The full text of Chapter 11 "Hill 258" from the book A GOLD DOLLAR Studies in Nature and Life written by Joseph M. Duff, Ph.D., D.D. 1926

On a dark day of November, 1918, the news reached us by a cablegram sent by his brother, that Joe had been killed in action on Hill 258. After some time, when the first sharp shock of grief was past, we found ourselves wondering and talking about the Hill. It haunted our imagination, in some such way as that ".. green hill far away, without a city wall" has haunted the heart of the Christian world.

Was it domed or jagged? Were its slopes green with fields or black with dense woods? Or, might it not be shaped like Round Top with its tuft of trees, that stood in full view from the cottage door, and which he had loved and climbed? Now and again it figured in our dreams, when sometimes it had a cross on it and its seamed sides were splashed with blood, and thunder rolled up its hollow.

We had no map of it. The Hill itself had no previous history. It was only a strategic number to distinguish it from a thousand other hills of France's wide area of battle. It might be a mere blank pile of rocks, a mere ordinary knob of earth. Nevertheless our interest in it grew rather than lessened as, little by little, we gathered information about it, from Joe's comrades and fellow-officers, until at length it became as real and familiar as any of the hills of home. Only we had not yet actually seen it, as sometime we hoped to do.

This opportunity came two years later, when his mother and I visited his grave in the Romagne Cemetery, where, under their white crosses and the folds of the flag for which they died, rest twenty-four thousand American youth. The Hill, in clear view from his grave, is only a half a mile further. I spent three days going up, over and around it. And I have put down this account of what I saw because I have taken that far-off hill of France into my heart, and "to take any part of the earth into your heart transfigures it for you and for all persons whom you can persuade to use your eyes."

This story of the Hill properly began with the beginning of Joe's life, for although it was so far from his birthplace and homeland, his personality was of such kind as made his going to it, in given circumstances, an inevitable thing. There was in that nothing fortuitous. The real story of his life would be what is called a character plot. There is no mere happening. Everything develops out of what he thought and felt and did and was. All its chief events are threaded on his personality. They have their coherence and necessity in him.

A neighbour who knew him from his boyhood, when he heard of his death, said to me, " It was to be expected, he was so aggressive." His primary teacher called him " Fearless Joe." He was an all-American guard. There are two memorials of him on the Princeton Campus, which, though placed there at an interval of years, and respecting different events and actions, yet relate to precisely the same quality of character; the one is in honour of the championship team of 1911, and his name, with the others, is written on the trophy hung upon the wall; the other is the brass tablet on the mantelpiece of 53 Blair Hill,—the tribute of his class to his heroic death on Hill 258.

On an evening in April, 1917, I heard the front door bang and a rush up the stairs—which I knew to be his—two steps at a time. He was in so much hurry to bring the great news. Pausing in the doorway of my room, he extended his hand and with great gravity and dignity said: " Congratulate me, Father, I am an enlisted soldier of the United States Army!" That first impetuosity was matched by the sustained enthusiasm with which he passed through each experience of the camp, and trench and battle. I have looked through his letters to find, if I could, any word of regret or dis-illusion. There is none. There is his last letter home, pencilled in a lull of the battle and posted by some comrade who found it in his pocket, soaked and stained by the rain that fell upon him for two days where he lay dead. And that soiled letter that lay on the heart forever stilled, is alive and pulsing with the very fighting ardour that had brought him upstairs in a rush to tell me he was an enlisted soldier. Thus his tragic death on Hill 258 was in no way separable from the main course of his life, but the final and highest expression of it.

The broad range of hills coming down out of the north of the Argonne narrows as it meets the wide sweep of the fair, rolling, open country that extends from the river Meuse to the Argonne forest. At the extreme point of that contact stands Hill 258, detached and salient. Just behind it, and divided from it by a narrow ravine which our soldiers named Death Valley because of the harvest of death reaped there, is Cote Dame Marie-steep and wooded and rising one hundred feet or more above it.

The two hills overlooked and dominated the line of advance of our army from Montfaucon north-ward. Whatever village or trench the Americans won, and left behind them, there remained always in full view on the horizon in the north the most formidable position of all. For across the top of Hill 258 ran the famous Krimheld-Stellung line-the German second defense, and supposed to be impregnable.

The assault on the centre of this position was assigned to the 125th Infantry, of the 32nd Division, in which Joe had command of a machine-gun platoon. It was made with dash and success on the morning of October 9, 1918.

On the forenoon of July 3, 1920, I, having come over from Romagne, stood in the street of the village of Genes and looked up the long slope of the Hill, that before I had ever seen it was a thing familiar to my mind. There is a garden next to the last house of the village, fenced on its east side by a hedge that comes down the hill to the street. Where the hedge meets the street, Joe's platoon took up its station, at the dawn of a foggy morning to await at eight o'clock, the signal to advance. Promptly on the signal they started, following the infantry in open order and carrying the different parts of their guns and the ammunition. The advance was slow, for the terrific artillery fire had pitted the slope from bottom to top, and they had to pick their way among the holes. Gruesome, sinister, yellow holes in the ground they were still when I saw them, with all their suggestion of explosive force, of the mutilation of human flesh, the spilling of precious blood. Some of them were small and some large enough to bury a small house in.

