No one who had the privilege to be on the scene at the time of this
first American attack will ever forget the sight. It was unforgettable.
The whole thing is uneffaceable from the time in the pregnant darkness
when the troops that had been chosen for this most honorable of tasks
went quietly along the shell-pitted roads to the jumping-off place;
from the time the grotesque monsters called tanks rumbled up the same
roads to hide until dawn in lairs behind the front line, while other
monsters with long snouts crouched upon their heavy carriages like
coiled serpents and were given their last drop of oil and their last
daub of grease to make sure that their devastating charges would fall
true upon their mark; from the time the men were given their last
orders and their last "good luck" and went off, they knew not to what,
in the first early streak of rosy dawn when the cannonade began and the
first airplanes whirred overhead toward the doomed village.
From then until that last throbbing hour when the tempest of shellfire
drowned out everything, yes, up to that tense minute at 6:45 o'clock
when we turned to one another and in an awestruck whisper said,
"They're over," it is all unforgettable. One lives such moments but
once.
This operation had been planned for weeks down to the minutest detail
under the direction of the Superior French Command, and in the closest
co-operation with the French, to whom must go a liberal measure of the
credit for its success.
So far as its objects may be disclosed, they were the following: To
reduce the enemy salient and capture its strong point and observation
post. Cantigny was all those things. Jutting out from the German front,
it gave the enemy an advantage in the field of fire, while, because of
its strong cellars, which were linked up with an especially long tunnel
under the château in the southern part of the village, which might be
likened to its citadel, it was decidedly a strong post.
Perhaps most important of all, it gave the boche a local advantage
comparable to that of a man looking down a well. It commanded a sort of
valley running back into our lines and permitted the enemy observers
to see many things that went on there and so direct his artillery fire
upon our back areas. For all of those reasons Cantigny was a prize of
value out of all proportion to its size.