CHAPTER XIX
A FAMOUS GESTURE
WHEN America had put the power of all her eloquence into the growing demand among the Allies for a unified command, and when, as a result of this pressure, General Foch, chief of staff of the French Army and hero of the battle of the Marne, had been made generalissimo, General Pershing put into words in what the French called a "superb gesture" the final sacrifice his country was prepared to make.
The first of the great German drives of 1918 had halted, but the battle was nowhere near its end. General Foch was sparing every possible energy on the battle-front and heaping up every atom of force for his reserve.
And on the morning of March 28 General Pershing went to headquarters and offered the American Army in full to General Foch, to put where he pleased, without any regard whatever for America's earlier wish to fight with her army intact.
It was the final sacrifice to the idealistic point of view. It had indisputably the heroic quality. And as such it was rewarded in the countries of the Allies with appreciation beyond measure.
"I have come," said General Pershing to General Foch that morning, "to say to you that the American people would hold it a great honor for our troops if they were engaged in the present battle. I ask it of you in my name and in that of the American people.
"There is at this moment no other question than that of fighting. Infantry, artillery, aviation – all that we have are yours, to dispose of them as you will. Others are coming, which are as numerous as will be necessary. I have come to say to you that the American people would be proud to be engaged in the greatest battle in history."
This offer was placed immediately by General Foch before the French war-council at the front, a council including Premier Clemenceau, Commander-in-Chief Pétain, and Louis Loucheur, Minister of Munitions, and was immediately accepted. American Army orders went forth in French from that day. And on those orders the army was presently scattered through the vast reserve army, from Flanders with the British to Verdun with the Italians and the French. They were not to go into actual battle, except near their own sectors, till the third monster drive, in July, for General Foch makes a religion of the reserve army and Fabian tactics. But they spread through the battle-line from Switzerland to the sea, as General Pershing had suggested, and "all we have" was at work.
Paris acclaimed the move royally. La Liberté wrote: "General Pershing yesterday took, in the name of his country, action which was grand in its simplicity and of moving beauty. In a few words, without adornment, but in which vibrated an accent of chivalrous passion, General Pershing made to France the offer of an entire people. 'Take all,' he said; 'all is yours.' The honor Pershing claims is shared by us, and it is with the sentiment of real pride that our soldiers will greet into their ranks those of the New World who come to them as brothers."
Secretary Baker, from American General Headquarters, gave out a statement. "I am delighted at General Pershing's prompt and effective action," he said, "in placing all the American troops and facilities at the disposal of the Allies in the present situation.
"It will be met with hearty approval in the United States, where the people desire their expeditionary force to be of the utmost service in the common cause. I have visited all the American troops in France, some of them recently, and had an opportunity to observe the enthusiasm with which officers and men received the announcement that they would be used in the present conflict. One regiment to which the announcement was made spontaneously broke into cheers."
The British Government issued an official statement on the night of April 1: "As a result of communications which have passed between the Prime Minister and President Wilson; of deliberations between Secretary Baker, who visited London a few days ago, and the Prime Minister, Mr. Balfour, and Lord Derby, and consultations in France in which General Pershing and General Bliss participated, important decisions have been come to by which large forces of trained men in the American Army can be brought to the assistance of the Allies in the present struggle.
"The government of our great Western ally is not only sending large numbers of American battalions to Europe during the coming critical months, but has agreed to such of its regiments as cannot be used in divisions of their own being brigaded with French and British units so long as the necessity lasts.
"By this means troops which are not sufficiently trained to fight as divisions and army corps will form part of seasoned divisions, until such time as they have completed their training and General Pershing wishes to withdraw them in order to build up the American Army.
"Throughout these discussions President Wilson has shown the greatest anxiety to do everything possible to assist the Allies, and has left nothing undone which could contribute thereto.
"This decision, however of vital importance it will be to the maintenance of the Allied strength in the next few months, will in no way diminish the need for those further measures for raising fresh troops at home to which reference has already been made.
"It is announced at once, because the Prime Minister feels that the singleness of purpose with which the United States have made this immediate and, indeed, indispensable contribution toward the triumph of the Allied cause should be clearly recognized by the British people."
Lord Reading, the British Ambassador at Washington, conveyed to President Wilson a message of thanks from the British Government, for "the instant and comprehensive measures" which the President took in response to the request that American troops be used to reinforce the Allied armies in France. The Embassy then gave out a statement that "the knowledge that, owing to the President's prompt co-operation, the Allies will receive the strong reinforcement necessary during the next few months is most welcome to the British Government and people."