I recalled, as I walked on, incidents of the advance of which I had been told. One of the men had written to me, that being little and overloaded he had fallen into one of the shell-pits, and that my son had come back from his position and given him a hand to help him out. I identified the prickly thorn-thicket on the banks of the brook in the hollow, through which, with much difficulty, they forced their way. And I noticed the hillock to the left from which came a gust of enemy machine gunfire so that they had to halt, put their guns together and reply. This caused a delay so that it was half past ten before they rushed the trench at the top of the Hill. The valorous charge penetrated the second defense, and in the long history of heroic charges will go down as one of the most gallant and effective of all. General Haan, the division commander, wrote a week later—" Today, I examined the German position, the Krimheld-Stellung, in the vicinity of Cote Dame Marie, and I do not believe that any troops in the world could take it, if held by our men."

Since the first days of the war Hill 258 had been the chief camp of the German second defense. It furnished supplies of troops and munitions to the siege of Verdun. It backed the front-line against repeated French efforts to break through. So strong was it that the question of the Argonne campaign was-could the raw American troops, even with their dash and numbers, win where the French veterans had failed? The German General Staff was quite sure they could not. And yet within two weeks from September 26, the American advance, with hardly a check, had swept up across the open country, and broken through the impregnable second line of defense. For two days after the capture of the Hill, the Germans held on to the wooded heights beyond the ravine, and then, their position no longer tenable, fled in the night, leaving a deserted camp.

There evidently had been little change in the place when, a year and a half later, I saw it. The German barracks were there in their long squat rows, the rustic officers' houses, dugouts, trenches with their barbed wire, and, piled on the floors of the houses and thrown on the ground, bushels of copper-bullets, and machine-gun rolls, furniture, gas-masks, broken rifles, raincoats. There had been no looting, no cleaning up, and, plainly, little visiting. It was remote, avoided by tourists of the battlefields and by villagers and farmers. The bombardment had loaded it with dynamite. The "duds" just under the surface might go off at the touch of a foot.

So the deserted camp had been left to the tender mercies of Time and Nature. And the mercies of wild Nature here were savage, as with prickly thorn and briar it sought to conceal the ravages it could not repair. The soil, as if fertilized by the blood spilled into it, brought forth such rank growth of raspberry and blackberry bushes, such matted lengths of grass, and tangled under-shrubbery as I had never seen before.

But on October 9, when the terrible 125th Infantry came striding up the hill and knocked at the gates, the camp was, alter the German manner, clean, orderly, all its borders bristling with guns, and its keepers confident.

The assault in its first rush pushed inside on the summit of the Hill, but the citadel gained, the fight had continued two days for full possession of the ravine and the wooded heights of Cote Dame Marie.

During these days the position of the victors was precarious, for they were exposed on three sides to continuous shell-fire, with poor shelter. On the first night up, my son's platoon packed themselves into a dugout so closely that there was only standing room. They could not sleep, so they talked over the situation and about what the next day would bring. One of the men told me of the following bit of conversation with Joe:

"Lieutenant, it looks pretty bad for us, doesn't it? "

He answered, "Our fate is in the hands of another."

"You mean the One above?"

He nodded assent.

The next morning the platoon laid down a barrage to cover an effort of the infantry to clear the left flank from the enemy. A hidden machine-gun on the right enfiladed the infantry line, and so the captain directed the lieutenant to go forward between the lines and locate, and if possible capture, the machine-gun. Such reconnaissance was part of the tactics of the war, but a mission of extreme peril, on which a great number of lieutenants were sent, who never returned.

Joe's men, from the shelter of their fox-holes, anxiously watched him go forward, revolver in hand, crouching, round a little black house that still stands on the crest of the hill, and disappear on the other side. The minutes passed. He did not return. Two days later they found him, an hundred feet beyond. He had been caught in the hail of fire that swept the hillside, and instantly killed.

I walked over the top of the Hill, round the little black house, and a hundred feet beyond. I reached the spot. It was strangely blank and meaningless. There was nothing to see but a mass of under-growth. There was not a footprint. There was not a scar of shell. There was no human association, save a yellow raincoat flattened out on the ground. I could not believe that the scene of an intimate event, whose dark shadow had fallen three thousand miles away, could give me on the spot no trace of it, no message from it. A gaunt great oak near, with a shell-broken limb dangling at its side, seemed the sole witness that a tempest of fire had swept the hillside.

Adding to my surprise was a curious, brooding Silence. There was neither voice, nor twitter of birds, nor rustle of leaves, nor even the break of padded feet of a scared rabbit scurrying out of the bush. I had noticed before, an absence of sounds in the fields and roads and in the village streets. The stillness of the thousands sleeping in their quiet graves in the great cemetery had seemed to spread like a contagion over the entire countryside.
But here on the battlefield, where had roared such thunder as hardly ever had been heard, the silence was eerie, as if the ghostly guard of the place had commanded it. Nature here, in shrub and tree and rock, stood rigid and still with her finger on her lips. Where war had loosed all her frightful voices, the only sound I heard was the faint rasp of a hoe in a ploughed field near, where a patient peasant, with his little daughter, was back at his toil.

