West of the river--The 82nd Division called for--A difficult
alignment--The outpost hills taken on the 7th of October--And the
28th cleans up the escarpments on its front--The all-American
character of the 82nd--The enemy defends desperately the remaining
escarpments--Repeated charges up the bluffs--Which are cleared by the
10th.
Hovering in reserve since September 26th, the 82nd Division, National
Army, was now to have its turn to be "expended" in the battle. During
its period of waiting it had two battalions severely shelled on the
way to assist the 35th Division in an attack which was countermanded;
and of course its engineers had been kept employed on the roads. No
engineers in sight were ever out of work, from the beginning to the
end of the battle. Previously the division, which had stayed but a
brief time on the British front, had served during the summer months
on the Toul front, where it had advanced on the extreme right flank of
the Saint-Mihiel operation. Originally formed in the South, the 82nd
had been called the "All-American" division because it had been filled
with draft men from all parts of the country, though its training-camp
associations remained Southern, and most of its officers were
Southerners. Now it was chosen for the thrust in the valley of the Aire
to spread the wedge which the 1st had driven.
We know how the 28th Division threw its men against the Argonne
escarpments in the first days of the battle. Since then it had remained
in the trough of the Aire under continual flanking fire, while its
units had alternate periods of rest; but after all it had endured, even
its determination could not give it the vigor of a fresh division. On
the 4th and 5th, while the 1st on its flank was advancing, and again
on the 6th, while the 1st was dug in, it had kept up its attacks, with
the net result that its left had made some further progress against
the Taille l'Abbé of infamous reputation, and its right had advanced
as far as Hill 180, a mile and a half to the south of the village of
Fléville where the men of the 1st were hugging the bluffs, which formed
a bastion in the trough interlocking the fire from either side.
Having moved down the valley of the Aire under the portion of the
eastern wall which the 1st held, the 82nd was to face west and attack
toward the western wall. Getting into position for the action was
itself a ticklish business as a tactical maneuver for the infantry.
The shell-swept road which it was to use for bringing its artillery
and transport up this narrow passage under the enemy's flanking
machine-gun nests, was already taxed with the transport of the 28th,
which was still to go on attacking. The 28th had sworn that it would
not leave the valley until it had taken the Taille l'Abbé. It had prior
rights to that formidable escarpment.
If ever a division needed capable guides, it was the 82nd on the night
of the 6th. It had to slip past Châtel-Chéhéry on the opposite bank of
the river, from which patrols of the 28th had been ejected in the day's
attack, and on past Hill 223 and Hill 180 to a point near Fléville, in
a winding, exposed passage. There were unexpected delays on the roads.
At 2.30 in the morning the artillery was stalled, and some of the
infantry was still at Varennes, five miles from its jumping-off place
for the attack set for three hours later. Guides failing to appear, it
was not surprising that the regiment which was to attack on the left,
or south, against Hill 223 should have gone too far in the darkness,
when a man was hardly visible ten yards away; and, after marching and
groping all night, should have had to retrace its steps. With men
exhausted and units confused, it arrived at its jumping-off line to
find that not a single gun was up for its support. An advance according
to schedule became out of the question.
By accepted canons this misfortune might have ruined the whole
movement, or at least led to delaying the movements of the other units;
but delays were out of the question. There was no time to communicate
counter-orders to the 28th, which had gathered all its strength for
a supreme effort whose success depended upon the coöperation of the
82nd. If the whole line could not go forward at daylight, then all of
it that could must go. Fortunately the dark night, which had screened
their movement from accurate fire by the enemy, was followed by a
thick morning fog. This was opportune in partially screening an attack
which must cross the river in face of the heights which they were
to storm. The right, or north, regiment, as it started on time, had
the advantage of the fog in its first rush. The men forded through
water two and three feet deep; the officers who were leading pulled
them up the steep banks on the other side. By 8.30 Hill 180, with its
machine-gun nests, which had been one of the bulwarks defying the thin
line of the 28th for nearly two weeks, was no longer in German hands.
The men of the left regiment, starting at 9 o'clock against a still
higher hill, 223, overlooking Châtel-Chéhéry, were swept at the fords
by enfilade shell-fire and storms of machine-gun bullets in front,
which made fearful gaps in their ranks. Under the spur of their delay,
considering nothing except that they must make up for lost time, they
plunged ahead, and once across they did not bother with any deliberate
infiltration around machine-gun nests, but simply swept over them in
headlong impatience. By one o'clock they had the hill, a portion of
which had been reached by a small detachment of the 28th. They did not
know whether or not the 28th had reached Châtel-Chéhéry until they saw
soldiers of the 28th climbing the steep sides of Hill 244 back of the
town. The fact that two-thirds of the men of two of the companies of
the 82nd were killed or wounded was evidence enough that the 1st was
not the only division willing to pay a price for gains when it was
called upon to be a human wedge. This finished the day's work for the
left regiment, except for a German counter-attack which received such
prompt and efficacious attention that another was not attempted.
