INTO PICARDY TO MEET THE GERMAN PUSH
Toward the end of March, 1918, just at the time when the American
Expeditionary Forces were approaching the desired degree of military
effectiveness, the fate of civilisation was suddenly imperilled by the
materialisation of the long expected German offensive.
This push, the greatest the enemy had ever attempted, began on March
21st, and the place that Hindenburg selected for the drive was Picardy,
the valley of the Somme, the ancient cockpit of Europe. On that day the
German hordes, scores upon scores of divisions, hurled themselves
against the British line between Arras and Noyon.
Before that tremendous weight of manpower, the Allied line was forced to
give and one of the holding British armies, the Fifth, gave ground on
the right flank, and with its left as a hinge, swung back like a gate,
opening the way for the Germans toward Paris.
There have been many descriptions of the fierce fighting put up by the
French and British to stem the German advance, but the most interesting
one that ever came to my notice, came from one of the few American
soldiers that participated in the defence. Two weeks after the opening
of the battle and at a time when the German advance had been stopped, I
came upon this American in a United States Military Hospital at Dijon.
An interne led me to the bedside of Jimmy Brady, a former jockey from
the Pimlico turf in Baltimore, and now a proud wearer of Uncle Sam's
khaki. In his own quaint way, Jimmy told me the story of what a little
handful of Americans did in the great battle in Picardy. Jimmy knew.
Jimmy had been there.
"Lad," he said, "I'm telling you it was a real jam. I learned one hell
of a headful in the last ten days that I'll not be forgetting in the
next ten years. I've got new ideas about how long this war is goin' to
last. Of course, we're going to lick the Boches before it ends, but I've
sorter given up the picture I had of myself marching up Fifth Avenue in
a victory parade on this coming Fourth of July. I'll say it can't be
done in that time.
"Our outfit from old ---- engineers, and believe me there's none better,
have been working up in the Somme country for the last two months. We
were billeted at Brie and most of our work had been throwing bridges
across the Canal du Nord about three miles south of Peronne. I'm telling
you the Somme ain't a river. It's a swamp, and they just hardly squeeze
enough water outer it to make a canal which takes the place of a river.
"We was working under the British. Their old bridges over the canal were
wooden affairs and most of them had signs on them reading, 'This bridge
won't hold a tank,' and that bridge wouldn't bear trotting horses, and
so on. Some of 'em we tore down must have been put in for scenery
purposes only. We were slamming up some husky looking steel structures
like you see in the States, and believe me it makes me sick to think
that we had to blow 'em all up again before the Boches got to 'em.
"I see by the papers that the battle began on the 21st, but I've got no
more idea about the date of it than the King of Honolulu. They say it's
been on only about ten days, but I couldn't swear it hadn't been on
since New Year's Eve. It sure seemed a long time. As I told you, we were
working just south of Peronne on the main road between St. Quentin and
Amiens. She started on a foggy morning and for two days the music kept
getting closer. On the first day, all traffic was frontward, men, guns,
and camions going up towards the lines, and then the tide began to flow
back.
"Ambulances and camions, full of poor wounded devils, filled the road,
and then came labour battalions of chattering Chinks, Egyptians, and
Fiji Islanders and God knows what. None of these birds were lingering,
because the enemy was sprinkling the roads with shells and sorter
keeping their marching spirits up. Orders came for us to ditch our packs
and equipment all except spades, rifles, belts and canteens, and we set
off toward the rear.
"Do you mind your map of the Somme? Well, we pulls up at Chaulnes for a
breath. It was a big depot and dump town--aeroplanes and everything
piled up in it. We were ordered onto demolition work, being as we was
still classed as non-combatants. I don't know how many billions of
dollars' worth of stuff we blew up and destroyed, but it seemed to me
there was no end of it. Fritz kept coming all the time and they hiked us
on to Aubercourt and then to Dormant, and each place we stopped and dug
trenches, and then they shoots us into camions and rushes us north to a
town not far out of Amiens.
