Our Greatest Battle (The Meuse-Argonne)
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Title: Our Greatest Battle (The Meuse-Argonne)
Author: Frederick Palmer
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OUR GREATEST BATTLE (THE MEUSE-ARGONNE) ***
OUR GREATEST BATTLE
BOOKS BY
FREDERICK PALMER
THE VAGABOND
WITH KUROKI IN MANCHURIA
THE LAST SHOT
MY YEAR OF THE GREAT WAR
MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR
WITH OUR FACES IN THE LIGHT
AMERICA IN FRANCE
OUR GREATEST BATTLE
OUR GREATEST BATTLE
(THE MEUSE-ARGONNE)
BY
FREDERICK PALMER
Author of "The Last Shot," "America in France," etc.
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1919
COPYRIGHT, 1919
BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, INC.
TO THE READER
During the war we had books which were the product of the spirit of the
hour and its limitations. Among these was my "America in France," which
was written, while we were still expecting the war to last through the
summer of 1919, to describe the gathering and training of the American
Expeditionary Forces, and their actions through the Château-Thierry and
Saint-Mihiel operations. Since the war and the passing of the military
censorship, we have had many hastily compiled histories, and many
"inside" accounts from participants, including commanders, both Allied
and enemy, whose special pleading is, to one familiar with events, no
less evident in their lapses than in their tone.
This book, which continues and supplements "America in France," is not
in the class of the jerry-built histories or the personal narratives.
It aims, as the result of special facilities for information and
observation, to give a comprehensive and intelligent account of the
greatest battle in which Americans ever fought, the Meuse-Argonne.
In the formative period of our army, I was the officer in charge of
press relations, under a senior officer. I was never chief censor of
the A. E. F.: I had nothing to do with the censorship of the soldiers'
mail. After we began operations in the field, my long experience in
war was utilized in making me an observer, who had the freedom of our
lines and of those of our Allies in France. Where the average man in
the army was limited in his observations to his own unit, I had the key
to the different compartments. I saw all our divisions in action and
all the processes of combat and organization. It was gratifying that my
suggestions sometimes led to a broader point of view in keeping with
the character of the immense new army which was being filled into the
mold of the old.
Friends who have read the manuscript complain that I do not give
enough of my own experiences, or enough reminiscences of eminent
personalities; but even in the few places where I have allowed the
personal note to appear it has seemed, as it would to anyone who
had been in my place, a petty intrusion upon the mighty whole of
two million American soldiers, who were to me the most interesting
personalities I met. The little that one pair of eyes could see may
supply an atmosphere of living actuality not to be easily reproduced
from bare records by future historians, who will have at their service
the increasing accumulation of data.
In the light of my observations during the battle, I went over the
fields after the armistice, and studied the official reports, and
talked with the men of our army divisions. For reasons that are now
obvious, the results do not read like the communiqués and dispatches of
the time, which gave our public their idea of an action which could not
be adequately described until it was finished and the war was over. We
had repulses, when heroism could not persist against annihilation by
cross-fire; our men attacked again and again before positions were won;
sometimes they fought harder to gain a little knoll or patch of woods
than to gain a mile's depth on other occasions. Accomplishment must be
judged by the character of the ground and of the resistance.
As the division was our fighting unit, I have described the part that
each division took in the battle. The reader who wearies of details
may skip certain chapters, and find in others that he is following the
battle as a whole in its conception and plan and execution, and in the
human influences which were supreme; but the very piling up of the
records of skill, pluck, and industry of division after division from
all parts of the country, as they took their turn in the ordeal until
they were expended, is accumulative evidence of what we wrought.
The soldier who knew only his division, his regiment, battalion,
company, and platoon, as he lay in chill rain in fox-holes, without a
blanket, under gas, shells, and machine-gun fire, or charged across
the open or up slippery ascents for a few hundred yards more of gains,
may learn, as accurately as my information warrants, in a freshened
sense of comradeship, how and where other divisions fought. He may
think that his division has not received a fair share of attention for
its exploits. I agree with him that it has not, in my realization of
the limitations of space and of capacity to be worthy of my subject.
There are many disputes between divisions as the result of a proud
and natural rivalry, which was possibly too energetically promoted by
the staff in order to force each to its utmost before it staggered in
its tracks from wounds and exhaustion. One division might have done
the pioneer hammering and thrusting which gave a succeeding division
its opportunity. A daring patrol of one division may have entered a
position and been ordered to fall back; troops of another division may
have taken the same position later. There was nothing so irritating as
having to withdraw from hard-won ground because an adjoining unit could
not keep up with the advance. Towns and villages were the landmarks
on the map, with which communiqués and dispatches conjured; but often
the success which made a village on low ground tenable was due to the
taking of commanding hills in the neighborhood. Sometimes troops, in
their eagerness to overcome the fire on their front, found themselves
in the sector of an adjoining division, and mixed units swept over a
position at the same time. In cases of controversy I have tried to
adjust by investigation and by comparing reports. I must have made
errors, whose correction I welcome. To illustrate the full detail
of each division's advance would require several maps as large as a
soldier's blanket. The maps which I have used are intended to indicate
in a general way the movement of each division, and our part on the
western front in relation to our Allies.
There may be surprise that I have not mentioned the names of
individuals below the rank of division commander, and that I have not
identified units lower than divisions. The easy and accepted method
would have been to single out this and that man who had won the Medal
of Honor or the Cross, and this or that battalion or company which had
a theatric part. Indeed, the author could have made his own choices
in distinction. I knew the battle too well; I had too deep a respect
for my privilege to set myself up in judgment, or even to trust to the
judgment of others. Not all the heroes won the Medal or the Cross. The
winners had opportunities; their deeds were officially observed. How
many men deserved them in annihilated charges in thickets and ravines,
but did not receive them, we shall not know until our graves in France
yield their secrets.
I like to think that our men did not fight for Crosses; that they
fought for their cause and their manhood. A battalion which did not
take a hill may have fought as bravely as one which did, and deserve
no less credit for its contribution to the final result. So I have
resisted the temptation to make a gallery of fame, and set in its
niches those favored in the hazard of action, when it was the heroism
and fortitude of all which cannot be too much honored. I have written
of the "team-play" rather than the "stars"; of the whole--a whole
embracing all that legion of Americans at home or abroad who were in
uniform during the war. If I have been discriminate about regulars and
reserves, and frank about many other things, it is in no carping sense.
We fought the war for a cause which requires the truth, now that the
war is over.
I regret that it is not possible for me to give due acknowledgment to
the many officers of our army who, during the actual campaign and since
their demobilization, have facilitated the gathering of my material.
For the preparation of the book I am indebted to the continued
assistance, both in France and at home, of Mr. George Bruner Parks.
FREDERICK PALMER.
September, 1919.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I A CHANGE OF PLAN 1
II INTO LINE FOR ATTACK 19
III NEW AND OLD DIVISIONS 42
IV THE ORDER OF BATTLE 51
V ON THE MEUSE SIDE 65
VI WE BREAK THROUGH 75
VII IN THE WAKE OF THE INFANTRY 95
VIII THE FIRST DAY 109
IX THE ATTACK SLOWS DOWN 129
X BY THE RIGHT FLANK 147
XI BY THE LEFT 168
XII BY THE CENTER 194
XIII OVER THE HINDENBURG LINE 223
XIV DISENGAGING RHEIMS 249
XV VETERANS DRIVE A WEDGE 266
XVI MASTERING THE AIRE TROUGH 280
XVII VETERANS CONTINUE DRIVING 294
XVIII THE GRANDPRÉ GAP IS OURS 309
XIX ANOTHER WEDGE 324
XX IN THE MEUSE TROUGH 340
XXI SOME CHANGES IN COMMAND 355
XXII A CALL FOR HARBORD 376
XXIII THE S. O. S. DRIVES A WEDGE 391
XXIV REGULARS AND RESERVES 413
XXV LEAVENWORTH COMMANDS 433
XXVI OTHERS OBEY 449
XXVII AMERICAN MANHOOD 472
XXVIII THE MILL OF BATTLE 485
XXIX THEY ALSO SERVED 501
XXX THROUGH THE KRIEMHILDE 515
XXXI A CITADEL AND A BOWL 540
XXXII THE FINAL ATTACK 571
XXXIII VICTORY 589
TABLE OF MAPS
FACING PAGE
1.--American Offensives and other Offensives
in which American troops participated,
May-November, 1918 2
2.--Where American Divisions were in line,
from our entry into the trenches until
the Armistice 14
3.--Offensives of September, 1918. Relation
of Meuse-Argonne Battle to the
decisive Allied offensive movement 20
4.--Divisions in the First Stage of the
Meuse-Argonne Battle, September
26th-October 1st 52
5.--Divisions in the Second Stage of the
Meuse-Argonne Battle, October 1st-31st 194
6.--Lines reached by German and Allied
Offensives, 1918 224
7.--In the Trough of the Aire 266
8.--The approach of the Center to the
Whale-back 274
9.--Divisions east of the Meuse 348
10.--The Services of Supply: Showing Ports
and Railroad Communications 378
11.--Divisions in the Third Stage of the
Meuse-Argonne Battle, October 31st-November
11th 590
OUR GREATEST BATTLE
I
A CHANGE OF PLAN
The original scope of Saint-Mihiel--A winter of preparation for a
spring campaign--Which is cut down to two weeks--The tide turning
for the Allies--The advantage of a general attack--And especially
of numbers--The tactician's opportunity--Why the Meuse-Argonne--The
whale-back of Buzancy--Striking for the Lille-Metz railway--All
advantage with the defense--The audacity of the enterprise--The
handicaps--A thankless task at best.
We were in the fever of preparation for our Saint-Mihiel attack.
Divisions summoned from the victorious fields of Château-Thierry, and
divisions which had been scattered with the British and French armies,
were gathering in our own sector in Lorraine. The French were to
assist us with ample artillery and aviation in carrying out our first
ambitious plan under our own command.
After cutting the redoubtable salient, which had been a wedge in the
Allied line for four years, we were to go through to Mars-la-Tour and
Etain, threatening the fortress of Metz itself. This was to be the end
of our 1918 campaign. Instead of wasting our energy in operations in
mud and snow, we should spend the winter months in applying the lessons
which we had learned in our first great battle as an army. Officers who
had been proved unfit would be eliminated, and officers who had been
proved fit would be promoted. All the freshly arrived divisions from
home camps and all the personnel for handling the artillery, tanks, and
other material of war which our home factories would then be producing
in quantity, would be incorporated in a homogeneous organization.
The spring would find us ready to play the part which had been chosen
for us in the final campaign. On the left of the long line from
Switzerland to the North Sea would be the British Army, striking out
from the Channel bases; in the center the French Army, striking from
the heart of France; and on the right the American Army, its munitions
arriving in full tide to support its ceaseless blows, was to keep on
striking toward the Rhine until a decision was won.
[Illustration: MAP NO. 1
AMERICAN OFFENSIVES AND OTHER OFFENSIVES IN WHICH AMERICAN TROOPS
PARTICIPATED, MAY-NOVEMBER, 1918. ]
In the early days of September, with our troops going into position
before the threatening heights of the salient, and with the pressure
of the effort of forming in time an integral army increasing with
the suspense as the 12th, the day set for the attack, drew near,
some important officers, at the moment when their assistance seemed
invaluable, were detached from the Saint-Mihiel operations. Their
orders let them into a portentous secret. They were to begin work in
making ready for the Meuse-Argonne attack. While all the rest of the
army was thinking of our second offensive as coming in the spring of
1919, they knew that it was coming two weeks after the Saint-Mihiel
offensive.
This change of plan was the result of a conference between Marshal Foch
and General Pershing which planned swift use of opportunity. The German
Macedonian front was crumbling, the Turks were falling back before
Allenby, and the Italians had turned the tables on the Austrians along
the Piave. Equally, if not more to the point for us, the Anglo-French
offensive begun on August 8th had gained ground with a facility that
quickened the pulse-beat of the Allied soldiers and invited the
broadening of the front of attack until, between Soissons and the North
Sea, the Germans were swept off Kemmel and out of Armentières and away
from Arras and across the old Somme battlefield.
The communiqués were telling the truth about the Allies' light losses;
at every point the initiative was ours. The Germans were paying a
heavier price in rearguard action than we in the attack. It was a
surprising reaction from the pace they had shown in their spring
offensives. All information that came through the secret channels from
behind the enemy lines supported the conviction of the Allied soldiers
at the front that German morale was weakening.
Ludendorff, the master tactician, was facing a new problem. That
once dependable German machine was not responding with the alacrity,
the team-play, and the bravery which had been his dependence in all
his plans. He had to consider, in view of the situation that was now
developing, whether or not the Saint-Mihiel salient was worth holding
at a sacrifice of men. He knew that we were to attack in force; he knew
that in an offensive a new army is bound to suffer from dispersion
and from confusion in its transport arrangements. If he allowed us to
strike into the air, he could depend upon the mires of the plain of the
Woëvre to impede us while the defenses of Metz would further stay our
advance, with the result that his reserves, released from Saint-Mihiel,
might safely be sent to resist the pressure on the Anglo-French front,
either in holding the Hindenburg line or in the arduous and necessarily
deliberate business of covering his withdrawal to a new and shorter
line of defense based on the Meuse River. The German war machine, which
had been tied for four years to its depots and other semi-permanent
arrangements for trench warfare, could not move at short notice.
A generalization might consider the war on the Western Front as
two great battles and one prolonged siege. For the first six weeks
there had been the "war of movement," as the French called it, until
the Germans, beaten back from the Marne, had formed the old trench
line. Throughout the four years of siege warfare that had ensued,
the object of every important offensive, Allied and German, had been
a return to the "war of movement." After a breach had been made in
the fortifications, the attacking army would make the most of the
momentum of success in rapid advances and maneuvers, throw the enemy's
units into confusion, and, through the disruption of the delicate
web of communications by which he controlled their movements for
cohesive effort, precipitate a disaster. The long preparations which
had preceded the offensives of 1915, 1916, and 1917 had always given
the enemy ample warning of what to expect. He had met concentrations
for attack with concentrations for defense. The sector where the
issue was joined became a settled area of violent siege operations
into which either side poured its fresh divisions as into a funnel.
Succeeding offensives, in realization of the limitations of a narrower
sector,--which only left the advance in a V with flanks exposed,--had
broadened their fronts of attack; but none had been broad enough to
permit of vital tactical surprises after the initial onset. The
attrition of the man-power of the offensive force had so kept pace
with that of the defensive that the offensive had never had sufficient
reserves to force a decision when the reserves of the defensive were
approaching exhaustion. Moreover, the Allies had never had sufficient
preponderance of men, ordnance, and munitions to warrant undertaking
the enterprise, which was the dream of every tactician, of several
offensives at different points of the front at the same time or in
steady alternation.
Now from Soissons to the sea the French and British were developing a
comprehensive movement of attacks, now here and now there, in rapid
succession. This drive was not a great impulse that died down as
had previous Allied offensives, but a weaving, sweeping, methodical
advance. Not only was German morale weakening and ours strengthening,
but attrition was now definitely in our favor. Ludendorff's reserves
were all in sight. His cards were on the table; we could feel assured
that we knew fairly well how he would play them. Our own hand was being
reinforced by three hundred thousand men a month from the immense
reserves in the American training camps. We could press our initiative
without fear of being embarrassed by serious counter-attacks taking
advantage of our having overextended ourselves.
Thus far, however, the Germans were still in possession of their old
trench system, except at a few points; our counter-offensive had
only been recovering the ground which the Germans had won in their
spring and summer offensives. Now that the tide had turned against
him, Ludendorff, if his situation were as bad as we hoped, had two
alternatives, and a third which was a combination of the two. One was
to fall back to the proposed shorter line of the Meuse. This would give
him the winter for fortifying his new positions. As a shorter front
would allow him deeper concentrations for defense and the Allies less
room for maneuvers in surprise, it must be their purpose to prevent his
successful retreat by prompt, aggressive, and persistent action. The
other alternative was to make a decisive stand on the old line, where
for four years the Germans had been perfecting their fortifications. If
we should overwhelm them when he was holding them rigidly, we should
have the advantage of a wall in fragments when it did break. The third
plan was to use the old fortifications as a line of strong resistance
in supporting his withdrawal. Broadly, this was the one that he was to
follow.
Everything pointed to the time as ripe for the fulfilment for the
Allies of the tactical dream which had called Ludendorff to his own
ambitious campaign in the spring of 1918. Marshal Foch would now
broaden his front of alternating attacks from Verdun to the North
Sea, in the hope of freeing the Allied armies from trench shackles
for a decisive campaign in the open. The American part in this bold
undertaking was to be its boldest feature.
If a soldier from Mars had come to Earth at any time from October,
1914, to October, 1918, and had been shown on a flat map the fronts
of the two adversaries, he would have said that the obvious strategic
point of a single offensive would be between the Meuse River and the
Argonne Forest. This would be a blow against the enemy's lines of
communication: a blow equivalent to turning his flank. If the soldier
from Mars had been shown a relief map, he would have changed his mind,
and he would have perfectly understood, as a soldier, why all the
offensives had been in the north, from Champagne to Flanders, where
breaking through the main line of defenses would bring the aggressor to
better ground for his decisive movement in the open. He would also have
understood why the front from the Argonne to the Swiss border had been
tranquil since the abortive effort of the Germans at Verdun.
When Ludendorff undertook his great offensive of March, 1918, he did
not repeat Falkenhayn's error, but turned to the north, where the
Allies had made their attacks. In that Lorraine-Alsatian stalemate
to the south, with the Vosges mountains and interlocking hills from
Switzerland to the forts of Metz as the stronghold of the Germans,
and the forts of Verdun, Toul, Epinal, and Belfort as the strongholds
of the French, the odds were apparently too much against an offensive
by either side to warrant serious consideration. Yet a watch was
kept. Over the French mind was always the shadow of a possible German
offensive toward Belfort; and, when the sector which our young army was
to hold in Alsace and Lorraine had been first discussed in July, 1917,
the French excluded the defense of a portion of the front opposite
Belfort, with the polite explanation that they preferred to hold that
themselves. But the Germans never did more than make the feint of an
offensive in the south, which Ludendorff used in the winter of 1918 to
draw off French troops and guns from the north: for the army with the
numbers and the initiative of offense can always force the defense to
waste movements to meet threats of attack. This was another advantage
which the Allies could now use in keeping Ludendorff in doubt as to
where our real blows were to be struck.
The heights of the Saint-Mihiel salient, which look directly across the
plain of the Woëvre to the fortress of Metz, may be said roughly to
have formed the left flank of the Lorraine-Alsatian stalemate. They
continue onward in the hills which are crowned by the forts of Verdun,
and then across the Meuse River for a distance of twenty miles through
the bastion of the Argonne Forest, where they gradually break into the
more rolling country of Champagne. The Meuse winds past Saint-Mihiel
and through the town of Verdun, and then, in its devious course, swings
gradually to the northwest until, at Sedan, it turns full westward.