The London papers reflected this sentiment in even stronger terms. Said the Westminster Gazette: "It seals the unity of the Allied forces in France, and so far from weakening the determination to provide all possible reinforcements from this country, it will, we are confident, give it fresh energy. All the big loans America has made to Great Britain and France, her heavy contributions of food, her princely gifts through the Red Cross, and the high, stimulating utterances of President Wilson, have done much to strengthen the Allied morale and lend material assistance to the war against autocracy, but none of these counts so heavily with the masses, because there are few families here or in France who have not a personal and intimate interest in the soldiers battling on the plains of Picardy."
The Evening Star wrote: "In a true spirit of soldierly comradeship they will march to the sound of guns, and will merge their national pride in a common stock of courage for the common good. It is a chivalrous decision, and President Wilson, Mr. Baker, and General Bliss have done a very great thing in a very great way. The British and French people are moved by this splendid proof of America's fellowship in the fight for world freedom."
If this gift was so significant in spirit, it was also bravely helpful in round numbers. At the end of March, 1918, General Pershing had 366,142 soldiers in his command in France, and of these, after nine months of training and adjustment, he could put about 100,000 in the line.
And within three months after this time he had more than 1,000,000 soldiers in France, the Navy Department having accomplished the astounding feat of transporting 637,929 in April, May, and June. The month that the reinforcement of the French and British Armies was planned and accepted the transport figures jumped from forty-eight thousand odd to eighty-three thousand odd. The month of its first practical operation the figures jumped again to one hundred and seventeen thousand odd, and in the month of June, the month of the anniversary of the first debarkation, there was a transportation of 276,372 men.
The last few days of March, 1918, saw the first large troop movements from the American zone – that is, saw them strictly in the mind's eye. Actually, the rain came down in such drenching downpours that the French villagers whom the motor-trucks passed did not so much see as hear the doughboys. Throughout the whole zone the activity was prodigious. Along the muddy roads two great processions of motor-trucks crossed each other day and night, the one taking the soldiers to one front, the other to another. Sometimes the camions slithered in the mud till they came to a stop in the gutter. Then the boisterous, jubilant soldiers would tumble out and set their shoulders under wheels and mud-guards, and hoist the car into the road again. The singing was incessant. The mood of the songs swung from "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" to "There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town To-night."
The exuberance of the soldiers knew no bounds. They were about to answer "present" to the roll-call of the big guns, the call they had been hearing for so many months, that had seemed to them so persistently and personally compelling. They were going to become a part of that living wall which for three years and a half had held the enemy out of Paris.
Those who were going to the British front were particularly exultant because they expected to find open fighting there, the kind they called "our specialty."
To all the units going into the French and British Armies a general order was read, jacking up discipline to the topmost notch.
"The character of the service this command is now about to undertake," read the order, "demands the enforcement of stricter discipline and the maintenance of higher standards of efficiency than any heretofore required.
"In future the troops of this command will be held at all times to the strictest observance of that rigid discipline in camp and on the march which is essential to their maximum efficiency on the day of battle."
The first of the fighting troops arrived on the British front on the morning of April 10, after an all-night march. They were grimed and mud-spattered, hungry, and tired, and cold. But the cheering that rose from the Tommies when they recognized the American uniforms at the head of the column would have revived more exhausted men than they.
The first comers were infantry, a battalion of them. Others came up during the day, with artillerymen and machine-gunners. The celebration of their coming lasted far into the next night, and the commanders of the British front exchanged telegrams of congratulation with the commanders of the French front that they were to be so welcomely refreshed.
But Generalissimo Foch, with his stanch determination not to be done out of his reserve, held the Americans back, and they were destined to remain behind the main battle-line for three and a half months longer.
Meanwhile the American strength was piling steadily up in the reserve, and in mid-May a large contingent of the National Army, said to be the first of them to land in Europe, reached the Flanders front and began to train at once behind the British lines, without preliminary work in American camps in France.
These men had what was probably the most exhilarating welcome of the war. The Tommies, many of them wounded and sick, poured out into the roadways as the new American Army arrived, and threw their caps into the air and split their throats with cheers. The British had been terrifically hard pressed in the German offensive. They had given ground only after incredible fighting. They were, in the phrase of General Haig, at last "with their backs to the wall." They held their line magnificently, but they could not have been less than filled with thanksgiving that they were now to have the help of the least war-worn of all their allies.
CHAPTER XX
THE FIRST TWO BATTLES
WHILE Generalissimo Foch was strengthening his long line, with American troops as flying buttresses, those sectors delegated to the Americans in their own right saw two battles, within a few weeks of each other, which attained to the dignity of names. The battle of Seicheprey, the first big American defensive action, and the battle of Cantigny, the first big offensive, the one in the Toul sector, the other in Picardy, were the occasions of the American baptism of fire. The one was so valiant, the other so brilliant, and both were so reassuring to the high commands of the Allies, that they would deserve a special emphasis even if they had not the distinction of being America's first battles.
