Wet misery--"Penetratin'er and penetratin'er"--The men behind the
lines--Back to "rest"--Replacements as bundles of man-power--Reliefs
in the fox-holes--Before and during an attack--Dodging shells--A
struggle to keep awake--And "on the job"--Will, endurance, and
drive--The wedge of pressure.
As the processes of the Argonne battle became more systematic, they
became more horrible. They would have been unendurable if emotion
had not exhausted itself, death become familiar, and suffering a
commonplace. The shambles were at the worst during the driving of
our wedges in the second and third weeks of October. The capacity to
retain vitality and will-power in the face of cold and fatigue, and
not to become sodden flesh indifferent to what happened, was even
more important than courage, which was never wanting. The thought
of ever again knowing home comforts became a mirage; a quiet trench
sector, with its capacious dugouts and occasional shell-bursts, became
a reminiscence of good old days. Paradise for the moment would be
warmth--just warmth--and a dry board whereon to lay one's head until
nature, sleep finished, urged you to rise.
We were learning what our Allies, and the enemy too, suffered in the
winter fighting of Verdun and the Ypres salient. The Europeans, we
must not forget, were fighting in their own climate. They were used to
having their oxygen served in the humidity of a clammy sponge pressed
close to their nostrils; we to having our oxygen served in dry air.
We suffered less at home when ice covered lakes and streams than in
mists and rains in France at forty and fifty degrees. There is sunshine
on snow-drifts and frosty window-panes in our northern States in
midwinter, as well as on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico; but we never
saw sunshine, as we know sunshine, in the Meuse-Argonne, though there
were days which the natives called fair, when the sun was visible as
through a moist roof of cheese-cloth.
"I'd charge a machine-gun nest single handed, if I could first sit on
a steam radiator for half an hour," one of our soldiers said.
It was summer during the Château-Thierry fighting; a kindly summer,
resembling our June in the northern, or our April in the southern
States. The enthusiasm of our first important action gave hardships a
certain glamour. Men could sleep on the ground without blankets; the
wounded did not suffer greatly from cold, if they remained out over
night. Cold rations were tolerable. Clothes and earth dried soon after
a rain. Fox-holes did not become wells on the levels, and cisterns on
the slopes. Guns and trucks did not cut deep ruts beside the roads or
in crossing the fields. Summer was ever the time for war in temperate
climates; winter the time of rest. It was so in our Civil War.
The battlefield was a sombre brown, splashed by liquid grays. No bright
colors varied the monotony of the landscape except the hot flashes from
gun-mouths; there were none overhead against the leaden and weeping
sky except the red and blue of the bull's-eye of an aeroplane, and
the gossamer sheen of its wings. Khaki uniforms and equipment, and
the tint of trucks, automobiles, caissons, and ambulances were all
in the protective coloration of the surrounding mud. A horse with a
dappled coat, or with dark bay or black coat, shining in the mist, was
a relief. The sounds were the grating of marching hobnailed shoes, the
rumble of motor-trucks and other transport, the roar of the guns, the
strident gas alarm, the bursts of shells, the staccato of machine-guns:
all in an orchestrated efficiency which wasted not even noise in
conserving all energy to the end of destruction--if we except the song
of marching companies at the rear, and the badinage with which men
diverted one another and themselves from their real thoughts.
There were the one-way roads where all the traffic was going in
one direction, either to or from the front, all day and all night
in orderly procession. Along the roads our negro laborers, who all
seemed to be giants, kept filling in stones and shoveling in earth to
mend broken places. They were in a marvelous world, whose diversions
tempted a holiday spirit. They rested on their spades as they watched a
general's car, or a big gun, or a tank, or one of a dozen other wonders
on wheels pass by; or, the whites of their eyes showing, looked around
at the sound of the burst of a shell or an aviator's bomb; or aloft at
the balloons and passing aeroplanes and duels in the air.
"How do you like this weather?" I asked one.
"It's ve'y penetratin' and ve'y cold, seh," he replied. "They
say it keeps on getting colder and colder, and penetratin'er and
penetratin'er, and spring nevah comes."
"It will not, if you don't work hard and win the war."
