AMERICA IN FRANCE (CONTINUED)
It was late when we left Verdun, on the afternoon of the day which saw
us at its beginning on the southern edge of the St. Mihiel
battle-field, and the winter daylight had passed into darkness before
we began to run through a corner of the Argonne, on our way to St.
Menehould and Châlons, passing by the wholly ruined village of
Clermont in Argonne. The forest ran past us, a wintry fairyland, dimly
lit by our quickly moving lamps, and apparently impenetrable beyond
their range, an optical effect, however, that may be produced in
darkness by a mere fringe of trees along the roadside. But I knew
while I watched the exquisite effects of brown and silver, produced by
the succession of tall, pale trunks rising above the lace-work of the
underwood, as scene after scene pressed upon us out of the dark, that
we were indeed in a forest country, only some twenty miles away from
the scene of General Pershing's drive at the end of last September,
when he achieved on the first day an advance of seven miles through
difficult country, while General Gouraud was pushing forward in
Champagne; and I found myself speculating in the dark on the many
discussions I had heard both among English and Americans of that
advance, and of the checks and difficulties which, as I suppose is now
generally admitted, followed on the first brilliant operations.
During the last few weeks further information has been forthcoming
about the Meuse-Argonne battle, as the American operations between the
Argonne and the Meuse from September 26th to November 11th are
apparently to be known. But a good deal of obscurity still hangs over
the details of the fighting. In the British Army I came across the
very general belief that the staff and transport work of the advance
had been--in the words of a well-known historian of the war--"as was
natural with a new army, scarcely adequate to the fighting qualities
of the troops engaged." And I often heard regret expressed that the
American Command had not been more willing to avail itself of the
staff experience of either or both of the older armies, which
might--so the British or French spectator thinks--have lessened the
casualty lists among extraordinarily gallant but inexperienced troops.
"Replacements fresh from home were put into exhausted divisions with
little time for training," says General Pershing's report. And "some
of the divisions were fighting their first battle." They were faced
also at the beginning of the advance by some of the best remaining
German troops. When one thinks of all the long and bitter training in
the field that went to the perfecting of French or British staff work,
and then of the difficult nature of the ground over which the First
American Army had to make its way, one can only feel the deepest
sympathy for the losses sustained by the fresh and eager troops. The
Argonne forest itself had long been recognised as impenetrable to
frontal attack, and on the Argonne side of the American twenty-mile
front, along the western edge of the valley of the Aire, the ground is
still heavily wooded and often very hilly. As one of the ablest
military critics, himself a soldier of great distinction, expressed it
to me: "Foch had set the Americans an uncommonly hard task!"
But if there was some failure in those matters where neither bravery
nor natural intelligence can take the place of long training, and
experience in the field, there was no failure in ardour or in spirit.
In spite of heavy losses, General Pershing never failed to push on.
Starting from a line on the northern edge of the great Verdun
battle-field, Montfaucon, the German headquarters during the Verdun
fighting of 1916, was captured in three days. Then came severe
fighting against fierce counter-attacks, and great difficulties with
transport over shell-torn ground and broken roads, difficulties
increased by bad weather. But on October 4th the gallant attack was
renewed, and by October 10th, owing to the combined effects of the
British drive in the north and the pressure on both sides of the
Argonne, from General Gouraud on the west and the Americans on the
east, the enemy fell back and the famous forest was cleared.
The third and last phase of the fighting began on the 23rd of October.
The enemy was now weakening rapidly along the whole of his line. For
while the American Army had been stubbornly fighting its way north
from Varennes to Grandpré, where it stood on November 1st, the British
Armies, in the great Battles of Cambrai-St. Quentin, Ypres, and
Courtrai, had not only captured the Hindenburg line and some fifty
thousand prisoners, but had brought about--without fighting--the
evacuation of Laon and the retreat of the Germans to the line of the
Aisne; the German withdrawal, also, to the Scheldt, involving the
freeing of Lille and the great industrial district of France; and
finally, in concert with Belgian, French, and some American units, the
clearing of the Belgian coast, and the recovery of Ostend, Zeebrugge
and Bruges. The end, indeed, was rushing on. Co-operation was
everywhere maintained, and blow followed blow. "During this period"
(6th to 31st October), says the British Commander-in-Chief, "our
Allies had been pushing forward steadily on both sides of the Argonne.