On the night of April 20-21 the German bombardment of Seicheprey, a village east of the Renners wood, and just northwest of Toul, grew to monstrous proportions. Frenchmen who had seen the great Verdun offensive, in which the German Crown Prince had made a new record for artillery preparation, said that the heavy firing on the American sector eclipsed any of the action at Verdun.
The firing covered a front of a mile and a quarter. The bombardment was of high explosive shells and gas, apparently an effort to disable the return fire from American artillery. But all through the night the artillerymen sent their shells, encasing themselves in gas-masks.
Toward dawn the attack began. A full regiment of German soldiers, preceded by 1,200 shock troops, advanced under a barrage. Halfway across No Man's Land the American artillery laid down a counter-barrage, and many of the Germans dropped under it, but still the great waves of them came on, focussing on the village of Seicheprey.
The impact of their terrific numbers was too powerful to be withstood at once. The American troops fell back from some of their first-line trenches, which the first bombardment had caused them to hold loosely, and part of the forces fell back even from the village. The Germans marched into the village, evidently believing it to have been totally abandoned, carrying their flame-throwers and grenades, but making no use of them. Suddenly they discovered that certain American troops had been left to defend the village, while the main force reformed at the rear, and hand-to-hand fighting in the street became necessary. An American commander sent word back that the troops were giving ground by inches, and that they could hold for a few hours.
Seicheprey, the first big American battle, had every element of the World War in little. Before the loss of the village, which occurred about noon, the troops defending it had fought from ambush and in the open, had fought with gas and liquid fire, with grenades, rifles, and machine-guns. In the inferno the new troops were giving proof of valor that was to come out later and be scattered broadcast, as a measure of what America would bring.
In and out of the streets of Seicheprey, in its little public square, from the yards of its houses, hundreds of American soldiers were fighting for their lives. France lay behind them, trusting to be saved. Other Americans were behind them, racing into formation with French troops for the counter-attack. The defenders of Seicheprey, "giving by inches," had a battle-cry of their own, brief and racy, of the football-fields: "Hold 'em."
After a while the Germans took Seicheprey. The hideously pressed, slow-giving outpost moved back. Before the day had finished the shell-stripped streets of Seicheprey, sheltering the invaders, weltered again under the first American shells of the counter-attack. By nightfall the troops were creeping forward under the counter-barrage. The army, reformed, refreshed, and replenished, was on its way to take its own back again. The counter-battle lacked the monstrous gruelling of the first attack. It took less time. The superiority of numbers had shifted to the other side, and the white heat of determination did its share.
The Germans held Seicheprey about four hours.
The main positions of the army, which were threatened, were untouched because of the stoutness of the resistance at the village, and most of the first-line positions were retaken with the rush of the counter-attack.
The German prisoners who were captured had many days' rations in their kits and extra loads of trench-tools on their backs. They had intended to hold the American trenches for several days, facing them the other way, before they commenced the new attack, which, in the plan of the German high command, was to break apart the French and American lines where they joined, above Toul. Once this wedge was into the Allied vitals the rest was to be easy.
Though Seicheprey did not count as a big battle in point of numbers engaged or numbers lost, it loomed large enough in the importance it had strategically. The German high command obviously expected little or nothing from the "green American troops." The shock troops had been rehearsed for weeks to take the American lines and hold them till the Allied line should be broken apart. In fact, it was nobly planned. The only compliment the Americans could squeeze out of it was that the Germans were sent over in many places eight to their one. But the capture of Seicheprey lasted just four hours, and the disruption of the Franco-American line remained a mere brain-child of the Wilhelmstrasse.
The French soldiers who joined the counter-attack told thrilling stories of the Americans. They told that in one place north of Seicheprey, an American detachment was separated into small groups, and was cut off from the company to which it belonged through the entire fight. Behind the Americans and on their left flank were German units, but they could have retired on the right. They decided to stay and fight, so there they stayed, notwithstanding incessant enemy bombardment.
In the town of Seicheprey a squad of Americans found a few cases of hand-grenades. With these they put up a tremendous fight through the whole day, holding to a strip at the northern end of the village. They refused to surrender when they were ordered to, and at the end of the fighting only nine of the original twenty-three were left. By the grace of these nine men Seicheprey was never wholly German, even for the four hours.
One New England boy passed through the enemy barrage seven times to carry ammunition to his comrades. A courier who was twice blown off the road by shell explosions carried his message through and dropped as he reported. A lieutenant with only six men patrolled six hundred yards of the front throughout the day, holding communications open between the battalions to the right and left of him. A sanitary-squad runner captured by the Germans, escaped them and made his way into Seicheprey, tending the wounded there till help came. A machine-gunner found himself alone with his gun, and on being asked by a superior officer if he could hold the line there, replied that he could if he were not killed. He did. A regimental chaplain went to the assistance of a battery which was hard pressed, and carried ammunition for them for hours, then took his turn at the gun.