Our new offensive was to be between the Meuse River and the western
edge of the Argonne Forest. East of the forest is the little river
Aire, and between its valley and the valley of the Meuse rises back of
the German front a whale-back of heights, as I shall describe them for
the sake of bringing a picture to mind, though the comparison is not
absolute. The practical summit of the whale-back is to the eastward
of the village of Buzancy. We may use Buzancy as a symbol: for it is
only in a highly technical history that the detail of names, confusing
to the general and even the professional reader, is warrantable. The
summit of the whale-back gained, you are looking down an apron of
rolling ground and small hills toward the turn of the Meuse westward
past Sedan, where the German Army surrounded the French Army in the
Franco-Prussian War.
To the northeast, readily accessible to attack, are the Briey
iron-fields, which were invaluable to the Germans for war material.
Along the valley of the Meuse after it turns westward, and along the
Franco-Belgian frontier runs the great railroad from Metz to Lille,
which is double-track all the way and in large part four-track.
Incidentally this connected the coal fields of northern France with
Germany, but its main service was to form the western trunk line of
communication for the German armies in Belgium and northern and eastern
France. It was linked up with the railways spreading northward into
Belgium and southward toward Amiens and Paris in the arterial system
which gave its life blood to the German occupation. If this road were
cut, the German troops in retreat would have to pass through the narrow
neck of the bottle at Liége.
The dramatic possibilities of gaining the heights of Buzancy and
bringing the Lille-Metz tracks under artillery fire had the appeal
of a strategic effect of Napoleonic days. The German staff had been
fully aware of the danger when, in their retreat after their repulse
on the Marne, which the world saw only as the spectacle of the French
Army inflicting a defeat on an advancing foe, it used its tactical
opportunity for choosing, with comparative deliberation, advantageous
defensive positions from the Argonne Forest to the Meuse at the foot
of the whale-back.
For future operations it was depending upon more than the elaborate
fortifications of that line. Every hundred yards from the foot of
the whale-back to the summit was in its favor in resisting attack.
Higher ground leads to still higher ground, not in a regular system
of ridges but in a terrain where nature cunningly serves the soldier.
Nowhere might the defense invite the attack into salients with a better
confidence, or feel more certain of the success of his counter-attacks.
All roads, and all valleys where roads might be built, were under
observation. Heights looked across to heights on either side of the
two river troughs, heights of every shape from sharp ridges and
rounded hills to peaked summits crowned by woods. Tongues of woods ran
across valleys. Patches of woods covered ravines and gullies where
machine-gunners would have ideal cover and command of ground. Reverse
slopes formed walls for the protection of the artillery. The attack
must fight blindly; the defense could fight with eyes open.
Had the Allies attempted an offensive in the Meuse-Argonne sector in
the first four years of the war, the long and extensive preparations
then regarded as requisite for an ambitious effort against first-line
fortifications would have warned the Germans in time to make full
use of their positions in counter-preparations. All the advantage
of railroads and highways were with them in concentrating men and
material. It might not be a long distance in miles from the Argonne
line to the Lille-Metz railway or to the Briey iron-fields, but it
was a long distance if you were to travel it with an army and its
impedimenta against the German Army in its prime. When attrition was
in his favor in the early period, the German might well have preferred
that the Allied offensive of Champagne, or Loos, or the Somme, or
Passchendaele, should have been attempted here: thus leaving open to
him, after he had inflicted a bloody repulse in this sector, the better
ground in the north for a telling counter-offensive.
Thus an Allied effort toward Mézières, Sedan, and Briey would have
been madness until the propitious moment came. Had it really come now?
Anyone who was familiar with the history of warfare on the Western
Front might ask the question thoughtfully. Bear in mind that we had not
yet taken Saint-Mihiel and were not yet certain of our success there;
and that from Soissons to Switzerland the old German line was intact.
North of Soissons we had broken into it at only a few points. In the
event that they had had to make a strategic withdrawal, the Germans had
always followed the tactical system of a full recoil to strong chosen
positions, where they resisted with sudden and terrific violence and
held stubbornly and thriftily until they began one of their powerful
counter-thrusts.
Thus they had fallen back after their defeat on the Marne, from
before Warsaw, and from Bapaume to the Hindenburg line. Again and
again their morale had been reported breaking, and they had seemed
in a disadvantageous position, only to recover their spirit as by
imperial command and to extricate themselves in a reversal of form.
The German Staff was still in being; the German Army still had reserve
divisions and was back on powerful trench systems with ample artillery,
machine-guns, and ammunition. Whether Ludendorff was to stand on the
old line or withdraw to a new line, either operation would be imperiled
by the loss of those heights between the Argonne and the Meuse. He must
say, as Pétain had said at Verdun: "They shall not pass!"
In my "America in France" I have told of our project, formed in
June, 1917, when we had not yet a division of infantry in France and
submarine destruction was on the increase, for an army of a million men
in France, capable of the expansion to two million which must come,
General Pershing thought, before the war could be won. That far-sighted
conception and the decision which was now taken are the two towering
landmarks of the troublous road of our effort in France. By July 1st,
1918, we had a million men in France, or nearly double the number of
the schedule arranged between the French and American governments. We
should soon have two millions.
[Illustration: MAP NO. 2
WHERE AMERICAN DIVISIONS WERE IN LINE, FROM OUR ENTRY INTO THE TRENCHES
UNTIL THE ARMISTICE.]
When the Allies called for more man-power, in the crisis of the German
offensive of March, 1918, the British had supplied the shipping that
brought the divisions from our home training camps tumbling into
France. They were divisions, not an army; and in equipment they were
not even divisions. They had been hurried to the front to support the
British and French as reserves, and they had been thrown into battle
to resist the later German offensives. There had been no niggardliness
in our attitude. We offered all our man-power as cannon-fodder to meet
the emergency. Across the Paris road behind Château-Thierry we had
given more than the proof of our valor. In the drive toward Soissons
and to the Vesle we had established our personal mastery over the
enemy. We had pressed him at close quarters, and kept on pressing him
until he had to go. The confidence inherent in our nature, strengthened
by training, had grown with the test of battle. We had known none of
the reverses which lead to caution. More than ever our impulse was to
attack.
Château-Thierry had taught Marshal Foch that he could depend upon any
American division as "shock" troops which would charge and keep on
charging until exhausted. Now he would use this quality to the utmost.
To the American Army he assigned the part which relied upon the call of
victory to soldiers as fresh as the French on the Marne, and, in their
homesickness for their native land, impatient for quick results. If a
Congressional Committee, knowing all that General Pershing knew, had
been told of the plan of the Meuse-Argonne, they would probably have
said: "No leader shall sacrifice our men in that fashion. We will not
stand by and see them sent to slaughter."
The reputation of a commander was at stake. Should we break through
promptly to the summit of the heights, then we might take divisions,
corps, even armies, prisoners; but that was a dream dependent upon a
deterioration in German staff work and in the morale of the German
soldier which was inconceivable. The great prize was the hope of an
early decision of the war; in expending a hundred or two hundred
thousand casualties in the autumn and early winter, instead of a
million, perhaps, during the coming summer. At home we should be saved
from drafting more millions of men into our army; from the floating
of more liberty loans; from harsher restrictions upon our daily life;
from the calling of more women and children to hard labor; from the
prolongation of the agony, the suspense, the horror, and the costs of
the cataclysm of destruction.
There were more handicaps than the heights to consider: those of our
unreadiness. If we had failed, this would have meant the burden of
criticism heavy upon the shoulders of the commander-in-chief, who would
have been recalled. Dreams of any miraculous success aside, it was not
the example of the swift results in a day at Antietam, or the brilliant
maneuver of Jackson at Chancellorsville, but the wrestling, hammering,
stubbornly resisting effort of the men of the North and South in the
Appomattox campaign which was to call upon our heritage of fortitude.
In that series of attacks which Marshal Foch was now to develop, our
part as the right flank of the three great armies was in keeping with
the original plan of 1917: only we were facing the Meuse instead of
the Rhine. Without sufficient material or experience, we were to keep
on driving, not looking forward to the dry ground and fair weather of
summer but toward the inclemency of winter. There against the main
artery of German communications we were to launch a threat whose power
was dependent upon the determined initiative of our men. Every German
soldier killed or wounded was one withdrawn from the fronts of the
British and French, or from Ludendorff's reserves which must protect
his retreat; and every shell and every machine-gun bullet which was
fired at us was one less fired at our Allies. It was to be in many
respects a thankless battle, and for this reason it was the more honor
to our soldiers.
II
INTO LINE FOR ATTACK
The Meuse-Argonne and the Somme Battle of 1916--The British had
four months of preparation--And a trained army--But a resolute
enemy--Our untried troops--Outguessing Ludendorff--Prime importance
of surprise--Blindman's buff--What it means to move armies--Fixing
supply centers--Staffs arrive--Their inexperience--Learning on the
run--Our confidence--Aiming for the stars--Up on time.
Comparisons with the Battle of the Somme, the first great British
offensive, which I observed through the summer of 1916, often occurred
to me during the Meuse-Argonne battle. In both a new army, in its
vigor of aggressive impulse, continued its attack with an indomitable
will, counting its gains by hundreds of yards, but never for a moment
yielding the initiative in its tireless attrition.
The British were four months in preparing for their thrust on the
basis of nearly two years' training in active warfare, with all their
arrangements for transport and supply settled in a small area only
an hour's steaming across the Channel from home. Behind their lines
they built light railroads and highways. They had ample billeting
space, and their great hospitals were within easy reach. They
gathered road-repairing machinery and trained their labor battalions;
built depots and yards; established immense dumps of ammunition
and engineering material; brought their heavy guns into position
methodically, and registered them with caution over a long period;
set an immense array of trench mortars in secure positions; dug deep
assembly trenches for the troops to occupy before going "over the top";
and ran their water pipes up to the front line, ready for extension
into conquered territory.
Their divisions had been seasoned by long trench experience, tested in
the terrific fire of the Ypres salient and trained in elaborate trench
raids for a great offensive. All their methods were as deliberate as
British thoroughness required. Units were carefully rehearsed in their
parts, and their _liaison_ worked out by staffs that had long operated
together. Commanders of battalions, brigades, and divisions had been
tried out, and corps commanders and staffs developed.
On the other hand, the Germans knew that the British attack was coming.
Their army was in the prime of its numbers and efficiency. They had
immence forces of reserves to draw upon to meet an offensive which was
centered in one sector, with no danger of having to meet offensives in
another sector. We were striking in one of several offensives, each
having for its object rapidity and suddenness of execution, over about
the same breadth of front as the British in 1916; and against the
Germans, not in their prime, as I have said, but when they had lost the
initiative and were deteriorating.
[Illustration: MAP NO. 3
OFFENSIVES OF SEPTEMBER, 1918. RELATION OF MEUSE-ARGONNE BATTLE TO THE
DECISIVE ALLIED OFFENSIVE MOVEMENT. ]
The increase of the skill of infantry in the attack, in their nicely
calculated and acrobatic coördination with protecting curtains of
accurate artillery fire, had been the supreme factor in the progress
of tactics. As a young army we had all these lessons to learn and to
apply to our own special problems. As we could not use the divisions
that were at Saint-Mihiel in the initial onset in the Meuse-Argonne,
we had to depend upon others from training camps and upon those which
were just being relieved from the Château-Thierry area. Two of them had
never been under fire; several had had only trench experience. They
had not fought or trained together as an army. Many of our commanders
had not been tried out. Some of the divisions were as yet without
their artillery brigades; others had never served with their artillery
brigades in action. By the morning of September 25th, or thirteen
days after the Saint-Mihiel attack, all the infantry, the guns, the
aviation, and the tanks must be in position to throw their weight, in
disciplined solidarity, against a line of fortifications which had all
the strength that ant-like industry could build on chosen positions.
We had neither material nor time for extensive preparations. We must
depend upon the shock of a sudden and terrific impact and the momentum
of irresistible dash. If we took the enemy by surprise when he was
holding the line weakly with few reserves, we might go far. Indeed,
never was the element of surprise more essential. We were countering
Ludendorff's anticipation that, if he withdrew from the salient,
we should stall our forces ineffectually in the mud before Metz:
countering it with the anticipation that he would never consider that a
new army, though it grasped his intention, would within two weeks' time
dare another offensive against the heights of the whale-back.
For our dense concentrations we had only two first-class roads leading
up to the twenty-mile front between the Meuse and the Forest's edge.
These were ill placed for our purpose. We might form our ammunition
dumps in the woods, but nothing could have been more fatal than to have
built a road, for to an aviator nothing is so visible as the line of
a new road. Where aviators were flying at a height of twelve thousand
feet in the Battle of the Somme, they were now flying with a splendid
audacity as low as a thousand feet, which enabled them to locate new
building, piles of material, even well-camouflaged gun positions;
and the minute changes in a photograph taken today in comparison with
one of yesterday were sufficient evidence to a staff expert that some
movement was in progress. An unusual amount of motor-truck traffic or
even an unusual number of automobiles, not to mention the marching
of an unusual number of troops along a road by day, was immediately
detected.
All our hundreds of thousands of men, all the artillery, all the
transport must move forward at night. To show lights was to sprinkle
tell-tale stars in the carpet of darkness as another indication
that a sector which had known routine quiet for month on month was
awakening with new life that could mean only one thing to a military
observer. With the first suspicion of an offensive the enemy's troops
in the trenches would be put on guard, reserves might be brought
up, machine-guns installed, more aviators summoned, trench raids
undertaken, and all the means of information quickened in search for
enlightening details.
It was possible that the German might have learned our plan at its
inception from secret agents within our own lines. If he had, it would
not have been the first time that this had happened. In turn, his
preparations for defense might be kept secret in order to make his
reception hotter and more crafty. He might let the headlong initiative
of our troops carry us into a salient at certain points before he
exerted his pressure disastrously for us on our flanks. Thus he had met
the French offensive of the spring of 1917; thus he had concentrated
his murder from Gommecourt to La Boisselle in the Somme Battle.
Not only had our army to "take over" from the French in all the
details of a sector, from transport and headquarters to front line,
but the Fourth French Army, on our left, which was to attack at the
same hour, must be reinforced with troops and guns. The decision that
the Saint-Mihiel offensive was not to follow through to Etain and
Mars-la-Tour meant that French as well as American units and material
must move from that sector to the Argonne. Immediately it had covered
the charge of our troops the heavy artillery, both French and American,
was to be started on its way, and, after it, other artillery and
auxiliary troops and transport of all kinds as they could be spared.
"It sounds a bromide to say that you cannot begin attacking until your
army is at the front," said a young reserve officer, "but I never knew
what it meant before to get an army to the front."
He had studied his march tables at the Staff School at Langres; now
he was applying them. Young reserve officers had a taste of the
difficulties of troop movements. They had to locate units, see that
they received their orders, and set them on their way according to
schedule, with strict injunctions from "on high" to see that everybody
was up on time. They had lessons in the speed of units and the capacity
of roads which, at the sight of a column of soldiers on the march, will
always rise in their recollections of anxious days.
When haste is vital, unexpected contingencies due to the uneven
character of men and materials break into any system. That is the
"trouble" with war, as one of these young officers said. Everything
depends upon system, and system is impossible when the very nature of
war develops unexpected demands that are prejudicial to any dependable
processes of routine. With urgent calls for locomotives and rolling
stock coming from every quarter to meet the demands of the extension of
the Allied offensive campaign over an unexampled breadth of front, the
railroads, which were few in this region, could not transport troops
and artillery which ordinarily would have gone by train.
Three road routes were available from the Saint-Mihiel to the Argonne
region. Artillery tractors that could go only three were in columns
with vehicles that could go ten and fifteen miles an hour. Field
artillery regiments, coming out from the Saint-Mihiel sector after two
weeks of ceaseless travail, were delayed by having their horses killed
by shell-fire. The exhaustion of horses from overwork was becoming
increasingly pitiful. They could not have the proper rest and care.
In some instances they made in a night only half the distance which
schedules required. When the deep mud, and outbursts of bombardment
from the enemy, retarded the relief of troops, motor buses, which
were waiting for them, had to be dispatched on other errands, leaving
weary legs to march instead of ride. Military police, army and corps
auxiliaries of all kinds, and various headquarters must be transferred.
Officers who had hoped for a little sleep once the Saint-Mihiel
offensive was under way received "travel orders," with instructions
to reach the Argonne area by hopping a motor-truck or in any way they
could. Soldiers, after marching all night, might seek sleep in the
villages if there were room in houses, barns, or haylofts. Blocks of
traffic were frequent when some big gun or truck slewed into a slough
in the darkness.
The processions on these three roads from Saint-Mihiel represented only
one of many movements from all directions to the Argonne sector. French
units had to pass by our new front to that of the Fourth Army. A French
officer at Bar-le-Duc, who had charge of routing all the traffic, was
an old hand at this business of moving armies. He perfectly appreciated
that curses were speeding toward his office from all four points of
the compass where traffic was stalled or columns waited an interminably
long time at cross-roads for their turn to move, or guns or tanks
or anything else in all the varied assortment were not arriving on
schedule time. By telephone he kept in touch with American and French
units in the process of the mobilization, while he moved his chessmen
on the rigid lines of his map.
The "sacred road" from Bar-le-Duc to Verdun coursed again with the full
tide of urgent demands; only this time the traffic turned off on the
roads to the left instead of going on to the town. With each passing
day, as the concentration increased, daylight became a more portentous
foe. "No lights! No lights!" was the watchword of all thought which
the military police spoke in no uncertain tones to any chauffeur who
thought that one flash of his lamps would do no harm; some of the
language used was brimstone and figuratively illuminating enough
to have made an aurora borealis. Camouflage became an obsession of
everyone who had any responsibility. Discomfort, loss of temper and of
time were the handicaps in this blind man's buff of trying to keep the
landscape looking as natural by day as it had in the previous months of
tranquil trench warfare.
Traffic management was only one and not the most trying or important
part of the problem. If the demands upon the Services of Supply
were not met, failure was certain: our army would be hungry and
without ammunition. In no department was the additional burden of the
Meuse-Argonne more keenly felt than in this. New railheads must be
established, and additional vehicular transport sent forward to connect
up with the new front. Though the mastering of the objective in the
Saint-Mihiel operation released a certain surplus, it was disturbingly
small. The line established after the salient was cut had become
violent. It would require large quantities of supplies as long as we
should hold it; and it was already evident that the Meuse-Argonne
offensive was to be a greedy monster which could never have its hunger
satisfied.
Every hour that we kept the enemy ignorant of the strength of our
concentration was an hour gained. The one thing that he must not know
was the number of divisions which we were marshaling for our effort.
They were the sure criterion of the formidability of our intentions.
The most delicate task of all was the taking over of the front line
from the French. Not until the stage was set with the accessories of
the heavy artillery, the new depots, and ammunition dumps did the roads
near the front, cleared for their progress, throb under the blanket
of night with the scraping rhythm of the doughboys' marching steps,
infusing in the preparations the life of a myriad human pulse-beats in
unison. Our faith was in them, in the days before the battle and all
through the battle to the end. Their faces so many moving white points
in the darkness, each figure under its heavy equipment seemed alike in
shadowy silhouette. In the mystery of night their disciplined power,
suggestive of the tiger creeping stealthily forward for the spring on
his prey, was even more significant than by day.
