On the night of the 26th the 3rd was relieved by the 5th, now recuperated. It was a pity that the 3rd, after its wonderful record in the battle, could not have participated in the sweep of our battalions down the far slopes of the whale-back. In line since October 1st, four weeks lacking two days, it had paid a price for taking the Mamelle trench, and for all its enduring, skillful attacks under that diabolical cross-fire from the galleries of heights. Its casualties, 8,422, were more than half its infantry, and, taken in connection with the positions it gained and its length of service, are an all-sufficient tribute to its character.
Hopeless stabbing at the flanks—The Lightning Division at Grandpré—Vertical warfare—Scaling walls to the citadel—Stumbling toward Loges Wood—The All-Americas still doing their part—A bowl east of the Meuse—Approached through Death Valley—The Blue and Greys crawling toward the rim—The rough end of the stick for the Yankee Division—Belleau Wood a key point—General Edwards and the staff—Desperate grappling.
Hopeless stabbing at the flanks—The Lightning Division at Grandpré—Vertical warfare—Scaling walls to the citadel—Stumbling toward Loges Wood—The All-Americas still doing their part—A bowl east of the Meuse—Approached through Death Valley—The Blue and Greys crawling toward the rim—The rough end of the stick for the Yankee Division—Belleau Wood a key point—General Edwards and the staff—Desperate grappling.
The enemy must make sure of holding our left in front of Grandpré gap, or we would swing toward the whale-back from that direction; he must not lose the heights east of the Meuse, or we would cut off his line of retreat across the river. This naturally called for violent pressure on his flanks in order to draw forces from his center, where we were going through the Kriemhilde Stellung. During the third week of October there was just as intense fighting for the "citadel" of Grandpré and for the heights east of the Meuse as for Chatillon and Dame Marie ridges, and for the Loges and the Ormont woods as for the Bantheville, Clairs Chênes, Rappes, and Pultière woods.
We shall first tell the story of our left, where the 78th Division not only drew the arrows to its breast but charged them in their flight, after, as we have seen in Chapter XVIII, the 77th, on the 14th and 15th, had accompanied the general attack in fighting to master the northern bank of the Aire. Sacrifice is the only word for the 78th's action. Without expecting that the division could gain ground, the Army command set it the thankless task of repeated attacks to consume the enemy's strength, which it carried out with superb ardor and fortitude.
The 78th, originally drawn from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and parts of New York State, took its name of the "Lightning" Division from an obvious local source. Under Major-General James H. McRae, a skillful and modest commander, both in its training at the British front and in its occupation of the Limey sector north of Toul, where it made remarkably successful raids, it had shown that although it was not one of the best advertised of National Army divisions it was one of the most promising. Where other new divisions had had their first experience in the intoxicating drive for three and four miles in the first stage of the battle, the 78th was to have no open field for its bolts of lightning, but must use them as hammer-heads against granite, when it took over from the 77th after the latter had made its lodgment in Grandpré.
Though we had the Aire trough, we were not yet through with the westward bend of the Aire river, where the bottoms are broad and swampy. A wedge-like escarpment projects down to the town of Grandpré from the heights of the Bourgogne Wood. This escarpment afforded machine-guns cover for firing east and west and into the town. Eastward, high ground sloping up from the river bottoms continues to the Loges Wood, which averages about three-quarters of a mile in breadth and depth, covering an eminence. In this sector, about two miles in length, the 78th on the river bottom faced commanding positions at every point on its front. To the Germans the Bourgogne Wood was a bastion against the right flank of the French Fourth Army in its movement toward Sedan, a barrier between our flank and the French, and the flanking outpost of the Loges Wood, as I have indicated, in holding us back from swinging northward toward Buzancy and cutting into the flank of the whale-back.
Conditions in the relief of the 77th in the intense darkness on the night of the 15th were very mixed. Saint-Juvin on the north side of the river, to the right or east, was securely held. In Chevières on the south side of the river the Lightnings of the 78th report that they still had mopping up to do before they crossed. East of Grandpré the Aire has two beds, which made the crossing of the river bottomunder shell- and machine-gun fire the more trying. In Grandpré the 78th found itself in possession of only a section of the town near the river bank on the morning of the 16th, and with only small detachments of troops across the river,—which it must cross in force under plunging fire before it reached the foot of the slopes.
It simplifies the action which followed to divide it into two parts: the left brigade, operating against the Grandpré positions, and the right against the Loges Wood positions. I shall describe that of Grandpré first. A principal street of the town runs up the hill against the western slopes of the escarpment. Machine-gunners and snipers could go and come from the heights into the back doors of the houses, and pass upstairs to the front windows, whence they could sweep the street with their fire. The division knew the escarpment as the "citadel"; for this tongue of high ground on its eastward side was surmounted by the ruins of ancient buildings, with old stone walls which must be scaled, while the Saint-Juvin road, which runs past it, is on the edge of a swamp. The only way to attack the citadel from the town, which it absolutely commanded, was over a narrow causeway where a squad of men could not properly be deployed. My Lord's castle of olden times had an ideal position for holding the villagers on the river bank in meek subjection.
A vertical warfare ensued in Grandpré, the Germans firing downward from upper-story windows and the citadel, and the Americans firing upward. It took two days of house-to-house fighting, in and out of doorways, hugging the house walls, and taking house by house, before this town of a thousand inhabitants was cleared of Germans, whose tenacity in holding the town itself, when they had the citadel at their backs, was indicative enough of the store they set by their right flank. On the 19th, the town having been mopped up, and sufficient troops across the fords for the purpose, an attack was made on the citadel and upon the western slopes of the escarpment. Beyond the citadel a park extends for a distance of a quarter of a mile. Beyond that Talma Hill, and Hills 204 and 180, and Bellejoyeuse farm formed a rampart of heights at the edge of the wood. The 78th, wrestling with machine-guns in this small area, was to use enough tactical resource for a great battle.
At 2A.M.the Lightnings began the assault. The hour was chosen because darkness favored the plan, which must be that of scaling the walls of an ancient fortress. Two separate parties made the attempt on the walls. The enemy machine-guns from the Bourgogne Wood instantly concentrated on one party, a target despite the darkness, while a shower of bombs was thrown down upon their heads. Theother party reached the top, only to be met by irresistible fire from machine-guns, which the artillery had not been able, for a good reason, to silence. The guns were dropped into deep dugouts during the bombardment, and hoisted by cables to turn on the advancing infantry, immediately the bombardment was over. This care in preparation was another indication of the value the Germans placed on the citadel and the hills at the edge of the wood. Under scourging machine-gun fire, the attack everywhere had to fall back, after severe casualties, except that the right regiment of this brigade took the Loges farm, between the Loges Wood and the Bourgogne Wood, which it managed to hold by skillful digging under cross-fire.
For the next four days there were the usual patrols, while the 78th's artillery hammered the citadel and the hills. On the 23rd a small party, led by a lieutenant and three or four men, under a powerful rolling barrage finally scaled the walls of the citadel and rushed on to Bellejoyeuse farm, where they had a ferocious struggle with the garrison while waiting for the second wave of the attack to come to their support; but the second wave, having been stopped by a curtain of machine-gun and artillery fire, had to fall back to the northern edge of the park. The gallantry of that little band had not been in vain, as was that of the men of the 5th who went throughthe Rappes Wood. They had the citadel. There had been success, too, at another vital point. Talma Hill had been taken. The Lightnings on the left were having their reward for their arduous sticking to it in a warfare which was no longer vertical, though still at a great angle of disadvantage.
Their jumping-off places having been gained, progress became more rapid in a series of thrusts. On the 25th, one party entered the Bourgogne Wood from Talma Hill. There was a gap of half a mile between them and the troops in the park. Both they and the men in the park held on against the worst the enemy's machine-guns and artillery could do, while it took two days' persistent fighting by other units to conquer machine-gun nests and snipers, to close the gap. On the 29th Bellejoyeuse farm was taken; Hill 180 beyond it was taken; Hill 204 had already been stormed with the aid of the French. The left brigade of the 78th had finished the task.
The traveler who goes to the Meuse-Argonne battlefield, as he follows the road from Grandpré on his way up the valley of the sinuous Aire, would do well to take a long and thoughtful look at the sweep of open ground between the river and the green mass of the Loges Wood rising from its edge. Let him imagine the right brigade of the 78th crossing the river on the 16th, and plunging through mudknee-deep, as in the freshness of the youth of its men and its division spirit, without artillery preparation, and without time to organize an attack properly, answering the call of the Army to divert German strength from the fronts of the divisions in the center, it went across that exposed zone straight in face of the blaze from the machine-guns in the woods and the associated heights. Though the gray valley floor was sprinkled with the figures of the dead and wounded, the charge reached the edge of the wood; it had gained the foot of the stairs.
Loges Wood was not only high ground. Its character and situation as well peculiarly suited it for defense. The wood was thick enough to prevent the artillery making a barrage to protect the infantry, and sparse enough to give hidden machine-guns in the thickets a free play. It was estimated that there were machine-guns at intervals of forty yards in the German first line of defense, not to mention the interlocking system in the depths of the woods. The ground itself was a series of ravines, resembling nothing so much as a corrugated iron-roof. Each formed a natural avenue for machine-gun fire. The machine-gunners in the woods were supported by plentiful artillery in the rear to concentrate upon the open spaces before the wood and on the irregular open slopes east and west, which were linked together in singular adaptability for the enemy's purpose. Hewas not, in this instance, to depend upon small groups of machine-gunners to fight to the death. Knowing from past experience that these would be overcome by our hammering tactics, he was prepared to keep on putting in reserves for counter-attacks to answer our attacks. Therefore Loges Wood was to become a cockpit.
The problem of how to attack it was baffling. Of course, encircling was the obvious method; but this meant a longer exposure of the men in the open, while as they swung in toward the wood they would have cross-fire from the adjoining positions into their backs. The troops that had reached the edge of the wood drove halfway through on the morning of the 17th, but were withdrawn to make an attack from the west. The reserves sent to hold the line they had gained had a rough and tumble with a German counter-attack, and had to yield a hundred yards. The attack from the west under the flanking fire of Hill 180 managed to dig in and hold on the west side of the wood, level with the line in the wood. This was progress; but it was progress at a terrible cost. The position was too murderous, however thoroughly the men dug, to be maintained. The Lightnings must either go forward or back, or be massacred in their fox-holes.
On the morning of the 18th the support battalions passed through the front line, and, rushing and outflankingmachine-gun nests, in a fight that became a scramble of units, each clearing its way as fast as it could, numbers of our men broke through to the northern edge of the wood. All the while the Germans, instead of holding fast to their positions, were acting on the offensive at every opportunity, infiltrating down the ravines, as they tried to creep around isolated parties, and again charging them. No commander could direct his troops under such conditions. It was a fight between individuals and groups acting as their own generals, of German veterans, with four years' experience in this kind of fighting, against the resourceful Lightnings. His artillery gassing the southern edge of the wood to keep back our reserves, the enemy kept forcing in more reserves in his counter-attacks, which gained weight and system until they forced our survivors, by ghastly losses, to retire to their starting point.
Thus far the Germans were still holding the escarpment and citadel and the hills at the edge of the Bourgogne Wood, in line with the southern edge of the Loges Wood, and well south of its northern edge, while the Loges farm, between Grandpré and the Loges Wood, was an outpost of enfilade fire at close quarters. We know how in its night attack just before dawn, though it failed to take the citadel, the left brigade took and held Loges farm. The right brigade was to move at the same time on thewood. Though our artillery had tried to smash the nests, its shells had been unsuccessful among the trees, and when a frontal advance was attempted, it met heavier machine-gun fire than hitherto. At the same time we attacked the wood from another direction, trying for the eastern edge. The Germans had the wood encircled with machine-guns, however. Our charge, as it turned in its swinging movement, met their fire in face, and received machine-gun fire in flank and rear from the village and high ground around the village of Champigneulle. Driven back to its starting point, it closed up its gaps and charged again under this cross-fire of machine-guns and a deluge of gas and high-explosive shells which shattered it.
The brigade had used up all its reserves; the division had none available; Corps could send none. By this time our divisions in the center had gained the Kriemhilde, and were consolidating their gains, and, therefore, events on other parts of the front had their influence in a Corps order to withdraw to the Grandpré-Saint-Juvin road. When the exhausted men in the gas-saturated Loges Wood were told that they were to retreat, they complained. They might be staggering with fatigue, and half-suffocated from wearing their gas masks, but they had been fighting in hot blood at close quarters for the wood. They did not want to yield to their adversary. They werecritical of the command which compelled them to retrace their steps in the darkness, which was done in good order, across the levels spattered with the blood of their comrades who had breasted the machine-gun fire.
Every bullet and shell which the men of either brigade of the 78th had received was one less fired at the heroic 42nd in its struggle for the mastery of the treacherous slopes and the wire and trenches of the stronghold of the Chatillon ridge. Their ferocious attacks, made in the hope of gains which the Army knew were impossible, had served another purpose in convincing the Germans that our final drive would concentrate on this flank instead of on the Barricourt ridge to the east of the whale-back. In this final drive the 78th, after hard fighting, was to enjoy its retribution; for it took Loges Wood, and afterward knew the joy of stretching its legs in rapid pursuit for twelve miles. Its casualties were 5,234 for all of its operations.
While we are following the careers of the divisions before the attack of November 1st, we must not forget that the 82nd was still in line on the right of the 78th. It had reached the Kriemhilde on October 11th, and then in the general attack of the 14th penetrated the Kriemhilde, where it bends west from the Chatillon ridge, and it had taken Hill 182 and the other heights to the north and northeastwhich commanded the defenses of Saint-Juvin. As the result of these actions of determined initiative and heroic sacrifice, one regiment had 12 officers and 332 men fit for duty; another regimental commander reported that eighty per cent of his survivors were unfit for duty, and that the other twenty per cent ought to be on the sick list. However, they could be depended upon until they swooned. The effective rifle strength of the division was 4,300, or less than a third of the normal total for a division. Yet it attacked in support of the 78th's effort against Loges Wood. Then it settled down to holding its lines and patrolling.
Provident General Duncan saved his exhausted men from a part of the strain by skillful front-line reliefs on alternate nights. As the All-Americas might not go into rest as a division, he established a rest camp of his own, where exhausted, slightly gassed, wounded, and sick men had clean clothing, baths, and plenty of hot food, which rehabilitated them into "effectives"; and this enabled him to keep the 82nd in line until the night of October 31st, when the exhaustion of its memorable service in the Aire trough was to rob it of the thrill of pursuing the enemy to the Meuse, which the now rested 77th and 80th, taking its place, were to know. It had taken 900 prisoners, and paid for its success with 6,764 casualties.
So much for the left flank. We have bidden farewell to the Aire valley, whose trough and gap were now behind us; but we were not to be through with the Meuse until the day of the armistice. I approach no part of our fighting in France with a greater sense of incapability than the battle east of the Meuse—a separate battle, so influential in the fortunes of the main battle, which has never received its share of credit. Here every feature of the main battle was repeated in a confined arena which recalled to me the assaults on Port Arthur. I have already described the early operations of the 29th and 33rd in driving the wedge, which we hoped would relieve our Third Corps from long-range flanking fire to which it could not respond; and how they had been checked in the quixotic mission of an immediate conquest of the Borne de Cornouiller, or Hill 378.
As we know, the Borne, about three miles from the Meuse, was the supreme height of the eastern valley wall. Southward in the direction of the attack it sloped down into the steep-walled ravine of the Vaux de Mille Mais, whose eastern end gave into a series of ridges rising to the summit of Hill 370, protecting the Grande Montagne Wood in front as it protected 378 in flank by the Grande Montagne Wood and the famous Molleville farm. Thence an encircling ridge turning southward toward the Verdunforts formed the rim of a bowl. Had the German Army, as planned, withdrawn to the Meuse line, these hills would have been to their defense what the hills of Verdun were to the French defense in the battle of 1916.
Once the heights were taken, except for a series of detached hills, the way was open to the plain of the Woëvre and to Germany. Back of them and on their reverse slopes the Germans had built barracks for their men, and assembled their material for the great Verdun offensive. On the crests and the near slopes they had built concrete pill-boxes at critical points, and arranged a system of defense in the Verdun days, when they had learned by experience the tactical value of every square rod of ground. The approach from the bottom of the bowl—which is a rough description—to the rim was covered by many smaller interlocking and wooded hills and ridges cut by ravines. There was no ravine, it seemed, no part of this pit which was not visible to observers from some one of the heights. The operation of the French Corps, under which our divisions operated, must be fan-shaped, sweeping up the walls of the bowl, as a wedge at any given point would have meant annihilation. The approach to the bowl for our troops was along a road through a valley, which was as warranted in receiving its name asany Death Valley in the war. On the French side of the old trench line this ran through an area of villages in utter ruin from the bombardments of the Verdun battle, then through Samogneux and more ruins, woods, and fields of shell-craters into the valley of the bowl itself.
For five or six miles, then, stretched an area of desolation without any billeting places where troops could rest, except a few rat-infested and odorous, moist dugouts and cellars, roofed by the débris of villages. The young soldier who was going under fire for the first time, as he marched forward past that grayish, mottled, hideous landscape, might see the physical results of war upon earth, trees, and houses. When he came into Death Valley, he was to know its effects upon men. For two or three miles the road was always under shell-fire. By day visible to the enemy's observers, by night his gunners could be sure that guns registered upon it, if they fired into the darkness, would find a target on its congested reaches. It was inadequate to the traffic of the divisions engaged. Troops marching into battle must run its deadly gamut before they could deploy. It was the neck of the fan-shaped funnel of the battle-line. Transport was halted by shell-torn cars and motor-trucks and dead horses until they were removed, and by fresh craters fromlarge calibers until they were refilled. There was no rest for the engineers; all the branches which were not ordinarily in the front line knew what it was to be under fire.
The Illinois men of the 33rd, on the left, after they had crossed the river and reached the slopes of the Borne de Cornouiller on the 9th, could move no farther on their front until the rim of the bowl was taken on their right. They stood off counter-attacks, and continued nagging the enemy until their relief on October 21st, forty-three days after they had gone into line on the left bank of the Meuse, and twenty-six days since, in the attack of September 26th, they had taken Forges Wood in their brilliant swinging maneuver which had been followed by their skillful bridging and crossing of the river. Now the division was to go to the muddy and active Saint-Mihiel sector for a "rest," relieving the 79th, which had had its "rest" and was to return for a part in the last stages of the battle. Even the much traveled, enduring, industrious, and self-reliant infantry of the 33rd had not had such a varied experience as the artillery brigade, which I may mention as a further illustration of how our units were moved here and there. It had been attached in turn to the 89th Division, the 1st Division, the Ninth French Corps, the 91st Division, the 32nd Division, the Army artillery, and finally to the 89th Division for the drive ofNovember 1st, without ever once having served with its own division.
While the 33rd had been maintaining its ground, under orders to attempt no advance, in the east of the Meuse battle, the Blue and Grey 29th, its regiments intermixed at times with French regiments, had been forcing the action among the ravines and woods of the Molleville farm region against the same kind of offensive tactics that the Germans were using in the Loges Wood, and for an equally important object in relation to the plan of our operations as a whole. All parts of its front line and its support positions were being continually gassed. The frequent shifting of its units in relation to the French, in an effort to find some system of making progress up the walls of the rim, were additional vexation in trying to keep organization in hand over such difficult ground, under such persistent and varied fire against the veteran Prussians and Wurtembergers, who were quick to make the most of every opening offered them.
A branch of the Death Valley road, the Crépion road, runs up the eastern slope of the bowl. The point where it passes over the rim was most vital. From a rounded ridge on both sides of the road for a stretch between woods you look down upon the village of Crépion in the foreground and receding slopes in the distance. This point gained mightflank the Etraye Wood positions, the Grande Montagne, and eventually Hill 378, the Borne de Cornouiller itself.
Commanding the southern side of the road and approaches to the summit was Ormont Wood, which rose to the crest of a very high hill, 360, only eighteen feet lower than the Borne, which was defended by pill-boxes. On the other side of the road were the Reine and Chênes woods. Beyond these was the Belleu Wood, on the same side of the road. Belleu and Ormont were key points. Belleu was to have as bad as name as Belleau Wood in the Château-Thierry operations.
On October 12th the Blues and Greys of the 29th, coöperating with the French, undertook in an encircling movement, which was complex in its detail, to take the woods on both sides of the roads. This aroused all the spleen of the German artillery. It drew violent counter-attacks from the German infantry, continued in two days of in and out fighting. Successive charges reached the edges of Ormont. There under a tempest of artillery fire they looked up the slope through the thickets toward the summit of 360, where the machine-guns were emitting too murderous a plunging fire to permit them either to advance or to hold all the ground they had gained. On the north side of the road Reine Wood and a part of Chênes Wood were taken against counter-attacks.This was encouraging. Though it did not seem to make the capture of Ormont easier, it opened the way for an attack on the 15th toward Molleville farm on the left and Grande Montagne on the right. Much ground was gained on the left, and some on the right, where the fire from the Etraye ridge stopped the advance.
We were slowly working our way toward the rim, using each bit of woods or ridge which we won as a lever for winning another. All the while we were an interior line, attacking up a gallery against an exterior line whose ends could interlock their cross-fire. On the 16th, by dint of the sheer pluck of units dodging artillery concentrations and zones of machine-gun fire, and wearing down machine-gun nests, further progress was made on the Grande Montagne. The 29th, always under shell-fire and gas, had been attacking and resisting counter-attacks for eight days. It was not yet "expended" by any means; but it was glad to find that another American division was coming into the arena to relieve some of its own as well as French elements.
Had we any division whose veterans might feel, as the result of their experience, that they were familiar with all kinds of warfare, it was the 26th, the "Yankee" Division, National Guard of New England. As I have mentioned in my firstbook, the Yankees had learned not to expect a sinecure. Assignments which meant victory with theatrical ease never came to them. If four divisions were to draw lots for four places in line, they took it for granted that the worst would go to the 26th, which had become expert in gripping the rough end of a stick. The second division to arrive in France, the 26th was put into trenches, after a short period of training, in the ugly Chemin des Dames region, away from the American sector. From there it was sent direct into the mire of the Toul sector under the guns of Mont Sec, where it resisted the powerful thrust of German shock troops at Seicheprey. The length of time it remained in the Toul sector, and the length of the line it held there, might well have turned it into a division of mud wallowers; but it was able, on the contrary, to make some offensive thrusts of its own, and only longed for the time when it might have something like decent ground for an attack. From Toul it went to relieve the Marines and Regulars of the 2nd in the violent Pas-Fini sector on the Château-Thierry road, where, after more than two weeks in line, instead of having the period of rest and reorganization given to divisions before a big attack, it drove through to Epieds in the counter-offensive. Then at Saint-Mihiel, where it was with the French on the western side of the salient, by rapid marching it swung across toVigneulles to meet the veteran 1st in closing the salient.
If there were any replacements in the 26th who felt apprehension as they came up Death Valley, the older Yankees, in the name of all the mud, shells, gas, machine-gun fire, and hardships they had endured, soon gave them the heart of veteran comradeship by their example. Saint-Mihiel had been revenge for them. It had set a sharper edge on their spirits. Artillery and all the other units having long served together, the Yankees were to be "expended" as other veteran divisions had been for a great occasion in the battle—an occasion in keeping with their tough experience. It was not for them to have the straight problem of charging a trench system, but to maneuver in and out of these ravines and woods, facing this way and that against appalling difficulties. Maine forests, Green Mountains, White Mountains, little Rhode Island, and Massachusetts and Connecticut had traditions in their history in the background of the fresh traditions the Yankees had won in France. With the Blue and Greys already in, and the 79th coming, the east of the Meuse battle became somewhat of a family affair of the original colonies. The French had great respect for the 26th. Much was expected of it, and it was to do much.
It went to the attack immediately on the morningof the 23rd. On the left it coöperated with the 29th, which, feeling rejuvenated in the presence of Americans on its flank, concentrated its remaining effectives for an ambitious effort which carried the Americans through to the Etraye ridge, and even to the important Pylone, or observatory, before the advance elements were stopped. This was the high watermark for the Blue and Grey, splendidly won. Without trying to follow the detail of the maneuver, the 26th, as soon as it was known that its Etraye ridge attack was succeeding, put in a reserve battalion and rushed for the Belleu, that wood on the east of the Crépion road, just short of the vital point on the rim that I have mentioned. In the impetuosity of new troops in their first battle, and the spryness and wisdom of veterans, this battalion swept over the machine-guns and through the wood, which the 29th had already entered, to meet a savage reception.
This was shaking the whole plan of German defense. It was an insulting slap in the face to German tactics. Just over the crest beyond Belleu, as I have already mentioned, the slope ran down to the plain of the Woëvre. The German had no shell-fire to spare now for the other bank of the Meuse. Batteries whose fire had been the curse of the Third Corps swung round in concentration on that exposed patch of woods. The machine-gunners in the pill-boxesand log-covered redoubts were reinforced by others. It was a wonderful thing to have gone through Belleu Wood; but in order to have held, the Yankees would have needed something less permeable to bullets and shell-fragments, and subject to gas, than a "stern and rock-bound coast" determination. The battalion had to withdraw from the wood during the night, which was illumined by a fury of bursting shells.
The Yankees were now fairly warmed to their task. On the 24th they fought all day for Belleu Wood and Hill 360 in the Ormont Wood. A cleverly arranged smoke-screen protected their first entry into Belleu, when they advanced five hundred yards. The Germans knew well how to fight in that wood. They could draw back from their advanced line of fox-holes to their strong shell-proof emplacements, and call for an artillery barrage to blast our charge. Then they could gather for a counter-attack. Four times that day they rushed the Yankees under the support of their concentrations of artillery, which prevented our reinforcements coming up, and the fourth time they drove out our survivors. Attack again! New England would not accept the rebuff from Prussia. At 2.30 the next morning the Yankees charged the wood in darkness and rain, and they went through it, too.
There was no use of our artillery trying to crushthe concrete pill-boxes defending the Ormont height on the other side of the road. They were invulnerable to shells, for the Yankees were facing, in most exposed down-hill positions, the latest fashion in mobile tactics in command of well-tested defenses on high ground. Trench-mortar fire in addition to machine-gun fire and shells shattered the two battalions which tried by all the suppleness of veteran tactics to reach Hill 360 on the 23rd. The next morning, after the usual night of shell-fire and suffering from cold on the wet ground, another attack did reach the hill, and fought in and out around it and in the woods, but could not hold it against the plunging fire of unassailable pill-boxes.
On October 24th a new commander, Brigadier-General Frank E. Bamford, who was trained in the school of the 1st, came to the 26th. Some people thought that our army staff was not in very intimate touch with the situation in the bowl. Preoccupied with the main battle, it was harassed by the flanking fire from the heights east of the Meuse. It wanted possession of these heights before starting the next general attack. A veteran division had been sent to take them. Evidently harder driving was required from Division Headquarters of the 26th.
"Go through!" Individuals did not count; success alone counted. Officers had been relieved right and left for failing to succeed. "Go through!"Other heights had been taken: why not these? Perhaps someone had overlooked the fact that while the German army retained anything like cohesion or any dependable troops, its command would not yield this Gibraltar in covering its retreat toward Germany after it was out of Sedan and Mézières, and withdrawn from the whale-back; and this was all the more reason for our desiring Gibraltar. The relief of other divisional commanders created nothing approaching the stir made by that of Major-General Clarence R. Edwards.
Well-known before the war as Chief of the Insular Bureau, possessing characteristics that were bound to attract attention, he had had command of the 26th from its organization. He went about much among his men. They all knew his tall figure. They and the line officers were bitter over losing him. If there had been a vote of the soldiers of the division on the question of recalling him, it would have been almost unanimous in his favor. The staff seemed to think that he was too kind to officers of a type which other division commanders relieved; that the success of the division had been due to the fine material in the ranks, which needed better direction; and finally that his long service had broken him down to a point where he had lost his grip on his organization. In answer, his friends said that he had made the division out of the nucleusof many National Guard units and replacements. He had given it its original spirit of corps, and kept up its spirits under handicaps which would have demoralized many divisions.
In the first two days the 26th had suffered 2,000 casualties. On the 27th they were sent into one of those ambitious attacks which look well on paper. To the right of Hill 360, which of course was on the rim, was a valley, and beyond that on higher ground the Moirey Wood, continuing the rim. Relying on veteran experience to carry out this daring maneuver, they were to swing around Hill 360, and into the valley, and take Moirey Wood. Such encircling movements had been carried out before; but their success had been dependent upon the relative strength of the positions to be encircled and of the forces occupying them, not to mention the volume of all kinds of fire on the flanks of the attack. This attack invited the reception that it met no less than a man who jumps into a rattlesnake's nest. The German army might be staggering to defeat, but east of the Meuse the German units were not yet in the mood to turn their backs to the heights, and retire to the plain. With a wonderful accuracy and system they poured the intensest concentration of artillery fire that even the bowl had known. All the guns on all the heights which could swing around upon any part of the bowl seemed to have only onetarget for shells of all calibers, mixed with gas, which is so hard on men who are clambering over slippery ground in violent physical effort. Units could not see one another from the smoke of the bursts, tearing gaps in the line, which was at the same time ripped by machine-gun fire from the pill-boxes. Every step forward meant more machine-gun fire in flank, and more of it in rear, without any diminution of the volume in front. It was not in human flesh to "go through"; and there was nothing more to be said on the subject.
At the same time, on the other side of the Crépion road the 26th had sought to drive through Belleu Wood and over the ridge. If both attacks had succeeded, and could have held the ground gained, we might have won the battle; but we could not have held it under the artillery concentrations which the Germans were able to deliver, unless each man had a shell-proof pill-box of the weight of a trench helmet—an invention which would have ended the war before we ceased to be neutral.
We were not in full possession of Belleu Wood yet. Conditions there were indeed "mixed." Yankees and Germans were dug in in fox-holes in the northern edges, at points where either could watch the other. Back of the Germans were their trenches on the crest, and their interlocking pill-boxes; at their command always the infernal concentrationsof artillery fire which could be brought down on a few minutes' notice. They still had the higher ground; they could slip back for rest into their bomb-proofs and camps in the valley. Many of our fox-holes were full of icy cold water, where the men had to lie—and did lie; for to show their heads was to receive a blast of fire. But the Yankees, all the while nagging the enemy by sniping and shell-fire, held on here and across the road under the same conditions. It was out of the question for warm food to reach the outposts, who received their rations by tossing biscuits from one fox-hole to another.
On their military maps the French gave Belleau Wood, which the Marines had taken in the Château-Thierry campaign, the name of the Marine Wood. Belleu Wood or Ormont Wood might either be called the "Yankee" Wood, though the 29th might ask that one be called the "Blue and Grey" Wood, or Grande Montagne the "Blue and Grey" mountain. After having repulsed counter-attacks on previous days, depleted as it was in numbers, the 29th supported the attack of the 26th through Belleu Wood in an attack through Wavrille Wood, where it met irresistible fire of the same kind as the 26th had against Hill 360 and Moirey Wood.
The 29th's three weeks' service in the hell's torment of the bowl was now over. In its place came the 79th, National Army, which was also from bothsides of Mason and Dixon's line, north and south mingling in its ranks. We know the 79th of old for its rush down the Montfaucon valley and over the slopes in the first stage of the battle. The isolation of units in slippery ravines and woods, and the depth of the shelled area, required two nights for relief. The 29th's 5,636 casualties were balanced on the bloody ledger of its record by 2,300 prisoners. This was a remarkable showing; testimony of harvest won by bold reactions against counter-attacks, of charges which made a combing sweep in their sturdy rushes, even when they had to yield some of the ground won. Man to man the Blue and Greys had given the enemy better than he sent; but not in other respects. They could not answer his artillery shell for shell, or even one shell to three.
My glimpses of the battle east of the Meuse among the Verdun hills recalled the days of the Verdun battle, while the French were stalling, with powerful artillery support, on the muddy crests and slopes and in the slippery ravines. When they re-took Douaumont and Vaux, they had a cloud of shell-bursts rolling in front of the charge. We were going relatively naked to the charge. This had been our fortune in most of our attacks in the Meuse-Argonne, as our part in driving in our man-power to hasten the end of the war. There was something pitiful about our divisional artillery in the bowl, trying to answer the smashing fire of the outnumberingguns with their long-range fire from the heights. The artillery of the 29th for three weeks kept its shifts going night and day, while the veteran artillerists of the 26th had problems in arranging patterns of barrages to cover the infiltrating attacks which put new wrinkles in their experience.
Of the 29th's wounded, thirty-five per cent were gassed. The whole area of the bowl was continually gassed. Sickness was inevitable from lack of drinking water, warm food, and proper care. While the Germans could slip back to billets on the reverse slopes, and to shell-proof shelters, let it be repeated that our men had to remain all the time under the nerve-racking shell-fire in the open, and under soaking rains that made every hole they dug on the lower levels a well. Some of the woods which they occupied were shelled until they could see from end to end through the remaining limbless poles of the trunks. The desolation of Delville and Trônes woods in the Somme battle were reproduced; but the 26th and the 29th were there to attack, and they kept on attacking. The fire they drew was a mighty factor in the success of our thrusts in the main battle against the whale-back. It should be enough for any soldier to say that he served east of the Meuse. The 79th and the 26th, which remained in to the death, were to sweep over the rim into the plain, as we shall see.
Stalwart 89th and 90th—Bantheville Wood cleaned up by the 89th—The 90th to the Freya system—The 5th, back in line, takes Aincreville and Brieulles—America's two-edged sword—An aggressive army and the Fourteen Points—Would the German links snap?—A last push—The military machine running smoothly—Vigorous divisions in line—Veterans in reserve—"We will go through."
Stalwart 89th and 90th—Bantheville Wood cleaned up by the 89th—The 90th to the Freya system—The 5th, back in line, takes Aincreville and Brieulles—America's two-edged sword—An aggressive army and the Fourteen Points—Would the German links snap?—A last push—The military machine running smoothly—Vigorous divisions in line—Veterans in reserve—"We will go through."
The rest of the picture, which had been done in the miniature of agonizing efforts for small gains, was now to be painted in bold strokes on a swiftly flowing canvas. During the last ten days of October, after the general attack of the 14th had slowed down, our preparations for the final attack included the taking of certain positions which would be serviceable as "jumping-off" places, and the arrival of two conspicuously able National Army divisions.
The 89th had been formed under Major-General Leonard Wood, which assured that the men of clear eyes and fine physique, drafted from Kansas and Missouri, would be well and sympathetically trained. If the division might not have Wood at its head in France, it was to have in his successor, Major-GeneralWilliam M. Wright, a leader worthy to exemplify the standards he had established. All the army knew "Bill" Wright, a man of the world as well as an all-round soldier, practical and broad-minded, who faced a problem or an enemy in all four-square robustness and energetic determination. In the Saint-Mihiel drive, and afterward in the Saint-Mihiel sector, the 89th had fully met the high expectation of its old commander and his admirers.
His men were as devoted to Major-General Henry T. Allen, who had formed the 90th from recruits and commanded it in France. The six feet of "Hal" Allen were as straight, now that his hair was gray, and he was as spare in body and as youthful in spirit as in the days when he was a lieutenant of cavalry, or organized the Philippine Constabulary. He too was known to all the army, always "all there," whether on parade or in a stuffy dugout, or in any group of men at home or abroad. When he went among his tall Texans they said that they had a general who looked like a general. Both Allen and Wright were afterward rewarded with corps commands for their service in the concluding drive of the battle.
As for the spirit of the infantry of the 90th during all the battle, only three stragglers were reported from the whole division. They were from Texas, as they were prompt to tell you. They had shownin the mire of the Saint-Mihiel salient that men from a very dry atmosphere can endure penetrating humid cold as well as the hot sun. The sight of them, no less than of the 89th and other divisions from the Middle West, was an assurance that anemia does not flourish in their native States. Neither the 89th nor the 90th had received enough replacements to change their local character. Their regional pride was accordingly almost as strong as their divisional pride. Both, when they arrived in the Meuse-Argonne, were considered as "shock" divisions, so rapid had been their progress in efficiency since they had come to France.
Taking over from the 32nd on October 19th, the 89th immediately proceeded to clean up the troublesome Bantheville Wood. Though the operation was entirely successful, it required severe fighting under other adverse conditions than machine-gun and artillery fire, which grew worse, the farther the infantry advanced. The roads through the wood, which was continually gassed, were impassable. Stretcher-bearers had to wade in mud knee-deep for the mile and a half of its length in bringing back the shivering wounded, and the men stricken with influenza.
When the Germans built that excellent bathing and disinfecting plant at Gesnes, they did the 89th a good turn. Taking care of over four thousand of our exhausted men, it was the adjutant of theirfine physique in so conserving the strength of the division that it was able, after ten days of action and exposure which might well have "expended" it, to fight its way to the Meuse and across the Meuse in the ten days of advance from November 1st until the armistice.
The 90th, taking over on October 22nd from the 5th Division in that violent sector of the Rappes Wood in front of Bantheville, under the cross artillery fire from the heights of the whale-back and east of the Meuse, its line joining the 89th on the left, made a spring for the village of Bantheville on the 23rd, capturing and holding it. The next day it drove ahead until it was up to the Freya Stellung, the second line of defense of the whale-back, with a precision that defied the enemy's artillery and machine-guns. The Freya was not as strong as the Kriemhilde, neither being of course a trench system in the former accepted sense; but the Freya had fragments of trenches and strong positions for machine-guns, linked together in characteristic mobile defense. Eager as the Texans were to attack the Freya, it was not in the plan that they should. They were to dig in and expose themselves as little as possible to the cross artillery fire, and "make medicine" for their part in the general attack, which would sweep over the Freya on November 1st. The Germans tried several counter-attacks;but every one was promptly repulsed by the accurate fire of the Texans, whom the deluges of shells could not budge from their positions.
Meanwhile the tried regulars of the 5th Division, which had come into line on the Meuse flank on October 27th, had a few chores to do before they were to carry out their brilliant programme in crossing the Meuse. I use the word chores, because the Aces, now refreshed and full of "pep," made their successes appear to be little more. We had not yet taken Brieulles on the river bank, though it had been set as a part of the Army objective of the initial attack of September 26th. For four weeks it had been whipping our flanks with its machine-gun fire and protecting enfilading German batteries. After having vigilantly pushed forward aggressive patrols, which seized vantage points, in a rush in the darkness on the morning of the 30th, the 5th took Aincreville. That evening skirmishers went into Brieulles, and cleared it of the enemy. To a point opposite Liny, where the river curved westward, we had straightened out our line on the Meuse bank, shortening our Third Corps front, which at the same time had cut deeper into the flank of the Barricourt ridge, the final crest of the whale-back.
