AMERICA IN FRANCE
On March 2nd, 1917, I found myself lunching at Montreuil, then the
General Headquarters of the British Expeditionary Force, with the
Staff of the Intelligence Department. After lunch I walked through the
interesting old town, with the Chief of the Department, and our talk
turned on the two subjects of supreme importance at that
moment--America and Russia. When would America come in? For that she
would come in was clear. It was now a full month since diplomatic
relations between Germany and the United States had been broken off,
and about a week since President Wilson had asked Congress to arm
American vessels in self-defence against the new submarine campaign
announced by Germany in January. "It can't be long," said my companion
quietly; "Germany has gone too far to draw back. And the President
will have the whole country with him. On the whole I think he has been
right to wait. It is from Americans themselves of course that one
hears the sharpest criticism of the President's 'patience.'"
My own correspondence of the winter indeed with American friends had
shown me the passion of that criticism. But on the 2nd of March there
was small further need for it. Germany was rushing on her fate. During
the course of the month, England and America watched the piling up of
the German score as vessel after vessel was sunk. Then on the 1st of
April came the loss of twenty-eight American lives in the _Aztec_, and
the next day but one we opened our London newspapers to find that on
April the 2nd President Wilson had asked Congress for a Declaration of
War.
"America is in," wrote an officer at G.H.Q., "and the faces of
everybody one sees show a real bit of spring sunshine. People begin to
say: 'Now we shall be home by Christmas.'"
But something else had happened in that fateful month of March. March
the 9th saw the strange, uncertain opening of the Russian revolution,
followed by a burst of sympathy and rejoicing throughout Europe. Only
those intimately acquainted with the structure of Russian society felt
the misgivings of those who see the fall of a house built on rotten
foundations and have no certainty of any firm ground whereon to build
its successor. But the disappointment and exasperation of the Allies
at that moment, as to all that had happened in Russia during the
preceding months, under the old régime, was so great that the mere
change bred hope; and for a long time we hoped against hope. All the
more because the entry of America, and the thrilling rapidity of her
earlier action put the Russian business into the shade, may, indeed,
have dulled the perceptions of the Allies with regard to it. In forty
days from the declaration of war the United States had adopted
Conscription, which had taken us two years; General Pershing and his
small force had sailed for France within eighty days; and by the end
of June, or within ninety days, America had adopted the blockade
policy of Great Britain, and assented to the full use of that mighty
weapon which was to have so vast an influence on the war. President
Wilson's speech, when he came to Congress for the Declaration of War,
revealed him--and America--to England, then sorely brooding over "too
proud to fight," in an aspect which revived in us all that was kinship
and sympathy, and put to sleep the natural resentments and
astonishments of the preceding years. Nay, we envied America a man
capable of giving such magnificent expression to the passion and
determination of all free nations, in face of the German challenge.
Then came the days of disappointment. Troops arrived at a more
leisurely pace in France than had been hoped. Ships and aeroplanes,
which American enthusiasm in the early weeks of the war had promised
in profusion, delayed their coming; there was congestion on the
American railways, interfering with supplies of all kinds; and the
Weather God, besides, let loose all his storm and snow battalions upon
the Northern States to hamper the work of transport. We in England
watched these things, not realising that our own confidence in the
military prospects and the resisting power of the Allies, was partly
to blame for American leisureliness. It was so natural that American
opinion, watching the war, should split into two phases--one that held
the war was going to be won quickly by negotiation, before America
could seriously come in; the other that the war would go on for
another three years, and therefore there would be ample time for
America to make all her own independent plans and form her own
separate army with purely American equipment. English opinion wavered
in the same way. I well remember a gathering in a London house in
November, 1917, just after the first successful attack in the Battle
of Cambrai. It was a gathering in honour of General Bliss, and other
American officers and high officials then in London. General Bliss was
the centre of it, and the rugged, most human, most lovable figure of
Mr. Page was not far away. The Battle of Cambrai was in progress, and
English expectations, terribly depressed, at any rate among those who
knew, by the reports which had been coming through of the severe
fighting in the Salient, during the preceding weeks, were again rising
rapidly. Everybody was full of the success of the initial attack, of
the tanks above all, and what they might mean for the future. At last
Sir Julian Byng had achieved surprise; at last there had been open
fighting; if by happy chance we took Cambrai what might not happen? A
flash of optimism ran through us all. Victory and peace drew nearer.