The men were prepared in the red blood that coursed young arteries,
in their litheness and their pride and will to "go to it." They had
their rifles, their belts full of ammunition, their gas masks, and
their rations. It was not for them to ask any questions--not even if
the barrages which would cover their charges would be accurate, if
the tanks would kill machine-gun nests, if the barbed wire would be
cut, and if their generals would make mistakes. Suspense, not of the
mind but of the heart, lightened at the sight of their movement, so
automatic and yet so stirringly human. The gigantic preparations of
dumps, gun positions, and trains of powerful tractors became only a
demonstration of the mighty energy of our industrial age beside that
subtler endeavor which had formed them for their task and set them down
as the pawns of a staff in a gamble with death. Might the big guns that
the troops passed, grim hard shadows in ravines and woods, do their
work well in order that the empty ambulances at rest in long lines
might have little to do!
By battalions and companies the marching columns separated, taking
by-roads and paths, as their officers studied their maps and received
instructions from French guides who knew the ground. By daylight they
were dissipated into the landscape. The hornets were in their hives;
they would swarm as dawn broke to the thunders of the artillery.
Attacks were always at dawn; and dawn had taken on a new meaning to
us since the morning of July 18th, when our 1st and 2nd Divisions, in
the company of crack French divisions, had started the first of the
counter-offensives.
The success of Saint-Mihiel had developed corps staffs which must now
direct the Meuse-Argonne, while others took over the arrangements
at Saint-Mihiel. Major-General Hunter Liggett, pioneer of corps
commanders, with the First Corps was to be on the left; Major-General
George H. Cameron, with the Fifth Corps in the center; and
Major-General Robert L. Bullard, with the Third Corps on the right.
Groups of officers making a pilgrimage in automobiles to the new sector
were to be the "brains" of the coming attack; for our corps command was
an administrative unit which took over the direction of a different
set of divisions from those under it at Saint-Mihiel.
The corps staffs had only four or five days for their staff
preparations for the battle. It was Army Headquarters in the town hall
of Souilly which set the army objective, the corps limits, and the
tactical direction of the attack as a whole, while the corps set the
divisional limits and objectives to accord with the army objective.
At our call we had French experience of the sector, and in this war
of maps we had maps. Our prevision in this respect was excellent. The
French furnished us with millions of maps in the course of the war; we
had our own map-printing presses at Langres; and we had movable presses
in the field for printing maps which gave the results of the latest
observations of the enemy's defenses. A snowstorm of maps descended
upon our army, and still the cry was for more. Not only battalion and
company, but platoon and even squad commanders needed these large-scale
backgrounds marked with their parts.
Yet maps have their limitations. They may show the ground in much
detail, but, even when the blue diagrams and symbols are supposed up to
date, not the bushes where the enemy's machine-gun nests are hidden,
or what the enemy has done overnight in the way of defenses. Nor are
maps plummets into human psychology. Even when they have located
machine-gun nests they cannot say whether the gunners who man them will
yield easily or will fight to the death. If the British on the Somme,
after months of preparation and study of the defenses of the sector,
had more elaborate directions for their units than we, it does not
mean that, considering its inexperience, our staff did not accomplish
wonders.
Our corps commanders may have known their division commanders in time
of peace, but they had never been their superiors in action of any
kind. Their artillery groupings and aviation arrangements included
French units as well as their own. There was no time for considering
niceties in dispositions. Division commanders who had to arrange the
details of their coöperation had never served together. They had scores
of problems, due to the haste of their mobilization, to consider; for
the burden of apprehension that pressed them close was of apprehension
lest they should not be up on time. They and their officers went over
the ground at the front, but they had not the time to make the thorough
observation that any painstaking and energetic division commander would
have preferred.
A division with all its artillery, machine-guns, and transport is a
ponderous column in movement, with every part having its regulation
place. One day in one set of villages and the next in another, the
communication of orders and requirements down through all the branches
is difficult, and the more so when you are short of dispatch riders,
and there is a limit to what can be done over the field telephone.
The unexpected demand for wires for our second great offensive must
not find the signal corps unprepared; or a people as dependent on
telephones and telegraph as we are, and so accustomed to having them
materialize on request, would have been helpless in making war. The
deepest tactical concern was, of course, the coördination of the
artillery with the infantry advance. It is only a difference of a
hundred yards' range, as we all know, between putting your shells among
your own men instead of the enemy's.
Reliable communication from the infantry to the aviator and his
reliable report of his observations to the artillery and infantry is
one of the complicated features in that team-play, which, in the game
of death, needs all the finesse of professional baseball, a secret
service, and a political machine, plus the requisite poise, despite
poor food and short hours of sleep, for worthily leading men in battle.
Some divisions that went into this action had not yet received their
artillery; or again their artillery arrived from the training camp,
where the guns had just been received, barely in time to go into
position, so that an inexperienced artillery commander reported to an
inexperienced division commander with whom he had never served. There
were batteries without horses, which the horses of other batteries
pulled into position after they had brought up their own. Battery
commanders received their table of barrages and their objectives of
fire, and, without registering, had to trust to observation by men
untried in battle or by aviators who had never before observed in a big
operation. Aviators had been trained to expect the infantry to put out
panels, and they might say that the infantry did not show their panels,
while the infantry would deny the charge. Such things had happened
before. They would happen this time. They happen to the most veteran
of armies, whose long experience, however, may have an excellent
substitute in other qualities which we had in plenitude, as we shall
see.
All our own guns were of French make, with the exception of a few
howitzers. The gun-producing power of the French arsenals supplying us
with our artillery and our machine-guns--the Brownings were only just
beginning to arrive--in addition to supplying all their own forces over
the long front of their offensive was one of the marvels of the war and
an important factor in victory. The majority of our planes were also of
French make: not until August had the Liberty motors begun to arrive.
The French had supplied us with additional aviation and tanks, as well
as artillery, from their own army; but much of this was new. All the
Allies, indeed, were robbing their training camps for the supreme
effort that was about to be made from the Meuse to the Channel.
While the public, which thinks of aviation in terms of combat, admired
the exploits of the aces in bringing down enemy planes, which they
looked for in the communiqués, the army was thinking of the value of
the work of the observers, whose heroism in running the gamut of fire
from air and earth in order to bring back information might change the
fate of battles. Training for combat, perhaps, more nearly approximated
service conditions than training for observation. A fighting aviator,
with natural born courage, audacity, and coolness, who goes out
determinedly to bring down his man, makes the ace. These qualities were
never lacking in our fliers. They went after their men and got them, in
a record of successes which was not the least of the honors which our
army won in France. The observer had no public praise; he was always
the butt of the complaint that he did not bring enough information, or
that he brought inaccurate information. His complex responsibilities
were singularly dependent upon that experience which comes only from
practice.
Instead of applying the lessons of Saint-Mihiel at leisure, as we had
hoped, to the whole army, we had to apply them on the run in the rapid
concentration of divisions which had not been at Saint-Mihiel. Yet the
supreme thing was not schooling. It was a seemingly superhuman task in
speed. It was to have the infantry up on time even if the other units
were limping. In this we succeeded. On the night of September 24th,
from the Meuse to the Forest's western edge every division was in
position. We had kept faith with Marshal Foch's orders. We were ready
to go "over the top."
The Marshal postponed the attack for another day. Rumor gave the reason
that the French Fourth Army was not ready; possibly the real reason,
or at least a contributory reason, was in the canniness of such an old
hand at offensives as Marshal Foch. Ours was a new army under enormous
pressure. Veteran armies were always asking, at the last moment, for
more time in which to complete their preparations before attacking.
Possibly the Marshal had set the 25th as the date with a view to
forcing our effort under spur of the calendar, while he looked forward
to granting the inevitable request for delay. At all events the respite
was most welcome. Our staff had time for further conferences and
attention to their arrangements for supplies, and our combat troops a
breathing spell which gave their officers another day in which to study
the positions they were to storm.
When I considered all the digging necessary for making the gun
positions, or had even a cursory view of the parks of divisional
transport, of the reserves crowded in villages and woods, of the
ammunition trains, and of the busy corps and division headquarters,
I wondered if it were possible that the Germans could not have been
apprised that a concentration was in progress. Not only did pocket
lamps flash like fireflies from the hands of those who used them
thoughtlessly, but despite precautions careless drivers turned on
motor lights, and some rolling kitchen was bound to let out a flare of
sparks, while the locomotives running in and out at railheads showed
streams of flames from their stacks, and here and there fires were
unwittingly started. An aviator riding the night, as he surveyed the
shadowy landscape, could not miss these manifestations of activity.
If he shut off his engine he might hear above the low thunder of
transport the roar of the tanks advancing into position, of the heavy
caterpillar tractors drawing big guns. When the air was clear and the
wind favorable, the increasing volume of sound directed toward the
front must have been borne to sharp ears on the other side of No Man's
Land. All this I may mention again, without reference to observations
by spies within our lines.
On our side, we might try to learn if the enemy knew of our coming,
and how much he knew. A thin fringe of French had remained in the
front-line trenches, with our men in place behind them. Thus our voices
of different timbre, speaking the English tongue in regions where only
French had been spoken, might not be heard if we forgot the rules
of silence, which were as mandatory by custom as in a church or a
library; and besides, if the Germans made a raid for information they
would not take American prisoners. They did make some minor raids,
capturing Frenchmen who, perhaps unwittingly when wounded or in the
reaction from danger, and subject to an intelligence system skilled in
humoring and indirect catechism, told more than they thought they were
telling. Information that we had from German prisoners left no doubt
that the Germans knew at least that the Americans were moving into
the sector, but did not expect a powerful offensive. This, as we had
anticipated, was discounted as being out of the question on the heels
of the Saint-Mihiel offensive. Our new army, the Germans thought, had
not the skill or the material for such a concentration, even if we had
the troops.
In our demonstration that we did have the skill and the energy, and
that in one way and another we were able to secure the material
even though it were inadequate, we were peculiarly American; and we
were most significantly American in the adaptable exercise of the
reserve nervous force of our restless, dynamic natures, which makes
us wonderful in a race against time. We strengthen our optimism with
the pessimism which spurs our ambition to accomplishment by its
self-criticism that is never satisfied.
On all hands I heard complaints by officers concerning lack of
equipment, of personnel, of training, and of time. But no one could
spare the breath for more than objurgations, uttered in exclamatory
emphasis, which eased the mind. I could make a chapter out of these
railings. Yet if I implied that the unit, whether salvage or aviation,
hospital or front-line battalion, tanks or signal corps, or any other,
would not be able to carry out its part, I was assailed with a burst
of outraged and flaming optimism. And optimism is the very basis of
the psychologic formula of war. Americans have it by nature. We lean
forward on our oars. Optimism comes to us from the conquest of a
continent. It presides at the birth of every infant, who may one day be
president of the United States.
Confidence was rock-ribbed in a commander-in-chief's square jaw; it
rang out in voices over the telephone; it was in the very pulse-beats
of the waiting infantry; it shone in every face, however weary. We
had won at Château-Thierry; we had won at Saint-Mihiel; we should win
again. The infantry might not conceive the nature of the defenses or
of the fire they might have to encounter. So much the better. They
would have the more vim in "driving through," said the staff.
The objectives which we had set ourselves on that first day, after the
conquest of the first-line fortifications, which we took for granted,
were a tribute to our faith in Marshal Foch's own optimism. On the
first day we were striking for the planets. In our second and third
days' objectives we did not hesitate to strike for the stars. This plan
would give us the more momentum, and if we were to be stopped it would
carry us the farther before we were. Of course we did not admit that
we might be stopped. If we were not, the German military machine would
be broken; and any doubts on the part of generals were locked fast in
their inner consciousness, for uttered word of scepticism was treason.
On the night of the 25th, when all the guns began the preliminary
bombardment, stretching an aurora from the hills of Verdun into
Champagne, our secret was out. From the whirlwind of shells into his
positions the enemy knew that we were coming at dawn. With thousands of
flashes saluting the heavens it no longer mattered if a rolling kitchen
sent up a shower of sparks or an officer inadvertently turned the gleam
of his pocket flash skyward. Along the front our infantry slipped
forward into the place of the French veterans, who came marching back
down the roads.
"Gentlemen," said the French, "the sector is yours. A pleasant morning
to you!"
III
NEW AND OLD DIVISIONS
A military machine impossible in human nature--Regular
traditions--National Guard sentiment--National Army
solidarity--Divisional pride--Our first six divisions unavailable to
start in the Meuse-Argonne--British-trained divisions--What veteran
divisions would have known.
The Leavenworth plan was to harmonize regulars, National Guard, and
National Army into a force so homogeneous that flesh and blood became
machinery, with every soldier, squad, platoon, brigade, and division
as much like all the others as peas in a pod; but human elements
older than the Leavenworth School, which had given soldiers cheer on
the march and fire in battle from the days of the spear to the days
of the quick-firer, hampered the practical application of the cold
professional idea worked out in conscientious logic in the academic
cloister. It may be whispered confidentially that all unconsciously
their own training and associations sometimes made the inbred and
most natural affection of the Leavenworth graduates for the regulars
subversive of the very principle which they had set out to practise
with such resolutely expressed impartiality. A regular felt that he was
a little more of a regular if he were serving with a regular division.
"We're not having any of this good-as-you-are nonsense in this
regiment," said its Colonel, talking to a fellow-classman who was on
the staff. "We're filled up with reserve officers and rookies,--but
we're regulars nevertheless. We've started right with the regular
idea--the way we did in the old --th"--in which the officers had served
together as lieutenants.
By the same token of sentiment and association the National Guardsmen
remained National Guardsmen. They also had a tradition. If they
were not proud of it they would be unnatural fighters. While the
average citizen had taken no interest in preparedness, except in the
abstraction that national defense was an excellent thing, they had
drilled on armory floors and attended annual encampments. Sometimes the
average citizen had spoken of them as "tin soldiers"; and they were
conscious perhaps of a certain superciliousness toward them on the part
of regular officers. Drawn from the same communities, members of the
same military club that met at the armory, they already had their pride
of regiment and of company: a feeling held in common with Guardsmen
from other parts of the country, who belonged to the same service
from the same motives. Should that old Connecticut or Alabama or any
other regiment with a Civil War record, and, perhaps, with a record
dating from the Revolution, forget its old number because it was given
a new number, or its own armory, because it went to a training camp?
Relatives and friends, who bowed to the edict of military uniformity
and anonymity, would still think of it as their home regiment. If
Minneapolis mixed its sons with St. Paul's, they would still be sons of
Minneapolis.
While all volunteers felt that they were entitled to the credit of
offering their services without waiting on the call, the draft men, who
had awaited the call, had their own conviction about their duty, which,
from the hour when they walked over from the railway stations to the
camp, gave them a sense of comradeship: while they might argue that
it was more honor to found than to follow a tradition. Their parents,
sisters, and sweethearts were just as fond, and their friends just as
proud, of them as they had been in the Guard. Aside from a few regular
superiors, their officers were graduates of the Officers' Training
Camps, who, as the regulars said, had nothing to unlearn and were
subject to no political associations. Yes, the draft men considered
themselves as the national army; and they would set a standard which
should be in keeping with this distinction.
All the men assembled in any home cantonment, with the exception
of the regulars, were almost invariably from the same part of the
country, which gave them a neighborhood feeling. The doings of that
cantonment became the intimate concern of the surrounding region. Its
chronicles were carried in the local newspapers. There was a division
to each cantonment; and in France the fighting unit was the division,
complete in all its branches,--artillery, machine-guns, trench mortars,
engineers, hospital, signal corps, transport, and other units. As a
division it had its training area; as a division it traveled, went into
battle, and was relieved.
Before a division was sent to France its men were already thinking
in terms of their division; they met the men of no other division
unless on leave, and met them in France only in passing, or on the
left or right in battle. In the cantonment the division had its own
camp newspaper, its own sports, its separate life on the background
of the community interest, without the maneuvering of many divisions
together on the European plan until they were sent into action in the
Saint-Mihiel or Meuse-Argonne offensive. Each division commander and
his staff, who were regular officers, conspired to develop a divisional
pride, thereby, in a sense, humanly defeating the regular idea of
making out of American citizens a machine which could be anything but
humanly American. Within the division, pride of company, of battalion,
of regiment, was instilled, and the different units developed rivalries
which were amalgamated in a sense of rivalry with other divisions.
Every cantonment had the "best" division in the United States before it
went to France, where rivalry expressed itself on the battlefield. The
record of the war is by divisions. Men might know their division, but
not their corps commander. Divisions might not vary in their courage,
but they must in the amount of their experience and in the quality of
their leaders. A division that had been in three or four actions might
be better than one that had been in ten; but a division that had not
been in a single action hardly had the advantage over one that had
been in several. Our four pioneer divisions, which had been in the
trenches during the winter of 1917-18 and later in the Château-Thierry
operations, the 1st (regulars), and the 2nd (regulars and marines), and
the 26th and the 42nd (both National Guard), were all at Saint-Mihiel.
Their units were complete; their artillery had had long practice with
their infantry; they had had long training-ground experience in France,
had known every kind of action in modern war, and had kept touch under
fire, rather than in school instruction, with the progress of tactics.
If they were not our "best" divisions, it was their fault.
Of the two other divisions which had been longest after these in our
army sector, the 32nd had just finished helping Mangin break through at
Juvigny, northwest of Soissons, and the 3rd was at Saint-Mihiel. These
six formed the group which General Pershing had in France at the time
of the emergency of the German offensive in March, which hastened our
program of troop transport.
Now we were bringing to the American army five of the divisions which
had been trained with the British, the 4th, 28th, 33rd, 35th, and
77th. From the British front the 77th had gone to Lorraine, whence
it was recalled to the Château-Thierry theater. The 4th and the 28th
were ordered from the British front, after the third German offensive
in June, to stand between Paris and the foe, and then participated,
along with the 77th, in the counter-offensive which reduced the Marne
salient,--or as the French call it, the second Battle of the Marne, a
simple, suggestive, and glorious name. Château-Thierry had thus been a
stage in passage from the British to the American sector, and the call
for the defense of Paris had been serviceable to the American command
as a reason for detaching American divisions, which the British had
trained, from Sir Douglas Haig, who, as he is Scotch, was none the less
thriftily desirous of retaining them.
The 33rd Division, remaining at the British front after the other
divisions had departed, gained experience in offensive operations,
as we know, which approximated that of the others at Château-Thierry,
when, fighting in the inspiring company of the Australians in the Somme
attacks beginning August 8th, the Illinois men took vital positions
and numerous prisoners and guns. Though these four divisions, the 4th,
28th, 33rd, and 77th, had not had the long experience of the four
pioneer divisions, they had had their "baptism of fire" under severe
conditions, they knew German machine-gun methods from close contact,
and they had the conviction of their power from having seen the enemy
yield before their determined attacks. To Marshal Foch they had brought
further evidence that the character of the pioneer divisions with
their long training in France was common to all American troops. The
National Guard divisions which had arrived late in France, though they
had been filled with recruits, had, as the background of their training
camp experience at home, not only the established inheritance of their
organization but the thankless and instructive service on the Mexican
border, where for many months they had been on a war footing.
According to European standards none of the divisions in the first
shock of the Meuse-Argonne battle was veteran, of course; and the
mission given them would have been considered beyond their powers.
