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| Poilus Heading for the Trenches |
Letter from Chasseur á Pied Robet Pellissier
February 7, 1915
. . . My battalion had a devil of a time the second half of January. We went up the range and down the other side to take up the trenches about Steinbach and Uffholz.
Hardly had we reached our positions than the Dutch began to give signs of unusual activity. They began to bombard, and they kept it up day after day. The first forty-eight hours my company was held on reserve and all we could do was to sit in covered trenches and listen to the shells burst in our neighborhood. It was quite a stunt to get out at all as fragments came buzzing along at any time. Although the explosions took place near the regular trenches quite a distance from us we could not have any fires because of the danger of being spotted, and it was freezing pretty hard. Another thing, we could not lie down. The covered ditches being too narrow, we slept with our knees to our chin.
The third and fourth days we relieved the company in the first line trenches. The one we occupied made me think of Dante‘s Inferno, the part assigned to Brunetto Latini, who runs madly on a sandy plain under a rain of fire. The trench was in yellow mud. In the front of it in the mud there were poor fellows stretched out in their last sleep, fifteen or twenty of them. In addition many humps over the field, all being hastily made graves. The trench was German originally. It had been stormed by the 252nd regiment and turned around to face the German front. The slaughter had been terrible. To our back and to the right was the village of Steinbach, or rather the ghost of the village. My company took it December 13th. It was retaken by the Dutch. Soon after that, taken away from them by line infantry, every house riddled with shot. Few roofs and many black walls, the steeple showing the light right through in a dozen places. To our left was the road of access, and perhaps the most striking element in the picture, every square yard ploughed up by exploded shells. There the earth was red, just as it is near Holyoke. Well, the trees, fruit trees and the vineyards were all red from the amount of dirt kicked up by shells. . .
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| Sgt. Robert Pellisier |
The fifth day and the sixth we were to be in the second line, they made us build an artillery shelter in the back woods. All went serenely until about 4 P.M. There was just the regular number of shells, two or three every five minutes, but at four, by gum, things began to hum, and we received orders to move to the front P.D.Q. My section started up, I pulled out my watch and started to count. It took us eleven minutes to get to our second line position and in that time we received in front and in back to the right and left eighty-two shells.
The noise and the stuff kicked up and the branches cut made an "ensemble" impossible to describe, yet no one was hurt. Our adjutant turned once to shout a command and got his mouth full of dirt. That was all. To me our escaping scot free was a real miracle. Well, the bombardment stopped and before we had time to get to the first line the Dutch had grabbed hold of a bit of trench. All we could do was to dig one right back and so we did. It was pitch dark by that time and as I am not much good at digging, I asked to be put on sentry duty to see that no Boche sneaked up to those who were working. Four of us went about twenty yards forward, sat down and listened. Our artillery had set fire to three houses in the plain. The red smoke was all we could see, but we could hear our men digging and the Germans digging. We were about eighty yards from them, suddenly things started up again. I don’t know who did the starting or why, but we were caught between two perfectly fiendish fusillades. Our light artillery fired over our heads, dangerously close to our pates. The Dutch fired bombs with their trench bombs and their hand grenades. Some kind of fragment finally hit me on the shoulder so I stopped firing and took to cover behind a big log. The other sentinels crept up also and we waited for the storm to slacken.
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Robet Pellissier was born in France in 1882. He grew up in the United States and was teaching at Stanford University when the Great War broke out in his homeland. Returning as a voluteer, he initially saw uninterrupted service in the Vosges Mountains. He was killed in action in the Battle of the Somme on 28 August 1916.
This letter excerpt is from:
A Good Idea of Hell:
Letters from a Chasseur á Pied
Reprinted by permission of the Editor and Publisher. Available at Amazon.com HERE
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