Yet in the background there were always those dim rumours of the
appalling losses at Passchendaele, together with the smarting memory
of Caporetto, and of the British divisions sent to Italy.
And in ten days more we knew that the German counter-attack had
checked the Cambrai advance, that Bourlon Wood was lost, that Cambrai
was still inaccessible, and we retained only a portion of the ground
gained by the dash and skill of the first days. The moral was, as
always--"more men!" and we settled down again to a stubborn waiting
for our own new recruits, then in the training camps, and for the
first appearance of the American battalions. Meanwhile the news from
Russia grew steadily worse; the Russian Army had melted away under the
Kerensky regulations; and the country was rapidly falling into chaos.
Brest-Litovsk was acutely realised for the German triumph that it was;
and the heads of the Army were already calculating with some precision
the number of German divisions, then on the Eastern front, which must
inevitably be transferred to France for the spring offensive of the
German Army.
It was natural that those really acquainted with the situation should
turn feverishly towards America. When was her Army coming? In the
matter of money America had done nobly towards all the Allies. In this
field her help had been incalculably great. In the matter of munitions
and stores for the Allies she had done all that the state of her
railways, the weather of her winter, and the drawbacks of the American
Constitution, considered as a military machine, as yet allowed her to
do. Meanwhile one saw the President, aided by a score of able and
energetic men, constantly at work removing stones in the path, setting
up a War Industries Board, reorganising the Shipping Board and the Air
Service, and clearing the way for those food supplies from the great
American and Canadian wheatfields without which Europe could not
endure, and which were constantly endangered by the pressure of the
submarine attack. Perhaps in all that anxious winter the phase of
American help which touched us English folk most deeply was the
voluntary rationing by which hundreds and thousands of American
families, all over the vast area of the States, eagerly stinted
themselves that they might send food overseas to Great Britain and the
Allies--sixty million bushels of wheat by January 1st--ninety millions
before the 1918 harvest. We knew that it was only done by personal
sacrifice, and we _felt_ it in our hearts.
Meanwhile, on this side of the sea, the anxiety for _men_ grew
steadily stronger. Who knew what the coming spring campaign would
bring forth? The French Army during 1917 had passed through that
_dépression morale_ of which I have spoken in an earlier letter. Would
a country which had borne such a long and terrible ordeal of death and
devastation be capable of yet another great effort during the coming
year, whatever might be the heroic patriotism of her people? One heard
of the enormous preparations that America was making in France--of the
new docks, warehouses, and railways, of the vast depots and splendid
camps that were being laid out--with a mixture of wonder and
irritation. A friend of mine, on coming back from France, described to
me his going over a new American dock with two French officers:
"Magnificent!" said the Frenchmen, in a kind of despair--"but when are
they going to _begin_? Suppose the war is over, and France swallowed
up, _before_ they begin?" A large section of American opinion was
shaken with the same impatience.
American letters to English friends, including those of Mr. Roosevelt to
his many English correspondents, among whom, to some small extent, I was
proud to reckon myself, expressed an almost fierce disappointment with
the slow progress of things. Ultimately, of course, an independent
American Army, under its own Commander-in-Chief, and fully equipped
from American factories. But why not begin by sending men in as large
numbers as possible to train with the British and French Armies, and to
take their places as soon as possible in the fighting line, as integral
parts of those armies, allowing the Allies to furnish all equipment
till America was really ready? It was pointed out that Canada and
Australia, by sending officers and men over at once to train and fight
with the British, and leaving everything else to be supplied by the
Allies, had in nine months from the outbreak of war already taken part
in glorious and decisive battles. Or why not adopt a two-fold
policy--of supplying men to the Allies as rapidly as possible, for
immediate aid, carrying on preparations the while for an independent
American Army with all its own supplies, as the ultimate goal? Time, it
was urged, was of the utmost importance. And what object was served by
experimenting with new types of munitions, instead of adopting the
types of the Allies, which the American factories were already turning
out in profusion? And so on.
With such feelings did many of us on this side of the water, and a
large section apparently of American friends of the Allies on the
other side, watch the gradual unravelling of America's tangled skeins.