Indeed, the disaster of broken units, dispersing from lack of tactical
skill, once they were against the fortifications, would have been
considered inevitable. A veteran or "shock" division in the European
sense--such divisions as the European armies used for major attacks and
difficult operations--would have had a superior record in four years
of war. Its survivors, through absorption no less than training, would
have developed a craft which was now instinctive. They were Europeans
fighting in Europe; they knew their enemy and how he would act in given
emergencies; they knew the signs which showed that he was weakening
or that he was going to resist sturdily; they knew how to find dead
spaces, and how to avoid fire; and they had developed that sense of
team-play which adjusts itself automatically to situations. All that
our divisions knew of these things they had learned from schooling
or in one or two battles. We had the advantage that experience had
not hardened our initiative until we might be overcautious on some
occasions.
The battle order of our divisions for the Meuse-Argonne battle was
not based on the tactical adaptation of each unit to the task on its
front. We must be satisfied with placing a division in line at a point
somewhere between the Meuse and the Forest's edge where transportation
most favored its arrival on time. One division was as good as another
in a battle arranged in such haste. The French Fourth Army was to
attack on the west of the Argonne Forest; on its right a regiment of
the 92nd (colored) Division, National Army, with colored officers, was
to form the connecting link between the French and the American forces.
For men with no experience under heavy fire, who were not long ago
working in the cotton fields and on the levees of the South, this was
a trying assignment, which would have tested veterans. Never before
had colored men under colored officers gone against a powerful trench
system. All the British and French colored troops had white officers,
and our other colored division, the 93rd, which was attached to the
French Army through the summer and fall of 1918, had white officers.
We come now to our divisions in place on the night of September
25th, with whom will ever rest the honor of having stormed the
fortifications. When I consider each one's part I should like to write
it in full. I shall mention them individually when that best suits the
purpose of my chronicle, and at other times I shall describe the common
characteristics of their fighting: in either case mindful of the honor
they did us all as Americans.
IV
THE ORDER OF BATTLE
The Metropolitan Division in the Argonne proper--Six weeks without
rest--Direct attack impossible in the Forest--Similar history of the
Keystone Division--Pennsylvania pride--Its mission the "scalloping"
of the Forest edge--The stalwart men of the 35th Division--Storming
the Aire heights--Fine spirit of the Pacific Slope Division--A
five-mile advance projected for the Ohio Division--North and South in
the 79th Division--Never in line before, it was to strike deepest.
Three National Army divisions were to be in the initial attack. It
was a far cry for the men who a year before had tumbled into the
training camps at home, without knowledge of the manual of arms or of
the first elements of army etiquette and discipline, to the march of
trained divisions forward into line of battle in France. On the extreme
left of the line was the Liberty Division, from New York City. The
metropolitans were given the task of taking not a town, but a forest,
with which their name will be as long connected as with our largest
city. Its left flank on the western edge of the Argonne Forest and its
right on the eastern, the 77th had a long divisional front of over four
miles; but it would have been unsatisfied if it had had to share the
Forest. The Forest was its very own. The public at home seemed to have
the idea that the whole battle was fought there. If it had been, the
77th would have had to share credit with twenty other divisions, which
had equally stiff fighting in patches of woods which were equally dense
even if they were not called forests.
If the Forest were stripped bare of its trees, it would present a great
ridge-like bastion cut by ravines, with irregular hills and slopes of
a character which, even though bald, would have been formidable in
defense. Its timber had nothing in common with the park-like conception
of a European forest, in which the ground opens between tree trunks
in lines as regular as in an orchard. If the Argonne had been without
roads, the Red Indians might have been as much at home in its depths
as in the primeval Adirondacks. Underbrush grew as freely as in
second-growth woods in our New England or Middle States; the leaves had
not yet begun to fall from the trees.
It had not been until September 15th that the 77th had been relieved
from the operations in the Château-Thierry region. A new division,
fresh from training at the British front and in Lorraine, it had gone
into line in August to hold the bank of the Vesle against continuous
sniping, gassing, and artillery fire; and later, after holding
the bottom of a valley with every avenue of approach shelled in
nerve-racking strain, it had shown the mettle of the Americans of the
tenements by fighting its way forward for ten days toward the Aisne
Canal. It had been in action altogether too long according to accepted
standards, though this seems only to have tempered its steel for
service in the Argonne.
[Illustration: MAP NO. 4
DIVISIONS IN THE FIRST STAGE OF THE MEUSE-ARGONNE BATTLE, SEPTEMBER
26TH-OCTOBER 1ST.]
Ordinarily a new division would not only have been given time to
recover from battle exhaustion, which is so severe because in the
excitement men are carried forward by sheer will beyond all normal
reactions to fatigue, but it would have been given time for drill and
for applying the lessons of its first important battle experience. The
value of this is the same to a division as a holiday at the mountains
or the seashore to a man on the edge of a nervous breakdown. He
recovers his physical vitality, and has leisure to see himself and his
work in perspective.
Instead of knowing the relaxation and the joy of settling down in
billets and receiving the attention of the "Y" and other ministrants,
of having plenty of time to write letters home, and of receiving from
home letters that were not more than six weeks old, the men of the
77th had long marches to make through ruined country, and were then
switched about, in indescribably uncomfortable travel, on the way to
the Argonne. The division commander made no complaint on this score;
but it was a fact to be taken into consideration. The 77th was short
of transport; its horses were worn down. Yet, faithful to orders, its
artillery as well as its infantry was up on the night of the 24th.
Owing to the length of its front, all four infantry regiments were put
into line, which meant that there could be no relief for any units
after they reached their destination.
We admire hardy frontiersmen, of whom we expect such endurance; but
what of these city-dwellers, these men from the factories and offices,
short of stature and slight of body? Who that had seen them before they
entered a training camp would have thought that they could be equal to
carrying their heavy packs on long marches and undergoing the physical
strain of battle? Their fortitude was not due altogether to good food
and the healthy régime of disciplined camps; it was the spirit of their
desire to prove that they were the "best" division because they were
the "Liberty Division." Their hearty, resolute commander, Major-General
Robert Alexander, was justly proud of them and believed in them; and
they had excellent officers, who held them up by example and discipline
to high standards.
Faith in the impregnability of the Forest, from ancient times a bulwark
for which armies competed, had not led the Germans to neglect any
detail in improving its natural defenses. In that area where for
four years the French and the Germans had stared across No Man's Land
at each other, the reasons for the enforced stalemate were almost as
obvious as those for the truce between the whale and the elephant.
Either army had at its back the cover of woodland, while the slopes
about the trenches formed a belt of shell-craters littered with trunks
of trees. Any attempt to take the forest by frontal attack must have
been madness. Action in front must be only an incident of pressure, and
confined to "mopping up," as action on either side forced the enemy's
withdrawal from a cross-fire. This was bound to be our plan, as the
enemy foresaw; we shall see that he governed himself accordingly.
The 28th Division, which had been on the left of the 77th in the
advance to the Aisne, was again on its left. These had really been
the first two American divisions to fight side by side under an
American corps command, that of Major-General Robert L. Bullard. In the
enterprise that they were now undertaking they had need of every detail
of team-play that they had learned.
Some elements of the 28th, which was then just arriving in the
Château-Thierry region, had been in action against the fifth German
offensive; then it had been pushed across the Marne, where it had been
put in by brigades and moved about under harassing circumstances in the
ensuing counter-offensive. Later, having proved its worthiness for the
honor, as an intact division it had taken over from the exhausted 32nd
on the Vesle. Practically, from July 15th until it went to the Argonne
it had had no rest. It had held not only the town of Fismes on the bank
of the Vesle, but the exposed position of the little town of Fismettes
on the other side of the river, during that period when the Germans
were inclined to make a permanent stand there if their digging, their
sniping, and their battering artillery fire, showered from the heights
upon the 28th and the 77th in the valley, were any criterion. In the
subsequent advance to the Aisne, and later in the transfer to the
Argonne, the division had to submit to the same kind of irregularities
and discomfort as the 77th, and to suffer in the same way for want
of adequate transport and of leisure for studying its latest battle
lessons for use in the next battle.
There is a general idea that such populous states as New York and
Pennsylvania lack state pride, particularly in the sense of the
southern states; but any state, whose National Guardsmen were numerous
enough to form a complete division on the new war footing, had the
advantage of the unity of sentiment of the old family, which does
not have to include strangers at its board. The 28th's deeds were
Pennsylvania's. It stood proudly and exclusively for Pennsylvania
with her wealth and prosperity and all her numerous colleges, large
and small, from Allegheny in the northwest to the University of
Pennsylvania. The men were evidently capable of eating three and four
square meals a day, and they looked as if they were used to having them
when they were at home.
"What about politics?" the critic always asks about any National Guard
division. If there were politics in the 28th it was so mixed up with
marching and fighting--and the men of the 28th were always doing one or
the other when I saw them--that it was unrecognizable to one so unused
to politics as the writer. Certainly, it was a good kind of politics,
I should say, in that Pennsylvania had taken a downright interest in
her National Guard, which was now bearing fruit. The 28th's commander,
Major-General Charles H. Muir, was a man of equanimity and force,
who had the strength of character, on occasion, to stand up to an
Army staff when he knew that its orders were impracticable. The staff
respected him for his confidence in the judgment of the man on the spot.
The 28th's losses both in officers and in men in that excoriating
progress from the Vesle to the Aisne had been the price of a gallantry
which was a further reproof to the scepticism in certain quarters
about the National Guard. Officers who had been killed or wounded had
been replaced by young men who were often from the training camps
though not Pennsylvanians; and in the fierce illumination of battle
much had been learned about the qualities of the survivors. Some of
these who had hitherto been called politicians had entirely overcome
the aspersion. Others who had worn themselves out physically might be
given a period of recuperation even if the division had none. The 28th
had been indeed battle-tried in all that the word means. If it could
have had two weeks before the Meuse-Argonne in which to digest its
lessons, this would have been only fair to it as a division: though
probably its determination would have been no stronger.
The 28th's front was from the edge of the Forest on its left to
the village of Boureuilles on its right. Astride the Aire River it
linked the Forest with the main battle-line. While maintaining its
uniformity of advance on its right, its left had the same difficult
maneuver in "scalloping" the eastern edge of the Forest as the French
in "scalloping" the western edge. This meant that the 28th must storm
the wooded escarpments which the Forest throws out on the western side
of the Aire. On the eastern side of the valley were heights which
interlocked with the escarpments. As one Guardsman said, the division
had a worse job than a Democrat running for governor of Pennsylvania in
an off year for Democrats.
Now the 28th could not succeed unless the division on its right took
the heights on the eastern side of the Aire. If the 28th failed, then
the whole turning movement of the Army offensive toward the main series
of heights which formed the crest of the whale-back was endangered. On
the right of the 28th was the 35th Division, National Guard from Kansas
and Missouri, which must offer the courage and vigor which is bred in
their home country in place of the battle experience which had been the
fortune of the Pennsylvanians. Major-General William M. Wright had been
the first commander of the 35th. He was a man of the world, most human
in his feeling and sound in his principles of war, with a personality
which was particularly effective with troops of sturdy individualistic
character, who were unaccustomed by their tradition of self-reliant
independence of thought to the arbitrary system which a regular army
develops in the handling of recruits in time of peace. Leonard Wood had
the same class of men from the same region in the 89th, which Wright
later led in the Meuse-Argonne battle with brilliant results.
Soon after the 35th arrived behind the British lines, Wright's accepted
knowledge of regular army personnel and his capacity for inspiring
harmonious effort in any group of subordinates led General Pershing
to set him the task of organizing corps staffs, among them the Fifth,
which was to develop exemplary traditions. Major-General Peter E.
Traub, a scholarly soldier, fully equipped in the theories of war,
succeeded him in command of the 35th. Traub's brigade of the 26th
Division had received at Seicheprey the shock of the first attack in
force that the Germans had made against our troops, where the quality
which the young officers and men had shown in face of a surprise by
overwhelming numbers, and their prompt recovery of the town without
waiting on superior orders, had reflected credit on their brigade.
The physique and the good humor of the men of the 35th had been the
admiration of everybody who had seen them after their arrival in the
British area. The Guardsmen of Kansas had a fine tradition linked up
with the career of Frederick Funston, who was in the fullest sense what
is known as a born soldier. He was a combination of fire and steel; of
human impulse and inherent common sense. His initiative was in tune
with that of his Kansans. Through the authority of their faith in him
he applied stern discipline.
With its left on Boureuilles and its right on Vauquois, the 35th must
storm the heights of the eastern wall of the Aire under flanking
artillery and machine-gun fire from the escarpments of the Forest,
unless these were promptly conquered by the 28th. No finer-looking
soldiers ever went into action. Their eagerness was in keeping with
their vitality. Compared to the little men of the 77th, who were
overburdened with heavy packs, they were giants of the type which
carried packs of double the army weight over the Chilcoot Pass in the
Klondike rush. Their inheritance gave them not only the strength but
the incentive of pioneers. Whoever had the leading and shaping of such
a body of American citizens had a responsibility which went with a
glorious opportunity. The stronger the men of a division, the abler the
officers they require to be worthy of their potentiality. Given the
battle experience of the 77th, under a Pershing, a Wood, a Bullard, a
Summerall, or a Hines, and a group of officers as such a leader would
have developed, the work of the 35th would never have become a subject
for discussion: but we shall come to this later on.
On the right of the 35th we had the 91st, National Army from the
Pacific Coast, as the left division of the Fifth or center Corps, with
its front from Vauquois to Avocourt. Its commander was Major-General
William H. Johnston, a redoubtable fighter and vigorous for his years,
as anyone could see at a glance. There was no question as to the
character of his men, who were six thousand miles from home. Their
physique was as good as that of the 35th, as you know if you know the
region where they were called to service by the draft. Never before
under fire, they were to fight their way through woods by a frontal
attack, and then under the enemy's observation into an open ravine, and
on through that up forbidding slopes. An appealing sentiment attached
to this division from the other side of the continent, no less than
to the 77th, from which it differed in its personnel as the Pacific
Slope differs from the streets of New York. There were city men in its
ranks, but not in the sense of city men from New York; and there were
ranchmen, and lumbermen, and those among them who spoke broken English
were not from tailors' benches.
On the right of the 91st was the 37th, Ohio National Guard under
Major-General Charles S. Farnsworth, a regular officer of high repute,
who was to take the division through its terrific experience in the
Meuse-Argonne and afterward to Belgium. Why so excellent a division
as the 37th should not have been earlier in France may be referred to
geography, which gave an advantage to National Guard divisions from the
seaboard states. The 37th had waited and drilled long for its chance,
which now came in generous measure. After breaking through the trench
system it must storm by frontal attack, for a depth of three miles,
woods as thick as the Argonne; and this was only a little more than
half the distance set for a single day's objective. Therefore, without
previous trial in grand offensives, it was assigned a mission which
would ordinarily have been supposed to be disastrous against even a
moderate defense. The 37th was without its own artillery, but it had
been assigned on short notice the artillery of the 30th Division,
which, however zealous and well-trained, had not worked with the
division or ever operated in a serious action, let alone protected
infantry advancing for such a distance over such monstrously difficult
ground.
On the right of the 37th was the 79th, National Army drawn from
Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia. Major-General
Joseph E. Kuhn, who was in command, was well-known as an able
engineer officer. He had served as an attaché with the Japanese in
the Russo-Japanese War, seeing more of the operations than any other
single foreign officer; and he had been an attaché in Germany early
in the Great War, afterward becoming president of the War College in
Washington. Aside from this equipment his untiring energy, his high
spirits, and his personality fitted him for inculcating in a division
confidence in itself and its leadership.
The 79th, with men from both sides of Mason and Dixon's line, united
North and South in its ranks. Since its arrival from the States it
had hardly had time to become acclimatized. In place of its own
artillery, which was not yet equipped, it had not even a homogeneous
artillery brigade. Of American artillery (aside from seventeen of
the French batteries upon which we were relying so largely for our
preliminary bombardment) it had three regiments, less six batteries,
from the experienced 32nd Division, and one regiment from the 41st
Division. Though the 79th had never been under fire before, though it
had only training-camp experience, it was expected, after taking the
first-line fortifications, to cover the most ground of any division on
the first day, and though it did not have to fight its way through any
important woods it was to proceed along the valley of the Montfaucon
road, passing over formidable ridges which were under the observation
of woods on either flank capable of concealing any amount of enemy
artillery.
V
ON THE MEUSE SIDE
The ground of the Verdun battle--The Crown Prince's observatory--The
Third Corps to move the right flank down the Meuse--Businesslike
quality of the 4th Division--A marshy front and no roads--Swinging
movement of the Blue Ridge Division--The Illinois Division to secure
the right flank--Dominating heights east of the Meuse.
At this point let us consider the missions of the three corps.
Liggett's First, with the 77th, 28th, and 35th Divisions, had the
problem of the left flank, the conquest of the Argonne Forest, the
valley of the Aire, and the heights of the eastern valley wall, which
was so essential to supporting the movement of Cameron's Fifth Corps
in the center. The Fifth, with the 91st, 37th, and 79th Divisions,
was to make the bulge of the sweep toward the main crests of the
whale-back. Its objective on the first day was the town of Montfaucon,
whose whitish ruins on the distant hilltop pretty well commanded all
the terrain on the corps front. Here the Crown Prince through his
telescope, at the safe distance which was in keeping with the strong
sense of self-preservation of the Hohenzollerns, had watched some of
the attacks on Verdun.
This sector was near enough to the battleground of Verdun to have
participated in some of the volume of shell-fire which had left no
square yard of earth in No Man's Land, or for half a mile on either
side of the trenches, untouched by explosions. The thicker the
shell-craters, the more difficult it is to keep uniformity of movement.
They are useful for cover for a halted charge, but for a charge that is
intended to go through, as ours was, they meant that troops must pick
their way over unstable footing. In view of the possibilities of French
counter-attacks the Germans had hardly been negligent in perfecting all
their defenses during the Verdun battle.
The groups of woods south of Montfaucon and north and west of Avocourt
was the heart of the German defense against the Fifth Corps. Against
Cheppy Wood which covered Vauquois the French, in 1915 when small
offensives were still the rule, had made many attacks in order to gain
the dominating position of Vauquois; and later, in the Verdun battle
and subsequent offensive operations by the French, the Germans had used
the woods as shelter for reserves, which drew persistent shell-fire of
large caliber from the French. A thick second growth had sprouted up
around the shell-craters and broken timbers, which afforded concealment
to the enemy and confused any platoon or company commander in keeping
his men together and in touch with the platoon or company on either
flank.
The assignment of such an ambitious objective to these three divisions
required an abounding faith in their manhood, initiative, and training
upon the part of an audacious command. I may add that before the attack
the Germans had taken one prisoner from the 79th Division, which
they thus identified; they did not know of the presence of the other
two divisions. As the 79th had never been in line before, they were
warranted in thinking that a green division could be there for no other
purpose than the usual trench training which we had systematically
given all our divisions before they went into serious action. When the
79th came rushing on toward Montfaucon on the morning of the 26th,
the enemy's surprise was warranted by all their canons of military
experience.
