A Special Contribution Courtesy of
Texas A&M University Press

Excerpted from:
A Good Idea of Hell: Letters from a Chasseur á Pied

Reprinted by permission of the Editor and Publisher. Available at Amazon.com

The author of the letters which compose A Good Idea of Hell was Robet Pellissier, born in France in 1882. He grew up in the United States and was teaching at Stanford when the Great War broke out in his homeland. Returning as a voluteer, he saw uninterrupted service in the Vosges Mountains. He was killed in action in the Battle of the Somme on August 28, 1916.

February 7, 1915

. . . My battalion had a devil of a time the second half of January. We went up the range and down the other side to take up the trenches about Steinbach and Uffholz.


Sgt. Robert Pellisier

Hardly had we reached our positions than the Dutch began to give signs of unusual activity. They began to bombard, and they kept it up day after day. The first forty-eight hours my company was held on reserve and all we could do was to sit in covered trenches and lis- ten to the shells burst in our neighborhood. It was quite a stunt to get out at all as fragments came buzzing along at any time. Although the explosions took place near the regular trenches quite a distance from us we could not have any fires because of the danger of being spotted, and it was freezing pretty hard. Another thing, we could not lie down. The covered ditches being too narrow, we slept with our knees to our chin. The third and fourth days we relieved the company in the first line trenches. The one we occupied made me think of Dante‘s Inferno, the part assigned to Brunetto Latini, who runs madly on a sandy plain under a rain of fire. The trench was in yellow mud. In the front of it in the mud there were poor fellows stretched out in their last sleep, fifteen or twenty of them. In addition many humps over the field, all being hastily made graves. The trench was German originally. It had been stormed by the 252nd regiment and turned around to face the German front. The slaughter had been terrible. To our back and to the right was the village of Steinbach, or rather the ghost of the village. My company took it December 13th. It was retaken by the Dutch. Soon after that, taken away from them by line infantry, every house riddled with shot. Few roofs and many black walls, the steeple showing the light right through in a dozen places. To our left was the road of access, and perhaps the most striking element in the picture, every square yard ploughed up by exploded shells. There the earth was red, just as it is near Holyoke. Well, the trees, fruit trees and the vineyards were all red from the amount of dirt kicked up by shells.


Heading for the Trenches

While on duty we were bombarded reasonably well, but no one was hurt. One of those big shells exploding is a great sight. The dirt is kicked up as high as a three-story house. A hole big enough to bury a horse is dug up. Stones fly in all directions, and also fragments of metal weighing pounds. Yet they do little harm considering the noise and the fuss. If they fall on a group of ten or twenty men, they will clean them all out, but they may fall ten yards away, and do no harm. It stands to reason that soldiers do not stand in groups under bombardment. The fifth day and the sixth we were to be in the second line, they made us build an artillery shelter in the back woods. All went serenely until about 4 P.M. There was just the regular number of shells, two or three every five minutes, but at four, by gum, things began to hum, and we re~ceived orders to move to the front P.D.Q. My section started up, I pulled out my watch and started to count. It took us eleven minutes to get to our second line position and in that time we received in front and in back to the right and left eighty-two shells.

The noise and the stuff kicked up and the branches cut made an "ensemble" impossible to describe, yet no one was hurt. Our adjutant turned once to shout a command and got his mouth full of dirt. That was all. To me our escaping scot free was a real miracle. Well, the bombardment stopped and before we had time to get to the first line the Dutch had grabbed hold of a bit of trench. All we could do was to dig one right back and so we did. It was pitch dark by that time and as I am not much good at digging, I asked to be put on sentry duty to see that no Boche sneaked up to those who were working. Four of us went about twenty yards forward, sat down and listened. Our artillery had set fire to three houses in the plain. The red smoke was all we could see, but we could hear our men digging and the Germans digging. We were about eighty yards from them, suddenly things started up again. I don’t know who did the starting or why, but we were caught between two perfectly fiendish fusillades. Our light artillery fired over our heads, dangerously close to our pates. The Dutch fired bombs with their trench bombs and thei’r hand grenades. Some kind of fragment finally hit me on the shoulder so I stopped firing and took to cover behind a big log. The other sentinels crept up also and we waited for the storm to slacken. I was not in any pain so I did not go to the field hospital. By morning our trench was ready for occupancy. We spent three days and three nights in it. Once in a while there would be fits of furious firing, with little or no harm done. Once we were ordered to put on our sacks. I found I could not stand mine, so retreated and came here where I am now.


French Monument at Hartmannweilerskopf (Old Armand)
Robert Fought Nearby

Since I have been here the Germans attacked twice, and got theirs richly each time. The first time was on the Kaiser’s birthday and they came up by fours, shouting drunk and got cleaned out. The second time they came in hordes, rushed two trenches and pinched a rapid fire gun, whereupon our commander came along, drew his revolver and my friends charged with him, kicked the Dutch out of the trenches, got hold of the machine gun and made a lot of prisoners. I have been told that the ground in front of the trenches is gray with German uniforms. One of our captains wept when he saw the slaughter of the Germans, for young men are young men, even when they are Germans. These slaughters take place at dusk or at night. Such is war, Tim! It does not seem credible that we are in the twentieth century. Things like that happen every day, from Switzerland to the Atlantic. Neither side advances but both sides lose heavily, the Germans more because they attack nearly always in close formation, whereas we scatter and run up individually. I am hoping to be off duty through February. War may be a stimulating occupation, but these hours when there is no good reason why any one second should not be your last are pretty trying, though it is astonishing how rapidly one gets used to danger, and takes it as a matter of course.

The Contributor and Sources:

 Editor Joshua Brown is the great-nephew of Robert Pellissier and a minister by profession. He is pastor of the the West Richmond Friends Meeting in Richmond, Indiana. The cover and image of Robert Pellisier are from the book, the other images are from contributor Tony Langley.





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