"With about forty men, we marched down the road, this time as
non-combatants no longer. We stopped just east of the village of
Marcelcave and dug a line of trenches across the road. We had twenty
machine guns and almost as many different kinds of ammunition as there
was different nationalities in our trench. Our position was the fifth
line of defence, we was told, but the guns kept getting closer and a
lot of that long range stuff was giving us hell. Near me there was a
squad of my men, one Chink, three Canadians, and we two Dublin
fusileers.
"Then we begin to see our own guns, that is, British guns, beginning to
blow hell out of this here village of Marcelcave right in front of us.
It made me wild to see the artillery making a mistake like that, so I
says to one of these here Dublin fusileers:
"'Whatinell's 'matter wid dose guns firing on our own men up there in
the village? If this is the fifth line, then that must be our fourth
line in the village?'
"'Lad,' says the Dublin fusileer to me, 'I don't want to discourage you
for the life of me, but this only used to be the fifth line. We are in
the first line now and it's up to you and me and the Chink and the rest
of us to keep the Fritzes out of Amiens. At this moment we are all
that's between.'
"We started to the machine guns and began pouring it in on 'em. The
minute some of 'em would start out of the town we would wither them.
Holy mother, but what a beautiful murder it was!
"I didn't know then, and don't know yet, what has become of all the rest
of our officers and men, but I sorter felt like every shot I sent over
was paying 'em back for some of their dirty work. We kept handing it to
'em hot. You oughter seen that Chink talking Mongolian to a machine gun,
and, believe me, he sure made it understand him. I'm here to say that
when a Chink fights, he's a fighting son-of-a-gun and don't let anybody
kid you different.
"Well, our little mob held 'em off till dark and then British Tommies
piled in and relieved us. We needed it because we hadn't had a bite in
seventy hours and I had been lying in the mud and water for twice that
time. Just before relief comes on, two skulking figures comes over the
top. I was thinking that maybe these was Hindus or Eskimos coming to
join our little international party and we shouts out to 'em and asks
'em where they hails from. Both of 'em yelled back, 'Kamerad,' and then
I knew that we'd not only held the fort, but had captured two prisoners
even if they was deserters.
"I marched 'em back that night to the next town and took 'em into a
grocery store, where there was a lot of Tommies helping themselves to
the first meal in days. While we were eating bread and cheese and
sardines and also feeding me two prisoners, we talks to them and finds
out that, as far as they are concerned, the Kaiser will never get their
vote again.
"One Tommy says to one of my prisoners: 'Kaiser no good--pas bon, ain't
it?' and the prisoner said, 'Yah,' and I shoved my elbow into his ribs
and right quick he said, 'Nein.' Then the Tommy said: 'Hindenburg dirty
rotter, nacy pa?' and the Fritz said, 'Yah. Nein,' and then looked at me
and said 'Yah' again. They was not bad prisoners and I marched 'em
twenty miles that night, just the three of us--two of them in front and
me in back with the rifle over me arm.
"And the joke of it was that both of them could have taken the gun and
killed me any minute for all I could have done."
"How do you figure that, Corporal?" I asked.
For reply, Jimmy Brady drew from beneath the blankets a pair of knotted
hands with fingers and thumbs stiffened and bent in and obviously
impossible to use on a trigger. Brady is not in the hospital for wounds.
Four days and nights in water and mud in the battle of battles had
twisted and shrunken him with rheumatism. But he is one rheumatic who
helped to save Amiens.
* * * * *
Upon the heels of the German successes in Picardy, developments followed
fast. Principal among these, was the materialisation of a unified
command of all the armies of the Allies. General Ferdinand Foch was
selected and placed in supreme command of every fighting man under the
Allied flags.
One of the events that led up to this long delayed action, was the
unprecedented action of General Pershing, when he turned over the
command of all the American forces in France to General Foch. He did
this with the words:
"I come to say to you that the American people would hold it a great
honour for our troops were they engaged in the present battle. I ask
it of you in my name and in that of the American people.
"There is at this moment no other question than that of fighting.
