Part 12

The artillery, which had worked ceaselessly all night and day to get forward, was now arriving, and with its support a new advance, which crowded in more troops, was undertaken at 5.30 in the afternoon. The artillery silenced some of the machine-gun nests, though it could not reach the enemy battery positions; but by the grace of their undaunted determination and energy the Kansans and Missourians took both Charpentry and the town of Baulny. In the darkness some daring units pressed through the Montrebeau Wood, while the main line dug in near Baulny to secure what protection it could from the shells whose flashes illumined vigorous spading, which had an incentive in the vicious singing of the fragments.

It had been another costly day, and the night that followed was ghastly for the wounded. They were gathered from the field under incessant bursts of machine-gun fire; and when they were brought in, the crowded roads made their evacuation horribly slow. The struggle to force ammunition and supplies forward over the main road did not relax in the area behind the troops, where all through the night the German artillery, which had the approaches to Charpentry and Baulny perfectly registered, kept up a fire shrewdly calculated to block a movement every time it started.

All the artillery was now up to support the troops being re-formed for another attack at daybreak, which was preceded by a counter-attack of the enemy which was promptly repulsed. More open spaces than yesterday must be crossed in full view of the enfilading batteries, particularly those firing from the west bank of the Aire. Ground was gained all along the front: ground important for the terrible day's work that was to follow. While the wounded, suffering from exposure, were walking back or being carried back across the shelled fields and along the shelled roads, the survivors must spend the night in leaving nothing undone to insure the success of the next morning's attack, which was to capitalize every atom of vitality remaining in this hard-driven division. Again the men were short of regular rations; and the fresh beef and vegetables which were again forced upon them could not be cooked. It was raw fighting, indeed, on raw meat and raw potatoes which was expected of the 35th. Incidentally the divisional transport was short fourteen hundred horses.

The loss of officers in their gallant exposure to keep up the _liaison_ of the units had continued severe. For this reason alone the 35th, which was having its first battle experience, was unprepared for a far less onerous task than that now assigned it. With nerve strength in place of physical strength, with will in place of adequate organization, the division was sent into a veritable alley, which could be swept by artillery fire from the Forest edge across the Aire as well as from the other flank and in front. The instant the attack began, the enemy guns concentrated with a pitiless accuracy and a volume of fire completely surpassing that of the other days. In places the advance was literally blasted to a standstill.

The village of Exermont which was the main goal was mercilessly exposed in that ravine where the enemy shell-fire had the play of a cataract through a gorge. Some men actually reached the village, but they could not remain there alive. Groups charging for what seemed cover only ran into more shell-bursts. The dead and wounded lay in "bunches" under the continuing blasts which disrupted organization, while officers in trying to restore it sacrificed themselves. There was no want of courage; but the division was undertaking the impossible. Every spurt of initiative was as futile as thrusting a finger into a stove door. Confused orders were further confused in transmission.

When night of the 29th came, there was nothing to do but for the 35th to withdraw, for lack of any means of supporting them, its exposed units from Montrebeau Wood and Exermont. The ravine could not be held until the guns commanding it were silenced and fresh troops in numbers were summoned. A willing horse had been driven to its death. The 35th's units had been crowded into the front line until the only reserves it had were men too exhausted from fighting to move. On the 30th a defensive position was organized. A battalion of the 82nd Division, brought up with a view to renewing the attack, met a killing barrage which warned commanders that advancing one fresh battalion was only throwing more cannon-fodder into the ravine.

Throughout the 30th the men of the 35th held their ground under continuous artillery fire, which could not keep many from falling asleep in their exhaustion; but they were awakened to retributive zeal by two German counter-attacks, their marksmanship being a warning to the enemy that though they had not the strength to advance they still knew how to shoot. On the night of the 30th the 35th was relieved by the veteran 1st Division. Gaunt and staggering, shadows of the sturdy figures which had advanced on the 26th, the survivors plodded back to rest billets, to find that in some quarters the view was held that the division had done badly. No more inconsiderate reflection upon brave men was ever engendered in the impulses of battle emotion, with its hasty judgment.

In an advance of over six miles the 35th had suffered 6,312 casualties. Nearly half of its infantry was dead on the field or in hospital. The other half was in a coma from fatigue. Every rod gained had been won by fighting against fire as baffling as it was powerful. To say that the 35th fought for five days as a division is hardly doing it justice. A division may be said to be fighting when only one brigade is in line while the other is resting. All the men of the 35th were fighting. There were soldiers who did not have five hours' sleep in that period of unbroken battle strain in the midst of the dead and dying. Only the powerful physique of the men, with their store of reserve energy which they drew on to the last fraction, enabled them to bear it as long as they did. Their courage and endurance and dash performed a mighty service in a most critical sector. Instead of being the object of any ungenerous reflections by captious pedants or commanders who did not know how to command, after they had given their generous all they should have been welcomed with a warmth of praise in keeping with their proud and justifiable consciousness that they had done their red-blooded best.

