"God Damn It, Don't You Know We're Going Over the Top"

“God damn it, don’t you know we’re going over the top at 5:35,” Lieutenant Maury Maverick yelled to his company of the 28th Regiment as it formed up and prepared to attack past the eastern edge of Montrebeau Wood. A fiercely independent Texan, he would serve in the 1930s as a Democratic congressman from San Antonio and coin the term gobbledygook to describe the language used by President Roosevelt’s government bureaucrats. No gobbledygook passed Maverick’s lips as he paced up and down the lines in the predawn darkness of October 4. The enemy lines were silent—some said they had already retreated, but Maverick had the unsettling feeling that they were just waiting. Sure enough, “the Germans simply waited, and then laid a barrage of steel and fire.”

At this moment of five-thirty-five, everything happened that never happens in the story books of war. . . . There were no bugles, no flags, no drums, and as far as we knew, no heroes. The great noise was like a great stillness, everything seemed blotted out. We hardly knew where the Germans were. We were simply in a big black spot with streaks of screaming red and yellow, with roaring giants in the sky tearing and whirling and roaring. I have never read in any military history a description of the high explosives that break overhead. There is a great swishing scream, a smack-bang, and it seems to tear everything loose from you. The intensity of it simply enters your heart and brain and tears every nerve to pieces.

At the beginning of the advance, Maverick’s company numbered two hundred men. A few minutes after the attack started, half of them were dead or wounded. As the last remaining officer, he took command of the company. The next highest-ranking soldier was a corporal.

With “nothing to do but keep on going,” Maverick tilted his head into the storm. Giving the Doughboy’s tin helmet more credit for stopping power than it deserved, he held his head down in hopes that it would deflect enemy bullets. Then he had second thoughts. What if a bullet hit him in the chin and tore off his jaw, leaving him horribly disfigured for life? He held his head up, and reconsidered. What if a bullet hit him in the mouth and knocked out all his teeth, or cut through his eyes and left him blind? Glancing up, he realized in a moment that his helmet was gone. In the excitement that morning he had worn it on top of his cap. It had slipped off without his feeling it.

“This was no time to be worrying about hats,” he told himself. “We had to advance.” Ahead, he saw trees interlaced with immense coils of barbed wire. In the middle, a single lane passed through the wire. In that lane lay dozens of American corpses—a death trap. Certainly a German machine gun waited on the other side. “I did not want to go through that lane. But the men began to waver a little and I figured it would not be right for me to lay down or stop, so I moved ahead. I said to myself, ‘This is one of the finest dilemmas I have ever been in. I must go through that lane, call for my men if I don’t get killed, and get a hat. I need a hat. I need a hat.’ “Maverick picked through the lane, stopping briefly to try on helmets from dead soldiers, and emerged safe on the other side. A German machine gun was there, sure enough, but its occupants were dead, one of them slumped over his gun. Maverick formed his men to resume the advance through the woods when a shell burst over his head, ripping out a large piece of his shoulder blade and collar bone and knocking him to the ground. A medical man joined him, and applied bandages.

As he lifted me from the ground, I looked at my four runners, and I saw that the two in the middle had been cut down to a pile of horrid red guts and blood and meat, while the two men on the outside had been cut up somewhat less badly, but no less fatally. It reminded me of nothing I had ever seen before, except a Christmas hog butchering back on the Texas farm.

Maverick’s 28th Regiment, and the 26th Regiment to its right, continued to advance over broken, machine-gun and sniper-infested country. They traversed the eastern end of Exermont Ravine and fought bitterly to capture two heavily fortified farms. Machine-gun emplacements made of logs overgrown with moss and shrubbery took a heavy toll. The veteran 1st Division troops expertly infiltrated between the German strongpoints and destroyed them before moving on. There was much bayonet work too, with no prisoners taken on either side. Eventually, they seized their objectives. But as the regiments had advanced well ahead of the 32d Division, German artillery methodically flailed their right flank. Being first was not always best.

Overall, the Big Red One had advanced about one and a half miles, farther than any other division on October 4. Its losses had been severe—2,057 casualties in one day—but the 1st Division had upheld its reputation as the most hard-driving unit in the AEF.

Edward G. Lengel, To Conquer Hell: the Meuse-Argonne, 1918