The 82nd having taken over a portion of its line, the 28th had been
able to concentrate its forces on the remainder. Though by all criteria
the 28th should have been counted as already "expended," it had an
access of energy at the prospect of attacking under more favorable
circumstances the positions which had so long held it back. After
building a footbridge across the Aire, the right regiment charged
across the level toward the village of Châtel-Chéhéry, at the base
of the heights. This time the Pennsylvanians meant to put more than
patrols into the village. Lashed by gun-fire and whipped by machine-gun
fire from the heights which had them seemingly at their mercy, units
were riddled and their officers killed, with resulting dispersion as
undaunted survivors sought for dead spaces and cover. The colonel in
command fell mortally wounded by a machine-gun bullet while directing
his men. His soldiers avenged him not only by taking and holding
Châtel-Chéhéry, but that night they took Hill 244, the ridge following
south to the Taille l'Abbé, silencing its galling fire on the river
bottoms.
So much for the right. The left regiment was again to attack the
Taille l'Abbé. This, being farther south, and toward the rear, than
Châtel-Chéhéry, which was in turn south of the 82nd's front, further
illustrates the anomalous tactical situation and the interdependence
of all the diverse and treacherous elements of ground and dispositions
in the problem of supporting the driving of the 1st's wedge. In the
course of their arduous ten days' effort to carry out the original plan
of "scalloping" the Forest edge to protect the frontal attack of the
77th through the Forest, the Pennsylvanians had developed a sinuous
line around the slopes which in places ran at right angles to our
battlefront as a whole. It was a line with outposts holding ravines,
and groups clinging to vantage points of all kinds, who, in their
fox-holes, were the present masters of their destiny, isolated from
communication by day and approachable only by silent crawling under
cover of darkness. This process of infiltration had bent a shepherd's
crook around the Taille l'Abbé. All the whittling of ten long days came
to a head in the attack of October 7th, whose ax's blow cut deep into
the Forest to La Viergette, past the south flank of the Taille l'Abbé,
whose defenses must now crumple under the additional pressure from the
north.
While we are with the 28th, we shall follow its career through the Aire
valley to the end. On the 8th neither the general situation in relation
to the neighboring divisions nor its exhaustion warranted a general
attack by the 28th; but it did not neglect a little chore, which gave
it retributory satisfaction, in cleaning up the last of the machine-gun
nests and any vagrant Germans remaining on the hateful Abbé. Its goal
won, its honor avenged, it was now to have the rest which it had as
fully earned as the name of the "Iron Division," which it was now being
called. It was relieved on the night of the 8th-9th by the 82nd. In
a marvelous endurance test of twelve days, in which the men had gone
without cooked food under continual rains, the Pennsylvanians had
suffered 6,149 casualties, while 1,200 officers and men had been sent
to hospitals, ill as the result of the terrible strain and exposure.
They had advanced over six miles. They had taken 550 prisoners and 8
guns in their plodding gains against fearful odds; and do not forget,
as they will tell you, that they had also taken two German locomotives,
most useful for bringing up supplies on a captured section of railroad
which the engineers had repaired. The engineers particularly, and all
the Pennsylvanians, were proud of that railroad--the 28th's own trunk
line; but the proudest thought of these emaciated Guardsmen, as they
marched away, was that they had not had to leave the conquest of the
Taille l'Abbé to a fresh division. They had taken it themselves.
Now Hills 223 and 180, which the 82nd had captured in its first day's
fighting on the 7th, were as detached forts, nearer the eastern wall
than the western, in a broad stretch of the valley. Their crests looked
over a rolling stretch of bottom lands to the bluffs of the Forest's
edge, which were so steep that the naked earth broken by landslides
held only scattered dwarf trees and shrubs. Torrents dashed down the
ravines during heavy rains. Scaling rather than assault was the word
to describe an attempt at their mastery. Artillery was hidden on
their crests, and machine-guns on their crests and in the favoring
intricacies of the slopes.
Northwest from Hill 180 the village of Cornay nestled at the foot of
an escarpment flung out from the Forest almost to the river's bank.
This promontory made of the stretch of bottom a kind of bay. While
commanding in rear and flank the farther advance of the 1st on the
opposite river wall, it could also turn a flanking fire on any charge
across the bay toward the bluffs in addition to the plunging frontal
fire from the bluffs. Cornay must be taken in order to gain the valley
as far as Fléville. On the way across the bay, either to Cornay or
to the bluffs, any charge must cross the Boulasson creek, which was
unfordable at points. Thus this bay was a _cul de sac_; but a visible
one. The All-Americas knew what to expect on their way to the heights.
With its personnel varying from little men from the tenements to tall
lean men of the cotton-fields, the 82nd had in its pride of corps the
rivalry of community, region, and state. It was said that one city
division had been careful in its sifting when it transferred an excess
of its draft men to the 82nd. If so, the result shows how inspectors
may err in judging by the measure of a recruit's chest whether or not
he will have the heart of a warrior when good food reddens the blood
pumped through the valves it strengthens, and drill and comradeship
stiffen his fighting temper. The All-Americas might have no state or
group of states that claimed them for its own; but the conviction that
they were for all the states--all America--was the fostering spirit of
the four days of unceasing attack, that were now to begin.
