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Editor's Note: The story of the Marines at Belleau Wood has been told many times, especially in November when the Marine Corps Birthday and Armistice Day are remembered. Never, we think, has this story been told better than by the late Col John W. Thomason, Jr., USMC.
To match the spirit at this somber epic is Sgt Tom Lovell's dramatic painting.
There is nothing particularly glorious about sweaty fellows, laden until killing tools, going along to fight. Ana yet -such a column represents a great deal more than 28,000 individuals mustered into a division. All that is behind those men is in that, column, too: the old battles, long forgotten, that secured our nation-Brandywine and Trenton and Yorktown, San Jacinlo and Chapultepec, Gettysburg, Chickatnauga, Anlietan, El Caney; scores of skirmishes, far off, such as the Marines have nearly every year-in which a man can be killed as dead as ever a chap was in the Argonne: traditions of things endured and things accomplished, such as regiments hand down forever; and the faith of men and the love of women; and that abstract thing called patriotism, which I never heard combat soldiers menlion-all this passes into the forward zone, to the point of contact, where war is girt, with horrors. And common men endure these horrors and overcome them, along with the insistent yearnings of the belly and the reasonable promptings of fear; and in this, I think, is glory.
. . . The platoons came out of the woods as dawn was getting gray. The light was strong when they advanced into the open wheat, now all starred with dewy poppies, red as blood. To the east the sun appeared, immensely red and round, a handbreadth above the horizon; a German shell burst black across the face of it, just to the left of the line. Men turned their heads to see, and many there looked no more upon the sun forever. . . .
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