"I'm goin' to work ve'y hard. We've gotta win this war, seh; or we'll
all freeze to death--only it's pow'ful hard keeping yo' mind on work,
seh, when so much is goin' on."
Thus at the front the colored man kept open the passageway for the
supplies which the colored man had unloaded at the ports. He was truly
the Hercules of physical labor for us.
In the zone of battle, back of the infantry and artillery lines, many
men had many parts, all under shell-fire and hardships; the rolling
kitchen men, the ammunition train and ambulance drivers; the salvage
men gathering up the overcoats, blankets, rifles, gas masks, and other
equipment discarded in the course of an attack; and the much-abused
military policemen, who made drivers keep their lights turned off, and
insisted, in the latter days of their high authority, upon colonels'
automobiles obeying orders, with the same impartiality that policemen
at street crossings show in "stop" and "go" to the "flivver" delivery
wagon and the limousine of the man who groans over the size of his
income tax.
Out of the shelled zone in the early morning the shattered companies of
expended divisions came marching back from the front. Sometimes they
broke into song. Usually they were too tired to sing; the recollection
of what they had seen was too near for rollicking gayety, at least.
They were going into "rest" in some ruined village or series of
dugouts, or possibly into a village that had not been shelled; to be
"Y. M. C. A.'d" and deloused, to receive fresh clean clothing and warm
meals. There were no beds or cots for them, with rare exceptions, but
floors and lofts, as we know. Of course, they were not rested in one
day, or two or three, or even ten. They had given an amount of their
store of reserve energy which it would take them a long time to renew.
Drill began as soon as they had had their first long round of sleep.
New officers took the place of the fallen: officers who often did not
know their men or the battle. Replacements came to fill the gaps in
the ranks, and share all the drills and the lectures which applied the
latest battle lessons. Tired brains reeled with instruction.
There was a plan to return convalescent wounded to their original
divisions, but in the pressure to hurry all available man-power forward
to fill the greedy maw of the front it could be carried out only in a
limited way. Thus, whether convalescent or newcomers, the replacements
might come from a part of the country widely separated from that of
the division which they were joining, and upon the division's welcome
home to the locality of its origin by relatives and friends find
themselves still far from their own homes. Maine was fighting in the
ranks of a battalion from Chicago; New York in the ranks of a battalion
from Kansas. The longer a division had fought, the less regional its
character. The fortune of war never fell more unkindly than upon the
National Army divisions which arrived late in France and were broken up
for replacements, or, even in those final days when victory beckoned
us to our utmost endeavor, turned into labor troops in the S. O. S. In
that vital juncture, they went where they were most needed, which is
a soldier's duty. I have seen groups of replacements, who had had so
little training that they hardly knew how to use their rifles, moving
up through the shelled area to find the battalion in reserve to which
they were assigned. Only two or three weeks from American training
camps, shot across France, strangers indeed on that grim field, they
were man-power which could take the place of the fallen.
In the late afternoon on the roads near the front one might see the
troops of rested divisions marching forward to relieve expended troops.
At Château-Thierry, our men, I know, went singing toward the line of
shell-bursts. I am told that many put flowers in their rifle barrels
and their button-holes. No doubt they did. So did the French and
British in the early days of the war. There were no flowers on the
Meuse-Argonne field, only withering grass and foliage. To sing was to
attract the enemy's attention. The first enthusiasm had passed; our
spring of war was over; our winter of war had come. Most of the men
whom I watched going forward looked as if they appreciated that there
was wicked, nasty business ahead, and they meant to see it through.
It was dark when they came into the zone where the transport had its
dead line. The length of their march was often in darkness if we were
making concentrations for an attack. Some went to their appointed
places as reserves in the warrens dug on reverse slopes; others in
cautious files, led by guides from the troops in position who knew the
ground, went on until they came to the little pits where the outposts
were lying, or to machine-gun posts which faced the enemy under the
whipping of bullets and the bursts of shell-fire and gas. They were
the very point of the wedge which all the strength of our nation was
driving. Wet to the skin, filthy, hollow-eyed, the occupants gave up
their places to the newcomers, whose officers located their positions
on the map, and received local information from their predecessors
about the character and direction of fire and many details. It was like
a change of shift in a factory--all as businesslike as possible.
