullets
and hunger; back of this point was
the 163rd Field Ambulance company,
composed of men from Paramount,
Hankinson, Bismarck, North Dakota,
and northern South Dakota men.
There are 600 hungry men over
there!" Ill.,
The battering continued. The hack
ing at the German defenses went on
with undiminished vigor. The artil-
lery doomed at the machine gun nests
and the boys vent owe the top in
their splendidlyl heroic effort to help
LLOSe WHO WO0iQ Qle amer IMAM sur
render.
Must be about 500 wounded half
starved Americans in those woods!"
There. were.
The. story Of the ~succoring of the
Lost Battalion has been told and re-
told.
The members Of the 163rd Field
Ambulance company followed the res
cuing forces. They drove their am
hula ov,or NehA1l-rsttal r1o@e ~k;1I
sprayed generously by the machine
gun fire.
Have you ever seen a weak-mind-
ed man brought out from under an
hypnotic spell?" Sergeant Lester
Crow. Lead. S. d.. asked Of me.
That's the way those chaps were.
something to. eat and drink. they
took the stuff mechanically and few,
I believe, realized what they were
doing when they ate.
Major Whittlesay mumbled away
to himself-'Six days and six nights!
That's a hell of a thing!"
MANY of the boys were badly
wounded and the gas poured into
them, and the hunger and thirst put
them in bad condition. We piled
them into ambulances and hauled
them back to the dressing stations.
Well maybe we did work about thirty
six hours without sleep or more than
a bite to eat. but we1had to get them
out" he concluded.
Pounding over the roads. living a
life in which American pluck, north
western hardness and American stick
to-it-iveness the ambulance men
had a big part in the a I am writ
ing of the 163rd because it was COM
posed of men formerly in Company Z
and other sections of the Second North
Dakota infantry regiment, which was
smashed and distributed about the
41st division at Camp Greene, Char
lotte. N. c.. in October. 1917.
These men. when last I saw them,
we're living in German military
school perched high. on the cliffs over
looking the Rhine river at Ehren-
breitstein opposite the city Of Coblenz,
They were Giving the life Of Reilly
as the troops call it. Officers of 1.-The
unit were housed in splendid quarters
merly used by the officers of the
school, and the buck privates, were
in apartments-1ittle heavens COM
pared to what they had known fol-
two years.
4 Other ambulance companies COM
posed of northwestern men saw the
same manner Of duty. The 163rd
however, saw perhaps a llttle more
than the others. This unit claim:
the ambulance record for the Ameri'
can <expeditionary forces. Its TWEEN
ty ambulances carried a total Of 21,'
, 900 wounded men and travelled ovel
$4,000 miles each.
The unit landed in France January
8, 1918. and was sent to Langres
The men first saw active duty at tn
time Of the Chateau-Thierry repuls'
of the German advance. Here the,
dashed back and forth from units %