The _North American Review_ asked in December, 1917: "Are we losing
the war? No. But we are not winning it." In January, 1918, the editor
warned his readers: "The Allied forces are not in condition to
withstand the terrific onslaught which Germany is bound to make within
six months. America must win the war." In April the _New York Bankers'
Bulletin_ said: "We have not made progress as far as we might or
could," while months later, even in its September number (1918), the
_North American Review_ still talked of "our inexplicable military
sluggishness," and rang with appeals for greater energy. There was of
course an element of politics in all this; but up to March last year
it is clear that, in spite of many things not only magnificently
planned, but magnificently _done_, there was a great deal of sincere
anxiety and misgiving in both countries.
But with the outbreak of the German offensive in March, as we all
know, everything changed. American troops began to _rush_
over:--366,000 in round numbers, up to the end of March, and 440,000
more, up to the end of June, 70 per cent, of them carried in British
ships; a million by the end of July, nearly a million and a half
before the Armistice. Wonderful story! Nobody, I think, can possibly
exaggerate the heartening and cheering effect of it upon the Allies in
Europe, especially on France--wounded and devastated France--and on
Italy, painfully recovering from Caporetto. How well I remember the
thrill of those days in London, the rumours of the weekly landings of
troops--70,000--80,000 men--and the occasional sight of the lithe,
straight-limbed, American boys marching through our streets!
And yet, curiously enough--what _was_ exaggerated all the time, on
both sides of the Atlantic, both here and in America, was the extent
of the British set-back hi March and April, and its effect on the
general situation. That is clear, I think, when we look back on our
own Press at home, and still more on American utterances, both in the
States and in France. In _August_ of last year Mr. Secretary Baker
said: "We are only just beginning"--and he pointed to the millions of
men that America would have in France by 1919. On August 7th General
March, Chief of the American General Staff, said in the Senate
Committee, that America would have four millions of men in France,
with one million at home, for the campaign of 1919. "The only way that
Germany can be whipped is by America going into this thing with her
whole strength. It is up to us to win the war.... We must force the
issue and win." The editor of the _North American Review_ wrote in
August, and published in his September number, phrases like the
following: "But the hand of the enemy cannot be struck down for a long
time to come." "Virtually impregnable positions" are still held by
him. "No military observer is so sanguine as to anticipate anything
like conclusive results from the present campaign. The real test will
come next year, in the late spring and summer of 1919." By then the
Allies must have "a great preponderance of men and guns. These America
must supply."
But when General March said in August: "It is up to us to win the
war," and the _North American Review_ talked of "virtually impregnable
positions," and the impossibility of "anything like conclusive results
from the present campaign"--the capture of those "impregnable
positions" by the British Army, and thereby the winning of the war,
were only a few weeks away! Similar phrases could be quoted from the
British Press, and from prominent Englishmen, though not, unless my
memory plays me false, from any of our responsible military leaders.
The fact is that the view I represented, in my second article, as the
view taken by the heads of the British Army, of the March retreat, had
turned out by the summer to be the true one. The German armies _had_
to a large extent beaten themselves out against the British defensive
battle of the spring: and while the Americans were making their
splendid spurt from April to August, and entering the fighting field
in force for the first time, the British Army, having absorbed its
recruits, taken huge toll of its enemies, and profited by all there
was to be learnt from the German offensive, was getting ready every
day to give the final strokes in the war, aided, when the moment came,
by the supreme leadership of Marshal Foch, by the successes of
Generals Mangin and Dégoutte on the Marne, by the masterly campaign of
General Gouraud in Champagne, and the gallant push of General Pershing
in the Argonne. This position of things was not sufficiently realised
by the general public in England, still less by the American public,
as is shown by the extracts I have quoted. So that the continuous
series of British victories, from August 8th onward, which ended in
the Armistice, came as a rather startling surprise to those both here
and abroad who, like von Kluck in 1914, had been inclined to make too
much of a temporary British retreat.
