100 years ago in The Record
Thursday, Dec. 12, 1918.
More Troy soldiers tell The Record their stories of combat during a decisive American offensive last September in interviews published today. Our special correspondent has been talking to local men at the Greenhut military hospital, housed in a former department store on Sixth Avenue in New York City. The most harrowing combat story is told by Corporal Livingston Eaton of Company A, 10th U.S. Infantry, who recalls going “over the top” six times before getting wounded twice in late September. Eaton is a “borderman” from when the 105th, then the Second New York National Guard, saw border-patrol duty in Texas in 1916. He tells our writer that regular army troops “sneered at the National Guard” and made them “the objects of everybody’s fun” during trenchwarfare training in South Carolina. “Lookwhat it made of us,” he boasts. During the assault on the St. Quentin Canal, “our speed and dash cost us some of our best fellows.” Company A rushed into a valley where German machine-gunners “crushed us with enfilading fire.” After artillery softened up the German defense, the company advanced into another valley “only to meet with a repetition of our former experiences….Jerry [the Germans] came back pretty hard on us but we were determined to hold our gains. That was the fiercest fighting I saw.”
Around 11 a.m. Eaton was hit simultaneously in the right thigh and the left side of his chest. He woke up in a shell hole that afternoon. He remained there for the next eighteen hours.
“Every time I got part way up the side of the hole I could hear the pitter patter of the machine guns and automatics,” Eaton says, “So I let myself slide to the bottomagain. It began to rain. Even amid the din of the guns you could hear a buddy moan nearby and the stench of the dead was stifling.
“By and by I simply had to get out. The heavies were at it again, setting off little earthquakes in the vicinity and when it comes to choice between the little ones and the big ones I’ll take my chances with the little ones.”
“Here, too,” seconds Private John F. McCrea of Company C. He refuses to describe how he was wounded in his lower right leg, telling the reporter to talk to Private Fred C. Rasmussen, who was gassed on September 25.
“If I hadn’t been gassed I would have been killed, so what’s the difference?” Rasmussen says, “I wouldn’t have missed [the war] for a thousand dollars, and a million won’t make me want to go through it again.”
—Kevin Gilbert