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A small group of Germans saw what was happening and gave chase. Gus saw them run onto the bridge, barely visible in the twilight, gray moving on gray. Then the bridge exploded. The French had previously wired it for demolition, Gus realized. Bodies flew through the air and the northern arch of the bridge collapsed into a heap of rubble in the water.
Then it went quiet.
Gus lay down on a palliasse at headquarters and got some sleep, his first for almost forty-eight hours. He was awakened by the Germans' dawn barrage. Bleary-eyed, he hurried from the sewing-machine factory to the waterfront. In the pearly light of a June morning he saw that the Germans had occupied the entire north bank of the river and were shelling the American positions on the south bank at hellishly close range.
He arranged for the crews who had been up all night to be relieved by men who had got some rest. Then he went from position to position, always staying behind the waterfront buildings. He suggested ways of improving cover-moving a gun to a smaller window, using sheets of corrugated tin to protect crews from flying debris, or piling up rubble either side of the gun. But the best way for his men to protect themselves was to make life impossible for the enemy gunners. "Give the bastards hell," he said.
The men responded eagerly. The Hotchkiss fired four hundred and fifty rounds per minute, and its range was four thousand yards, so it was highly effective across the river. The Stokes mortar was less useful: its up-and-over trajectory was intended for trench warfare, where line-of-sight fire was ineffective. But the rifle grenades were highly destructive at short range.
The two sides pounded one another like bare-knuckle boxers fighting in a barrel. The noise of so much ammunition being fired was never less than deafening. Buildings collapsed, men screamed in the agony of wounds, bloodstained stretcher-bearers ran from the waterfront to the dressing station and back, and runners brought more ammunition and jugs of hot coffee to the weary soldiers manning the guns.
As the day wore on Gus noticed, in a back-of-the-mind way, that he was not scared. He did not think about it often-there was too much to do. For a brief moment, in the middle of the day, as he stood in the canteen of the sewing-machine factory gulping down sweet milky coffee instead of lunch, he marveled at the strange person he had become. Could it really be Gus Dewar who ran from one building to the next through an artillery barrage, shouting at his men to give 'em hell? This man had been afraid he would lose his nerve and turn around and walk away from the battle. In the event, he hardly thought of his own safety, being too preoccupied with the danger to his men. How had that come about? Then a corporal came to tell him that his squad had lost the special wrench used to change overheated Hotchkiss barrels, and he swallowed the rest of his coffee and ran to deal with the problem.
He did suffer a moment of sadness that evening. It was dusk, and he happened to look out of a smashed kitchen window to the spot on the bank where Chuck Dixon had died. He no longer felt shocked by the way Chuck had disappeared in an explosion of earth: he had seen much more death and destruction in the last three days. What struck him now, with a different kind of shock, was the realization that one day he would have to speak about that awful moment to Chuck's parents, Albert and Emmeline, owners of a Buffalo bank, and to his young wife, Doris, who had been so against America's joining the war-probably because she feared exactly what had happened. What was Gus going to say to them?
"Chuck fought bravely. " Chuck had not fought at all: he had died in the first minute of his first battle, without firing a shot. It would hardly have mattered if he had been a coward-the result would have been the same. His life had just been wasted.
As Gus stared at the spot, lost in thought, his eye was caught by movement on the railway bridge.
His heart missed a beat. There were men coming onto the far end of the bridge. Their field-gray uniforms were only just visible in the half-light. They ran awkwardly along the rails, stumbling on the sleepers and the gravel. Their helmets were of the coal scuttle shape, and they carried their rifles slung. They were German.
Gus ran to the nearest machine-gun emplacement, behind a garden wall. The crew had not noticed the assault force. Gus tapped the gunner on the shoulder. "Fire at the bridge!" he shouted. "Look-Germans!" The gunner swung the barrel around to the new target.
Gus pointed to a soldier at random. "Run to headquarters and report an enemy incursion across the east bridge," he shouted. "Quick, quick!"
He found a sergeant. "Make sure everyone is firing at the bridge," he said. "Go!"
He headed west. Heavy machine guns could not be moved quickly-the Hotchkiss weighed eighty-eight pounds with its tripod-but he told all the rifle grenadiers and mortar crews to move to new positions from which they could defend the bridge.
The Germans began to be mown down, but they were determined, and kept coming. Through his glasses, Gus saw a tall man in the uniform of a major who looked familiar. He wondered if it was someone he had met before the war. As Gus looked, the major took a hit and fell to the ground.
The Germans were supported by a terrific barrage from their own artillery. It seemed as if every gun on the north bank had trained its sights on the south end of the railway bridge where the defending Americans were clustered. Gus saw his men fall one after another, but he replaced every killed or wounded gunner with a fresh man, and there was hardly a pause in the firing.
The Germans stopped running and began to take up positions, using the scant cover of dead comrades. The boldest of them advanced, but there was no place to hide, and they were swiftly brought down.
Darkness fell, but it made no difference: firing continued at maximum on both sides. The enemy became vague shapes lit by flashes of gunfire and exploding shells. Gus moved some of the heavy machine guns to new positions, feeling almost certain this incursion was not a feint to cover a river crossing somewhere else.
It was a stalemate, and at last the Germans began to retreat.
Seeing stretcher parties on the bridge, Gus ordered his men to stop firing.
In response, the German artillery went quiet.
"Christ Almighty," Gus said to no one in particular. "I think we've beaten them off. "
{VI}
An American bullet had broken Walter's shinbone. He lay on the railway line in agony, but he felt worse when he saw the men retreating and heard the guns fall silent. He knew then that he had failed.
He screamed when he was lifted onto the stretcher. It was bad for the men's morale to hear the wounded cry out, but he could not help it. They bumped him along the track and through the town to the dressing station, where someone gave him morphine and he passed out.
He woke up with his leg in a splint. He questioned everyone who passed his cot on the progress of the battle, but he got no details until Gottfried von Kessel came by to gloat over his wound. The German army had given up trying to cross the Marne at Chateau-Thierry, Gottfried told him. Perhaps they would try elsewhere.
Next day, just before he was put on a train home, he learned that the main body of the United States Third Division had arrived and taken up positions all along the south bank of the Marne.
A wounded comrade told him of a bloody battle in a wood near the town called the Bois de Belleau. There had been terrible casualties on both sides, but the Americans had won.
Back in Berlin, the papers continued to tell of German victories, but the lines on the maps got no nearer to Paris, and Walter came to the bitter conclusion that the spring offensive had failed. The Americans had arrived too soon.
