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