One Marine top sergeant encouraged the men behind him by bellowing: “Come on, you sons of bitches. Do you want to live forever?”

The Marines were under-equipped: Their helmets are Army knock-offs of British helmets, and the light machine guns they’re using are French Chaucats. Our troops went into the Meuse-Argonne in French trucks driven by French colonials from Indochina. They were Vietnamese. Our tanks were French Renaults. Our airplanes were obsolete Nieuports.

The Americans were under-trained, too. Pershing was still enamored of a tactical doctrine that called on the audacity of the individual soldier and the lethality of the bayonet, lessons the Europeans had unlearned by 1915.  When they’d first gone into action, the Americans had died in parade-ground rows; they were babies to war.

But this ignorance saved the Marines—who died by the bushel-load, too—because the survivors kept advancing anyway. The Germans remembered them coming toward them in Belleau Wood: They were smoking cigarettes and firing from the hip.

The Germans, themselves disciplined and courageous soldiers, finally could take no more of this madness. They broke and ran.

I wonder if our president knows about Belleau Wood. I wonder what those Marines would think about him.