XII

BY THE CENTER

The wooded front of the Fifth Corps--Where the Germans discounted the chance of an attack--Particularly by a division that had never been under fire--The Pacific Coast men through the woods for a five-mile gain--And, its artillery up, keeps on for nearly as much more--Into a dangerous position which cannot be held--The "hand-made" attack of the Ohioans--Surprise carries them in a rush through the pathless woods--Three days of unsupported advance against counter-attacks--Open country for the advance of the 79th up the valley to Montfaucon--And open country beyond toward Nantillois and the whale-back--The 79th "expended."

Cameron's Fifth Corps, which made the central drive head on to the whale-back, relied, in mastering the distance it had to cover on the first day as the "bulge" of the Army movement, upon the freshness of its troops, whose inexperience would be only another incentive to hold up their end. No aspect of the plan of our command was more audacious or more thrilling than the decision to expend in one prodigious ruthless effort the energy of the 37th, 79th, and 91st Divisions and their impatience for action accumulated in their long period in training camps.

It was in this that we defied accepted standards; in this that we carried to the seemingly quixotic limit our confidence in our ability to transform on short notice citizens into soldiers who would go bolt from the drill-ground into a charge that was to take an elaborate trench system as the prelude of from five to six miles of advance in the days of mobile interlocking machine-gun fire. Anyone who was surprised that they did not go as far as they were told to go on the first day had forgotten the power of modern weapons in defense, and was oblivious of the military significance of the ground which the Corps had to traverse.

The right division, the 79th, had before it a comparatively woodless stretch following the Esnes-Montfaucon road among the hills to Montfaucon, but the other two divisions faced the German trenches at the edge of a deep belt, or rather mass, of woods as dense as the Argonne, which, though broken by only one open space of a breadth more marked than a roadway, had sectional names--Montfaucon, Véry, Béthincourt, Cheppy, Malancourt,--each taken from the name of the nearest neighboring town. The store which the Germans set by these woods had been shown by their stubborn resistance to the attacks of the French for their possession in 1915.

When the Germans detected--as they did despite our care--unusual activity on our roads in this sector during the later stages of our preparations, they made the raid of September 22nd, already mentioned, which took a man of the 79th prisoner; but evidently they did not learn from him of the presence of the other two divisions. German prisoners said that an Allied attack was expected along the whole front from Metz to Champagne, but that it would be limited to the front-line positions--a feint, to cover the offensive from Soissons to the Channel. Certainly the enemy had no thought that we would try to storm the woods on the first day. On September 18th a memorandum of the 1st German Guard Division, in occupation of this sector, said:

It is unlikely that the enemy will direct his attack against the wooded territory in Sector K (Cheppy Wood) or against the neighboring sectors on our left. He would have to meet an unknown situation, and to advance through the heavy underbrush of the woods, which are totally secured from observation, would be very difficult....

It is only in the case of a deliberate offensive against the whole front of the Group or Army that there should be any retirement to the main line of resistance (the Lai Fuon ravine).

The main line of resistance must be held in any event.

The Lai Fuon ravine really bisected the woods transversally into two masses or belts. In describing the action of the Corps, which had the mission of taking the ravine and both sections of the woods, I shall begin with the 91st Division, National Army from the Pacific Slope, on the left. The 91st had never been in any except a practice trench, or heard a bullet or shell fired in battle, when it went into position for the attack. On its left was the 35th of the First Corps, and on its right the 37th of its own Fifth Corps. For artillery the 91st had that of the 33rd, and a battalion from the 82nd. The fact that the 33rd was also using borrowed artillery in its own attack is sufficiently indicative of the character of the hasty and heterogeneous mobilization of our unprepared army for the battle.

The Pacific Coast men had traveled far, clear across the Continent and across the Atlantic. Traveling was in their line. If distance had kept them from reaching the front as soon as some of the eastern divisions, noticeably those praised New Yorkers of the 77th, they would show that they could move fast and stick in the war to the end. The pioneer heritage was theirs; they were neighbors to Alaska, who looked toward Asia across the Pacific: big men who thought big and were used to doing big things. Their people depended upon them for great deeds worthy of their homes beyond the Great Divide. As the National Guard divisions from the Pacific Coast had had the misfortune, through sudden necessities when they were the only available men in depot, to be cut up for replacement, the men of the 91st had as an intact division a special responsibility in upholding the honor of the Coast.