Infantry, artillery, aviation--all that we have are yours to dispose
of as you will. Others are coming which are as numerous as will be
necessary. I have come to say to you that the American people would
be proud to be engaged in the greatest battle in history."
The action met with the unqualified endorsement of every officer and man
in the American forces. From that minute on, the American slogan in
France was "Let's go," and every regiment began to hope that it would be
among the American organisations selected to do battle with the German
in Picardy. Secretary of War Baker, then in France, expressed his
pleasure over General Pershing's unselfish offer with the following
public statement on Mar. 30th:
"I am delighted with the prompt and effective action of General
Pershing in placing all American troops at the disposal of the
Allies in the present situation. His action will meet with hearty
approval in the United States, where the people desire their
Expeditionary Force to be of the utmost service to the common cause.
"I have visited practically all the American troops in France, some
of them quite recently, and had an opportunity to observe the
enthusiasm with which the officers and men receive the announcement
that they may be used in the present conflict. Regiments to which
the announcement was made, broke spontaneously into cheers."
Particularly were there cheers when the news spread through the ranks of
the First United States division, then on duty on the line in front of
Toul, that it had been the first American division chosen to go into
Picardy. I was fortunate enough to make arrangements to go with them.
I rode out from old positions with the guns and boarded the troop train
which took our battery by devious routes to changes of scenery,
gratifying both to vision and spirit. We lived in our cars on tinned
meat and hard bread, washed down with swallows of _vin ordinaire_,
hurriedly purchased at station _buvettes_. The horses rode well.
Officers and men, none of us cared for train schedule simply because
none of us knew where we were going, and little time was wasted in
conjecture. Soldierly curiosity was satisfied with the knowledge that we
were on our way, and with this satisfaction, the hours passed easily.
In fact, the blackjack game in the officers' compartment had reached the
point where the battery commander had garnered almost all of the French
paper money in sight, when our train passed slowly through the environs
of Paris.
Other American troop trains had preceded us, because where the railroad
embankment ran close and parallel to the street of some nameless
Faubourg, our appearance was met with cheers and cries from a welcoming
regiment of Paris street gamins, who trotted in the street beside the
slow moving troop train and shouted and threw their hats and wooden
shoes in the air. Sous and fifty centime pieces and franc pieces
showered from the side doors of the horses' cars as American soldiers,
with typical disregard for the value of money, pitched coin after coin
to the scrambling mob of children. At least a hundred francs must have
been cast out upon those happy, romping waves of childish faces and
up-stretched dirty hands.
"A soldier would give his shirt away," said a platoon commander, leaning
out of the window and watching the spectacle, and surreptitiously
pitching a few coins himself. "Hope we get out of this place before the
men pitch out a gun or a horse to that bunch. Happy little devils,
aren't they? It's great to think we are on our way up to meet their
daddies."
Unnumbered hours more passed merrily in the troop train before we were
shunted into the siding of a little town. Work of unloading was started
and completed within an hour. Guns and wagons were unloaded on the quay,
while the animals were removed from the cars on movable runways or
ramps. As each gun or wagon reached the ground, its drivers hitched in
the horses and moved it away. Five minutes later we rode out of the
yards and down the main street of the town.
Broad steel tires on the carriages of the heavies bumped and rumbled
over the clean cobbles and the horses pranced spryly to get the kinks
out of their legs, long fatigued from vibrations of the train. Women,
old and young, lined the curbs, smiling and throwing kisses, waving
handkerchiefs and aprons and begging for souvenirs. If every request for
a button had been complied with, our battery would have reached the
front with a shocking shortage of safety pins.
Darkness came on and with it a fine rain, as we cleared the town and
halted on a level plain between soft fields of tender new wheat, which
the horses sensed and snorted to get at. In twenty minutes, Mess
Sergeant Kelly, from his high altar on the rolling kitchen, announced
that the last of hot coffee had been dispensed. Somewhere up ahead in
the darkness, battery bugle notes conveyed orders to prepare to mount.
With the rattle of equipment and the application of endearing epithets,
which horses unfortunately don't understand, we moved off at the sound
of "forward."