On the 8th the south regiment, moving down the slope of Hill 223 and
crossing the level, had reached the ridge beyond in two hours. By 5
P.M. it had fought its way to the possession of a portion of the ridge.
Bitterly yielding to the power of the enemy's fire after companies, in
characteristic all-America bravery, had lost half their numbers, it
retired down the slope during the night to dig itself protection. The
north regiment bridged and forded and swam the creek, and fought all
day for Cornay and the heights to the westward. The Germans did not
depend alone upon fire from the heights. Their machine-gunners were
under cover of the bushes and knolls of the bottoms, contesting the
passage of the brook, sweeping stretches of its winding course with
flanking as well as frontal fire. Their roving field guns attached to
battalions fired at point-blank range upon the infantry wave as it
appeared on a knoll on the other side of the brook before Cornay, and
the men face to face with the gunners bore them down and passed on.
By six that afternoon they were in the town and up the slopes of the
adjoining heights. There were not enough of them to hold what they had
taken. All but forty men of two companies had been killed or wounded
in crossing those deadly reaches of the river bottom. As darkness fell,
bullets were spattering in every street in Cornay, and pelting down
from the crest upon the All-Americas, trying to dig into the slope.
Orders had to be given for withdrawal from Cornay and the most exposed
ground, for a night of reorganization in the valley of the brook.
A reserve regiment of the 82nd, having taken over the 28th's front,
spent the next day under galling fire in swinging its line up level
with the other regiments. Again a charge, running the gamut from the
bluffs and in face of machine-gun nests in the village itself, entered
Cornay at 11 A.M.; again we were slowly forcing our way up the heights
where in places the men could climb only by drawing themselves up by
bushes and dwarf trees. Reduced in number by the incessant drain of
casualties, beginning to feel the exhaustion from three days' fighting
and nights practically without sleep, they thought that this time they
could hold their gains; but at dusk a German counter-attack launched
right across the river bottom from Fléville to Cornay under a barrage
of shells and machine-gun bullets, and by infiltration from the heights
into Cornay, where our men fought from house to house in a confused
struggle against odds, forced those of the advanced groups who did not
remain to die in their tracks to fall back upon their reserves, who
stood fast. The Germans depended much upon that counter-attack, and
they made it at a time when the losses and exhaustion of the 82nd, of
which they were fully aware, might well have led them to think that
this young division would break under a sharp blow. Far from breaking,
the 82nd, having savagely and promptly repulsed the counter-attack,
was, despite its casualties, further to extend its front that night by
taking over the eastern bank of the river from the 1st Division.
October 10th was to see the culmination of the movement in the trough
of the Aire, when the 77th, the pressure on its flank released, was
to begin its final sweep through the Forest. It was to be a day of
such retribution for the 82nd as the 28th had had in the taking of
the Taille l'Abbé; hills and woods are the landmarks of divisional
histories in this battle. The dead of the 82nd were intermingled with
the dead enemy on the slopes and in Cornay, and in that stretch of
the river bottom which in its exposure resembles more closely than
the background of any other charge in the Meuse-Argonne battle the
open fields which Pickett's men crossed in their rush up the slopes of
Seminary Ridge. The gallant officers who led these men knew that they
would follow, and Major-General George B. Duncan, who had taken command
of the division before the battle, was serene and resourceful in his
confidence.
Along the embankment, along the banks of the creek, in little gullies
and dips of that _cul de sac_ of a bay, they had pegged down their
gains as the jumping-off places for their assaults on the gallery of
heights overlooking the stage of their indomitable tenacity. They were
fighting against better than German veterans--German specialists. The
prisoners they took usually yielded not in bodies but as individuals
or small groups, wounded, exhausted, surrounded by dead. Two out of
three of those in the Cornay region were machine-gunners or chosen
non-commissioned officers who were trusted to fight to the death and
make the most of their sacrifice by their skill. First and last the
82nd captured 277 machine-guns, as the harvest of its courage at close
quarters.
On the morning of the 10th it brought its field guns close up behind
the infantry, assigned roving guns to its battalions, and placed its
Hotchkiss guns and its little 37's in the front line, which smashed
machine-gun nests at point-blank range. Now the All-Americas took
Cornay for the last time, clearing its streets and cellars; swept up
the valley and over the ridge above Cornay; and sprinting patrols
entered Marcq in the plain beyond, while from the conquered higher
ground they looked down upon the bend of the river toward Grandpré,
where it passes between the Argonne and the Boult Forests. At last the
trough of the Aire with both its walls was ours from Varennes past
Cornay. The taking of the gap of Grandpré which brought us in face of
the heights beyond may wait upon an account of the action of the 1st
and 32nd from October 6th to 11th.