Memoirs of 2dLt W. B. Jackson, USMC
SOISSONS
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About this time our first Sergeant told me to take over the duties of Police Sergeant for the outfit although I was only a corporal. I was disgusted. I wanted line duty. Almost as I sulked word came for the outfit to stand by for camions that night. The camions came, loaded and left. For where? Nobody seemed to know. My new chore was to assist one of the Lieutenants in taking 24 mules and carts to wherever the troops had gone. I know nothing about mules or handling them. Fortunately, their regular skinners were still with them so I really had little to worry about. I was furnished a horse to ride and we took off into the night. On we went hour after hour into the night in a column of baggage wagons, machine gun carts and what have you. Around midnight or shortly thereafter the tremendous press of the column and equipment told us that something big was going on or was going to happen. It became a mad house trying to keep our mule carts together in the night's darkness (total blackness) to say nothing of the company's baggage wagons, etc. Every time we came to a fork in the road or a cross road part of our train would go down one road and the rest down the other. Finally we came to a big woods (Bois de Villers Cotteret). It developed that there were two main roads that crossed in the middle of the woods. By that time there were tremendous trains of vehicles moving on each road. At the crossing there was a traffic control working in complete darkness. We approached and, having been given a right of way, about half of our carts crossed the other road. Suddenly the control officer switched the right of ways. The remainder of our column was halted and the command split. I galloped up to the corner and in the dark in my mightiest voice ordered the control to stop the other road saying they had cut my command in half. Back came a voice announcing that he was Colonel so and so, Sir, he would stop the traffic on the other road from crossing and allow "the rest of my command" to proceed. Apparently the horse, the mighty voice and the words "my command" in the darkness made him think I was a general or something thereabouts. He stopped them. I said something like thank you Colonel, galloped back and sent the rest of our outfit across the road. If we had remained separated that night we would have been looking for each other the rest of the war. But I have often chuckled over my profane and bellicose orders in the night to that Colonel. Thank goodness it was pitch dark.
My horse was a problem. He was an ex-artillery offside horse, that is he was from the left, not ridden row of horses used to hanging close to the horse on his right which was usually ridden by a trooper. All of that night, if a horse happened to be ridden by me on my right, away would go my horse hanging on to the other horse like a leech and I would have an awful time breaking him loose from a recollected position on the left of the other horse.
As daylight approached we came closer and closer to the roar of artillery fire. It was heavy enough to tell us something major was happening, but what? Near daylight we were directed into a semi-open grove in the woods. We lined ;up our carts, set up a line for the mules, heaved a sigh of relief and started looking for chow. We learned as we gathered that the neck of the Chateau Thierry salient had been closed by driving across it just like pulling up
a draw string on a gunnysack. Thousands of Germans had been captured. All that day, long columns of prisoners passed along the road under their own officers going to our rear. This was the beginning of the end of the war. From here on the Allies took the offensive and Heinie was fighting a defensive retreat to the Rhine.
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