The Third Corps on the right flank, with its right on the Meuse River,
had in a broad sense the same mission as the First in supporting the
main drive toward the whale-back by the Fifth. On its left in _liaison_
with the 79th was the 4th, the only regular division in the attack,
under Major-General John L. Hines, whose ability was later rewarded
by a corps command. Regular divisions had a certain advantage in the
assignment of experienced professional officers and in the confidence
of the staff in the value of regular traditions which must be
maintained. Though in detached units, the 4th had had a thorough trial
in the Marne counter-offensive of July 18th to 24th. Then it had been
swung round, and as an intact division had taken over from the 42nd,
after the heights of the Ourcq were gained, for the final pursuit to
the Vesle, where it had a taste of shells, gas, and machine-gun fire
in the "pocket" before it was relieved by the 77th and started for
Saint-Mihiel. The 4th was a thoroughly regular and singularly efficient
division, disinclined to advertisement, doing its duty systematically
and unflinchingly.
At the outset of its advance it would have to cross marshy ground and
the Forges Brook, from which the footbridges had naturally been removed
by the enemy. On the left it was to keep up with the swift progress
of the 79th, with its course dominated on the left by the Montfaucon
heights, and on the right by the heights east of the Meuse--of which
we shall hear much before the story of the Meuse-Argonne battle is
told. There were wicked slopes and woods to be conquered. Indeed, its
position on the right flank of the 79th confronted as stern and complex
difficulties as that of the 37th on the left flank of the 79th.
On its right was the 80th Division under Major-General Adelbert
Cronkhite, sturdy, thick-set, cut out of sandstone, who faced the
world all four-square with his Blue Ridge men. The 80th had done well
at the British front, and had been in reserve at Saint-Mihiel. Though
it had its own divisional artillery and its units complete, this was
its first experience in a drive through first-line fortifications for
an extensive objective. If it had not so far to go as the 4th, its
trying maneuver in swinging toward the Meuse included passing between
the Juré and Forges Woods, which, unless cleared of the enemy, would
enfilade its advance with machine-gun fire.
The 33rd Division, Illinois National Guard, had the extreme right. I
have mentioned already the preparation which the 33rd had had in the
August offensive with the British. Major-General George Bell was calm
and suave, but a stalwart disciplinarian. Before leaving the States he
had eliminated many officers who for temperament, physical disability,
or other reasons appeared less serviceable abroad than at home. This
enabled him to travel to France without excess baggage, and to arrive
there with his organization knit together by a harmonious and spirited
personnel. As for his men, they were from Illinois and of the Illinois
National Guard, as you may learn in Cairo, Springfield, or Chicago,
for Illinois had been one of the forward states in supporting its
Guardsmen.
The 33rd was to swing up along the Meuse by noon of the first day, and
to rest there as a pivot for the Third Corps,--a delicate operation.
Its position was as picturesque as its record was various, in its
service first with the British under the Australian Corps, then with a
French, and later with an American Corps. If the war had lasted long
enough the Illinois men might have been sent to serve on the Italian
front, to complete their itinerary of military cosmopolitanism. At its
back now was the Mort Homme, or Dead Man's Hill, whose mention in the
communiqués during the Verdun fighting was frequent in the days when
the world hung on the news of a few hundred yards gained or lost on the
right or left bank of the Meuse. There under countering barrages from
the quick-firers and the plowing by high explosive shells, Frenchman
and German had groveled in the torn earth, mixed with blood and flesh,
between the throes of hectic charges for advantage. The Germans won the
hill, but eventually the French regained it. Then silence fell on the
shambles where the unrecognizable dead rested, and above them rose not
the red poppies of the poet's pictures, but weed and ragged grass from
the edges of the shell-craters.
Such was the texture of the rising undulating carpet unrolled to the
northeast over the battlefield of Verdun. In the foreground it was
variegated by the ruins of villages and those exclamation points of
desolation, the limbless trees, which melted into its greenish-ashen
sweep over the fort-crowned hills in the distance. Beyond them was
the plain of the Woëvre; and beyond that was Germany. An occasional
shell-burst showed that the volcano of war still simmered; its report
was an echo of the crashing thunders of the past, which we were to
awaken again in the valley of the Meuse.
The Meuse seemed only a larger Aire, asking its way sinuously in this
broken country. As vision followed its course past the German trench
system in front of the Mort Homme and past the area of destruction, it
was arrested by the bald ridge of the Borne de Cornouiller, or Hill
378. Mark the name! It will have a sinister part in our battle. Ten of
our divisions were to know its wrath without knowing its name. Higher
than any of the Verdun forts, except Douaumont, and higher than the
heights of the whale-back, it had been in the possession of the Germans
since August, 1914. From its summit observers could give the targets
to the countless guns hidden in the woods and ravines of its reverse
slopes.
An offensive against frontal positions resembles the swinging open of
double doors, with their hinges at the points where the first-line
fortifications are broken. The farther the doors are swung, the
greater the danger of enemy pressure on the hinges, whose protection
is the tactician's nightmare. In broadening his front of offensive
operations by alternating attacks Marshal Foch may be said to have been
opening several doors which were to become the alternately advancing
panels of a screen.
The Fourth French Army was the left flank of our army in the
Meuse-Argonne. As its left, and therefore the left of the whole
Franco-American attack, was making only a slight advance at the start,
it was little exposed. Our Third Corps had the right flank of the whole
movement, the Meuse River being the hinge, with the swing toward the
west bank of the Meuse, which bends westward toward the heights of
the whale-back on the Corps front. This gave it a frontal command of
the west bank, while it put the German trench system on the east bank
in the right rear of our line of general movement. Though the Meuse
was an unfordable stream, and we held the bridgeheads to prevent any
infantry counter-attack, this could not prevent cross-fire upon us
from artillery and even from machine-guns. As from the Mort Homme one
had a visual comprehension of the mission of the Third Corps, which
was more informing, not to say more thrilling, than the study of maps
at Headquarters, the inevitable question came to mind as to what was
being done for our protection on the east bank. The answer was that
French artillery and infantry were to undertake "exploitation." This
was a familiar word, which could not intimidate the artillery on the
Borne de Cornouiller. Forces in exploitation on the flanks, however
encouraging in battle plans, form an elastic term in application,
dependent upon what sacrifices they will make in the thankless task of
diverting the enemy's fire to themselves. With the heights of the Meuse
commanding one flank and the heights of the whale-back commanding the
other, the Third Corps was to operate in the Meuse trough as in the
pit of an amphitheater, striving to fight its way up the seats under a
plunging fire from the gallery.
Still, there was nothing else to be done. Someone had to take
punishment on the flanks for the support of the drive on the center.
The grueling which the Third Corps was to endure in advancing on one
side of the trough of a river valley beyond the enemy line on the other
was as certain to entail severe losses as was the mission of the First
Corps against the Argonne Forest and down the valley of the Aire. The
duty of all concerned, in an offensive which was organized in haste
in the hope of winning a great prize by springing into the breach of
opportunity, was not to hesitate in consideration of handicaps, but to
minimize them as much as possible in the initial plan, and then to
strike in fullness of confidence and of all the power at our command.
The strategy of the battle was daring in conception, and resolute in
execution.
VI
WE BREAK THROUGH
French gunners at home in the landscape--Sleep by regulations in
spite of suspense--"Over the top" not a rush--Difficulty of keeping
to a time-table--Even with a guiding barrage--What barbed wire
means--And the trench mazes beyond--Moving up behind the infantry.
The Pacific Slope, Kansas, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Delaware,
Maryland, Virginia, and New York thus had the honor of the initial
attack in our greatest battle, in which men from every state in the
Union were to have a part before it was won. In that area of rolling
country from Verdun to the Bar-le-Duc-Clermont road, which had been
stealthily peopled by our soldiers, the swarming of their khaki was
relieved by scattered touches of the blue of the Frenchmen who had come
to assist us. Though ours was the flesh and blood which was to do the
fighting--every infantryman was an American--the French were filling
the gaps in our equipment which we could have filled ourselves, as
I have said, only by delaying the Meuse-Argonne offensive until the
spring of 1919 as we had originally planned.
Under their camouflage curtains in an open field, or in the edge of a
woods, or under the screen of bushes which fringed a gully, the groups
of French gunners seemed at home in a landscape that was native to them
while it was alien to the Americans. When at rest their supple lounging
attitudes had a certain defiance of formal military standards, as if
French democracy were flouting Prussian militarism. When the order for
firing came, the transition was to the alertness of the batter stepping
up to the plate, and their swift movements had the grace and confidence
of professional mastery which had long put behind it the rudimentary
formalities of the drill-ground. They seemed a living part of the
infantry, their pulse-beats answering the infantry's steps. Never were
guests more welcome than they to our army. We could not have too many
French guns--or cannon, as our communiqués called them in recognition
of the unfamiliarity of our public with military terms--playing on the
enemy's trenches and barbed wire in the preliminary bombardment which
blazed a way for the charge.
I have known the suspense preceding many attacks while the darkness
before dawn was slashed by the flashes from nearby gun mouths and
splashed by the broad sheets of flame from distant gun mouths. There is
nothing more contrary to nature than that the quiet hours of the night
should be turned into an inferno of crashes and, at the moment of dawn,
when the world refreshed looks forward to a new day, men should be
sent to their death. The suspense before the Meuse-Argonne attack was
greater than before the Somme attack, when the British new army, after
its months of preparation and nearly two years of training, was sent
against the German line; it was greater than before Saint-Mihiel, our
own first offensive.
At Saint-Mihiel we had hints that the enemy would oppose us with only
a rearguard action. Our mission would be finished with the first
onslaught; we had only to cut the salient; the result was measurably
certain, while in the Meuse-Argonne it was on the knees of the gods.
The Germans could afford to yield at Saint-Mihiel; they could not in
the Meuse-Argonne, where, if informed of the character of our plan,
they might make a firm resistance in the first-line fortifications or
at such points in them as suited their purpose in seeking to draw us
into salients, to be slaughtered by enfilade fire as the French were in
their spring offensive of 1917.
After the preliminary bombardment began at midnight, our American Army
world, as detached in its preoccupation with its own existence, as much
apart from the earth, as if it were on another planet, waited on the
dawn of morning, which was the dawn of battle. The stars which were out
in their distant serenity had a matter-of-fact appeal to generals to
whom a clear day meant no quagmires to impede the advance. It was the
business of all except the gunners and the truck-drivers, or of those
speeding on errands to tie up any loose ends of organization, to try to
force a little sleep. Even the infantry, with the shells screaming over
their heads, were supposed to make the most of their inertia in rest
which would give them reserve strength for the work ahead.
This was in keeping with the formula which had been studied and
worked out through experience. No one not firing shells could be of
any service in smashing in strong points or cutting barbed wire.
Particularly it behooved high staff officers and commanders to lie
down, with minds closed to all thoughts of mistakes already made or
apprehensions of future mistakes, in order to be fortified with steady
nerves, clear vision and stored vitality for the decisions which they
would have to make when they had news of the progress of the action.
The plans for the attack were set; they might not be changed now;
the attack must be precipitated. Aides protected their generals from
interruption, and arranged that they should have food to their liking,
and as comfortable a bed as possible. No genius composing a sonnet or
a sonata could have been more securely protected in his seclusion than
a corps commander. The rigorous drill which had formed the men in the
front line to be the pawns of superior will was applied to keep the
superior will in training for its task.
General Pershing kept faith with the formula, and many others followed
his example, though junior staff officers worked through the night.
They were plentiful, and "expendable," as the army saying goes, as
expendable in nervous prostration as were in wounds and death the
young lieutenants who were to lead their platoons into the hell of
machine-gun fire. Waiting--waiting--waiting while the guns thundered
were the ambulances beside the road, the divisional transport, the
ammunition and engineer trains, the aviators with their planes tuned
up and ready, the doctors and nurses at the dressing-stations and
evacuation hospitals, and the reserve troops in billets. Officially
through his orders everyone concerned knew only his own part, but all
knew without asking that an unprecedented ordeal was coming.
It was easier for French and British veterans, familiarized by other
offensives with the roar and the flashes of artillery, to relax than
for Americans who were having the experience for the first time. With
sufficient practice one may learn to sleep with a six-inch howitzer
battery in an adjoining field shaking the earth. Many times during
the Meuse-Argonne battle I have seen our own veterans giving proof
of such hardihood; but on this night of September 25th it was not in
human nature for all the thousands who were to have no sleep the
next day or the next night to summon oblivion to their surroundings.
Those who fell asleep slept with nerves taut with anticipation and in
the consciousness of a nightmare, in which the rending thunders were
mixed with reflection upon their own arduous efforts and their part
in the future. Everyone was a runner crouched for the pistol-shot,
as he awaited the dawn. The great test for which all had prepared
individually and collectively for two years was coming tomorrow.
With the first flush of thin light the observation balloons had risen
in stately dignity from the earth mist, and the planes had taken to
the sky and swept out over the enemy lines: the combat planes seeking
foes and the observers to watch the progress of the charge or enemy
movements or the location of batteries or of machine-gun nests which
were harassing our infantry. Mobilization by the aviators for the
offensive had not been hampered by the problems of one-way and two-way
roads. They flew over from Saint-Mihiel the afternoon before or on the
morning the battle began.
At 5.30, just as a moving man would be visible a few yards away,
from the Meuse to the western edge of the Argonne, where we had our
_liaison_ with the French who advanced at the same moment, our men
left the old French trenches and started for the German trenches.
Everyone is familiar with the phrase "going over the top," yet despite
the countless descriptions everyone who saw an attack for the first
time remarked, "I didn't know it was like that!" The system of the
advance on the morning of September 26th accorded with the accepted
practice of the time. In their familiarity with the system soldiers
and correspondents have taken it for granted that what was common
knowledge to them was common knowledge to all the world. Only when they
returned home did they realize their error, and learn that ignorance
of fundamentals ingrained in army experience had made their narratives
Greek to all who had not been in action.
The average man is slow to yield his idea that a charge is an impetuous
sweep. It sounds more real to say that "the boys rushed" than to
say that they advanced with the sedateness of a G. A. R. parade on
Decoration Day, which is more like what really happened. Indeed, they
simply walked, unheroic as that may seem; and from high ground, or
better still from a plane flying low, an observer saw to the limit of
vision right and left men proceeding at a set and regular pace. The
more uniform and the more automatic this was, the better. On closer
view every man, except in height and physique, was a duplicate of the
others, in helmet, in pack, in gas mask, in every detail of uniform,
even in the way he carried his rifle with its glistening bayonet,
which was the only relief to khaki on the background of somber-tinted
earth.
Every man, every platoon, and on through the different units to
divisions and corps, was moving on a time schedule. A competition
between companies to "get there" first would have resulted from the
start in a hopeless tangle. If not literally, it may be said broadly
that each company was to be at a given point on the map at a given
hour; and if one company, or battalion or regiment, for that matter,
outdistanced another, it was because it had kept its schedule and the
other had not. In case it became "heady" and was on its objective in
advance of schedule, it ran the risk of "exposing its flanks." At
least that is the theory of the staff in its essence. An ideal army,
according to the staff, would be at a given line on the map at 10.30,
at another at 11.30, and so on. This might be possible if there were
no enemy to consider, although it would require an adept army, as
everyone who has ever drilled recruits well appreciates. He knows
how long it takes to train them, and to learn how to direct a small
force in carrying out satisfactorily a practice skirmish evolution
over slightly uneven ground. The gregarious instinct of itself seems
to break uniformity by drawing men into groups in face of infantry
fire in battle for the first time, as well as eagerness to close with
the enemy and gravitation away from the points of its concentration.
Shell-bursts scatter them, casualties make gaps which lead to further
disorganization.
Could our army have had reproduced for its edification the confusion of
the battle of Bull Run or of Shiloh, it would have realized the purpose
of all the painstaking drill, the monotonous and wearing discipline,
which made the well-ordered movement possible. Its very deliberateness
in maintaining the coördination of all its units gave it a majesty in
its broad and mighty sweep, which was more like the sweep of a great
river than the cataract rush of the small forces of the old days, which
the public still continued to visualize as a charge. I thought of it
too as in keeping with the organization of modern life, in the trains
entering and leaving a great city station or the methodical processes
of a vast manufacturing concern.
How did our men know whether or not they were keeping their schedule?
Did they look at their watches as they counted their steps? They had
a monitor at first in the rolling barrage, that curtain of fire which
preceded them. This was their moving shield which the guns far in rear
provided for their guidance as well as protection. If they came too
close to the barrage, they were exposed no less than their enemies to
death from its hail.
We may have a comparison in marching behind a road sprinkler, with
orders to keep just out of reach of its spray, which will be obeyed if
the spray consist of nitric acid instead of water. The more guns the
stronger the shield. We could never have an excess of guns as Grant had
at the outset of the Wilderness campaign, when he sent many batteries
of the short-range pieces of those days to the rear for want of room
on a narrow front in which to maneuver them. Cæsar applied the first
barrage in France in his tactical use of the shields of his legions,
who owed their success to systematic training no less than we in the
Meuse-Argonne. His men had to carry their own shields; the modern
soldier has enough to carry without carrying his.
Suspense was most taut, it was agonizing, as every soldier knows, in
the waiting hours ticking away into waiting minutes before the charge.
As the final minute approached, the veteran, as a connoisseur in
death's symbols, might find assurance in the strength, and apprehension
in the weakness, of the supporting barrage laid down on the enemy
trenches. Those of our men who had not been in battle before could have
no such prescience. They did know that when they left their trenches
the full length of their bodies would be exposed. They would march,
rifle in hand, without firing, while only the shield of the shells from
friendly guns screaming over their heads--the greater the volume, the
sweeter the music--could silence the fire of rifles and machine-guns
which had them at merciless point-blank range. Instantly they climbed
"over the top," anticipation became realization. One ceased to listen
to his heart-beats. The emotion became that of action. Suspense became
objective, merged in responsibility for every man in watching where
he stepped as he moved toward his goal, and for every captain and
lieutenant in directing his company or platoon.
The most careful maneuvering on fields at home was poor preparation for
No Man's Land, which is like nothing else in the world except No Man's
Land. Millions of soldiers know it through long watches over its dreary
lifeless space, and more vividly through crossing it in a charge. For
four years it had been the zone of death where no soldier from either
side ventured except at night on patrol or in a raid or general attack.
All this time shells had been pummeling it. The rims of craters, of
sizes varying with the calibers of the shells, joined each other; old
craters had been partly filled by later bursts. This continued pestling
of the soil with nothing to press it down but the rain made it the more
spongy in wet weather and the looser in dry weather. The heads of the
men bobbed as they advanced, stepping in and out of craters, and wove
in and out as they passed around craters. The rims often gave way with
their weight, or they slipped on the dew-moist weeds that fringed them
or upon some "dud" shell hidden in the weeds, as their attention was
diverted from the ground under foot by the burst of an enemy shell or
of one from their own guns which fell dangerously short.
As our artillery, in order to preserve the element of surprise, had
not "registered" with practice shots, it was firing strictly by the
map; and, though its accuracy was wonderful, inexperienced gunners
manning guns which had not had the allowances for error recently
tabulated, were bound, in some cases, to send their shells wide of
the mark. The big calibers might fail to destroy "strong points" that
held machine-gun nests, or a battery of seventy-fives fail to cut
the section of wire which was its assignment. For these mistakes the
infantry must suffer. It is the infantry which always pays the price in
blood for all mistakes; and the transfer of an officer to Blois or the
demotion of a general officer would not bring back their dead.