How different this front from the days of stationary warfare, with the
deep trenches with parapets of sand-bags! Individualism here returned
to its own. Patrols must be sent out to keep watch of the enemy;
machine-guns and riflemen must be ready for a counter-attack,--which
were variations from that deadly monotony of lying in a wet hole in
the ground, whether on a bare crest or among the roots of trees in a
wood. Blood-stains, torn bits of uniform, meat tins, and hard bread
boxes formed the litter around the fox-holes, which marked the stages
of progress where we had dug in. The young officers had to creep from
fox-hole to fox-hole, keeping touch with their platoons, and bearing
in mind all the instructions, regardless of exposure to cold and fire.
The men must not forget anything they were told. Their gas masks must
always be ready; they must "stick to the death" when that served the
purpose of their superiors. Nothing except war's demands could have won
them to such willing submission to such a hideous existence.
If there were to be an attack the next morning, then stealthily the
men of the first wave came up to the line of the fox-holes and hugged
the clammy moist earth, while they were to keep their spirits hot for
their charge. Their officers had to study the ground over which they
were to advance; consider the speed of the barrage which they were to
follow; carry out amazingly intricate maneuvers,--not knowing what
volume of shell and machine-gun fire would meet them as they rose to
the charge in the chilliest hour of the day, at dawn, when the ground
reeked in slipperiness from the mist. The night before an attack always
had the same oppressive suspense, the same urgency on the part of all
hands in trying to be definite under the camouflage of darkness--hazard
omnipotent in its grip on every man's thought.
After the attack came the hurry call for artillery fire on points
which had checked our advance; the summoning of reserves to add more
pressure; the eagerness for exact reports from out of the woods and
ravines where our men were struggling; the hurried flight of messengers
running the gamut of machine-gun bullets; the glad news of gallant
charges going home; the sad news of companies "shot to pieces"; the
filtering back of the walking wounded, and the stretcher-bearers
carrying those who could not walk; prostrate forms waiting on
ambulances, and busy doctors at the _triages_; all so habitual that its
wonder had ceased even for our young army.
If you were wary, studying your ground, eyes and ears alert, you might
travel far in that region beyond the dead line of transport; or you
might invite a burst of machine-gun fire at the outset of your journey.
When it came, or the scream of a shell announced that it would burst
in close proximity, as you sought the nearest protection with an
alacrity that increased with experience, you indulged in that second
of prayer, blasphemy, or fatalistic philosophy which suited your mood.
Some men laughed and smiled; I do not think, however, that they were
really amused. The farther you went, the more deadly the monotony.
When you had seen the front once, you had seen it all, in one sense;
in another, little. After that, going under fire was in answer to duty
or the desire to be nearer the realities. Every man was subjective at
intervals. The less time he had to think of anything but his work, the
more objective he was. One man might be killed when he left the parapet
the first time he was under fire; another might go through showers of
missiles again and again, and never receive a scratch. I have marveled,
considering the number of men whom I have seen fall, how chance had
favored me. The high-explosive shell I always found the most hateful
with its suggestion of maiming for life. Bullets were merciful. They
meant death, or a wound from which, except in rare cases, you would
recover. Fighting in the open as our men did in the Meuse-Argonne, all
their bodies exposed to machine-gun nests, the percentage of dead was
often only one in six or seven, and in some cases only one in ten, to
the wounded. In the Ypres salient, conspicuously, and elsewhere in the
old days of trench warfare, when only heads were exposed above the
parapet, and shells mashed in dugouts and struck in groups of men, the
percentage was one in three, and even one in two.
Those who saw our returned veterans parading in clean uniforms have
little idea of their appearance in battle, their clothes matted with
mud, their faces grey as the shell-gashed earth from exhaustion, when
they had given the last ounce of their strength against the enemy. This
picture of them makes a march over pavements, between banks of people
rewarding them with cheers for what they had endured, seem exotic
pageantry. No one can know except by feeling it the physical and mental
fatigue of this siege battle. There was always the contrast of effort
at high nervous pitch and the utter relaxation of moments of inaction.