Off on our left, a noiseless passenger train slid silently across the
rim of the valley, blue dimmed lights in its coach windows glowing like
a row of wet sulphur matches. Far off in the north, flutters of white
light flushed the night sky and an occasional grumbling of the distant
guns gave us our first impression of the battle of battles. Every man in
our battery tingled with the thrill. This was riding frontward with the
guns--this was rolling and rumbling on through the night up toward the
glare and glamour of war. I was riding beside the captain at the head of
the column. He broke silence.
"It seems like a far cry from Honolulu with the moon playing through the
palm trees on the beach," he said quizzically, "to this place and these
scenes and events to-night, but a little thing like a flip of coin
decided it for me, and I'm blessing that coin to-night.
"A year ago January, before we came into the war, I was stationed at San
Antonio. Another officer friend of mine was stationed there and one day
he received orders to report for duty at Honolulu. He had a girl in San
Antonio and didn't want to leave her and he knew I didn't have a girl
and didn't give a damn where I went, or was sent, so long as it was with
the army. He put up the proposition of mutual exchange being permitted
under regulations.
"He wanted to take my place in San Antonio and give me his assignment in
Honolulu, which I must say looked mighty good in those days to anybody
who was tired of Texas. I didn't think then we'd ever come to war and
besides it didn't make much difference to me one way or the other where
I went. But instead of accepting the proposition right off the reel, I
told Jim we'd flip a coin to decide.
"If it came tails, he would go to Honolulu. If it came heads, I would go
to Honolulu. He flipped. Tails won. I'm in France and poor Jim is out
there in Honolulu tending the Ukulele crop with prospects of having to
stay there for some time. Poor devil, I got a letter from him last week.
"Do you know, man knows no keener joy in the world than that which I
have to-night. Here I am in France at the head of two hundred and fifty
men and horses and the guns and we're rolling up front to kick a dent in
history. The poor unfortunate that ain't in this fight has almost got
license to shoot himself. Life knows no keener joy than this."
It was a long speech for our captain, but his words expressed not only
the feeling of our battery, but our whole regiment, from the humblest
wagon driver up to the colonel who, by the way, has just made himself
most unpopular with the regiment by being promoted to a Brigadier
Generalship. The colonel is passing upward to a higher command and the
regiment is sore on losing him. One of his humblest critics has
characterised the event as the "first rough trick the old man ever
pulled."
Midnight passed and we were still wheeling our way through sleeping
villages, consulting maps under rays of flashlights, gathering
directions some of the time from mile posts and wall signs, and at other
times gaining knowledge of roads and turns and hills from sleepy heads
in curl wrappers that protruded from bedroom chambers and were
over-generous in advice.
The animals were tired. Rain soaked the cigarettes and made them draw
badly. Above was drizzle and below was mud. There were a few grumbles,
but no man in our column would have traded places with a brother back
home even if offered a farm to boot.
It was after three in the morning when we parked the guns in front of a
chateau, brought forward some lagging combat wagons and discovered the
rolling kitchen had gone astray. In another hour the animals had been
unhitched but not unharnessed, fed and watered in darkness and the men,
in utter weariness, prepared to lie down and sleep anywhere. At this
juncture, word was passed through the sections that the battery would
get ready to move immediately. Orders were to clear the village by six
o'clock. Neither men nor horses were rested, but we moved out on time
and breakfasted on the road.
The way seemed long, the roads bad and the guns heavy. But we were
passing through an Eden of beauty--green fields and rolling hills
crested by ancient chateaux. At times, the road wound down through
hillside orchards, white and pink with apple blooms. Fatigue was heavy
on man and beast, but I heard one walking cannoneer singing, "When It's
Apple Blossom-time in Normandie." Another rider in the column recalled
the time when his father used to give him ten cents for standing on the
bottom of an upturned tin basin and reciting, "Over the mountains
winding down, horse and foot into Frederickstown."
"The jar of these guns as they grind over the gravel is enough to grind
the heart out of you," said a sweating cannoneer who was pressing a
helping shoulder to one of the heavies as we negotiated a steep hill.
