Frederick Funston, with his slightly silly-sounding name, had the reputation of a street fighter, and now he was in command of a newly formed division.
“Meat?” he snickered. “What kind of meat, Patrick?”
Shit, thought Patrick, why are we playing word games with Germans coming down the pike? “Raw meat, Fred. Dead, raw meat. And don’t you need a meat grinder?” The two men had met a couple of days before, renewed an earlier brief acquaintence, and taken a quick liking to each other. As Roosevelt’s observer, Patrick had been invited by Funston to watch the ambush of a German column. As Funston had explained, it was time to strike back.
Funston slapped him on the shoulder. “And how do you feed that raw meat into a meat grinder, smart-ass?”
Despite his tenseness, Patrick had to laugh. “With your hands?” He began to think he’d rather face the Germans than Frederick Funston’s foolish questions.
“You’re hopeless, Patrick. No, you feed it in one piece at a time.” He picked up his binoculars and held them to his eyes. “Now watch,” he said, all jocularity suddenly gone.
Funston and Patrick were in a woodland that covered several dozen acres. It fronted on an open meadow that ended in another wooded area. A wagon road ran down the center and straight toward them.
About in the middle, a small group of armed men, soldiers in civilian clothes, sat huddled about a fire, cooking a meal. They were the bait for the trap Funston was about to spring.
Patrick and Funston, along with Funston’s soldiers, were west of the Housatonic River near the small village of New Canaan. They were about twenty miles east of the site of the unlamented Blaney’s defeat. Prudently, the Americans had earlier withdrawn their forces farther east, almost to the Housatonic, which formed a natural north-south boundary running from Long Island Sound toward Massachusetts.
Funston dropped his voice to a whisper. “What a wonderful place for a picnic. You like picnics, Patrick?”
Patrick’s mind went quickly to the afternoon with Trina, and how surprised he was that he missed her. “Yes,” he said and tried not to think of her kiss and the brief but shockingly erotic feel of her body against his. “But aren’t they being foolish out there?”
“Maybe. Look!” There was motion in the trees, a sparkle of sunlight off something shiny. Funston snickered. “Like clockwork. Every three days, rain or shine, they march down this road and then march back again, a show of force trying to scare us. Goddamn, are they punctual. Germans probably screw their women to a metronome!”
Patrick thought it very likely and said so, even though he was more fascinated by the approach of the German column as it moved toward him from the enemy’s lines in the west. It was like watching a snake slither toward you, evil and ominous yet utterly fascinating. He felt like shouting a warning to the men now casually eating but held it back.
A small group of horsemen emerged from the trees and Patrick gasped. Uhlans! To the casual eye they looked ridiculous with their nine-foot lances and square-blocked helmets, but they were the elite of the German cavalry. And now a troop of them was moving slowly into view.
There was a shout from the campfire as the horsemen were spotted. Men started to run the other way, toward Patrick. A couple of them leveled their rifles and fired. A horse shrieked in sudden pain, which seemed to galvanize the Uhlans. More German horsemen appeared, Patrick guessed fifty altogether, and fanned out on either side of the road. They started forward at a brisk trot and quickly increased the pace to a pounding gallop that ate the ground and closed the distance.
The men on foot, the bait the Germans were swallowing, ran in apparent panic, any thoughts of cohesiveness seemingly replaced by the primal fear of being impaled on one of those fearful lances being lowered in their direction.
Patrick watched in fascination as they ran toward him and his sheltering shrubs. Would they make it to safety, or had they cut it too close? Then, to Patrick’s horror, one man fell and couldn’t get up right away. Perhaps he’d had the wind knocked out of him. As the others made the safety of the trees and the rest of the trapping force by about fifty yards, a Uhlan caught the straggler and ran his lance into the man’s back with the bloody point sticking out of his chest. The man shrieked as, for a moment, he was propelled along the ground by the horse and spear, his arms and legs whirling like the limbs of a deranged marionette. Then he was lifted off the ground and shaken loose from the lance like a leaf by the grim-faced German rider.