These make no roster of the heroes of Seicheprey. There were hundreds of them. But the censor's passionate aversion to details of all battles has scotched the narrative of heroes for the present.
Cantigny will warm the cockles of the American heart as long as it beats. There was a battle that for spirit, flare, brilliancy, came up to the rosiest dream that ever was dreamed, in Washington, or London, or Paris.
Cantigny, like Seicheprey, was not an engagement of great numbers. It was a little town that was hard to capture. It commanded a fine view of the American lines for miles back, and it had been able to withstand some violent attempts earlier, so it was particularly desirable. And it was in a salient, so that it formed an angle in the line. Its taking straightened the line, heartily disgruntled the Boches, who lost 200 prisoners and many hundred wounded and dead in defending it, and it gave the American troops their first taste of the offensive. But more than all that, it gave these same troops a record of absolutely flawless workmanship which, if not large, was at least complete.
The capture of Cantigny and 200 yards beyond it, which included the German second line, took just three-quarters of an hour.
In the niggardly terms of the communique: "This morning in Picardy our troops attacked on a front of one and a fourth miles, advanced our lines, and captured the village of Cantigny. We took 200 prisoners and inflicted on the enemy severe losses in killed and wounded. Our casualties were relatively small. Hostile counter-attacks broke down under our fire."
It was on the morning of May 28. At a quarter to six a bombardment began. At a quarter to seven the troops went over the top. The barrage went first, a dense gray veil. Then came twelve French tanks. Just behind the tanks stalked the doughboys.
The soldiers moved like clockwork. There were no unruly fringes to be nipped by the barrage. There was no break in the methodical stride. They went forward first a hundred yards in two minutes. Then the barrage slowed to a hundred yards in four minutes. In a little while the troops had arrived at the edge of the village; then the close-quarter fighting began.
At 7.30 a white rocket rose from the centre of Cantigny, dim against the smoky sky, to tell the men behind that "the objective is reached and prisoners are coming."
The Americans found the enemy in confusion and unreadiness, and the initial resistance from machine-guns at the town's edge was easily overcome. Where the burden of hard fighting came was in routing the Germans out from the caves and tunnels and cellars of the town into which they had retired.
There was a long tunnel in the town, which, after furious fighting, was surrounded and isolated. The flame-throwers were placed at both ends of the tunnel, and that episode was ended. Some of the caves were large enough to hold a battalion. These were handled by the mopping-up troops, who threw hand-grenades.
The prisoners began to file back almost immediately. One grinning Pittsburgher, wounded in the arm, marched in the rear of a prison squad. "That's handin' it to them Huns, blankety-blank 'em," he said cheerfully.
The village caught fire from the bombardment and the firing of the tunnel, and for hours after its capture the soldiers had to fight flames.
The first of the American "shock troops" went from the village on to the German second-line trenches, and under a hail of bullets from German machine-guns dug themselves in and faced the trenches the other way.
All that day they held their prize unmolested. They had all the high ground beyond Cantigny, and an approach was, to put it mildly, precarious. But by five of the afternoon the German counter-attacks had begun. One wave after another stormed half-way up the hill, then tumbled down again, broken under the American artillery. Four counter-attacks were made against Cantigny, but all of them failed. The new positions were consolidated, under heavy fire and gas attack, and there they stayed.
This gallant battle called forth intemperate commendation from the headquarters of the Allies. The French despatch to Washington told officially of the high opinion the French held of it, and there were many congratulatory telegrams from London. The press of London and Paris glowed with praises. The London Evening News wrote:
"Bravo, the young Americans! Nothing in to-day's battle narrative from the front is more exhilarating than the account of their fight at Cantigny. It was clean-cut from beginning to end, like one of their countrymen's short stories, and the short story of Cantigny is going to expand into a full-length novel, which will write the doom of the Kaiser and Kaiserism. We expected it. We have seen those young Americans in London, and merely to glance at them was to know that they are conquerors and brothers in that great Anglo-Saxon-Latin compact which will bring down the Prussian idol… They do not swagger, and they have no war illusions. They have done their first job with swift precision, characteristic of the United States, and Cantigny will one day be repeated a thousand-fold."
The Times wrote:
"Our allies know the significance of that as well as we do. So, too, do the German generals and the German statesmen. It means that the last great factor between autocracy and freedom is coming into effective play on the battle-field… There could be no reflection more heartening for the Allies or more dismaying to their adversaries."
"Their adversaries," meanwhile, were doing what they could to keep their dismay to themselves. In the German announcement of the loss of Cantigny there was mention only of "the enemy." The German people were not to know for a while that the "ridiculous little American Army" had got to work.