The enemy was held by their attacks on his southern flank, while to
the north the British offensive was driving forward rapidly behind his
right."
Then, with November, the British Army, in the Battle of the Sambre,
"struck at and broke the enemy's last important lateral
communications, divided his forces into two parts on either side of
the Ardennes, and initiated a pursuit which only stopped with the
Armistice." About one hundred thousand prisoners had been taken by the
British Armies since September 26th. "Victory, indeed," in General
Gouraud's phrase, "had changed her camp!" Led by her, the British,
French, and American Armies streamed east and north through the few
days that remained, pursuing a beaten and demoralised enemy. The final
American advance was begun on November 1st, and on November 7th
patrols of the 42nd Division reached the Meuse at Wadelincourt,
opposite Sedan; while the Fifth Division was in the Forest of Woevre,
and the 90th Division had captured Stenay.
Some very interesting figures have lately been given as to the forces
under General Pershing's command. Altogether some 770,000 men seem to
have been employed--both east and west of the Meuse--of whom 138,000
were French. Forty-six German divisions, amounting, according to the
American estimate, to about 350,000 men, opposed the American advance.
The casualties are given as 115,000--among them 26,000 killed[8]--for
the American troops, and 7,000 for the French. The enemy casualties
are estimated at 75,000, and 16,000 prisoners were taken.
[8] According to the latest estimate I have seen.
One incident, relatively unimportant, but wonderfully picturesque, is
sure to find a place in the American song and story of the future. It
was during the rapid advance of the last days, when the far vision of
the Rhine was already beckoning forward the victorious Allies, and
giving wings to the feet of youth. On the night of November 3rd, after
a successful day, the 9th and 23rd Infantry of the Second Division
found themselves in column formation on the road leading north to
Beaumont, a small town south of Sedan. The way lay open, and they took
it. They marched on and on through the night, throwing out the usual
advance guard and flank patrols, but otherwise unprotected. By all the
rules of war the brigade should have been cut off. But in this
twilight-time--this _Götterdämmerung_ of the end, conditions were
abnormal, and the two regiments marched on through forest country,
right through the enemy lines towards the Meuse, for about eight
kilometres, capturing machine-gunners asleep at their guns, and
rounding up parties of the enemy on the roads, till in the early dawn
they reached a farm where German officers were sitting round tables
with lights burning--only to spring to their feet in dismay, as the
Americans surrounded them. The cold autumn morning--the young bronzed
faces emerging from the darkness--the humbled and astonished foe:
surely Old and New, Europe and America, were never brought together in
a moment more attractive to the story-teller. A touch of romance amid
the tragedy and the glory! But how welcome it is!
The full history, however, of the Argonne fighting will probably not
be accurately known for some little time to come. No such obscurity
hangs over the glorious fighting on the Marne, through the scenes of
which I passed both on the railway journey from Paris to Metz, and in
motoring from Châlons to Paris on our return. Colonel Frederick
Palmer's book[9] gives an account of these operations, which, it seems
to me, ought to be universally read in the Allied countries. The
crusading courage of whole-hearted youth, the contempt of death and
suffering, the splendid and tireless energy which his pages describe,
if they touch other English hearts as deeply as they have touched
mine, will go a long way towards that spiritual bond between our
nations which alone can make real and lasting things out of Leagues
and Treaties.
[9] _America in France_, by Lt.-Col. Frederick Palmer, S.C., U.S.A.
It was on our way from Rheims to Paris after our drive through the
Champagne battle-field that we passed rapidly through the places and
scenes which Colonel Palmer describes.
As we approached Rheims about midday, a thick white fog rolled
suddenly and silently over the chalk uplands that saw General
Gouraud's campaign of last September and October. We ran through it,
past a turning to Moronvilliers on the left--famous name!--and within
a short distance of Nogent l'Abbesse, the fort which did most to wreck
Rheims Cathedral, and so down in a dreary semi-darkness into Rheims
itself.
Thirty-five years ago I was in Rheims for the first and only time,
before this visit. It was in September, not long before the vintage.