"What in hell you kicking about," said the man opposite. "Suppose you
was travelling with one of them guns the Germans are using on Paris--I
mean that old John J. Longdistance. You'd know what heavy guns are then.
They say that the gun's so big and takes so many horses to haul it, that
the man who drives the lead pair has never spent the night in the same
town with the fellow who rides wheel swing."
A young reserve lieutenant with mind intensely on his work, combined for
my benefit his impressions of scenery with a lesson in artillery
location. His characterisation of the landscape was as technical as it
was unpoetical.
"A great howitzer country," was the tenor of his remarks. "Look at the
bottom of that slide. Fine position for one fifty-five. Take that gully
over there. That's a beaut of a place. No use talking. Great howitzer
country."
During the afternoon, a veterinarian turned over two horses to a French
peasant. One was exhausted and unable to proceed, and the other suffered
a bad hoof, which would require weeks for healing. News that both
animals were not going to be shot was received with joy by two men who
had ridden them. I saw them patting the disabled mounts affectionately
on the neck and heard one of them say,
"'Salright, old timer--'salright. Frenchy here is going to take care of
you all right. Uncle Sam's paying the bill and I am coming back and get
you soon's we give Fritzie his bumps."
An hour later, a young cannoneer gave in to fatigue and ignored orders
to the extent of reclining on gun trail and falling asleep. A rut in the
road made a stiff jolt, he rolled off and one ponderous wheel of the gun
carriage passed over him. One leg, one arm and two ribs were broken and
his feet crushed, was the doctor's verdict as the victim was carried
away in an ambulance.
"He'll get better all right," said the medico, "but he's finished his
bit in the army."
The column halted for lunch outside of a small town and I climbed on
foot to the hilltop castle where mediaeval and modern were mixed in mute
melange. A drawbridge crossed a long dry moat to cracked walls of rock
covered with ivy. For all its well preserved signs of artistic ruin, it
was occupied and well fitted within. From the topmost parapet of one
rickety looking tower, a wire stretched out through the air to an old,
ruined mill which was surmounted by a modern wind motor, the tail of
which incongruously advertised the words "Ideal power," with the
typical conspicuity of American salesmanship.
Near the base of the old mill was another jumble of moss-covered rocks,
now used as a summer house, but open on all sides. At a table in the
centre of this open structure, sat a blond haired young American soldier
with black receivers clamped to either ear. I approached and watched him
jotting down words on a paper pad before him. After several minutes of
intent silence, he removed the harness from his head and told me that he
belonged to the wireless outfit with the artillery and this station had
been in operation since the day before.
"Seems so peaceful here with the sun streaming down over these old
walls," he said.
"What do you hear out of the air?" I asked.
"Oh, we pick up a lot of junk," he replied, "I'm waiting for the German
communique now. Here's some Spanish stuff I just picked up and some more
junk in French. The English stations haven't started this afternoon. A
few minutes ago I heard a German aeroplane signalling by wireless to a
German battery and directing its fire. I could tell every time the gun
was ordered to fire and every time the aviator said the shot was short
or over. It's kinder funny to sit back here in quiet and listen in the
war, isn't it?" I agreed it was weird and it was.
In darkness again at the end of a hard day on the road, we parked the
guns that night in a little village which was headquarters for our
regiment and where I spent the night writing by an old oil lamp in the
Mayor's office. A former Chicago bellhop who spoke better Italian than
English and naturally should, was sleeping on a blanket roll on the
floor near me. On the walls of the room were posted numerous flag-decked
proclamations, some now yellow with the time that had passed over them
since their issue back in 1914. They pertained to the mobilisation of
the men of the village, men whose names remain now only as a memory.
But in their place was the new khaki-clad Chicago bellhop snoring there
on the floor and several thousand more as sturdy and ready as he, all
billeted within a stone's throw of that room. They were here to finish
the fight begun by those village peasants who had marched away four
years before when the Mayor of the town posted that bulletin. These
Americans stood ready to go down to honoured graves beside them.