Their immediate concern, as that of every infantryman had been in every
charge throughout the war, as they crossed No Man's Land, was the wire
entanglements. All the original wire, four years' exposure to the
weather making its rusty barbs the more threatening, was still there in
some form or other, though it had been ruptured or further twisted by
previous bombardments whose craters only added to the difficulties of
passage. Breaks had been filled by new wire, which rather supplemented
the old than took its place. Additional stretches had been put out
at intervals to reinforce the defense of vital points. A half-dozen
strands will halt a charge in its tracks; here was a close-woven skein,
from three and four to twenty yards in depth. Where the depth was
greatest, it was most likely to have a continuous uncut stretch which
the enemy had marked as a target for fire upon the arrested attackers.
According to photographs of selected areas, which show a few bits of
wire sticking out of a choppy sea of fresh earth, every square yard of
which has been lashed by shell-fire, it would seem that artillery was
accustomed to do as thorough mowing as a reaper in a field of grain.
Even with treble our volume of artillery fire, taking treble the length
of time of our bombardment, and with every shell perfectly accurate on
its target, we could hardly have accomplished any such blessed result.
The best that could be expected was that lanes would be opened at
frequent intervals.
A break in the uniformity of advance appeared at once when one platoon
or company had a clear space on its front while its neighbors had not.
Suppose that for five hundred yards of distance the guns had completely
failed and for five hundred yards on either side they had succeeded:
then you had two exposed flanks sweeping forward into the trenches
beyond, possibly against the enfilade fire of machine-gun points
especially established for this opportunity.
Where the guns had not done the work for them the men must do it
themselves. If they had the torpedoes at the end of long sticks,
resembling exaggerated skyrockets, they might thrust these into the
meshes and explode them to gain the destructive effect of shell-bursts.
If the artillery had made some breaks, they might, in their impetuosity
to keep up with the rest of the line, try to pick their way. What young
soldiers can accomplish in this respect is past all comprehension
by elders who try to follow in their steps. The first wonder is how
they were able to go through at all, and the second is how they had
any flesh on their leg-bones after they had gone through. Their main
reliance was on the hand wire-cutters, which had not been improved
since Cuba and South Africa.
All the while that the soldier was snipping the strands and bending
them back as he crawled forward, he was usually too near the trench to
have any protection from the barrage, while from the trench he was a
full-size target at short range. War offers no more diabolical suspense
than to this prostrate soldier in his patient groveling effort, when
machine-gun fire is turned in his direction. He is in the position of
a man lashed to a bulls-eye. Bullets sing as they cut strands of wire
around him. He feels a moist warm spot on his leg or arm and knows
that he is hit. Perhaps he tries to apply the dressing to the wound;
but more likely he refuses to expose himself by any movement which
will attract the gunner's attention. He may be hit again and again
before the inevitable final bullet brings the last of his ghastly
counted seconds of existence. The bones of men who were killed in this
way--"hung up" in the wire--are all along the wire of the old trench
line from Switzerland to Flanders. Or perhaps, when that patient
wire-cutter has taken death for granted, the machine-gun suddenly
diverts its spray to other targets, and he is safe.
Such was the nature of the barrier of entanglements which had to be
conquered by these young divisions of ours before they ever began
fighting. Beyond its fiendish and elaborate skeins was a trench system
equally elaborate in all its appointments for the real resistance.
German officers and soldiers in occupation had taken all the interest
in improvements, and the more as it concerned the safety of their
own skins, of the most fastidiously scientific and progressive
superintendent of a manufacturing plant. The latest wrinkles in the
development of defensive warfare were promptly applied. After each
trench raid or enemy attack, weak points that had appeared were
corrected. Generals who came on inspection ordered changes suggested
by their study of the ground. Regiments new to a sector brought fresh
ideas and industry. Work was good for German soldiers, who were kept
digging and building for four years in perfecting the security of these
intricate human warrens.
Any trench system, after allowing for an enemy's success in clearing
the hurdle of the wire and in penetrating the trench system, and even
for his successful occupation of considerable stretches of the front
line, relied upon "strong points" and second lines in the maze of
fortifications to make the gains futile, or only the prelude to a more
costly repulse than if the attack had failed in its first stage. Let it
be repeated that not one out of four of our soldiers had ever before
stormed a first-class fortified line. They and their officers knew
the character of its mazes only through lectures, pictures, maps, and
imagination; but they were perfectly certain of one thing, and that
was that their business was to clean the Germans out, and for this
they were equipped with proper tools. In other words, when you saw a
German emerging from a deep dugout where he had taken refuge from the
bombardment, or appearing round a traverse, either kill him or gather
him in.
The ardor and ferocity of our youth in a furious offensive mood was
never more compelling in its results. Caution was not in our lexicon.
If strong points held out, the thing was to go through them. There
was no time to lose. The first wave must go on according to schedule,
leaving those who followed to do the mopping up of details. Our
faith was in our valor and destiny. In our progress the first-line
fortifications were to be only another hurdle after the wire.
In the course of this famous day, in seeking a personal glimpse
of every aspect of the action, I was at Army, Corps, and Division
Headquarters as the news came in, and I was three miles beyond the
trenches with our advance against the machine-gun nests. Such a
morning sun as is rare in this region eventually dissipated the thick
mist which had been in our favor in concealing our attack from enemy
observation, and against us in preventing our observation of the
movement of our own units. It kept on shining, which was still more
rare, in all the genial pervading warmth which we associate with its
generous habit in this season at home, until midday found the air
singularly luminous--luminous for this region--and the sky a soft blue.
The generals could not have asked more; and to the medical corps it
meant a blessing for the wounded. Judging by the weather that ensued
during the remainder of the battle, the point that the sun of the
Argonne exhausted all its beneficence on the first day and had to
retire behind clouds to recuperate, in order to keep up the reputation
of "sunny France" for future tourist seasons, seems well taken.
Not only was the infantry advancing, but all the rest of the army, no
longer obliged to court concealment under the cover of the night, had
come aggressively into the open, the stealthy processes of preparation
having given place to the thrill of battle joined. Where all efforts on
preceding days had been directed toward a stationary theater, now all
were directed to a traveling theater. A mighty organism of human and
metal machinery, which had been assembling and tuning up its engines,
had thrown in the clutch and was in motion.
Considering the volume of shells being fired at the Germans, the
columns of motor-trucks loaded with ammunition now had an intimate
appeal. The front had become a magnet drawing every thought toward it,
with every waiting ambulance and vehicle expectant of an order to start
forward. At the rear there was less traffic on the roads than during
the period of preparation; but forward, close to the trench lines,
roads that had been empty two days before were crowded. Machine-gun
battalions in reserve and batteries of artillery which had carried
out their assignment in the preliminary bombardment, and were moving
forward to new positions where they could support the advance, were
demanding right of way over divisional transport, which was clear as
to its duty to keep as close to the infantry as orders would permit.
The signal corps, unrolling their wires, also wanted precedence in
order that division headquarters might have information; and the
engineers had taken precedence over everybody with the compelling
argument that unless roads were built no traffic could move forward.
It was a familiar enough picture. To the jaded observer of war every
glimpse only reproduced some scene which was part of a routine of
which he was so weary that it made him desire, if for no other reason,
the realization of the supreme hope that this should be the final
offensive of the war. The great thing, though all the equipment and
all the system seemed age-old because of their associations, was
that the personnel was new. A new knight had slipped into old armor,
and taken up the sword from a tired if experienced hand. D'Artagnan
had arrived from Gascony to add his young blade to the blades of the
three Musketeers. On the part of everybody there was still the boyish
enthusiasm of the beginner in a game.
Hundreds of officers who had been to staff schools, or enduring the
S. O. S. in fractious impatience, now for the first time were at the
front--the front of the Great War; and with them were all the men
of the supply units, motor drivers, ambulance drivers, engineer
battalions, military police, whose one thought was a sight of that "big
show."
The French gunners looked on smiling, as a middle-aged woman smiles
over the enthusiasm of the débutante. Given the hour of attack, they
knew by experience how long it would be before the first wounded and
the first prisoners would come down the road. Soldiers who had never
seen a German at close quarters perhaps had taken the prisoners; a
young intelligence officer might be having his first experience in
questioning them. To the French the prisoners looked like all the
"sales Boches"; but we were discovering their characteristics afresh.
Later came the severely wounded on stretchers which were slipped into
the ambulances which bore them away. By nine o'clock in the morning we
knew that except for a few strong points which could not hold out we
were through the wire and through that elaborate trench system and out
in the open, and still going on.
VII
IN THE WAKE OF THE INFANTRY
A successful surprise--The importance of traffic control in
maintaining the advance--The "show" in the air--How the engineers
built roads--And traffic blocked them--And colonels showed the
traffic police how.
The veteran accepts his long service as a guarantee of efficiency; the
novice is patient under instruction and open to suggestion. Our desire
to do everything in the book, our painstaking individual industry under
a meticulous discipline, and our willingness as beginners to learn had
served us well before the battle in the concealment of our strength
and plans from the enemy. There were so many of us and we were so
swift in our onset that we gave the enemy the benumbing shock which on
many occasions the newcomer, springing aggressively into the arena,
has inflicted by a rain of blows upon a hardened adversary who has
appraised him too lightly.
If the Germans had made the most of their fortifications with their
customary skill, the dam might have held against the flood; for it
is the touch and go of impulse that decides in the space of a second
between docile hands up begging for succor and a fury of resistance
to the death. Suddenly brought to face overwhelming formations, the
answering sense of self-preservation prevailed in the German trenches
before the German officers and non-commissioned officers, had they been
in the mood, could overcome the mass instinct of their men.
The French on our left had presumably met more resistance than we
in the first-line fortifications. Their attack was doubtless more
professionally skillful than ours. Had they failed, for no other reason
than that they had fewer men to the mile, the cost of a repulse would
have been less for them than it would have been for us. The Germans
knew that the French were massing west of the Argonne, and apparently
accepted their attack as serious, while they thought that we would make
only a demonstration. We had been right in our anticipation that they
would not consider, for one thing, another major offensive by our army
feasible so soon after Saint-Mihiel; or, for another, that Marshal
Foch, while he was carrying on extensive operations in northern France,
would have the temerity or the forces to undertake in addition such an
extensive effort as that of September 26th.
Despite the honor in which open warfare was now held, a first line was
still a first line, with its wire, deep dugouts and strong points, and
all the approaches accurately plotted by the artillery through long
practice in fire. A part of it might be readily taken at any time by
thorough artillery preparation, but the victors in the early offensives
had suffered enormous toll of casualties from shell-fire in organizing
their new positions. Though the short artillery preparation, without
registering, had proved efficacious against the Germans on July 18th
and August 8th, when they were holding shallow trenches in ground
which they had won in their spring offensives, it had not as yet been
tried by the Allies--I may mention again--over any such length of
front against the old trench system as in the Meuse-Argonne. It is
only fair to say that we were not opposed in strong force, but, make
any qualification you choose, by conquering twenty miles of first-line
fortifications we had won a signal triumph which must have been a
distressing augury to the German command.
After our "break through" there was little answering artillery fire. We
had drawn the teeth of immediate artillery resistance by going through
to the guns. We had captured many guns; others were forced to fall
back to escape capture, and they, or any that were hurried forward,
would have had to fire, not at a settled trench line, but at infantry
deployed and on the move. Meanwhile our infantry must be driven to the
utmost of its capacity to make the most of the headway that we had
gained.
We had also to consider the dispersion and the fatigue which bring
loss of momentum in an attack, just as a tidal wave spends itself in
flowing inland. The farther our infantrymen went, the farther our
transport must go to provide them with rations and ammunition. Thus the
ability of our organization to continue the advance after the "break
through" included the indispensable factor of efficient arrangements at
the rear. As a division has twenty-seven thousand men, its daily food
requirements are equal to those of a good-sized town, without including
small arms and artillery ammunition and other material. People at home
who were surprised at the length of time it took a division to march by
on parade, without its artillery or transport, will have some idea of
the road space required for a single division fully equipped for action
and in motion.
Behind the old trench system traffic movement had settled into a
routine, under the direction of policemen at the crossings, resembling
that of a city. In our mobilization for the attack we had brought,
aside from corps and army troops, nine divisions into the Meuse-Argonne
sector. This led to the pressure which would appear in suddenly
trebling the traffic of a city. Though the roads were insufficient,
they were kept systematically in repair; quantities were known; we
were forming up on a definite line of front. After the attack was
begun, the defensive force was falling back upon its established
and dependable arrangements. The offensive force--and this cannot be
too clearly or vividly stated--had to build a city, as it were, by
establishing new depots and camps, repairing old roads and building
new roads, while traffic control in the area of advance was subject
not only to the calculable requirements of a great street parade in a
city, but to the incalculable requirements of a great fire and other
emergencies which switch concentrations from one street to another.
From a ridge in the midst of the old trench system in the center of
our line, the nature of our task appeared as a picture, which my
observation in threading my way through the streams of traffic in the
rear filled in with detail. Ahead, except for occasional groups and
lines appearing and disappearing in the wooded, undulating landscape,
our advancing infantry seemed to have been dissipated into the earth.
Their part after they were through the fortifications I shall describe
in another chapter. The bridge between them and the rear was for
the moment in the air, where Allied and German planes in prodigal
numbers came and went on their errands of combat and observation.
In the jam on the roads back of the trenches, thousands of men, of
waiting machine-gun battalions and of stalled artillery, and drivers
and helpers attached to traffic of all kinds, were looking aloft
at a "show" which was worth the price of being packed in darkened
transports, and almost worth the price of enduring army discipline.
If they might see nothing of the battle going on behind the ridge, they
had grandstand seats for the theatrics of war in the air, staged on the
background of the blue ceiling of heaven. I was not to see the like
of this scene again in such bright sunlight. The most jaded veteran
never failed to look up at the sound of machine-gun firing, which
signaled that the aces might be jousting overhead. Would one be brought
down? There might be only an exchange of bullets between planes in
passing; then one might turn to give chase to the other; or both begin
maneuvering for advantage. In shimmering flashes the sunlight caught
the turning wings of planes that tumbled in a "falling leaf" when at a
disadvantage, caught the wings of planes that were crippled and falling
to their death.
Duels were forgotten when a German plane with no Allied plane across
its path swept down toward the huge inflated prey of an observation
balloon. His telephone told the observer in the basket that it was time
to take to his parachute. The sight of the figure of a man, harnessed
to a huge umbrella, leisurely descending from a height of a thousand
feet, divided attention with watching to see whether or not the gas
within the thin envelope overhead broke into a great ball of flame. If
not, it was brought down to take on its passenger again; and it could
be lowered with incredible rapidity for such an immense object, as
the wire which anchored it was reeled in on the spinning reel on the
motor-truck. There was something very modern and truly American about
a motor-truck in a column of traffic towing a balloon.
Most fortunate of all the spectators were the men with machine-guns for
aërial defense mounted on trucks. They both observed and participated
in the game. Many of them were in action for the first time with a new
toy. They did not propose to miss any opportunity to make up for having
come late into the war.
"Haven't you learned the difference between an Allied and a German
plane? You're shooting at an Allied plane," an officer called to a
machine-gunner.
"Yes, sir," was the reply, and he stopped firing.
"Why didn't you tell him you couldn't hit it anyway?" remarked a
passing wounded man, after the officer had passed on. "But don't worry.
If they miss the plane, the bullets can still hit somebody when they
fall."
Entranced as they were by the spectacle, all the men who had to do
with the moving of the wheels of all the varieties of transport which
overflowed the roads were only the more eager to press forward. The
air was not their business. Their duty was over the ridge toward
the front. The artillerists had particularly appealing reasons for
impatience, as we shall see. They were using rugged language, which
relieved their steam-pressure without changing the fact, which was
being burned into the consciousness of the whole army, that as surely
as a chain is no stronger than its weakest link, a road is no stronger
than any slough which holds up traffic.
The engineers had no time to spare for observing blazing balloons.
Their labors in the old trench system, in contrast to the florid drama
of the air, were a reminder of how completely earth-tied the army was,
and how small a part of its effort was above the earth, even in the
days when communiqués paid much attention to aces. For a mile or more
every road in the immediate rear of the old French trenches had been
in disuse for four years while it was being torn by shell-bursts. For
the distance across No Man's Land, it had become part of the sea of
shell-craters. On the German side of No Man's Land were more trench
chasms, and another stretch which had been blasted in the same fashion
as the French side.
Shoveling would fill many of the holes; but shoveling required labor
when we were short of labor, and time when every minute was precious.
It was increasingly evident every minute, too, that trucks that carry
three tons, and six-inch mortars, and heavy caissons were not meant to
pass over any piece of mended road that had its bottom two or three
feet below the surface. They insisted upon finding the bottom and
remaining there until pulled out by other traction than their own.
The division engineers were supposed to keep on the heels of the
infantry, which they did with a gallantry which made amends for the
inadequacy of their numbers and material. Their efficacy was dependent
upon these two features and upon the prevision of the division command
in mastering the problem beforehand. There were critics who said that
some division staffs evidently expected their artillery and rolling
kitchens to take wing; but the division staffs produced by way of
answer the unfailing list of written orders on the subject, which
could not be carried out. If the infantry were repulsed or checked,
the engineers might share some of the fighting, as they had on more
than one occasion. There seemed to be a universal apprehension, the
engineers said, that an engineer might have a chance to sleep or
rest, which would obviously ruin his morale. If, after the infantry
had passed on, the enemy concentrated the fire of a battery on the
road-builders, they were not supposed to be diverted from their labor,
but to be prompt in filling new shell-craters.
The lack of material ready on wagons for immediate movement to the
front left them to gather what material they could on the spot. They
could not use barbed wire, and in places that seemed the only thing in
sight. They tore out trench timbers, which often proved rotten from
four years in moist earth, they gathered stones where stones could be
found and used these to make something more solid than loose earth
turned by the shovel; and they sent hurry calls to the rear for trucks
of material, which themselves might be stalled on the way forward in
the jam of waiting traffic. The more sticks and stones filled in a bad
spot, the more were needed as the earth underneath continued to yield.
When a truck-driver saw that the truck in front, which belonged to his
convoy, had passed through a rut, he determined that where his leader
could go he could follow, and he drove ahead, cylinders roaring with
all their horse-power. When he was stuck, he spurred them to another
effort. Meanwhile his wheels were probably sinking, and he had delayed
the mending of the break in any satisfactory way while the truck in
front backed up to put out a towline, and all hands in the neighborhood
added their muscular man-power to cylinder horse-power. The Germans had
raised in the shell-torn earth of the trench system another barrier
than that of their fortifications to a swift drive for their lines of
communication.
Their own limited opportunities in "passing the buck" did not exclude
the engineers from easing their own mental, if not physical, burden
by remarking with acid intensity that a little better traffic control
on the part of some of the people who were complaining would help
matters. No one who had been along the roads could deny that this
point was well taken. If not the experience of other offensives, our
traffic demoralization at Saint-Mihiel should have been a warning to
us, though most of the men who had learned their lessons in that sector
were still occupied there. We had the admirable example of the British
transport, which, after confusion in the Somme battle resembling ours
at Saint-Mihiel, had developed in practice under fire a system which
seemed automatic.
The number of guns and ammunition-caissons and the length of a column
of divisional transport were calculable quantities. Their order of
precedence behind the infantry was largely a settled formula. The
number of roads and their state of repair must be known not only on the
map but by practical observation. Some were narrow country roads, which
would accommodate only "one-way" traffic, and others would accommodate
traffic going both ways. Having all these factors in mind, the program
must include the disposition of labor battalions where they would
be needed in making prompt repairs, when heavy trucks cut up roads,
especially one-way dirt country roads.