I stood there so disappointed and benumbed, without even the poignant stab of pain which was my due where my boy had suffered, that to break the spell, I took from my pocket the letter of the regimental chaplain written on the day he buried him, and read it once again.

"Permit me to extend to you my sincere sympathy in your loss," it ran, " and also to congratulate you on having given a son in one of the great battles of the war. The capture of Hill 258 marked the breaking through the Krimheld-Stellung line which Germany had boasted was impregnable. This was the real turning-point of the Argonne campaign. But only we who are here can realize the awful struggle and cost. Those who fought here were not ordinary men. They were superhuman here. Nature must have revolted at the horrors of the place, and only an extraordinary courage could have kept them going. We buried over an hundred Americans within a few yards of where your son fell. So, he lies in consecrated ground. 'Sir, you may be proud of him! Such courage never dies with mortal death! '"

There was magic in the kind and sympathetic letter that so stirred my mind that for a while I could hardly tell what of all I saw and felt was dream, and what reality. I saw the long row of dead soldiers, as wrapped in their greatcoats they one by one were taken up and gently lowered into their graves. I heard the old familiar words of the liturgy of burial, " Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust." And then, there came flashes of memories of Joe's boyhood,—little things—a certain day, for instance, on which he was wearing a black velvet suit that fitted closely his perfect form, so that we wondered if there ever was a boy so handsome! There was a difference in his love for his mother and me. When he called, "Mother!" with voice so clear and soft, he had something intimate to say, and likely for her ears only. But in the stress of his boy's life, or when he was hurt, it was always, "Father! " He never used the word
"Daddie," or other of the diminutives of affection—always it was "Father!" One day he got a forefinger mangled in some wheel-cogs and he came racing and calling my name. Though shockingly hurt, there never was a whimper as I gave him firstaid what time the doctor was coming. And here, on this Hill, he had been hurt mortally-and if he had had one moment,—I know what had been his call. And I was too far away to hear! And I could not have helped. I was so overcome by what would have been my helplessness, that my whole heart seemed to go out of me, in my love and pity and sorrow.

After that, as I stood there, there rose the tumult of the battle, and above it one clear voice in prayer.
It was his voice, for I would have known it anywhere. He was kneeling over his mortally-wounded and dying first corporal. It was the day before his own death. Although I had not been told a word of the prayer I now knew every word of it, and I did not wonder that his men hearing it were, as they told me, comforted by it and heartened for their fight. For he thanked his Master "for the gallant soldier who was at his last breath, and he asked the Lord for a bright way home for him beyond all the tumult and strife, and that the eternal peace might rest upon him and the reward be his, that was meet for one who had finished the well-fought fight." And when he had ended, all the comrades said, " Amen," just as I had been told.

I knew, as he then did not, that the prayer was for himself also, that it would meet him with its good answer at the gate of the great reward when he went home the next morning, and, so quick was the summons had no moment for a prayer for himself. And I was so moved when I thought of that home-going, taking his works with him, that, like John Bunyan in his dream, when he watched a fellow-pilgrim cross the river and reach the gate of the Holy City, I also saw it open and a flood of light come out, and caught a glimpse of the host within meeting him with music and procession.
And I wished I were there myself.

When I came out of my dream, a strange thing happened. The Death Valley and the wooded heights beyond and the Hill also, that had numbed me with their uncanny silence and dreariness and meaninglessness, were transfigured as by a divine glory. I recalled that this very thing had happened once on the banks of the Hudson to Jonathan Edwards, and had kept him in a flood of tears for near an hour. The sky was clear, and all the leaves were glistening and rustling, and birds that I had not known were there, were up in the branches of the great oak, singing.

Thus ended my visit to the Hill, that I had so long figured in my mind and that at last I had seen with my own eyes! And now, as often as it lifts its scarred brow on the horizon of my memory, I see through the mist of my tears a glory crowning it, for American brave hearts there forgot their love of life in their love of duty, and among them my boy was one.

And now, we think of him no longer enclosed in a coffin and deep in a grave. In another form, he has taken up his old free life with us. He drops in upon us at any time when we are in the mood for his company and filled with memories,—big, brave and cheery, with all the indisputable proofs of identity-red hair, freckled face, quick step, walking as though there was nothing in all the world he feared.

There is a finality in this spiritual presence, over which the years have no power. They do not touch his youthfulness, or steal a leaf from the garland of his heroism, or cloud the radiance of his buoyancy and content. He is inviolate in each virtue and grace. Between him and us it is just as it is in Jean Mackenzie's lines:

“If you should say
‘Who goes there.’
Then I would say
‘You go there—
It's your hand at the door
And your feet on the stair
Of my heart, everyday
And everywhere.’

“Then you would say
‘It is long since I passed,’
And I would say
'It is year before last
Since you went away
But I still have you there
In my heart everyday.’ “