Two enemy soldiers tried to haul Roberts away, until Johnson drove his nine-inch knife into one of their skulls. Johnson shot one German in the chest, point-blank, then swung his rifle to club another. The German forces rushed into the Americans’ dugout. Roberts, bleeding from his head, threw grenades of his own back over the parapet. The grenades exploded behind him, and pain struck his left leg and side. Johnson fired an illumination rocket into the sky, then ducked as German grenades flew toward him.
They heard it again: the snip of barbed wire being cut. He heard a sound and turned to his partner in their tiny observation post, Needham Roberts, who gestured toward the direction of the noise. Under French command, he manned the front line of the Great War about 115 miles east of Paris on the early morning of May 15, 1918. Johnson was a 25-year-old railroad baggage porter, the son of North Carolina tobacco farmers.
Beyond the parapet, he could make out shapes and shadows under the waning moon.
Private Henry Johnson of Albany, New York, held tight his French Lebel rifle and stared into the darkness of no-man’s-land, listening for German raiders.
