Miracle at Belleau Wood: The Birth of the Modern U.S. Marine Corps (1 of 3 free samples)

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COPYRIGHT
Miracle at Belleau Wood: The Birth of the Modern U.S. Marine Corps by Alan Axelrod. Copyright 2007 Alan Axelrod
All Rights Reserved. Sharing not permitted.

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DEDICATION: For Anita and Ian

Miracle at Belleau Wood: The Birth of the Modern U.S. Marine Corps
By Alan Axelrod


INTRODUCTION

A PATCH OF WOODS

And, waking or sleeping, I can still see before me
the dark threat of Belleau Wood, as full of menace
as a tiger's foot, dangerous as a live wire, poisonous
with gas, bristling with machine guns, alive with
snipers, scornfully beckoning us to come on and be
slain, waiting for us like a dragon in its den. Our
brains told us to fear it, but our wills heard but
one command, to clean it out, and I can still see
before my very eyes those waves in the poppy-spattered
wheat-field as the steady lines of our Marines went in.

--Colonel Albertus W. Catlin, U.S. Marine Corps,
6th Marine Regiment

By spring 1918 the world was nearly used to being a world at war. After four years, it had grown accustomed to the killing machine, almost as if it were a fixture of nature, like a thunderstorm that rarely let up or an earthquake that would not cease upheaval. But none of it was ever really natural, of course. It was a machine, a filthy, muddy, bloody machine of vast extent. Its western front stretched in a network of trenches from the English Channel in the north some six hundred miles south to the border of Switzerland. Into these ditches were fed the young men of Europe and Europe's colonies--and, more recently, of America as well--65,038,810 in all, of which 8,020,780 emerged as corpses.

Four years of boots, bombs, shells, and rain had churned much of Belgium and France into a glutinous mud indistinguishable from the mud-dun uniforms of the young warriors who contended for this ugly ground. By 1918, with the United States in the struggle, the Great War (as it was then called) had become truly a world war, and it was now increasingly difficult to find a place on the planet untouched by the conflagration. Yet, in France, on the western front, no more than two score miles east of Paris, at the very seam of the inferno, there was such a place, even in the spring of 1918. It was called the Bois de Belleau, Belleau Wood.

Nearby, the village of Belleau, along with other towns and villages and farms, had been scarred by the combat that had swirled around them, but the woods--an ancient hunting preserve, the domain of a wealthy Parisian sportsman whose château lay just within it--was virtually untouched. It had not been purposely preserved but was somehow overlooked by the forces of destruction. Amid the chaos it was, in fact, a profoundly peaceful place, darkly green with old-growth trees, its paths overgrown, its underbrush wild, a place of lichen and mushrooms, of soil almost intoxicating with the rich, loamy fragrance of fertility. The boundaries of Belleau Wood were difficult to discern, since its shape was organic, reminding some of a kidney and others of a seahorse. In extent, the place was little more than a mile north to south, and at its widest, east to west, perhaps a thousand yards across--about half the size of New York City's Central Park.

Not that Belleau Wood was any manicured park. It was, rather, a concentration of thick woods rising over a heavy blanket of undergrowth. On its perimeter were fields chest-high with winter wheat, the kind of crop that shines in the sun as if some caring, patient hand had polished each stalk individually. Those glistening fields separated the southern end of the woods from the villages of Lucy-le-Bocage to the west and Bouresches to the east.

It was an ancient forest, mostly innocent of the ax; for wild as it was, Belleau Wood had never been a source of lumber or firewood but a place of recreation and pleasure, a place of sport, the domain of the Saturday hunt, civilized, none too strenuous, gentlemen shooters bagging some birds, some game, all to be prepared in the château scullery that very evening and enjoyed, among weekend guests from Paris, with several bottles of very fine wine from the master's cellars. It was, then, a tiny forest of very old growth, split by streams, gullies, and ravines, and punctuated by boulders the size of (as the Americans would say) railroad boxcars. Small game and game birds abounded in this place, a place known before the war chiefly to the privileged few who were guests of the château, and during the war, a place neglected.

Shortly before the spring of 1918, cool, dark Belleau Wood, named for the clear, icy spring nearby, had been the quiet heart of what seasoned commanders called a "quiet sector," a corner of the war reasonably close to the fight but in which little had happened and even less was expected to happen. By the time the U.S. Marines arrived at the end of May 1918, however, tranquil Belleau Wood had been transformed into a "dark threat . . . as full of menace as a tiger's foot, dangerous as a live wire, poisonous with gas, bristling with machine guns, alive with snipers," a dragon's den, beckoning entry, promising death. It was as if the lovely woods had fallen under a curse. And so, like much of the world beyond it, it had.


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