Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 22, 2025
Leonard, looking his man squarely in the eye, "I am inclined to think that the cavalry staff officer is sometimes given to too much 'whitewashing, and if an infantryman had been sent instead of a cavalryman the most discreditable affair of the late campaign would not have been, as it was, whitewashed entirely."
Yes, one had the system in the large and the small, by the army, the corps, the division, the brigade, the battalion, and the man, the individual infantryman who was to suffer that hazard of marching in the open toward the trenches which not guns, or motor trucks, or trench-mortar shells could take, but only he could take and hold.
One of the boys in the M squad was a Maine infantryman, who had been with me in the Pemberton building, in Richmond, and had fashioned himself a little square pan out of a tin plate of a tobacco press, such as I have described in an earlier chapter. He had carried it with him ever since, and it was his sole vessel for all purposes for cooking, carrying water, drawing rations, etc.
The spirit of it runs through the narrative of a French infantryman who described an action in the Argonne, where his regiment held a village heavily attacked by the enemy. There was street-fighting of the fiercest kind, and hand-to-hand combats in the houses and even in the cellars. "Blood," he wrote, "ran in the gutters like water on a rainy day."
My position, as commander of the advance-guard, was now very difficult; for how could I, without a single infantryman and with cavalry packed between two high mountains and an uncrossable torrent, fight troops on foot whose scouts, climbing up the rocks would shoot us at close range? I sent at once to warn the divisional general, but Exelmans could not be found.
But even doctors sometimes live and learn, and those of us who went right forward with the troops came to know how impracticable it was to carry out the Army Order that bade a man drink only boiled water and sleep beneath a net. Late in the night the infantryman staggers to the camp that lies among thorn bushes, hungry and tired and full of fever.
Thurstane, an infantryman, and only a fair equestrian, would not have been half so effective in this combat of caballeros. Coronado's first bullet knocked a villainous-looking tatterdemalion clean into the happy hunting grounds.
One of the wounded died, a mere lad, sobbing pitifully for his mother; an infantryman, peering forth from his covert, had been shot in the face, and his scream echoed among the rocks in multiplied accents of agony; while Wyman lay tossing and moaning, mercifully unconscious.
But in order to finish it, it is necessary to advance, to attack the enemy, and infantryman or troopers, we are naked against iron, naked against lead, which cannot miss at close range. Let us advance in any case, resolutely. Our adversary will not stand at the point-blank range of our rifle, for the attack is never mutual, we are sure of that. We have been told so a thousand times.
The poor boy fell in the fullness of triumph, with his face towards the enemy. A few days before he had sworn to me that the Germans should never take him alive. His heroic death is not more glorious than that of the gunner defending his gun, the infantryman rushing out of his trench, or even that of the poor soldier perishing in the bogs. But Guynemer was known to all.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking