Le Cateau 1

collage painting on Arches black paper with mylar
15 x 19
WWI series / $450


That afternoon, the 305th Infantry attacked ‘Machine Gun Hill’ or ‘Suicide Hill’ in the Bois de la Naza, and suffered over three hundred casualties. One of the men in Company F wrote:
‘At 3:30 we lined up our gangs and started over that most terrible hill. We were at once under direct machine gun fire, the worst yet, and it seemed as if the air was so full of bullets that a man could not move without being hit. A man standing upright would have been riddled from head to foot. That’s what happened to Lieutenant Gardner, leading E Company. We were approaching the crest of Suicide Hill, advancing very slowly on our bellies. The only order that could be given was ‘Forward,’ and F Company was game. It was awful. The poor boys were getting slaughtered as fast as sheep could go up a plank. No one could ever describe the horror of it. The screams of the wounded were terrible, but we stuck to it. We could not see a Boche; once in a while one would stick his head out of his machine gun emplacement only to his sorrow … The Boches made our company look like a squad;
all that was left was a handful of men.’
– Frank Freidel, unknown soldier, Oct 2 1918