Our division was under the French high command and was buried in the
midst of the mighty preparations then on foot. Our ranks were full, our
numbers strong, our morale high. Every officer and man in the
organisation had the feeling that the eyes of dashing French
comrades-in-arms and hard fighting British brothers were on them. Our
inspiration was in the belief that the attention of the Allied nations
of the world and more particularly the hope and pride of our own people
across the sea, was centred upon us. With that sacred feeling, the first
division stood resolute to meet the test.
Some of the disquieting news then prevalent in the nervous civilian
areas back of the lines, reached us, but its effect, as far as I could
see, was nil. Our officers and men were as unconcerned about the reports
of enemy successes as though we were children in the nursery of a
burning house and the neighbourhood was ringing with fire alarms. German
advances before Amiens, enemy rushes gaining gory ground in Flanders,
carried no shock to the high resolve that existed in the Allied reserves
of which we were a part.
Our army knew nothing but confidence. If there was other than optimism
to be derived from the current events, then our army was inclined to
consider such a result as gratifying, because it could be calculated to
create a greater measure of speed and assistance from the slowly
functioning powers in America. The reasoning was that any possible
pessimism would hurry to the wheel every American shoulder that had
failed to take up its individual war burden under the wave of optimism.
The army had another reason for its optimism. Our officers knew
something about the dark days that had preceded the first battle at the
Marne. They were familiar with the gloomy outlook in 1914 that had led
to the hurried removal of the French government from Paris to Bordeaux.
Our men recalled how the enemy was then overrunning Belgium, how the old
British "Contemptibles" were in retreat, and how the German was within
twenty miles of the French capital.
In that crisis had come the message by Foch and the brilliant stroke
with which he backed it up. What followed was the tumble and collapse of
the straddling German effort and the forced transformation in the
enemy's plans from a war of six weeks to a war of four years.
Our army knew the man who turned the trick at the Marne. We knew that we
were under his command, and not the slightest doubt existed but that it
was now our destiny to take part in another play of the cards which
would call and cash the German hand. Our forces in the coming
engagements were staking their lives, to a man, on Foch's ace in the
hole.
That was the deadly earnestness of our army's confidence in Foch. The
capture of a hill top in Picardy or the loss of a village in Flanders
had no effect upon that confidence. It found reinforcement in the
belief that since March 21st, America had gained a newer and keener
appreciation of her part in the war.
Our army began to feel that the American people, more than three
thousand miles away from the battle fronts, would have a better
understanding of the intense meaning that had been already conveyed in
General Pershing's words, "Confidence is needed but overconfidence is
dangerous." In other words, our soldiers in the field began to feel that
home tendencies that underrated the enemy's strength and underestimated
the effort necessary to overcome him, had been corrected. The army had
long felt that such tendencies had made good material for Billy Sunday's
sermons and spread-eagle speeches, but they hadn't loaded guns or placed
men in the front line.
We felt that this crisis had brought to America a better realisation of
the fact that Germany had not been beaten and that she was yet to be
beaten and that America's share in the administration of that beating
would have to be greater and more determined than had heretofore been
deemed necessary. It was the hope of the army that this realisation
would reach the people with a shock. Shocks were known to make
realisations less easy to forget. Forgetfulness from then on might have
meant Allied defeat.
Lagging memories found no billet in the personnel of that First
Division. Its records, registering five hundred casualties, kept in mind
the fact that the division had seen service on the line and still had
scores to settle with the enemy.
Its officers and men, with but few exceptions, had undergone their
baptism in German fire and had found the experience not distasteful. The
division had esprit which made the members of every regiment and
brigade in it vie with the members of any other regiment and brigade.
If you had asked any enlisted man in the division, he would have told
you that his company, battery, regiment or brigade "had it all over the
rest of them."
That was the feeling that our division brought with them when we marched
into Picardy to meet the German push. That was the spirit that dominated
officers and men during the ten days that we spent in manoeuvres and
preparations in that concentration area in the vicinity of the ancient
town of Chaumont-en-Vexin in the department of the Oise. It was the
feeling that made us anxious and eager to move on up to the actual
front.