Moreover, behind the military successes of Great Britain--and not only
on the French front, but in the East also--stood always the deadly
pressure of the British blockade. When after the capture of the
Hindenburg positions, the line indicating "prisoners," on that chart
at G.H.Q., a reduced copy of which will be found at the end of this
book, leapt up to a height for which the wall in the room of the
Director of Operations could hardly find space, it meant not only
victory over Germany in the field, but also the disintegration of
German _morale_ at home; owing first and foremost to that deadly watch
which the British Navy, supported during the last year of the war by
the American embargo, had kept over the seas of the world, to
Germany's undoing, since the opening of the struggle. The final
victory of the Allies when it came was thus in a special sense Great
Britain's victory, achieved both by her mastery of the sea, and the
military expansion forced upon her by the German attack; conditioned,
of course, by the whole earlier history of the war, in which France
had led the van and borne the brunt, and immensely facilitated by the
"splendid American adventure," to use the phrase of an American.
For to show that, in a strictly military sense, the British and
Dominion Armies, backed by the British Navy, brought the war to a
successful end--a simple matter of figures and dates--is not all, or
nearly all. The American intervention, and especially the marvellous
speeding-up of American action, from March to the end of the war,
quite apart from the brilliant promise of America's first appearances
in the field, had an effect upon Europe--Great Britain, France,
Italy--akin to that which the American climate and atmosphere produces
on the visitor from this side of the Atlantic. It breathed new life
into everything, and especially into the heart of France, the chief
sufferer by three years of atrocious war. As weary and devastated
France watched the American stream of eager and high-hearted youth,
flowing from Bordeaux eastwards, column after column, regiment after
regiment, of men admirable in physique, fearless in danger, and full
of a laughing and boundless confidence in America's power to help, and
resolve to win--at last it seemed that the long horror of the war must
be indeed coming to an end. "Three thousand miles!" said the French
villager or townsman to himself, as he turned out to see them
pass--"they have come three thousand miles to beat the Boche. And
America is the richest country in the world--and there are a hundred
millions of them." Hope rose into flood, and with it fresh courage to
endure.
Nor was the effect less marked on the British nation, which had not
known invasion, and on the British Army, for all its faith in itself.
The rapid growth of American strength in France from March onward in
response to the call of the Allies, provided indeed a moral support to
the two older armies, which was of incalculable value and "influenced
the fighting qualities of both; while the knowledge of these mounting
reserves enabled the Allied Commanders to take risks which otherwise
could hardly have been faced." I am quoting a British military
authority of high rank.
It was at Metz that--outside Paris--I first came in contact with this
"America in France," which History will mark on her coming page with
all the emphasis that belongs to new chapters in the ever-broadening
tale of man. It was in the shape of some "Knights of Columbus,"
pausing at Metz for a night on their way to Coblenz. We only exchanged
a few words on the steps of the hotel, but I had time to feel the
interest and the strangeness of this American Catholicism in Europe,
following in the track of war, and looking with its New World eyes at
those old, old towns, those ancient churches in which American
Catholics were at home, yet not at home. At Strasbourg I saw no
Americans that I can remember. But our arrival at Nancy at midnight,
very weary after a long day in the car, during which we had missed our
way badly at least once, is linked in my recollection with the
apparition of two young American officers just as we were being told
for the third time that there was no room in the hotel to which we had
driven up. Should we really have to sleep in the car? There seemed to
be not a single vacant bedroom in Nancy; and there had been snow
showers during the day! But these two Americans heard from our French
Lieutenant that there were two English ladies in the car, and they
came forward at once, offering their rooms. Luckily we found shelter
elsewhere; but I shall not soon forget the kind readiness of the two
young men, and the thrill of the whole scene. There we stood in the
beautiful Place Stanislas, that workmen from Versailles built for the
father-in-law of Louis Quinze. A flickering moonlight touched the
gilding of the famous _grilles_ that shut in the square; and the only
light in the wide space seemed to come from this one hotel taken by
the American authorities for the use of their officers and Red Cross
workers passing to and from the Rhine. When that square was built,
George Washington was a youth of twenty, and after one hundred and
seventy years it stood within the war-zone of an American Army, which
had crossed the Atlantic to fight in Europe!
Next day we spent entirely in the American sector, between Nancy and
Toul, where American road directions and sign-boards, and fine,
newly-built camps and depots for the American forces met us in all
directions. A military policeman from a coloured regiment put us into
the right road for St. Mihiel after leaving Toul--a strongly-built,
bronzed fellow, dealing with the stream of military and civil traffic
at a cross roads in Eastern France with perfect ease and _sang-froid_.