The town and the country-side were steeped in sunlight, and in the
golden riches of Mother Earth. The air indeed, as it shimmered in the
heat above the old town, and the hill slopes where the famous
vineyards lie, seemed to "drop fatness." Wealth, wine, the body and
its pleasures, the cunning handicraft and inherited lore of hundreds
of years and many generations seemed to take visible shape in the fine
old town, in its vast wine-cellars, and in the old inn where we stayed
with its Gargantuan bill of fare, and its _abonnés_ from the town,
ruddy, full-fleshed citizens, whose achievements in the way of eating
and drinking we watched with amazement. Even the cathedral seemed to
me to breathe the richness and gaiety of this central France; the
sculptures of the façade with its famous "laughing angel" expressed
rather the joy of living, of fair womanhood, of smiling maternity, and
childhood, of the prime of youth and the satisfied dignity of age,
than those austerer lessons of Christianity which speak from Beauvais,
or Chartres or Rouen. But how beautiful it all was, how full, wherever
one looked, of that old spell of _la douce France_! And now! Under the
pall of the fog we drove through the silent ruin of the streets, still
on their feet, so to speak, as at Verdun, but eyeless, roofless, and
dead, scarcely a house habitable, though here and there one saw a few
signs of patching up and returning habitation. And in the great square
before the Cathedral instead of the old comeliness, the old stir of
provincial and commercial life--_ruin!_--only intensified by a group
of motors, come to bring distinguished Sunday visitors from Paris and
the Conference, to see as much of it as an hour's wait would enable
them to see. There in front of the great portal stood the Prime
Minister of England and the Cardinal-Archbishop--heroic Cardinal
Luçon, who, under the daily hail of fire, had never left his church or
his flock so long as there was a flock in Rheims to shepherd. And
above the figure of the Cardinal soared the great West Front,
blackened and scarred by fire, the summits of the towers lost in mist,
and behind them, the wrecked and roofless church.
The destruction of irreplaceable values, other than human life, caused
by the war, is summed up, as far as France is concerned, in this West
Front of Rheims; so marred in all its beautiful detail, whether of
glass or sculpture, yet still so grand, so instinct still with the
pleading powers of the spirit. The "pity of it!" and at the same time,
the tenacious undying life of France--all the long past behind her,
the unconquerable future before her--these are the ideas one carries
away from Rheims, hot in the heart. Above all, for the moment, the
pity of it--the horror of this huge outrage spreading from the North
Sea to Switzerland, of what the French call so poignantly _nos
mines_--symbolised, once for all, by the brutal fate of this poem in
stone, built up by the French generations, which is Rheims Cathedral.
And as we passed away from Rheims, through the country roads and the
bombarded villages of the Tardenois, another district of old France,
which up to May last year was still intact, with all its farms and
village and country houses, and is now but little different from
Artois and Picardy, I found myself thinking with a passionate anxiety,
almost, of the Conference sitting in Paris and of its procedure.
"France is right--is _right_," I caught myself saying for the
hundredth time. "Before anything else--justice to her!--protection and
healing for her! Justice on the criminal nation, that has ravaged and
trampled on her, 'like a wild beast out of the wood,' and healing for
wounds and sufferings that no one can realise who has not witnessed
for himself the state of her richest provinces. It was she who offered
her breast to the first onslaught of the enemy, she who fought for us
all when others had still their armies to make, she who has endured
most and bled most, heavily as others--Britain, Italy, Belgium,
Serbia--have endured. Her claim must come first--and let those in
England and America who wish to realise why _come and see_."
We drove down diagonally through the Marne salient as it was last
summer after the German break-through on the Marne, to Dormans and so
across the river. In the darkening afternoon we passed over the
Montagne de Rheims, and crossed the valley of the Ardre, near the spot
where the 19th British Division, in the German attack of last June,
put up so splendid a fight in defence of an important position
commanding the valley--the Montagne de Bligny--that the General of the
Fifth French Army, General de Mitry, under whose orders they were,
wrote to General Haig: "They have enabled us to establish a barrier
against which the hostile waves have beaten and shattered themselves.
This none of the French who witnessed it will ever forget."
