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, or we must have fresh troops, before another
considerable offensive effort. A hundred millions of population at
home did not mean that we had unlimited trained man-power to draw on
in France. Our divisional reserves were exhausted. Replacements were
not arriving in sufficient numbers to fill gaps from casualties and
sickness. We were not only fighting from the Meuse to the Argonne and
holding the line of our new front at Saint-Mihiel, but we had four
excellent fresh divisions just going into attack in British and French
offensives, not to mention our divisions in tranquil sectors. If we had
had more men for the front, we could not have fed them. If we had made
a farther advance, we could not have kept our artillery and transport
up with the troops. We needed more motor-trucks, horses, and every kind
of equipment for that insatiable maw. If we had had more transport, we
should hardly have had room for it. The arterial road facilities over
the old trench system were as yet unequal to caring for the number of
our troops. The bottle necks could not meet the demands of the bottle.
Our appetite for victory had exceeded our digestion.
Army reports which spoke of "poor visibility" referred to the
morale of the men as "excellent." There was no question of the "poor
visibility" or of the morale of men who were well enough to be in line,
for they were always ready to fight. The chill October rains had begun.
We could expect little more fair weather. When, already, one needed a
heavy blanket over him in bed, our men sent into action, for mobility's
sake, without blankets were shivering at night on the wet ground, not
under the roof of the stars but in the penetrating cold mist which
hugged the earth when it was not raining. This and the lack of proper
food and of sleep brought on diarrhea, and the pitiful sight on the
roads of the sick and gassed was a reminder of how quickly war may
wreck the delicate human machine which takes so long to build. In a few
days sturdy youth with springy steps in the pink of health had become
pale and emaciated, looking ten years older as they dragged their feet
in painful slowness.
Some divisions had suffered more exhaustion than others. All their
reserves had been crowded in to meet an emergency. They had given to
the limit of their strength in a few days, while others might spread
theirs over weeks. At close quarters with the enemy we dug in, with
machine-gun nests and defensive lines of our own to repulse his
counter-attacks, while the message of our own piecemeal attacks, by
which we sought to maintain our personal mastery over him, was: "We are
only gathering our strength. This is our battle. We are coming at you
again--soon." Thus established in our gains, in temporary stalemate,
we might withdraw some divisions for rest. This meant fewer mouths to
feed, lessening the strain on our transport. Other divisions had rest
by the alternate withdrawal of regiments and brigades.
X