Memories of weary men prone on the earth, or lying on caissons or
gun limbers, go hand in hand with memories of our bursts of "speed"
when orders summoned weariness to another impulse of effort. Nature
compelled sleep at times, even in the cold; and men awoke to find that
they had pneumonia or "flu." It was not only the wounded, but the sick,
who were dripping, painfully hobbling shadows along the muddy roads.
The medical corps accomplished a wonder I do not understand in the low
percentage of mortality.
The battle was a treadmill. If there were men of faint hearts or dazed
by fatigue, they had to keep on going. The number with an inclination
to straggle was infinitely fewer than in the Civil War. Not only battle
police but something stronger held them in their places in the machine:
public opinion. We were all in it; we must all do our share. The spirit
of the draft was applied by the common feeling. A soldier who might
sham illness or shell-shock--which was rare indeed--if his malingering
were not understood at a glance, must pass the test of a searching
diagnosis. I have in mind such a case, of a soldier who came into a
_triage_.
"Well, what's the matter with you?" asked the medico, looking at him in
gimlet intensity as their eyes met.
"Nothing, except tired, I guess. I'm feeling better. I'm going back to
the front," was the reply.
The wonder is that there were not more men who succumbed, not to
fear or fire but to the strain. There were instances of insanity, of
temporary illusion, of mind losing control over body--shell-shock,
or whatever you choose to call it--which sent a soldier back through
sifting processes for specific treatment; but no soldier well enough
to fight might escape his duty. Never, I repeat, were there so few
who had any such thought; and this under conditions worse than Valley
Forge. Where heroes of that day only knew want and cold in camp, they
did not have to fight at the same time. The lack of warm food was
alone enough to weaken initiative in men used to comforts and to being
well fed. We tried to force the rolling kitchens up to the front, but
it was impossible on many occasions. Division staffs might say they
were up--and they were, in some parts of the line, but not in all. The
men growled, of course. They had a right to growl. They growled about
many things. The lack of artillery fire, the failure of our planes to
stop enemy planes from flying low with bursts of machine-guns, orders
that made them march and counter-march without apparent reason. They
growled, but they kept on the job.
I always think of three words to characterize the battle. Will,
endurance, and drive: the will to win, the endurance which could bear
the misery necessary to win, and the drive which by repeated attacks
would break the enemy's will. It was the old accepted system; but its
application is the test of the soldier in every cell of brain and body.
The high command could supply the orders, but the men must supply the
qualities which could carry out the orders.
"It's drive, drive, drive!" as one of the soldiers said. "All the way
down from Washington, through Pershing, to the lieutenants, to us--and
there's nobody for us to drive except the Boche"--an enemy who was a
mighty soldier. We tried our steel against no inferior metal. To say
otherwise is not to allow just tribute to ourselves.
All our national energy, our pride, came to a head in the fields of
the Argonne. We can be ruthless with ourselves and with one another.
We consumed man-power like wood in a furnace. Some men and divisions
gave their all in the first period of the battle; others in a later
period; others in the final period. The thing was to give your all.
For officers there was always the fear of Blois; of being sent to
the rear. I know of an officer who staggered at the door of division
headquarters; and then stiffened and drew in his chin as he entered.
"How are you?" asked his division chief of staff.
"All right. Never felt better."
Then his hand went out to the wall to keep him from falling. This was
the right spirit. Yet he must have rest. He could no longer command
three thousand men.
One day an officer might seem fully master of himself and his task;
the next day he "cracked." Superiors, breaking under the strain, were
unjust to subordinates who could not carry out orders to take a series
of machine-gun nests. Personal fortunes were subject to the "break in
luck."
Favoring circumstances honored officers who perhaps had not done as
well as those who were considered to have failed. Success was success;
failure was failure. Time was precious.
"Finding that X-- was not close enough up to his battalion, I
immediately relieved him," was the matter-of-fact report of a colonel
on a major, which meant tragedy to the major; the next day the colonel
himself might "crack." The young lieutenants of platoons and companies,
burdened with their instructions and maps, were the object of the
accumulated pressure from senior officers. They could always charge.
There was one sufficing answer to criticism--death. It came to many
against impossible positions: yet not in vain. Every man who dared
machine-gun fire added to the enemy's conviction of our determination
to keep on driving until we had "gone through."