For if the Montagne de Bligny had gone, the French position on the
Montagne de Rheims, south-west of Rheims, and the Cathedral city
itself would have been endangered, no less than by the attack on the
north-east of the town, which General Gouraud a month later pinned to
earth. And when we reached Dormans, on the south bank, turning
west-ward to Chateau Thierry, we were on ground no less vital, where
in July the American troops in General Pershing's words wrote "one of
the most brilliant pages in our military annals." The story is well
known. The Germans were attempting to cross the river in force between
Donnans and Château Thierry, and then to thrust their way down the
valley of the Surmelin to Montmirail and the great main road to Paris,
which passes through that town. A single regiment of the 3rd American
Division held up the enemy, on the river bank to the east of Mézy,
fighting at the same time east and west against German parties who had
managed to get a footing at other points on the south side, and
finally counter-attacking, throwing two German divisions into complete
confusion, and capturing six hundred prisoners. No episode in the war
is more likely to ring in the memory of after-times. "In the bend of
the Marne at the mouth of the Surmelin," says Colonel Palmer, "not a
German was able to land. In all twenty boats full of the enemy were
sunk or sent drifting harmlessly down the stream." To the east of
Mézy also, four American platoons did incredible things in defence of
the Paris-Nancy railway. "They were not going to yield that track
alive--that was the simple fact." And their losses were appalling. In
the second platoon of the four engaged, all were killed except three
who were wounded, and half of the third were down before they had
driven the enemy from the embankment. The American graves lie all on
the south side of the line--the German on the north. "We actually took
over four hundred prisoners between the railroad and the river--the
6th German Grenadier Regiment was annihilated...." And the Germans
never reached the Surmelin valley, or that Montmirail road on which
they had set their hearts. "The deciding factor," says Colonel Palmer,
"was the unflinching courage of our men, and their aggressive spirit."
And the action, small as were the numbers engaged, could not have been
bettered. "It is a military classic."
Over this hard-fought ground, consecrated by the graves of men who had
thus bravely--thus gaily--laid down their lives for a cause of which
they had no doubt, we ran on to Chateau Thierry, and that western
flank of the Marne salient, where in June, while the Germans were
still pressing south, and in July when Foch turned upon his trapped
foe, the Americans, most of whom were for the first time in real
battle, bore themselves to the astonishment and admiration of all the
watching Allies. In June especially, when matters were at their worst.
The capture of Bouresches, and Belleau Wood, the capture of Vaux on
July 1st, the gallant help which an American machine-gun battalion
gave the French in covering the French retreat across the bridge at
Château Thierry, before it was blown up, and foiling the German
attempts to cross, and the German move towards Paris, were perhaps,
writes a British military authority, "the most splendid service, from
a military standpoint, the Americans rendered to the Allied Cause. It
was certainly the first occasion on which they really made themselves
felt, and brought home to the Germans the quality of the opposition
they were likely to encounter from the American Armies."
As we approached Château Thierry, the fog had cleared away and the
night was not dark. On our railway journey to Metz a week earlier, we
had seen the picturesque old place, with Hill 204 behind it, and the
ruins of Vaux to the north-west, in daylight, from the south bank of
the river. Now daylight had gone, but as we neared the Marne, the high
ground on the curving north bank, with its scattered lights and their
twinkling reflections in the water, made still a dimly beautiful
setting for the much injured but still living and busy town. We
crossed the temporary bridge into the crowded streets, and then as we
had come a long way, we were glad to dip for tea and a twenty minutes'
break into an inn crowded with Americans. Handsome, friendly fellows!
I wished devoutly that it were not so late, and Paris not so far away,
that I might have spent a long evening in their company. But we were
all too soon on the road again for Meaux and Paris, passing slowly
through the ruined streets of Vaux, with Bouresches and Belleau Wood
to our right, and behind us the great main road from Soissons to
Chateau Thierry, for the command of which in its northern sector, the
American divisions under General Mangin, and in its southern portion
those commanded by General Dégoutte, had fought so stoutly last July.
Altogether seven American divisions, or close upon 200,000 men, were
concerned in Foch's counter-attack, which began on July 18th; and as
General Pershing notes with just pride: "The place of honour in the
thrust towards Soissons on the 18th was given to our 1st and 2nd
divisions, in company with chosen French divisions. These two
divisions captured 7,000 prisoners and over 100 guns."
What one may call the "state entry" of America into the war had thus
been made, and Germany had been given full warning of what this new
element in the struggle must ultimately mean, were it given time to
develop. And during all these weeks of June and July, British and
American ships, carrying American soldiers, came in a never-ending
succession across the Atlantic. An American Army of 5,000,000 men was
in contemplation, and, "Why," said the President at Baltimore in
April, "limit it to 5,000,000?" While every day the British Navy kept
its grim hold on the internal life of Germany, and every day was
bringing the refreshed and reorganised British Army, now at the height
of its striking power, nearer to the opening on August 8th of that
mighty and continuous advance which ended the war.