We had written out extensive instructions for traffic regulation,
which were to be enforced by military police who were new to the task
and insufficient in numbers. The same thing happened to the military
police on September 26th as happened to the New York City police during
the parade of the 27th Division, when the crowd broke through the
police lines into the line of march. In this instance, when aggressive
commanders of artillery and convoys saw an opening, they made for it
without regard to traffic regulations, though their ardor may have
meant only delay in the end.
Thus the military police had paper authority which they could not
enforce. Their minds were kept in confusion by the confusion of
personal directions they received from volunteer experts. They
were overwhelmed in rank; and respect for rank had been drilled
and drilled into them. A colonel is a colonel and a mighty man;
a lieutenant-colonel is a mightier man than a major, who in turn
outranks any captain in charge of a section of road. What was the use
of proclaiming a road "one-way," when a staff officer appeared and
declared it "two-way"? What was there to do when another staff officer
appeared with an outburst against the disobedience of regulations that
had interlocked traffic going both ways on this same one-way road?
This is not saying that the personal initiative of a passing senior
officer was not serviceable, when he confined his effort to breaking
a jam, without reorganizing the system in one locality, and thereby
throwing it out of gear in other localities. With the best of
intentions, colonels fresh from home who had not seen a large operation
before were particularly energetic. Some of their remarks stirred
memories of Philippine days when the transport of an expeditionary
battalion was in difficulties. The burden of the world was on their
shoulders. When they gave an order, they wanted no suggestive "But,
sir----" from any captain or major, though they complained that
reserve officers lacked both initiative and discipline. As each
colonel departed in the blissful consciousness that it had taken a
trained soldier to "straighten things out," the traffic officers, in
the interval before another appeared with contradictory orders, might
indulge their sense of humor with the reflection that numerous "fool
colonels" must be wandering about France with a free hand in impressing
their rank upon juniors.
The biggest "fool colonel" or general was he who, to avoid walking,
took his car in the early part of the day across the freshly made
road over the trench system, thereby delaying the carts of machine-gun
battalions. When his car was stalled, he received about as much
sympathy as the driver of a truck stalled on a road which did not
belong to his division. Not being a colonel, the driver might be made
the public object of language which did not consider rank or human
sensibilities.
In no result was the fact more evident than in our traffic direction
that in making a large army we must crack the mold of a small army. In
time our capacity for organization would make a new mold. Meanwhile,
though it might be applied at cross-purposes, our American energy,
adaptable, tireless, furious, and determined, must bring results.
The many broken-down trucks in ditches beside the road were only the
inevitable casualties of a prodigious effort. Let the infantrymen keep
on advancing; we would force their supplies up to them in one way or
another.
VIII
THE FIRST DAY
Out in the open--The enemy limited to passive defense--And relying on
machine-gunners--Their elusiveness--Problems of the offense--Slowing
down--Up with the infantry--Why dispersion--_Liaison_ up, down,
and across--How keep the staff informed?--The spent wave before
Montfaucon.
What of the infantry lost to view in the folds of the landscape? They
were confronting the originals of the hills, woods, and ravines, whose
contours on paper had been the definite factor in making plans, while
the character and resistance of the enemy had been the indefinite and
ungovernable quantity. As the day advanced, irregular pencilings,
reflecting the reports of the progress of the fighters, moved forward
on the maps of the different headquarters toward the heavy regular
lines of the objectives which were the goals of our high ambition.
The loss of the first-line fortifications to the Germans could not be
considered as serious as in an offensive in the first years of the war.
Even as early as the Verdun battle, proponents of the mobile school
of warfare, who had never been altogether silenced by the engineering
school, had advocated a yielding elastic defense, which, after drawing
the Crown Prince's Armies away from their depots, would counter by
a sudden attack of the gathered French forces; but such a maneuver
was too daring and contrary to the thought of the time, with its
dependence upon rigid defense. Infantry had fallen into the habit of
feeling "undressed" and helpless unless in trenches. When the soldier
was forced into the open, he had hastened to hide his "nakedness" in
a shell-crater, or instantly, in the very rodent instinct that he had
developed, set to digging himself a pit. Since the German offensive of
March, 1918, all the practice had been to wean the infantry away from
settled defenses to the supple use of light artillery, trench mortars,
and machine-gun units. Happily, as we know, the basic training of our
infantry had been in keeping with this idea.
In the palmy days of German numbers and vigor, the German High Command
might have met our Meuse-Argonne offensive by the prompt marshaling of
reserves for a decisive counter-attack against our extended forces with
inadequate roads at their backs; but if Ludendorff realized the errors
which our fresh troops might commit from inexperience, we realized,
on our part, that he was too occupied elsewhere by Allied attacks to
consider any considerable aggressive action on our new front, where his
tactics must have in mind, obviously, the protection with a minimum
cost of men and material of his lines of communication, in order to
assure a successful withdrawal from northern France and Belgium. With
our attack developed, his subordinate in the Meuse-Argonne sector, in
carrying out this policy, would choose the points where he could gain
the best results by concentrating the fire of the artillery at his
command, and then depend upon the expert German machine-gunners for
defensive warfare in the open, supported by such fragmentary defense
lines as might be hastily constructed.
According to the German intelligence report of our operation at
Saint-Mihiel, our staff work had been immature, while our line officers
did not know how to make the most of our gains. Without considering
that at Saint-Mihiel we were under orders to stop on our limited
objectives, and granting the Germans their view, no one will deny
them the credit of knowing how to make the most of their tactical
opportunities. The bellows of our accordeon was being drawn out as
theirs was drawn in. With every hundred yards of advance our men were
farther from their communications. Reports were accordingly the longer
in reaching headquarters, and orders for future moves the longer in
reaching the line, while those of the Germans, as they fell back on
their communications, were prompt.
It was not the first time that they had lost first-line fortifications.
They knew by experience as well as observation what had happened to
their first line under the powerful initial assault; and they knew
what they had to do, in full dependence upon a staff system trained
in practice to meet this as well as the other vicissitudes of war.
The failure of their men in the front line to stand to the death was
an irritating exhibition of deteriorating morale, which must be taken
into consideration not only by the subordinate but the higher commands.
Scattered and demoralized individuals and groups, filtering back in
retreat, might be re-formed, or passed through advancing reserves to
the rear for reorganization. Fresh machine-gun units, which had almost
the mobility of infantry, could be readily placed at points already
foreseen as most suitable. One machine-gun might hold up the advance of
a company of infantry. The enemy was fully familiar with the details
of a landscape studded with ideal machine-gun positions, the choicest
being the edge of a woods on a hillside overlooking an open space.
Some of our officers and men had met German machine-gun practice in
open warfare in the Château-Thierry campaign and at the British front.
As others knew it only under the limitations of trench warfare, the
resistance which they now must face was familiar to them only through
instruction. The German machine-gunner, having learned as the survivor
of many battles the art of self-preservation at his adversary's
expense, would wait all day and all night and even longer without a
shot, until his target appeared in the field of fire assigned to him;
wait as a Kentucky feudsman waits behind a rock for his enemy to appear
on a road. Each gun was only one in a well-plotted array covering all
the avenues of approach which any attacking force must follow. The guns
disposed in front might precede or wait on the guns in flank in opening
fire.
There was nothing new or wonderful in this arrangement. Any soldier
with a sense of ground and of natural combative strategy could work
out a plan of interlocking fire; but the discipline and the training
requisite to its proper execution, and the stubborn phlegmatic bravery
which sticks to a machine-gun to the death, are not to be found at
random on any page of a city directory or social register. The fact
that a gun had begun firing did not mean that it could be immediately
located. Sometimes when light conditions were right the flash was
visible, unless the gunner had hung a piece of bagging, through which
he could aim, to conceal the flash. The direction of the fire might
be judged somewhat by sound, and also by observing the spits of dust
in the earth or on the wall of a building. Judgment on this score was
affected by the proximity of the passing bullets to the observer's
person.
The more machine-guns were firing from different angles, the more
difficult it was to locate any one of them by either method; and
the more influential the human element. In the midst of their fire
imagination easily multiplied the number of guns, which is one of the
moral effects of their use. When a gun was located, the gunner might
slip back behind the crest of a ridge, or he might have moved as a
precaution, before he was located, to another position which had been
chosen as his next berth, with pit and camouflage in readiness.
An experienced aviator--always there is that word "experience" which
has no substitute--might detect a machine-gun nest if he flew low; but
not as a rule in woods or in bushes, or even in the open when covered
with green branches. There were many machine-gunners and relatively
few aviators. If a gunner thought that an aviator who flew low had
seen him, he might have taken up a new position before the aviator's
information had brought down artillery fire. The machine-gunner was a
will-of-the-wisp with a hornet's sting, which could be thrown a mile
and a half. Usually the price of locating him was casualties to the
infantry, and still more casualties before he was taken, if he stood
his ground. If the Germans had not enough machine-guns back of their
first line for a complete interlocking defense on the first day of the
battle--and they certainly had later--they aimed to place them where
they could do the most good.
Naturally the American Army, studying its chessboard, had taken into
consideration the counter-moves of the enemy which would result from
its attack. Of course the passage through the entanglements would lead
to the first dislocations of _liaison_; the storming of the trenches to
more; and the passage over the shell-craters to still more. After every
offensive against the trench system, officers had studied how to avoid
the slowing down of the attack after the first line was taken. This had
led to passing the first wave promptly through the trenches and leaving
a second wave to "mop up" by "breaching" dugouts and cleaning up points
of resistance; and then to the system of "leap-frogging," in which,
when the men in front had been weakened in numbers by casualties and
lost their aggressive cohesion, fresh troops went through them to carry
forward the attack. Reserves in passing through the lanes of the barbed
wire and over the trenches and on to catch up with an advancing line
also suffered from disorganization, which might be increased by strong
concentrations of enemy shell and machine-gun fire.
A division commander had discretion as to how he would gain his
objectives, which brings us into the field of tactical direction, as
technical as it is vital to success. His dispositions were a test of
his knowledge of his profession, and his handling of the division
after it was engaged of his qualities of generalship. In some instances
villages and strong points were passed by the main line of advance, and
left to be conquered by special attacking forces. Instructions had not
only to be elaborate but practical.
Those captains and lieutenants, the company and platoon commanders,
who were carrying out the instructions, must each be a general in his
own limited field. The less experience his seniors had in preparing
practical instructions, the more he might suffer for his want of
experience in leading men in battle. With the conquered trenches behind
him, he had to make sure that his men were in hand, and if he had
been allowed no time for reorganization behind his shield, that was
an error; for barrages might move too fast, in expressing the desire
of commanders for speed. At the same time, the line officer had to
identify by the map the ground on his front which he was to traverse
and the positions he was to take as his part in that twenty miles of
pulsing, weaving, and thrusting line.
When you are seated before a table in calm surroundings, trying to
follow the course of one company in an advance, you realize the
limitations of your 1 to 20,000 map. It ought to be 1 to 10. More
elements than any layman could imagine entered into the problem of
the location of the command post from which a battalion commander was
to direct the movements of one thousand men, or a regimental commander
of three thousand, in action. All this, of course, represents sheer
fundamentals in thoroughgoing military science; but we must have the
fundamentals if we are to appreciate the accomplishment of our young
army in the Meuse-Argonne battle.
A prominent hill was easily recognized. If a village were in the line
of your attack, that was a simple guide; but in a region where, unlike
our country of scattered farmhouses, the farmers all live in villages,
there was a paucity of buildings which might serve as landmarks. One
of our men expressed the character of the terrain by saying that with
every advance it all looked alike--hills, ridges, woods, and ravines;
yet when you came close to the part which you were to attack it seemed
"different from any other and a lot worse." We had to cross brooks
and swamps as an incident to conquering the other features of the
landscape. If we missed any kind of fighting on the first day of the
battle, it was in store for us in the later stages.
Oh, that word _liaison_! That linking up of the units of the attack in
proper coördination! Is there any man of the combat divisions who does
not know its meaning or who wants to hear it again? It never came into
slang at home in the same way as camouflage; but it is a thousand times
more suggestive of the actualities of war. _Liaison_ between the French
and the American armies, between corps, divisions, brigades, regiments,
battalions, companies, platoons, squads, and individual soldiers.
_Liaison_ between infantry and artillery and trench mortars and planes
and tanks! If you did not have it, why, the adjoining commander might
be as much to blame as you, at least, and you could say that he was
altogether to blame. It may be said that the history of the war will be
written in terms of positions taken, and of positions which were not
taken because coöperating units failed to keep their _liaison_. They
were not up. When I mention that there were difficulties of _liaison_
in writing of any division, I am not saying who was at fault, as no one
person was, perhaps, more than another.
Other generals might be promoted and demoted, but General _Liaison_
remained the supreme tactician. "Establishing _liaison_" was fraught
with more heartaches and brain-aches than any other military detail.
Men prowled through the night in gas-masks under sniping rifle and
machine-gun fire and artillery fire, to ascertain if the unit supposed
to be on their flank was there: perhaps to receive a greeting from an
officer hugging a fox-hole, "Why aren't you fellows keeping up with
us?"
_Liaison_ was most difficult in woods, though the fighting was not
necessarily always the severest there. Men naturally took to the paths
instantly they advanced into woods, and these, if they were not stopped
by machine-gun fire, advanced ahead of those in the deep underbrush.
A stretch of unseen wire might arrest a part of the line, without
the men in _liaison_ on the right and left, as they plunged through
the thickets, knowing that it had been stopped. The sheer business
of keeping any kind of formation was distracting enough, without the
sudden bursts of machine-gun fire, which might be so powerful that
there was nothing to do except to take cover and consider a plan for
silencing or capturing the gun. Unless the casualties were so serious
that it was suicidal not to halt and mark out a plan for capturing the
nest, and as advancing was a sure way of locating machine-guns and
a prompt way of overwhelming them, we swept on in the spirit of our
instructions and impatience. Captured machine-guns littered the paths
of our battalions, in tribute to the effect of our impetuous rush upon
gunners who continued to forget their orders to stand to the death when
they saw the tidal wave of our soldiers about to swamp them.
As the day wore on and the enemy began to recover from the shock of the
surprise of our initial onset, we encountered an increasing volume and
fury of machine-gun fire from hill to hill across valleys, sweeping
down ravines, plunging from crests and by indirect aim over crests,
from village houses and from both directions where village streets
crossed. At critical points it was supported by concentrations of
shell-fire. Along that road, at the edge of this patch of woods, along
that stretch of river bottom, the German's artillery laid down barrages
over a space already swept by bullets, to hold positions by which he
set as much store in his plans as we in ours.
"Why aren't you getting on?" division commanders asked, or tried to
ask--as communication did not always permit the message to arrive
promptly--when the pencilings on the map were not keeping up to the
schedule of progress toward the objectives. It was an easy question;
the answer might be in the lack of resolution of a regimental or
battalion commander, in the character of the resistance to his troops,
or in their disorganization under new and severe trials. After further
ineffectual efforts the battalion and regimental commanders might say
that progress was impossible without reserves.
Should the division commander send them? Expending his reserves on the
first day of a long battle might place him in a dangerous position
in face of a later and graver emergency; but he had the word of a
subordinate that they were necessary. Had that subordinate in his first
serious engagement become too readily discouraged? What was the extent
of his losses? They were a criterion for judging his balance of assets
for continuing the attacks, though they did not include the exhaustion
of the men, their mood of the moment, or the disruption of _liaison_ of
their units.
The division commander might sit rigid with the front of Jove, which
he thought was the chief item of the military formula, and say: "I
want no excuses. Take the position!" Or he might keep on pressing in
his reserves, in the determination that his division would be up on
time; for Corps Headquarters were depending on him. The pencilings
moving toward the corps objective were his record in the battle. If the
pencilings were in a V-shape, that was bad. It meant that some of his
elements were in a salient, in danger of being "squeezed."
Sometimes the pencilings were farther advanced than the troops. The
wish being father to the thought, observers who saw a charge entering a
woods took it for granted that it would go through the woods. Aviators
sometimes mistook German soldiers in movement for our own; again they
misread the maps, and placed our troops on a ridge ahead of their
actual position. Company leaders might make the same mistake. The
incentive to "get there" involved eagerness to send back word that you
were arriving. A little group of gallant men who pushed through a wood
or gained a crest might have been swept back by machine-gun fire by the
time their proud report had reached division headquarters. Instead of
having commanding ground as a "jumping-off place" for the next stage of
advance, they might be hugging the reverse slope, exposed to fire from
three sides immediately they showed themselves.
Regular as well as reserve officers who had never before been in action
were to prove again that no amount of study of the theory of war,
invaluable as it is, may teach a man how to keep his head in handling
a thousand or three thousand men under fire. West Point cadet drill,
Philippine jungle and "paddy" dikes, Leavenworth staff school, army
post routine, and border service had no precedent of experience for
the problems of maneuver which they now had to solve. It was all very
well to say that the men were all right; but another thing was keeping
your men together. I saw a regular colonel violating, in a singular
reaction to amateurishness, the simplest principle of organization--the
same that keeps subordinates informed of the location of a business
superior--by having no post of command where he or an adjutant could be
found with orders or reports. Some colonels remained steadily at their
headquarters, without absenting themselves for personal inspection in
any emergency; others moved restlessly about the field, trying to apply
to three thousand men the personal direction of a platoon commander.
Every subordinate who witnessed such an exhibition by a superior was
bound to lose confidence in the command. I am not thinking of a lack
of physical bravery when I say that there were instances of colonels
and brigadiers voicing pessimism in the presence of subordinates. They
might have become good judges or good philosophers, but they were
not meant by nature, at least in their lack of battle experience, to
drive home an ambitious offensive movement. Others had too much blind
initiative; they were the kind that would drive head downward at a
stone wall. Others were amazingly cool, determined, and efficient.
These the men would follow against any odds.
Being human, our men who symbolized the pencilings on the map had
muscles and nerves which were subject to fatigue. They had no
visualization of their goals. If they could have been shown a flag on
a mountainside, which they must reach before they "knocked off" for
the day, the incentive for keeping on would have been more directly
applied. All they saw was the slope or woods ahead of them. Their
knowledge of the battle plan was limited to their orders to keep on
going. After nights when suspense and suppressed excitement had
allowed them little sleep, they had been going all day from 5.30 in the
morning--going through barbed wire and trenches, over uneven ground, as
they fought their way not only under fire but under the strain of that
wearing mental concentration of trying to remember and apply all they
had learned in their training and in previous actions.
Physically, the task set for our troops had seemed almost superhuman.
Many had taken enough steps to cover in a straight line twice the
distance they had traveled. To the eye of a hurrying observer, these
myriad figures, whether dashing toward a machine-gun nest, or ducking
to avoid an outburst of fire, or coming wounded across the fields, had
the attraction of the ardor and fearlessness of youth in battle, while
they brought many thoughts which were as far from the battlefield as
the homes that had sent them forth.
We might say "check!" to the Germans if we had taken Montfaucon at the
end of the first day. Montfaucon was the highest point on our way to
the Lille-Metz railway except the Buzancy heights. It was visible from
the old first-line trench system at Malancourt and from the Mort Homme
on the banks of the Meuse, and it looked forward over the ground of the
projected second day's advance.
