E. H. Tostevin, the Mandan soldier and newspaperman, traveled throughout France attempting to record the war as seen through the eyes of North Dakota soldiers. In a hospital somewhere in France he met Albert T. Mastrud, a freckled-faced, nineteen-year-old from Hatton who fought near the town of Bouresche, France on this date in 1918. He was one of sixteen North Dakota soldiers in his company from Barnes, Traill and Cass Counties who had enlisted in the Marines in May of 1917, shortly after the United States entered the war. As they went into battle, only two of them were over 20 years of age.
Assigned to take some machine gun positions, Mastrud stated that they didn't have time to think about danger. They just charged across No-Man’s-Land, and straight at the machine guns. “Yes it takes guts to do it, “Mastrud recalled, “this going up to a machine gun on a frontal attack. You see men dropping all around you and you think you haven't got a chance anyway, and then you think, 'well they haven't got me yet, maybe I'll get by,” and he surmised, “… about that time you get so boiling, ding-busted mad that you don't care what happens…Oh! Well! You don't get much time for thinking.” On one occasion a high explosive shell cut the shoulder strap of his pack and tore it off, but he kept on going. The next day when he found it, he claimed that it contained an additional fifty pounds of shrapnel.
Mastrud recalled the good feed that night after taking the town of Bouresche. “We had been watchin…all day, and every once in a while we could hear them butchering cattle or pigs. The house I hit that night had half a pig still roasting with the fire still going…That fresh meat, and hot, just as though we'd ordered it, sure tasted ding-busted good.”
On June 26th, when the battle ended, the official casualty count for the Marines was over three hundred dead, seven hundred wounded, with two missing. As for Albert Mastrud and the Marines from North Dakota, he said: "Just tell the folks for us that we intend to keep right on going until the Kaiser wishes he was enjoying the peace and quietude of Hell. …none of us would miss this for all the money in the state of North Dakota."
Dakota Datebook by Jim Davis
Sources:
Foster County Independent, July 18, 1918
Grand Forks Herald, July 16, 1918
In the World War, 1917-1918-1919, Cass County, North Dakota, 1919. Buckbee-Mears Co, St Paul, MN
