Spies in the Valley of the Shadow
Thanks to some talented spy work, Harvey Allen and his men find themselves caught in a storm of steel.
DISCLAIMER: The Dive is now Code of Words!
This is the name of a book I’m working on and I think a better title for this blog. The next post will show in your email as “Code of Words”.
The story below is the type of content you can expect more of in the future.
Now, onto the story!
Have I got a story for you.
The account below comes from Toward The Flame: A War Diary by Harvey Allen, a Pennsylvania National Guardsmen who fought in the Great War. Allen characterizes Toward The Flame as “[…] a glimpse of some of the fighting about Château-Thierry and Fismes, but above all, it shows how we lived and died, ate, cooked, looked, thought and felt during that time. It is the intimate detail of life at the front as I saw it, and pretends to be nothing more.”
Lieutenant Allen was a fantastic writer in my opinion and his memoir reads like a novel. He recounts details I would surely forget if I lived through what he did. My memory of his combat experience would be a flash of moments that run together and I would likely misremember the sequence of events. But Allen tells this story as if it happened yesterday. I’m sure It helps that his memory was, as he describes it, photographic.
Into the Valley of the Shadow
Lieutenant Allen's long march for the "Valley of the Shadow" from western France began its last leg near Château-Thierry, a small commune east of Paris. He doesn't mention why this sector was colloquially called the Valley of the Shadow, but he does mention his men also called it "Death Valley". I think it's safe to say it's a biblical reference for an area where many bad things happen. A "big relief was in progress" and Lieutenant Allen had been ordered to find and replace the 30th Infantry Brigade.
After a day of marching in the sun, Allen and his men entered the woods at 5 p.m. Allen's men had a good nap in the woodline while he chatted up a nearby MP who was directing traffic. The two got lucky and, when trusting their gut, moved off the road and into a ditch, narrowly missing a German shell. They peered out of the ditch to find a 4-foot-deep hole right where they had been standing.
At twilight, Allen’s battalion was ordered to move out. They stepped off in file. All around them the air shook and the ground trembled at the force of German 420mm guns known as "Big Bertha." Allen mentions that they did not know it at the time, but their swap was taking place during one of the largest bombardments by the Germans of the war.
It didn't take long for the battalion to be separated. By mistake, the front platoon of Alpha company continued on with their guide without alerting the rest of their company. Now Allen was in the dark without a guide. Allen took charge and, grabbing an experienced man from his company, set out to find someone who knows where the 30th Infantry might be. They came across several sentries, some helpful, others useless. While Allen searched, his company slept. Thanks to his leadership, they found their way. Allen's battalion made their way down a mountainside, toward the bottom of the hill, where the 30th was waiting. Once his men found and fortified their positions, Allen finally had a chance to rest. He crawled into his tent and slept for the first time in two days.
It was at the bottom of this hill that Allen encountered the spies:
One morning a French major with an American captain came down the hill, asking for various items of information. He had all necessary credentials and had passed through battalion headquarters. He got sketches of our positions. About an hour later a lieutenant came down from regimental headquarters with orders to arrest him. He was a German spy. Both of them were, I feel sure, although the “American captain” must have lived a long time in the United States as his accent was quite natural and he was familiar with the streets in my home town.
Owing to this visit, the bombardment that night was deadly and accurate. I tried to get Captain Law to shift the men out of a trench the fourth platoon occupied, but he could not see the advantage of leaving cover to move forward into the open. About two o’clock a poor “kid” came to my dugout, evidently with something to say, but he couldn’t say it. He led me over to the fourth platoon trench. We hit the ground about every thirty seconds. They had the trench “cold”; the place was full of dead and wounded. Three direct hits had accounted for fifteen.
I was so frightened myself, I could scarcely get the men together. One sergeant, cool as a cucumber, came up and gave me an immense sense of help. There were three or four maniacs from shell shock whom we had to overpower. We dug some of the poor devils out and started them up the hill. The faint sounds and stirrings in the caved-in banks were terrible. Some we could not reach in time, and one of these was smothered. We had one party of wounded all together and started up the hill once, when a big shell fell right in their midst. I saw men blown into the air. Awful confusion again....The state of a wounded man, wounded again, and still tinder fire, is beyond description.
Two more shells hit the trench, and I sent the men forward two or three hundred yards. They were in perfect safety there, all shells sailing over them.
We got what wounded we could and dragged them up to battalion headquarters. There were no stretchers there, and I could not get anyone to come out of the dugouts. I shouted at them, but heard only muffled voices in reply. The darkness was inky. One of the men was hit again.
That was the first time in my life that I ever knew what it was to be angry. If certain of the men in the dugouts had come out then I believe I could have shot at them. Lieutenant Sharpe, the scout officer, who was the only one there who tried to do anything for us, finally got a runner to send up to the dressing station and ask for stretchers.
Sharpe and I in the meantime tried to bandage some of the poor devils. The feel of warm human bodies and blood, the quiet patience and confidence of the men, brought a realization of life to me in that hour that I shall never forget. “This is my body which is given for you.” What that really meant, now I knew.
After half an hour the stretcher bearers came and the men were taken up and borne away.
Going down the hill again, I got the nearest call; a “big boy” came over and exploded in a drain beside the road. I had thrown myself down, of course, but I got tossed and wafted some feet in sliding débris. Nothing hit me. I went back to Sergeant Davidson in the dugout after a while with a numb feeling in my side, pretty well unnerved and shaken up. Nick made me some hot coffee over an alcohol lamp. I slept after a while, and next day came to, rather than woke up, about eleven o’clock—beautiful sunshine—it hardly seemed possible in those woods.