From alongside Funston and Patrick, more than a hundred hidden rifles opened fire at once from close range, sending horses and men into jumbled piles. Funston surged to his feet. “Hit the horses! Hit the horses. They can’t ride without the goddamn horses!”
The firing continued, men working the bolts of their rifles as quickly as possible. Dozens of horses and men lay on the ground. Some tried to rise but were quickly dropped by the withering fire. The remaining Uhlans scampered for the other side of the meadow and the protection of the infantry that was coming into view.
Funston was exultant. “I said one piece of meat gets fed into the grinder at a time, didn’t I?” Patrick nodded, his eyes glued to the field. “Well, that was the first piece. Now watch.”
German infantry emerged from the other side of the field in open skirmish formation. They were followed by several more companies in assault formations that were more dense. They moved with a precision that showed discipline and confidence. Their bayoneted rifles were at the ready, and their helmet points bobbed almost in cadence as they walked. Patrick quickly estimated their numbers at a nearly full battalion.
Funston snickered. “Good. Now they’ve stuck their heads in it.”
At six hundred yards, the Americans opened fire and started dropping Germans. Those who were not hit simply continued on. They must have felt they could overwhelm the hundred or so men shooting at them.
At four hundred yards, the American machine gunners opened up from their hiding places, along with two more companies of infantry. Now the American front was a U, with the open end covering the head of the German column. The volume of fire was deadly and the Germans paused, dropping to their knees to fire back at their dug-in and largely hidden tormentors. The Americans could see the Germans starting to bring up their own machine guns.
“Enough,” Funston snapped to Patrick and crawled away from the front line. Patrick followed in undignified haste behind him while bullets whipped and whistled through the branches and whacked off the trees. “Let’s get back to the horses,” said Funston. “I’ve got the rest of this fight to direct.”
The horses were in a clearing only a few hundred yards away. The two men covered the distance quickly, all the while being passed by hundreds of well-armed Americans heading for the battle. Funston’s plan, as outlined earlier in the day to Patrick, was simple. The German force numbered about two thousand men. To combat it, Funston had gathered half his entire division, almost eight thousand. These were now enveloping the head of the column and concentrating fire on the left flank. Recently purchased pom-poms and French 75mm cannon added to the din as they fired from positions where targets had already been registered.
“Like I said, Patrick, the Krauts are so totally and marvelously predictable. Same number of men, same route, but today, a different result.”
A messenger ran up to them, breathless and flushed. “Sir, Colonel Martin requests permission to take the road behind them and cut off their retreat.”
Funston threw his hat on the ground. “No, goddamnit! Tell Colonel Martin to keep his troops off that road and pay attention to the plan.”
He picked up his hat and dusted it off. “Goddamn Martin’s too reckless. I don’t want them cut off. If that happens they’ll dig in and send out for reinforcements, which will come long before we can root them out. If we leave an escape route open, they’ll take it and we can maul them all the way back, or at least as far as we want. Jesus, we don’t want them to brag about a ‘heroic rescue.’ I want them to retreat with their tails between their legs and have to tell the All-goddamn-Highest kaiser how they got their asses whipped.” He paused and grinned. “You think that’s plain enough, Patrick?”
“Wonderfully eloquent, Fred.”
They waited out the remainder of the afternoon while the outnumbered and outgunned Germans fought on tenaciously and with iron discipline, inflicting surprisingly severe casualties on the advancing Americans until they finally decided to fall back. Subject to continuous harassment and driven by the nightmare fear of being surrounded, the Germans soon quickened the pace of their retreat. Very soon, units lost their cohesion and thus their strength. Individual soldiers lost their nerve and started to run. This was infectious. Despite protestations from mounted officers, who made wonderfully easy targets for riflemen, the retreat quickly became a rout, with men flowing down the road to the safety of the German lines. First, equipment was abandoned, then the wounded; then the German soldiers started looking for a way of surrendering to end the torment.