The astonishment and interest of this American occupation of a country
so intensely and ultimately national, so little concerned in ordinary
times with any other life than its own as France, provincial France
above all, never ceased to hold me as we drove on and on through the
American sector; especially when darkness and moonlight returned, and
again and again as we passed through wrecked villages where a few
chinks of light here and there showed a scattered billet or two, the
American military policeman on duty would emerge from the shadows,
tall, courteous, self-possessed, to answer a question, or show the
way, and we left him behind, apparently the only human being under the
French night, in sole possession of the ruins round him.
But before darkness fell, during the central part of the day, we had
crossed the southern lines of the convergent American attack on St.
Mihiel. Trenches and wire-fields and artillery positions had all
belonged to the French battle-zone before the Americans took them
over, and there had been fierce fighting here by the French in 1915.
But for three years the position had changed but little, till the
newly-formed First American Army undertook in September the clearing
of the Salient.
We left the car near the village of Beaumont, and walked to the brow
of the low ridge from which the American attack started. Standing
among what had been the _tranckées de départ_, with the ruins of the
village of Seichprey below us to the right, we had before us the
greater part of the American battle-field--Thiaucourt in the far
north-east; the ridge of Vigneulles, which had been the meeting-point
of the converging American attacks coming both from the north-west and
the south-east; while in the near foreground rose the once heavily
fortified Mont Sec. The American troops went over the parapet at five
o'clock on the morning of September 12th, and by the morning of the
13th their forces had met at Vigneulles, and the Salient, with its
perpetual threat to the French line, had disappeared. In three more
days the Heights of the Meuse had been cleared, and the foremost
Americans were already under the fire of the fortified zone protecting
Metz.
It was a brilliant but happily not a costly victory. Von Gallwitz, the
German Commander, had probably already determined on retirement, when
the American attack forestalled him. So that the American troops with
certain French units supporting them achieved a great result with
small losses; and as the first battle of an independent American Army
the operation must always remain one of extraordinary interest and
importance, even though, in British military opinion, the palm of
difficulty and of sacrifice must be given rather to the splendid
fighting on the Marne in June and July, when the Americans were still
under French direction, or to the admirable performance of the two
American divisions, the 27th and the 30th, serving under Sir Henry
Rawlinson, a fortnight after St. Mihiel, on the Hindenburg line. "The
original attack," at St. Mihiel, says one of the keenest of British
military observers--"was carried out with extraordinary dash by very
eager and physically magnificent soldiers." Possibly, he adds, a more
seasoned army--the American troops had only had six months' experience
in the fighting line!--might have turned the effects of a successful
action to greater military advantage than was the case at St. Mihiel.
The British or French critic, mindful of the bitter lessons of four
years of war, is inclined to make the same criticism of most of the
American operations of last year, except the fighting on the Marne in
June and July, when French caution and experience found a wonderful
complement in the splendid fighting qualities of the American
infantry. "But"--adds one of them--"undoubtedly the American Command
was learning _very rapidly_." What an army the American Army would
have been, if the war had lasted through this year! The qualities of
the individual soldier, drawn many of them from districts among the
naturally richest in the world, together with the vast resources in
men and wealth of the nation behind them, and the mastery of the
lessons of modern war which was already promised by the American
Command, during the six months' campaign of 1918--above all, the
comparative freshness of the American effort--would, no doubt, have
made the United States Army the leading force among the Allies, had
the war been prolonged. That is one line of speculation, and an
interesting one. Another, less profitable, asks: "Could the Allies
have won without America?" The answer I have heard most commonly given
is: "Probably yes, considering, especially, the disintegration we now
know to have been going on in Germany, and the cumulative effects of
the British blockade. But it would have taken at least six months more
fighting, the loss of thousands more precious and irreplaceable lives,
and the squandering of vast additional wealth in the bottomless waste
of war."
Thank God, we did not win without America! The effects, the
far-reaching effects, of America's intervention, of her comradeship in
the field of suffering and sacrifice with the free nations of old
Europe, are only now beginning to show themselves above the horizon.
They will be actively and, as at least the men and women of faith
among us believe, beneficently at work, when this generation has long
passed away.