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?