It happened that I knew by travel that day how far it was from
Headquarters to the front line. I might feel as well as appreciate the
reasons of the officer and the soldier for disappointing Headquarters
when I came to the end of my journey, where the tidal wave, expending
itself, had left a platoon of infantry, without touch with the units
on their right and left, washed up in a sunken road on the reverse
slope of a hill in front of Montfaucon. On the bare crest of the hill
lay the bodies of comrades who had fallen when the watchful German
machine-gunners aimed at the human targets appearing in bold silhouette
on the sky-line. It would have been madness for a handful of men
without support to continue on against such blasts of cross-fire. They
had fallen back, bringing their wounded, to await orders. Apart from
the opposition they had met, the irregular landscape over which they
had advanced was sufficient explanation of their inability to keep
their _liaison_. It made islands of the hills as it diverted the tidal
wave into the channels of the ravines. Scattered American soldiers were
moving about the neighborhood like hunters, beating up Germans who had
taken cover among bushes and in holes.
There was a recess in the battle in the vicinity, with stretches of
several seconds when the countryside seemed quite peaceful. Then for
another quarter of a minute, only a single machine-gun might be firing
with deliberately precise intervals between shots. Suddenly the whole
pack broke into full cry at the sight of quarry on the ridge which
forms the southwestern approach to the town from the Montfaucon woods.
We must have this ridge before we took the town. As I looked in this
direction, I saw a line of our men appearing above the crest, each
figure sharp against the light blue sky. Their intervals seemed at
first as exact as the teeth of a comb; then the teeth began to drop out
as figures fell. For a few seconds longer the survivors strove against
the blasts before they drew back and faced right and moved along under
cover of the slope, apparently seeking a less exposed portion of the
crest for another attempt.
The machine-gun fire died down into spiteful irregularity until the
line wheeled again toward the crest. Their heads were hardly above it
when, with the unity of an orchestra answering the conductor's baton,
the diabolical whirring rattle began again with all its previous
volume. Evidently quite as many guns had this portion of the ridge
under their fire as the other. This time the men did not persist. In
proper tactical wisdom they disappeared from the sky-line as quickly as
a woodchuck dodges into his hole.
We had now definitely developed the strength of the enemy at this
point. Possibly we had located some of his machine-guns. At least,
a battalion commander had learned enough to realize that he must
undertake a deliberate method adapted to the situation for silencing
them, which of course meant delay in pushing forward toward the day's
objective the pencilings in one small section of the Headquarters map.
Yet it was such details as this, revealed to me in a pantomime of vivid
and stark simplicity and brevity, which taken together made the whole
for that abstraction to the soldier which is called the High Command.
"Is Montfaucon taken?" was the question of Headquarters when I arrived
there in the evening. Some reports indicated that it was. This part of
the line was the most extended, and its communications accordingly the
most uncertain. There were other pencilings on the map which also had
to be erased. If we had not gained all our objectives, this was not
saying that we had not been astonishingly successful. Having, as it
were, set out ambitiously to take the whole solar system between dawn
and darkness, one of the planets still held out, with the fixed star of
Buzancy heights in the distance.
There might be many small salients, but none of threatening importance
in our new line. Despite the uneven battle experience of our divisions,
all had done their part magnificently. Our gains were more than a
mile on our flank to four miles in the center, where we had made the
bulge toward the summit of the whale-back. How far had we expended our
momentum in our initial onset? What was the traffic situation? What of
the morrow?
IX
THE ATTACK SLOWS DOWN
The call goes back for artillery--And at night for the rolling
kitchens--The staff interferes with sleep--Our part meant no
stopping--Keeping at the roads during the night--Montfaucon on the
second day--Then drive for the whale-back--Enemy resistance holds our
exhaustion--Settling down in the rain to slow progress.
Moving on their feet, with each man's course his road through the
trench system and across the country beyond, the infantrymen, as they
hourly increased their distance ahead of the part of the army moving
on wheels, were calling oftener for artillery than for reserves.
They needed shells to destroy machine-gun nests, to silence enemy
batteries, and to make barrages to support their farther advance as
resistance began to develop. There were equally urgent appeals for
machine-gun battalions to meet the German machine-gun opposition in
kind. Their spray of bullets, in indirect fire over the heads of the
men in a charge, was another form of shield, the more desired when the
protection of the artillery was lacking.
The machine-gunners, who called themselves the "Suicide Club," were
soldiers both of the wheel and the foot. Their light carts did not
have to wait on the stout passageway over the trench system which even
the light artillery required. Yet some of them had been marooned, to
their inexpressible disgust; for it was their part in an emergency to
press on to the firing line through the shell-fire which may sweep the
roads back of the infantry. The place of the artillery was as near the
actual front as orders and traffic jams would permit.
How the artillery chafed on the leash! Not only duty but the gunner's
promised land was beyond the barrier of the trench system which stayed
his progress. Open warfare called to him from the free sweep of the
landscape. The seventy-fives had come into their own again as mobile
living units which would unlimber in the fields close behind the
moving infantry, instead of playing the part of coast artillery behind
fortifications. There would be no need to bother about camouflage. They
would move about so rapidly that the enemy could not locate them; or
if he did--well, that was all in the game. Their protection and the
protection of the infantry would be in the blasts overwhelming the
enemy's fire.
"Why in ----" the infantry was calling to the artillery. "Why in ----"
the artillery was calling to the engineers. You may fill out the
blank space of this cry of mutually dependent units with the kind
of language which was not supposed to be, but sometimes was, used in
the presence of chaplains. The infantry changed the object of their
impatience when night stopped them wherever the end of that long day's
work found them. They were not thinking of supporting artillery fire
for the moment. The late September air was chill, the ground where they
lay was cold. Their appetites were prodigious from their hard marching
and fighting. Their hearts and thought were in their stomachs. Wasn't
it the business of rolling kitchens to furnish them warm meals? It was
past supper-time. Where in ---- were those rolling kitchens? After dark
they surely need not be held back in apprehension of being seen by the
enemy's artillery.
Night had laid its supreme camouflage over all the area of operations.
Under its mantle an activity as intense as that of the day must
continue for all who supported the infantry. We might take an account
of stock. Regimental, battalion, and company officers might move about
freely along the front in familiarizing themselves with the situations
of their commands. _Liaison_ which had been broken between different
units must be re-established. The ground ahead must be scouted.
Platoons and companies which had become mixed with their neighbors, and
individual men who had strayed from their units, must be sorted out
and returned. Gaps in the line must be filled; groups that had become
"bunched" must be deployed; groups whose initiative had carried them
forward to exposed points might have to be temporarily withdrawn,--all
by feeling their way in the darkness. The sound of machine-gun fire
broke the silence at intervals as the watchful enemy detected our
movements. A shadowy approaching figure, who the men hoped was the
welcome bearer of that warm meal from the rolling kitchens, might turn
out to be an officer who directed that they stumble about in woods and
ravines to some other point, or creep forward in the clammy dew-moist
grass with a view to improving our "tactical dispositions," which does
not always improve the human dispositions of those who have to carry
out the orders.
Army Headquarters wanted information from the three Corps Headquarters.
Each Corps wanted information from its three Division Headquarters,
which in turn were not modest in asking questions of the weary fellows
at the front. Exactly where was your line? What was the morale of the
men? Were they receiving ammunition and food? When would the guns be
up? What identifications of the enemy forces in your sector? Had many
machine-gun nests been located? Was the enemy fortifying, and where?
What was the character of his shell-fire? The high command had to
consider the corps summaries of the answers in relation to its own
news from other sources, communications from the French staff, reports
from Army aviation and artillery, conjectures of the enemy's strength
and probable intentions, and the general situation of transport in the
Army area and the flow of supplies from the rear.
The lack of information on some points was no more puzzling than the
abundance of contradictory information on others. Staff heads must work
into the small hours of the morning. They might rest after they had
arranged their program for the morrow. The men at the front who were to
carry it out were supposed to rest at night to refresh themselves for
another effort at dawn. This was a kindly paternal thought, but how,
even in the period of daylight saving, they were to find the time for
sleep in the midst of re-forming their line and answering all those
questions was not indicated. Whether they slept or not, whether their
shields and food were up or not, they were supposed to fight from dawn
to dusk on the 27th.
Our army, though our situation perhaps warranted it, might not dig in
along the new line and hold fast while it recuperated after that long
first day. Other double doors from Verdun to the sea were about to
be swung open; other armies must be considered. Indeed the decision
in this respect was not with our army. In a sense it was not with
Marshal Foch, for the forces which he had set in motion to carry
out his great plan had already prescribed our part, as we know. On
September 28th the Franco-Belgians were to attack in Flanders, and
Mangin's army was to move on Malmaison; on the 29th the Anglo-French
armies, including our Second Corps, were to storm the Hindenburg line
in the Cambrai-St.-Quentin sector; on September 30th Berthelot was
to free Rheims from the west; and on October 3rd, Gouraud, with our
2nd Division, was to storm the old trench system east of Rheims. We
must hold off reserves from their fronts. The more determined were
our attacks, the more ground we gained on the way to the Lille-Metz
railroad in this critical stage of Allied strategy, the more perturbed
would be the enemy's councils in adjusting his combinations to deal
with the other offensives. Though it might have been better for us
to have taken two or three days in which to gather and reorganize
deliberately our forces for another powerful rush which would have been
a corresponding shock to the enemy, this was no more in the psychology
than in the calculations of the moment. We were winning; we meant to
keep up the winning spirit of our army. What we had done one day we
should do the next. We and not the Germans must take possession of the
commanding position of Montfaucon as the first great step in gaining
the heights of the whale-back, should their resistance require delay in
reaching our goal.
Leaving the account of each Corps' and division's part in its sector
to future chapters, I shall conclude this chapter with the results of
the fighting of our army as a whole for the succeeding days to October
1st, when we were to realize that Saint-Mihiel was the quick victory
of a field maneuver compared to the realism of war at its worst in the
Meuse-Argonne. When night fell on the 27th, our transport direction
appreciated still more pregnantly the limitations of our roads for our
deep concentrations. Each road, where it passed over the old chasms of
the trenches,--where the rats now had the dugouts to themselves, and
the silence of a deserted village prevailed except for the rumble of
the struggling trucks over the new causeways--was pumping the blood
from the veins of the by-roads to the rear, through its over-worked
valves, into the spreading arterial system of the by-roads in the
field of advance. Once on the other side, the drivers felt the relief
of a man extricated from the pressure of a crowd at a gate, who finds
himself in the open. Lights being forbidden, night was less of a
blessing and more of a handicap to the transport than to the infantry.
The argument that it secured the roads from observation, which might
mean artillery concentrations, had little appeal to the average army
chauffeur. He was not worried about shell-fire. If he had not been
under it before, he was curious to know what it was like.
Darkness only made road repairs more onerous and slow. The engineers
could not see to gather material or where to place it to do the most
good. Unexpected difficulties appeared in the midst of the shadows of
men and vehicles. The most calculating of staff heads, who wished to
neglect no detail in his instructions, had not suggested that anyone
connected with artillery, signals, or transport should sleep until
he had overtaken the infantry, except as drivers might take cat-naps
between the fitful pulsations of traffic. Men at the rear who were mere
passengers waiting on others to clear the way felt a certain disloyalty
if they slept in the face of the hurry call from the front.
The partisanship of the spectators "pulling" for the home team is a
faint comparison with the partisanship of war, with comrades asking
for more than your cheers. The cry of "Come on! Take hold here!" in
the darkness would instantly awaken any man, nodding in his seat on
a caisson or truck, into welcome action. Now he had a chance really
to help, instead of exercising telepathic pressure on the Germans. He
ceased to feel that he was a slacker. Shoulders to the wheel with the
last ounce of your strength! Timbers taken out of dugouts, stones dug
out of the earth with bare hands to be filled into sloughs! Break a
way, make a way,--but "get there!"
As a people, when we want something done in a hurry, we are no more
inclined to count the cost than to stint our efforts. Ditched trucks
and caissons were the casualties of the charge of our transport, which
was no less furious in spirit than that of our infantry. Moving a
broken-down truck off the road of course meant delay for the trucks
behind it; and it meant, too, that someone at the front would be asking
in vain for the supplies that it carried. But that pitcher of milk was
spilled; on to the market with other pitchers.
Anyone who thought that the going would be easy or troubles cease on
the other side of the old trench system was soon disillusioned. The
Germans had blown up some roads as well as bridges. Our own shells in
the preliminary bombardment had made shell-craters and dropped trees
as obstacles. We must not forget that for four years there had been
a belt three or four miles wide beyond the old trench system from
which any but army life had been excluded. No roads had been kept up
except those which served a military purpose. The Germans, partly
because of their rubber famine, had depended largely on light railways
rather than motor-trucks for sending up supplies. Where they did not
use a main road, it was of no interest to them how far it had fallen
into disrepair. Maps did not take bad spots into account, and aërial
scouting did not reveal them.
Dirt country roads had been utterly neglected. We must use them all to
meet the demands of our immense force. Our heavy trucks and artillery
wheels soon cut them with deep ruts. When the engineers were not on
hand, each battery and convoy negotiated a passage for itself and
left those in the rear to do the same. Freshets had washed out some
sections, and undermined others. Embankments had fallen away into
swamps, where a side-slipping truck would sink in up to its hubs. If
shoulders to the wheel failed when artillery striking across fields ran
into ditches and holes, snatch ropes were used.
Each convoy must locate the unit which it was serving. The rolling
kitchens that had worked their way forward could not deliver their
warm meals until they had found the impatiently ravenous troops.
Artillery commanders must grope about for their assigned positions,
or wait until they were assigned positions. They must have their
ammunition as well as guns up. Officers bearing instructions from the
staff were as puzzled as the recipient about their meaning, as they
studied the map by the discreet flash of an electric torch, and sought
to identify landmarks shrouded in the thick night mist under the
canopy of darkness. Lightly wounded men moved counter to the streams
of traffic and of reserves, who might also be uncertain of their exact
destination. Men with bad wounds in the body tottered across the fields
and dropped by the roadside. Others who could not move must be found
and brought in by searchers.
It was not surprising that some of our leaders had not yet learned to
apply in the stress of action and the conflict of reports the principle
that when committed to one plan it is better to go through with it than
to create confusion by inaugurating another which may seem better.
Half-executed orders were countermanded and changed and then changed
again; and this led to trucks trying to turn round in the narrow roads,
and to eddies in that confused scene of the hectic striving of each
man and unit to do his part. The effect suggested a premature dress
rehearsal of a play on a stage without lights, while the stage-hands
were short of sets and the actors were still dependent upon reading
their parts.
When morning came, few rolling kitchens indeed had reached the
objective of the men's stomachs with their cargo. Our heavy artillery
was still struggling in the rear. Only a portion of our light artillery
was up. Where our troops were fresh on the first day, they were now
already tired. The Germans had made the most of the night. Their
reserves which had arrived included the 5th Guard Division, already
on the way when we began the battle. We needed our heavy artillery to
pound roads and villages, and to counter artillery which the Germans
had brought into action. Against the increase of German machine-guns
we needed the rolling barrages of our light artillery even more than
on the first day after we were through the trench system. Renewing
the attack over the full length of our twenty miles of front, we
were to advance with our moving shields irregularly distributed and
vulnerable in most places. Any observer could see soon after daylight,
in the widespread puffs of German shells on the landscape, that the
inevitable had happened, as in all previous offensives. The enemy
artillery had other targets than our infantry; he was laying a barrier
to the infantry's support on the roads, halting the columns of traffic,
forcing reserves to cover, and making new shell-holes in the roads to
be filled by the transport and engineer workers.
The important thing on the second day was to take Montfaucon. On
the ridges west of the town the German infantry, artillery, and
machine-gunners were utilizing the positions which he had laid out
months before the attack. He fought stubbornly here as in Cuisy Wood
and on the hills on the left; but buffeted as they were, our men,
under firm orders to keep on attacking, conquered both systems. This
cracked the shell of the Montfaucon defenses. Before noon we were in
the town.
There are those who say that if we had taken Montfaucon on the first
day, we might have reached the crest of the whale-back itself on the
second or third day, and looked down on the apron sweeping toward the
Lille-Metz railway. I fear that they belong to the school of "ifs,"
which may write military history in endless and self-entertaining
conjecture. They forget the lack of road repairs; the lack of shields
to continue the advance; and the interdictory shell-fire which the
enemy laid down on the ruins of the town and on the arterial roads
which center there. If we had taken Montfaucon on the first day,
I think that there would still have been a number of other "ifs"
between us and the crest. Of course, once we possessed Montfaucon and
its adjoining heights, the enemy's infantry was not going to resist
in down-hill fighting, though he harassed us with artillery and
machine-gun fire as we descended the irregular slopes of the valleys
beyond.
Our ambition was soaring for a decisive success on the 28th. We
had been delayed a day, but we should yet carry through our daring
programme. Forced optimism saw our field artillery coming up, our
roads improving, our transport somewhat more systematized, and tried
to forget other factors; but the fatigue of all hands was greater; the
vitality of our troops was weakening for want of proper food. Our heavy
artillery, and indeed some of our light artillery, was still struggling
in the rear. Our artillery ammunition supply was insufficient to feed
the guns all the shells they would need when dawn proved that the
Germans had brought up still more artillery on the second night. There
were the heights of the whale-back before us, with the first great step
in their conquest behind us. Attack was the thing, attack from the
Forest's edge to the Meuse. The more time we gave the enemy, the more
time he would have to fortify and bring up reserves. Necessity accepted
no excuses from subordinate commanders. Drive, and again drive; keep
moving; the enemy would eventually yield. He must yield. Once we broke
his resistance, then the going would be swift and easy against his
shattered units.
The 28th was a critical day: the day when it was to be decided whether
or not we were to fight a siege operation, or to carry the whale-back
in a series of rapidly succeeding rushes,--though I think that the
decision really came with the signs of developing resistance on the
morning of the 27th.
Our divisions put in their fresh reserves; they would admit no word
of discouragement. Artillerymen who had been at work for two nights
and two days tried to bring their guns close up to the infantry. All
the remaining tanks were called into service. With the forced burst
of energy which may be mistaken for "second wind," we everywhere made
gains. Our right had moved along the Meuse to south of Brieulles, which
with the bend of the river westward narrowed our front. On the left we
had reached Exermont ravine. On the 29th we tried for Brieulles; for
Gesnes; for the ravine; and for the escarpments of the Forest, points
which the attack of the third day had developed as the locked doors
which we must smash through to give us purchase for another general
attack. There was a certain fitfulness in these efforts, as of a fire
dying down blown into a spitful flame. In the trough of the Aire we
were under the raging artillery fire from the heights on either side;
and in the trough of the Meuse from the heights across the river and
from the whale-back, which I shall describe in later chapters. In the
valleys beyond Montfaucon and the neighboring heights we faced the
first slopes of the whale-back, which were the covering positions for
the Kriemhilde and Freya Stellungen, new trench systems utilizing all
the natural strength of the heights as a main line of defense by an
aroused enemy in strong force.
Our army might now take counsel of necessity, if not of prudence. In
the future we must hack and stab our way. Meanwhile we must have rest
for the tired troops
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