hardly
platoons, but they held their lines and advanced them. In more than one
case companies lost every officer, leaving a Sergeant and sometimes a
Corporal to command, and the advance continued.

After thirteen days in this inferno of fire a captured German officer
told with his dying breath of a fresh division of Germans that was about
to be thrown into the battle to attempt to wrest from the marines that
part of the wood they had gained. The marines, who for days had been
fighting only on their sheer nerve, who had been worn out from nights of
sleeplessness, from lack of rations, from terrific shell and machine-gun
fire, straightened their lines and prepared for the attack. It came--as
the dying German officer had predicted.

At 2 o'clock on the morning of June 13 it was launched by the Germans
along the whole front. Without regard for men, the enemy hurled his
forces against Bouresches and the Bois de Belleau, and sought to win
back what had been taken from Germany by the Americans. The orders were
that these positions must be taken at all costs; that the utmost losses
in men must be endured that the Bois de Belleau and Bouresches might
fall again into German hands. But the depleted lines of the marines
held; the men who had fought on their nerve alone for days once more
showed the mettle of which they were made. With their backs to the trees
and boulders of the Bois de Belleau, with their sole shelter the
scattered ruins of Bouresches, the thinning lines of the marines
repelled the attack and crashed back the new division which had sought
to wrest the position from them.

And so it went. Day after day, night after night, while time after time
messages like the following travelled to the post command:

Losses heavy. Difficult to get runners through. Some have never
returned. Morale excellent, but troops about all in. Men exhausted.

Exhausted, but holding on. And they continued to hold on in spite of
every difficulty. Advancing their lines slowly day by day, the marines
finally prepared their positions to such an extent that the last rush
for the possession of the wood could be made. Then, on June 24,
following a tremendous barrage, the struggle began.

The barrage literally tore the woods to pieces, but even its immensity
could not wipe out all the nests that remained, the emplacements that
were behind almost every clump of bushes, every jagged, rough group of
boulders. But those that remained were wiped out