Jan. 7, 1915.
Dear Agnes:
I have had practically no sleep for the last eighty hours, but I can’t sleep now so will write you and try to keep my mind occupied.
I received your letter and the gold piece a few days after Xmas, in the trenches. I forwarded the letter to Paul but kept the money myself and thank you very much for it, and must say that you are very ingenious.
I spent the holidays fairly quietly, came out of the trenches New Year’s Eve. New Year’s Day we were marched ten kilometers to the rear and given the first bath the army had given us for three months. The next day we were inoculated for typhoid. The next two days our arms were a little sore and we were more or less feverish; so we got two days’ rest— the first since being in the army.
On the night of the 4th, almost midnight, we started to where I now am. This is a village that I should say probably had five thousand inhabitants before the war and it has been fought over quite a bit, the Germans having lost two thousand killed in a night attack on it in the early part of the war. There is now not a building that has not been demolished by shells.
The march here was through swamps and it was dark and rainy, so it took us about three hours to get here. We marched quietly through the streets and my section was sent to the sector nearest the enemy, which was a beautiful château (probably belonging to some millionaire) with a fine park all around it. When we got to it, we relieved the section there who had been staying in the basement, it being intact. While the relief was going on the ninth squad (the one I am in) was called off by the sergeant as petit poste. We went through the park about one hundred yards and came to a wall that was like the walls built around castles in medieval times. There were nine of us and our corporal (our number in camp was fifteen). Four of us were stationed at different points along the wall as sentries, while the others went down to the station for the petit poste.
At my position a shell had blown a hole through the wall. This hole had a door, propped up against it by a ladder, a small opening being left at each side, from which I could watch the direction of the enemy. Once in a while I would crawl up the ladder and look over the wall.
I was stationed there about four o’clock. At 7 o’clock, when it was getting light, the corporal came and told me to go back to the Château for food for us, which I did. There, I met one of the other guards and we got the food and started back with it. As we came out of the woods towards the wall we saw that we were exposed to fire from three directions and that the German trenches were quite near the wall. About that time bullets began to “whizz,” and we “ducked” and ran to the wall and then along the side of it about two hundred yards to the petit poste. All that day we crouched in little dug-outs and cursed our officers for putting us in such a death-trap without more men and without telling us the real situation. At nightfall, we were stationed in such a way that four of us had to watch a wall practically one half mile long, right under the nose of the enemy, with hundreds of men in the rear of us subject to an attack. The poste was two hours on and two hours off, with no man to close his eyes, and the understanding that we would be relieved at six the next morning.
At ten-thirty p.m. I was standing at the door mentioned above when the communication sentinel came up to me. Just as he started to speak something fell at my feet and sputtered a little and then went out. We each said,” What’s that?” I reached down and picked it up, when the other sentinel said, “Good God! It’s a hand-grenade!” I threw it away and we both jumped to attention, asked each other what to do, and finally decided for Seeger (the other sentry), to go to the petit poste for the corporal, while I watched. Just as he and the corporal came running up the corporal called “Garde à vous, Rockwell,” and another grenade fell at my feet. I jumped over the ladder toward the corporal and as I reached his side the bomb exploded. We both called out “Aux armes.” We had no more than done this when the door gave in and a raiding band entered the side of the opening. The corporal and I both were in an open position at their mercy, so we turned and jumped toward cover. I went about ten feet when a rifle flashed and I dropped to the ground. When I dropped the corporal fell beside me and I knew by his fall that he was dead. I crouched and ran, the bullets whizzing by me, but I made it to the woods. In the meantime, the five men left at the poste jumped over to their positions. When they did the Germans in the trenches, at the door in the wall, and others who had managed to slip over the wall at some unprotected point, opened fire on them. Two were slightly wounded and another’s rifle was shattered by a bullet. They immediately dropped flat on the ground and lay there, afraid to fire as most of the fire was coming from the direction in which they expected reinforcements, and in which they knew we sentries were. I lay in the woods and watched, not daring to move lest I be seen.
While they had us in this position, part kept firing while others ran down to the corporal, dragged his body up toward the door, cut off his equipment and coat and took them and his gun, broke his body up with the butts of their rifles and then got away without a shot being fired on our side.
A few minutes later a sergeant with two men came running through the woods, and Seeger (who had joined me) and I halted them and we five advanced on the opening and put up the door. By that time reinforcements came up.
Written four days later and sent in same letter
Corporal Weideman was a full-blooded German, but a naturalized Frenchman, having been in the Legion for fifteen years. He was ignorant but honest, impartial and afraid of nothing (something that can be said of few legionnaires). In my mind he was the best of all the old legionnaires.
The affair was rather a disgrace for all of us. I made mistakes in my actions due to not being well versed in all kinds of warfare. The corporal acted wrongly through ignorance and astonishment. The whole thing impressed all of us more like a murder than warfare. The Germans had no military point to gain by doing what they did. It was done as an act of individualism with a desire to kill. The top of poor Weideman’s head was knocked off, after he was killed, by the butt of a rifle.
After the reinforcements came up they scattered in search of Germans while I resumed my post with the corporal’s body beside me. In about fifteen minutes the Red Cross men came and got it and I called the acting chief of the squad and told him he would have to relieve me as my nerves had gone all to pieces. He did this and I went back to the château to make a report on how it all happened.
After about half an hour I came back to my post and was on guard practically all the rest of the night at another post.
About two hours after all this happened there came from the German trenches the most diabolical yell of derision I ever heard. It was mocking Weideman’s last words, his call “Aux armes,” and it practically froze the blood to hear it. Up until that minute I had never felt a real desire to kill a German. Since then I have had nothing but murder in my heart, and now no matter what happens I am going through this war as long as I can.
At daybreak we were relieved and I went back to the château but couldn’t sleep that day. At night we were relieved by another section and went to another château where I was out on petit poste again. The following morning I came in and felt that I must sleep. I lay down and was just getting to sleep when some excitable fool called a false alarm of “Aux armes,” and I could not get back to sleep. In the afternoon, I started writing to you, was sitting in the doorway, and got up to get more paper. When I came back German sharpshooters were firing at the position, so I had to give it up. That night I was on petit poste again, also the following night, until we were relieved early in the morning, and came back here, where I now am—about five kilometers to the rear.
Nothing could be worse than those four days and nights. The uncertainty of it all—lying in the rain and mud, eternally watching and listening, knowing that everywhere men were prowling, trying to slip up on one another in the dark and kill.
I have had my second inoculation for typhoid fever and am not feeling well to-day, but will be all right by to-morrow, I suppose. To-morrow night we will go back to some point on the line.
With much love,
Kiffin.