Fix Bayonets!
by New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1926. Large 8vo. xxvii+248 pp. Illustrated. $3.50.
WE’VE had war books by the thousand, most of them long since forgotten. Three of the scores that I have read stand out in my mind: The First Seven Divisions, by an English officer whose name I don’t recall; Le Feu, by Henri Barbusse; and John Masefield’s Gallipoli. America now makes her first genuine contribution to these soldiers’ narratives, and it has been well worth waiting for. As the name implies, Fix Bayonets! is a battle piece, and no doubt the reason why Captain Thomason gives you battles to the exclusion, practically, of everything else is that the Marines went over to fight, and they got what they were looking for in generous measure. This story, which tells what they got, how and where they got it, and what they gave in return, is as far in advance of all the others as the Marines themselves were in advance of their compatriots on October 4, 1918, at the storming of Blanc Mont on the Champagne front.
I quote briefly to show the simplicity of Captain Thomason’s method of telling his story, and the uncanny rightness of his choice of words.
The Marines, ‘laden like mules with gas-masks, bandoleers, grenades, chaut-chaut clips, trudging forward without haste and without excitement,’ are approaching the Bois de Belleau. They are not under fire at the moment. Their own artillery has lengthened range and they hear the shells dropping into the depths of the wood that neither answers back nor shows an enemy.
Then the enemy infantry lets them have it; —
‘The air snapped and crackled all around. The sergeant beside the lieutenant stopped, looked at him with a frozen foolish smile, and crumpled into a heap of old clothes. Something took the kneecap off the lieutenant’s right knee and his leg buckled under him. He noticed, as he fell sidewise, that all his men were tumbling over like duck-pins; there was one fellow that spun around twice, and went over backward with his arms up. Then the wheat shut him in, and he heard cries and a moaning. He observed curiously that he was making some of the noise himself. How could anything hurt so? He sat up to look at his knee — it was bleeding like the deuce! — and as he felt for his first-aid packet a bullet scared his shoulder, knocking him on his back again. For a while he lay quiet and listened to the odd, thrashing noises around him, and off to the left a man began to call, very pitifully.’
Here is another, to show the absolute authenticity of his observations.
The Marines, after a miserable night in the open, had assembled at dawn, around the galleys, waiting for something hot. ‘But something hot was long in coming. The cooks swore because dry wood could n’t be found. . . . The men swore at the weather and the slowness of the kitchen force, and the war in general, and they all growled together.’ Then a second-incommand informed a captain that some French artillerymen in a near-by ditch had a lovely cooking fire, and that they had given him some coffee with rum in it. The captain and ‘a lieutenant in a mouse-colored raincoat’ faded in that direction at once. ‘They returned in time to see their company and the other companies of the battalion lining up for chow. This matter being disposed of, the men cast incurious eyes about them.’
Come hell and high water, but come chow first! And when it had come, and was safely stowed away under their belts, ‘the men cast incurious eyes about them.’ That is exactly the way it was.
I regret exceedingly that I can’t quote at length from the conversations of officers and files as recorded by Captain Thomason. These men, so many of whom are dead, live in his pages as soldiers never lived before. He has given them a splendid immortality.
JAMES NORMAN HALL