They had the stamina which their climate breeds. They were under no apprehension that their inexperience in battle would not enable them to take care of the Germans they met, once they were through the trenches and in the open. As men of the distances, they had imagination which applied all their training to the situations which they would have to encounter. No veterans ever went into action with more confidence than these draft men. The roar of the surf on Pacific beaches, of the car-wheels from the Coast to New York, of the steamship propellers across the Atlantic, was the song of their gathered energy suddenly released in a charge.

The wire on their front had not been well cut; but what might have been a justifiable cause for delay they overcame in an intrepidity of purpose supported by a team-play which prevented confusion of their units. Happily the prompt taking by the stalwart Kansans and Missourians of the Vauquois hill positions commanding the 91st's field of advance, which had been the object of the French attacks in 1915, removed a formidable threat on their left. The Germans, who had been told that a division which had never been under fire was on their front, had no thought that it would attempt a serious attack. They were accordingly the more unprepared for the avalanche of man-power which came rushing at them. Relatively few in numbers, waiting on the 5th Guard Division to come up in reserve, they had a painfully urgent desire to start to the rear and meet it on its way forward.

If the uncut wire had made progress slow for the men of the 91st at the start, once these fast travelers were past the fortifications, they stretched their legs in earnest as they rushed through the thickets of the first belt, which in their sector was the Cheppy Wood, in a practically unbroken advance. When they came out in front of the Lai Fuon ravine, they had the "jump" on the enemy on their front. He had not the numbers to form up for a determined defense on that main line of resistance which he was supposed to hold in any event. The best he could do was a skilful rearguard action. Speedy as they were, the Pacific Coast men could not force the enemy, who surrendered or withdrew after bursts of machine-gun fire, to close with the bayonet, as they desired.

Having fought their way through the Véry Wood, the narrowing spur of the second belt, which extended only part way across their front, they had now open hilly country, for the most part, before them. The men were warmed up for their afternoon's work. As they continued to gather in prisoners, as they pressed steadily ahead against rearguard resistance, they maintained the _liaison_ of their units admirably. By nightfall they had advanced nearly five miles. The Coast might well be proud of its sons in their first day's battle.

They had been fortunate in preventing congestion of their transport, and their artillery was fast coming up in support when they attacked with unbroken vigor the next morning. They were to find, as all other divisions found, that the second day was a different kind of day from the first. As all their power was needed on the 27th to support the 37th Division in its attack for the ridges protecting Montfaucon, all four regiments were put into line, with orders to go as far as they could, regardless of whether or not their ardor carried them ahead of the other divisions into a salient. They drove the enemy out of the positions which he had taken up overnight, and continued their advance in repeated charges against his increasing resistance. Parties charged into the village of Epinonville several times, to receive a blistering cross-fire from positions in flank and rear, and from the Cierges Wood, where the German machine-gunners looked down upon all the streets and approaches of the village.

Though its flanks were still exposed, the 91st was told to go ahead the next day, the plan of the Army command, as we have seen, being to use all the fight there was in every division on the 28th, when our ambition still dared an immediate conquest of the whale-back after the taking of Montfaucon. Switching now to a two-regiment front, after fifteen minutes of preparation by the artillery, which was all in position, the Pacific Coast men again attacked on the third day, which, in turn, they were to find different from the second. While the guns kept moving forward and striving to lay down protecting barrages and to smash machine-gun nests, they made a mile and a half against resistance hourly becoming more vicious and determined, taking Epinonville and entering the Cierges Wood, which was to earn such a sinister reputation.

Despite the general results of September 28th, which had somewhat dampened its ambition for a prompt decision, the Army command, now seeking to drive a wedge into the heights between the Aire and whale-back in order to break the chain of its covering defenses, ordered the 91st to continue attacking on the 29th. The two regiments in the rear, which had had a little rest, passed through the two that had been exhausted by the hard work in front on the 28th. Two battalions of the engineers, whose indefatigability had kept the roads in shape, were sent into line. As we know, the engineers were never allowed to be idle. If they had nothing else to do, they could fight.

The morning advance drove its point beyond the Cierges Wood, but was checked by merciless fire from Cierges village on the right. Though the front was in a salient, still the orders were "at all costs" to "push ahead." At 3.40 that afternoon, after forty minutes' preparation by the artillery, which was keeping faithfully up to the infantry despite the weariness of horses and men, the right once more moved forward with a vigor that was amazing after the four days' strain, and succeeded in passing through Gesnes and in gaining a footing in Morine and Chêne Sec Woods on its left. Every rod farther meant an increase of overwhelming cross-fire. Either there must be support on the flanks from the adjoining divisions, or this tongue of men thrust into furious cross-fire must be withdrawn. Support could not be given. The 35th Division on the left was stopped in the shambles of the Exermont ravine, the 37th on the right was facing counter-attacks. Accordingly on the night of the 29th the 91st fell back to the front of the morning's gains. The 32nd, which was to have such hard fighting in re-taking the positions which the 91st had temporarily held, was to relieve it on October 4th. During the 30th the 91st organized defensive positions, and until October 4th held its ground under continuous artillery and machine-gun fire as well as harassing blasts of machine-gun bullets from low-flying enemy aeroplanes. Though the men were suffering from exposure and diarrhea, the whole division was not to be relieved. The 181st Brigade, under Brigadier-General John B. MacDonald, was assigned to the 1st and 32nd Divisions to take part in the greater effort of fresh troops to break the heights between the crest of the whale-back and the Aire, which was to be such a brilliant and costly exploit. The 91st had advanced for a depth of nearly eight miles, and held its gains for a depth of nearly seven miles.

It might be said that the 37th Division had had, as National Guardsmen, a longer military experience than the other two divisions of the Corps, and some trench experience in a tranquil sector, which, however, was slight technical preparation for the offensive action which it was now to make. If ever there was a "hand-made" battle, it was that of the Ohio men. For artillery they had the brigade of the 30th Division, which, after five days' hard marching when it should have been brought by train, arrived with its men exhausted and its horses utterly so. There were no French guns to assist this tired artillery brigade, operating with a division with which it was associated for the first time.

Ohio's predilection for politics is well-known; and it has even been said that her National Guardsmen took some interest in politics. The politics of September 26th was Republican-Democrat-Socialist politics,--all the political genius of Ohio, town and country, from the river to the lake, armed, trained, and resolute. I have no idea what part these soldiers will play in the future of Ohio elections; but I do know how they fought in the Meuse-Argonne. It is something that Ohio should not forget.

Their rush through the trench system was soon over. Ahead was the full depth of nearly four miles of the Montfaucon woods which I have already described. The old trench system was partly in the midst of woodland wreckage, caused by long sieges of artillery fire, of the same character as that facing the 77th in the Argonne Forest. In its attack through the thickets the 37th was to have the assistance of no scalloping movement in forcing the enemy's withdrawal from its front.

I have already referred to the enemy's conviction that our "untrained" troops would not have the temerity to attempt an attack which comprised the taking of this deep belt of woods; and do not forget that half way through the belt, which it really divided into two sections, was the Lai Fuon ravine. Here, as our troops emerged to descend the hither and ascend the opposite slope, they would be in full view; and here, in the edge of the woods on the far slope, the Germans had long ago organized the positions for that main line of resistance which the enemy memorandum of September 18th had said must be held in any event,--which did not include, however, the event of a drive by the Ohio men of the same swiftness as that of the Pacific Coast men on their left.

Had the 5th German Guard Division come up a little earlier, had the Germans had time to mass reserves for the defense of the ravine, it seems impossible that it could have been conquered without a siege operation. The value of taking an enemy by surprise and audaciously following up the surprise was singularly illustrated by the rushing tactics of the Ohio infantry, who cleared the whole depth of the woods on the first day. When they were halted, it was not for long. Theirs was no cautious policy. Their reserves, keeping close to the front line, were ready instantly to add their weight in the balance in charging any refractory machine-gun nests. The Germans never had time to form up for prolonged or effective resistance. Their familiarity with the woods made retreat behind the screen of underbrush the more inviting in face of the numerous figures in khaki which they saw swarming forward through the openings in the foliage. Instead of a determined stand on the Lai Fuon line, there was only a rearguard action, fitfully though never clumsily carried out by the veteran Prussians, in their injured pride at having to yield to the American novices.

With no thought except to keep on going, when the Ohioans emerged from the woods into the open, they pressed on toward the commanding positions of Montfaucon on their right. The fact that there was nothing like a practicable road for their transport through the woods behind them now developed a handicap which they appreciated keenly in their eager appetites and the thought of shields for the next days' attacks. Though tanks and artillery were of no service in the woods, they were needed now. The tanks assigned to assist the Ohioans as they came into the open did not arrive until the evening, when they were short of gasoline. The artillery, by the use of snatch ropes, managed to bring up one battalion of guns to the south of the ravine.