This was cheerful news for our Army command. It was an augury confirming all our information inthe latter days of October. The rapid advance of the other Allied armies to the west was having a pronounced effect. Indeed, during the second stage of the Meuse-Argonne battle, powerful as the German resistance had been, it was not that of full divisions, as a rule, but of elements of divisions hurried into line, their officers sometimes uncertain of the identity of units on their flanks, as they strove to obey orders to hold at any cost. An army, in its many units, is like a series of steel links. For over four years the German army had presented a front possessed of the alternate mobility of a chain and the rigidity of a steel wall. So rapidly was German morale now deteriorating that it looked as if the chain, worn by attrition, might snap in a confusion of scattering links.
America's part in this juncture was that of a two-edged sword. One edge was preparing to strike with all our military force against the German front. It is needless to repeat how influential is psychologic suggestion on a soldier's mood. Our soldiers were forbidden to speak of peace; all thought of peace being as resolutely suppressed in the military mind as apprehension of defeat, when the German offensives in the spring had seemed to be threatening Paris. The average soldier, being a human being, and particularly the veteran who had survived many battles, if he thought the end werenear, did not want to be the "last man killed in the war." The more he had endured, the more he wanted to live. So we must leave peace to the peace-makers. The war-makers must keep at war. The harder we fought in the days to come, the better we served the purpose of President Wilson, the Commander-in-Chief.
The other edge of our sword was his Fourteen Points. The German soldier now knew that he could never undertake another offensive. Henceforth his back was against the wall. A soldier who submitted to the will of his superiors in full faith in their promises of victory, a soldier who fought peculiarly for victory on enemy soil, found his great organization, which he had been told was unconquerable, breaking, and himself yielding in disheartening retreat the ground that his sacrifice had won. He may have thought that he had fought in his country's defense by invading France; now he knew that defense had become a matter of the defense of his own soil. Would he fight to the last ditch? Would he resist on the Meuse as the British had at Ypres, and the French at Verdun, and the South at Appomattox? The question was for him, the soldier, to answer. It always is, in every war. Leadership and staff work can effect nothing, unless the soldiers are for battle. The aim of all the propaganda on both sides was to promote the fightingspirit of the masses at home and at the front.
Germany still had millions of armed men, a great staff organization, and immense numbers of guns and quantities of ammunition. The organic disintegration was due to the mood of the Kaiser's atoms, his men. Strike a spark in them, flaming into desperate common defense as a people—and the German army might show as a whole something of the resistance to the death of individual units in the Meuse-Argonne. It was all very well to talk of a swift movement to Berlin; but the Allied armies were themselves becoming exhausted. They were running short of fresh divisions; they were hampered for lack of transport and horses. An army advances slowly against rearguard action alone. Between Berlin and the Allied soldiers, who knew the meaning of interlocking fire from machine-guns manned by small groups of men, were Luxemburg, the walls of the Moselle and the Rhine valleys, and all the stretch of country beyond the Rhine, which meant long lines of railroad communication, many bridges to be built, and an infinite amount of labor. If a million German veterans decided that it was better to die than to yield, though we should go to Berlin, we should have much fighting on the way, increasing the ghastly cost in lives and treasure which was swamping the world in blood and debts.A common view of German character during the war had held that once the Germans knew they were losing, their resistance would collapse; that they would fight well only when the odds were in their favor. This hardly accorded with their record under Frederick the Great. I think that with them, as with all peoples and all soldiers, much depended upon whether or not some event or train of events should have again aroused their passion. They lacked food; but a people in siege desperation will go hungry for a long time.
It was a solace to the German soldier's mind, a tribute to his courage, for him to think that if America had not come into the war he would have won it from the other Allies. He had finished Russia and Rumania; he had France and Britain trembling, when a fresh and gigantic antagonist appeared against him. His retreats had begun just as American troops were making their force felt on the battle line. Despite censorship of the press, belittling our effort, despite the espionage of officers over their men, word traveled fast from German soldier to soldier. By talks with others who had fought, if not by actual contact, every German soldier knew with what freshness and initiative the Americans fought. If we had been slow in preparing, once our enormous preparations came to a head in the immense numbers we were now throwing intobattle, the effect was all the more impressive upon the German soldier, and through him upon the German people.
This same America, which was now attacking with such increasing power, had made through its President the peace offer of the Fourteen Points, which had followed his speeches and notes during our neutrality, all to the same effect: that America—then considered weak and unmilitary—was not fighting in a war of conquest. The Fourteen Points guaranteed Germany from the dismemberment and subjection which the military caste had said would be her fate if she ever yielded to the Allies. After he awakened to his leaders' failure to give him victory, the Fourteen Points and associated propaganda were infiltrating into the German soldier's mind as effectively as German infantry infiltrated down a ravine or through a patch of woods. One hand of America driving a bayonet into his face, the other was offering him self-preservation in the rear. Why fight to the last ditch when such terms were offered? Three out of four German soldiers were accepting them in the sense that they were no longer fighting to the death in machine-gun nests. The war was over; they wanted to go home.
It was these two influences in the latter part of October and early November which were weakening the enemy's spirit on our front. Our conviction thatthis time we would break through waxed stronger every day. Our men thought of the enemy as groggy; another smashing blow would topple him. We, too, wanted to go home; we wanted an end of the horror and the hardship, as the days grew colder and the ground a moister bed. One supreme effort, and the orgy might be finished. The second stage of the battle had already passed, in our thoughts. We were entering a new stage, which should free us from the grim routine of siege. Something of the fervor of our preparations for the first stage, tempered and strengthened by the experience gained in the second, was in our preparation for the third.
Originally Marshal Foch had set the attack for October 28th; but postponement to November 1st was found to be better suited for his plans. This gave us time to take Aincreville and Brieulles, to bring up still more material, and further improve our arrangements. This time we were to have enough guns. More divisional artillery had come from the French foundries to the training camps, whence the waiting gunners brought them to the front. We had an increase of Army and Corps artillery, while Admiral Plunkett's bluejackets, with their long-range naval pieces which they wanted to take up as close to the enemy as if they were machine-guns, were cheering to the eye. Yet altogether wewere to have only one hundred guns of American make in the battle; all the rest were of French make. Our columns of ammunition trucks, increased by the recent arrival of large numbers from home, seemed endless. Great piles of shells were rising beside the roads. The artillery of the 90th Division alone was to fire over 68,000 rounds in twenty-four hours on November 1st. All the artillery of divisions in reserve and in rest were brought up to the line. Artillerymen could endure longer service than the infantry. Those off duty might steal some sleep under shell-fire. This time we were to make a shield of shells, and a bridge of shells, too, for our troops. Despite our deep concentrations and the quantity of supplies moving, there was none of the confusion of the early days of the battle. Our staff heads had learned in a fierce school to control traffic. The machine was running comparatively smoothly—no military machine can ever run exactly so except in inspired accounts—equal to the extra and foreseen demand upon it. Our officers in the different headquarters were making their tables of barrages and the dispositions for attack with the routine confidence of clerks balancing a ledger. We were no longer new to war.
The plan for November 1st was only carrying out the final stage of the first plan which our ambition had dared: a sweep over the last of the crests ofthe whale-back, and down the irregular descents toward the westward course of the Meuse and the Lille-Metz railway. On the left, the French Fourth Army was pressing against the western edge of the Bourgogne forest. Our left flank and their right flank were to "scallop" the forest, while it was filled with gas, instead of accompanying the flanking movement by a frontal drive, as we did in the Argonne.
Our National Army divisions had come into their own, the National Guard divisions, which in the first and second stages had helped to pave the way for a glorious day, being in reserve, or "resting" in that muddy Saint-Mihiel sector. In Dickman's First Corps, at the left, were the 78th Division, still in line after the taking of the citadel and its ordeal in the Loges Wood; the 77th, come into line for a second time, after it had been in camp in its own Argonne Forest; and the peripatetic 80th, which had swung round from the Third Corps, come into line for the third time. Two divisions formed Summerall's Fifth Corps in the center: the veteran 2nd, which, after its service in helping to disengage Rheims, was back "home" in our army; and the 89th, which had made Bantheville Wood secure as its "jumping-off" place. In Hines' Third Corps on the right were the 90th Division, which had taken Bantheville, and the 5th, now masters ofBrieulles of evil repute and of Aincreville. Across the river with the French Second Colonial Corps, as an influential and thoroughly inclusive part of the whole movement, the 79th was preparing to start from Molleville farm to storm the Borne de Cornouiller, and the 26th, the only National Guard division in the front line, clinging to Belleu Wood and the edge of Ormont Wood, preparatory to rushing the eastern rim of the bowl.
We know all these divisions of old. Their spurs had been won; they had tasted what Lord Kitchener called the salt of life in his message to the little British expeditionary force in August, 1914,—if the mud, the blood, the lice, the gas, the evisceration of battle is to have this name rather than that of the acid of death. We know, too, the three divisions in reserve, which had had a longer experience. Some of their survivors had been toughened to the point of pickling by the salt of life. Two of them were National Guard, and one regular—the old dependables of the pioneers. It was good that they, and the 26th and the 2nd, too, among the pioneers, were to be in at the finish. Back of the Third Corps, in reserve on the right, was the 32nd, and of the First Corps on the left was the 42nd, both fit for any duty after the rest following their smashing blows which went through the Kriemhilde; and back of the Fifth Corps was the 1st, which, with usualpromptness, had trained in its ways the replacements who filled the gaps of its more than 8,000 casualties in its October 4th-11th drive. It was now under command of Brigadier-General Frank Parker, who was a soldier of the school of the 1st, and as knightly a young officer as ever won promotion in battle.
I should have said that these three veteran divisions were to be in at the finish only in the event of the checking or exhaustion of one of the divisions in front. Their part was to follow up the advance, ready to spring into an opening. They were a whip from behind in the Army policy, which meant this time not only to go through the enemy's final defense line, but to keep on going. The 42nd seemed to have drawn the most favorable position for its ambition, as the 78th was worn down by its attacks on the citadel and Loges Wood, and might have an initial nervous voltage to drive its legs, but not the reserve strength to remain long in pursuit. The 1st's prospects seemed very dismal. Do you suppose that Kansans and Missourians of the 89th were going to yield place to any division? As for the 2nd, fresh in line, it was the "best" of the older divisions. You may have that on official authority from its headquarters, and on the informal authority of every officer and man of the 2nd, and also from every transport horse or mule, if they could have spoken.The 1st was also the "best" division, as we know from equally numerous and valiant authorities. Anyone who cares to dispute either set of authorities, lacking, of course, information to justify his opinion, is left to his fate.
Was the race-horse 2nd to allow the 1st to take one rod of its line of advance? Not while the 2nd had a corporal's guard able to march and fight; not unless the 1st could leap-frog the 2nd in aeroplanes. The 1st might do police duty and repair roads after it was tired out in trying to keep in sight of the 2nd's heels. Were the Texans of the 90th, who were just becoming warmed up to the Argonne battle, to allow the 32nd to do anything but trail in their wake? Was the regular 5th, which had taken a lien on the west bank of the Meuse, to accept assistance from National Guardsmen, even if they were the greedy and swift Arrows?
We had in this array of divisions—to pass a general compliment, as they passed few compliments to one another because the "bests" were so numerous—infantry which thrilled the most stale of observers with admiration apart from national pride. I had heard much of the "trench look" and the "battle face," which, as seen by civilians, sometimes puzzled men long at the front. I saw it, as I understand it, at Château-Thierry and during the Meuse-Argonne battle; I saw it, too, in the Ypres salient and at Verdun.It was sharp-featured, in keeping with lithe muscular bodies, with a smile that possibly took its character from that "salt of life," a direct look in the eye in answer to a challenge,—the face of a man who has seen the flight of things more dangerous than baseballs, who knows grinding discipline, roofless, fireless billets in midwinter, and the submission of self to a cause in the grimmest of team-play.
Our infantry were ready, resolutely and confidently ready. All our gunners, there on the slopes, in the ravines and woods, in the midst of that array of guns, were ready to pour forth their hurricane of shells. Our machine-gun battalions, our medical, engineer, and salvage units, our ammunition trains, our rolling kitchens, were ready. General Maistre, who came from Marshal Foch to Fifth Corps headquarters the night before the attack, asked if we would "go through."
"We will go through," Summerall replied.
"Do you want to see my plans?" Summerall asked Pershing.
"No. I know them."
Summerall went out with him to his car.
"Will you go through?" Pershing asked him.
"We will."
Pershing put the same all-embracing question to Hines and Dickman, and received the same resoluteanswer. Corps commanders were only repeating the messages of division, brigade, and battalion commanders, who were speaking the thought of the men.
"We will go through."