Part 15

If ever the determined faces of sturdy men coming up in reserve were welcome, they were those of the Australians, as they appeared for their part of the program--which was to "leap-frog" our troops and carry on the advance: to find that they had hot work in prospect from the moment they passed the tape we had strung for our jumping-off line. Our battalion in Le Catelet having been effectively cut off, the battalion which had kept its footing in the Hindenburg line at Bony stayed on, mingled with the oncoming Australians, for that night and another day of fighting. The Australians who had passed through the 30th Division, on its objective at Nauroy, for a farther advance to the next village of Joncourt, were obliged to relinquish their gains in order to bend back their line diagonally to join up with the mixed Australians and New Yorkers at Bony. The German hinge at that point was not to be broken until the next day; north of Bony the 27th's line that night slanted back, in order to face as far as possible the murderous fire on its exposed flank, to the outpost line from which they had been unable to advance. The 27th had suffered 4,000 casualties since September 27th. Now, as fast as units could be gathered and re-formed, it was withdrawn for reorganization, as was the 30th, leaving the Australians to finish the task. The fact that our Meuse-Argonne offensive had slowed down, and that at other points the progress of the general Allied movement was being stayed, may account, judging from German reports I have read, for a return of German staff confidence which was imparted to the German veterans, who, after their brilliant and savage use of their amazing opportunities against the 27th, kept up their resistance point by point for four days before the Australians had gained the complete objective set for the 27th on September 29th. It is never a pleasant task for any body of troops to have to do the work assigned to another; but the Australian staff had made the plan, and the "Aussies" accepted the legacy we had left with a spirit in keeping with their comradeship for the Americans. From our staff and our army, from the state of New York and our country, as well as from the men of the 27th, ever willing to give it with full hearts, they deserve the tribute due to their bravery and fellowship.

I may add that this was the Australians' last action. After thirteen months of continuous fighting they were sent into winter quarters. The men who had been out from home since 1914--and the Americans who were homesick after three months in France can imagine what this meant--were just starting on their first home leave when the armistice came. May the recollection of how they fought at our side in a war to end war keep the friendship of the two peoples secure.

On the night of October 5th the 30th Division, which had suffered far less than the 27th, relieved the Australians. The job was finished; on this part as on the rest of the British front, the once glorious Hindenburg line was left behind, suddenly become a somewhat frowsy irrelevance of deserted trenches, dugouts, shell-craters, and tangles of barbed wire. With its passing one knew that, for the northern half of the front, there was no question of stopping; careful, methodical planning, mindful of the necessary vigorous thrusts at the key positions of railway centers and canal and river defenses, would irresistibly sweep the enemy back to the Meuse line, while the slower movement "down below"--as the French and American fronts seemed from the north--would question his ability to stand even there.

Not that there was to be any spectacular rush about the movement, though one looked expectantly at the fitness of the British cavalry, which was always kept ready; the German staff could be expected to handle itself in this its most serious emergency. The spectacular and amazing thing was the steady, unruffled forward movement of millions of men, glacier-like in its assuredness. The temper of victory revealed itself in the eyes and bearing of the men who had waited four years, and who now saw Ypres disengaged, Lille on the point of recovery, Lens, Cambrai, Saint-Quentin restored to France. Americans might feel out of place in the midst of rejoicings, the depth of which they could not measure because they had not known the suffering which had gone before.

The Second Corps was now to take part in the advance of one French and three British armies which, by November 1st, was to expand until the whole line from the sea to the Argonne was in motion. From north of Cambrai to south of Saint-Quentin the line was to reach its apex before Le Cateau in the attack of October 8th-10th; on the 14th the Franco-Belgian and British attack north of Lille was to start bringing the line up to this level; from the 17th to the 25th the southern British and French armies would again take up the offensive to the gates of Valenciennes, while the French armies "around the corner" on the right would have passed over the Saint-Gobain bastion and straightened out the corner.

The plan of the advances in which the Second Corps took part was simple. The enemy had none but hastily organized defenses, and if he were pushed hard enough he would go. So the artillery was to be moved as far forward as possible to give the necessary protection to the infantry; the attack would start all along the thirty-mile front for generous objectives, and could be expected to go fairly well for two or three days, when stubborn resistance at various points would make it necessary to halt the advance until supplies were brought up and the resistance overcome in another general effort. The artillery declared that this was getting to be too much of an infantry war, nothing counting except keeping up with their giddy romp across fields. The infantry might have replied that they were pushing on so fast in order to keep the Germans from destroying the roads and light railways which the artillery and transport would be using. Not that I wish to imply that the infantry found it a giddy romp; there were always the machine-guns and the front-line artillery batteries, and, especially on the first day of the attack, a considerable quantity of "h-vic" shells, as they were called on the British front, from the large-calibre guns which were protecting the withdrawal of field-guns and material.

There was no question, however, of the withdrawal. When the 30th Division, after two days of waiting on the two miles of Corps front which the Australians had handed over, started forward on October 8th along the south edge of the Roman Road to Le Cateau, it was able to cover three miles by noon, taking the fair-sized towns of Brancourt and Prémont, and a number of solid farmhouses and small copses, on the way. Enough guns were moved up over virtually undamaged roads to permit another start at dawn on the 9th; and the end of that day found the Southerners four miles farther on and in possession of the important railway center and large town of Busigny, which the enemy had relinquished practically without a struggle. Another mile was gained on the 10th, and the division line brought to the Selle river, which was not much of a river in the eyes of the Americans, but on which the enemy had obviously intended to call a halt. The railway yards in front of Le Cateau, in the sector of the Thirteenth British Corps on the left, gave violent resistance to any further progress on that side; the rearward movement of enemy field-guns had apparently stopped, to judge from the quantity of shell-fire and gas which now came over; and worried intelligence officers were doing their best to decipher the mystery of prisoners from eleven German divisions who had been taken on the two-mile front. Incidentally, it should be said that the Southerners had gathered in 1,900 Germans in three days, which was more than their share of the total of 12,000 prisoners captured by the three British armies.

One who knew the dreary waste of the Somme battlefield, or indeed the level ruins of any part of the old trench line, might well rub his eyes when he came into this fresh landscape, where the Southerners seemed as much at home as if they had never seen mountains. One had forgotten, it seemed as if one had never known, that you could have war in a country where women and children walked about the streets, and lived in intact houses, and even went to shop, to school, and to mass. A Corps officer who had worked with Hoover in Belgium found a familiar task in distributing food to the four thousand civilians in the sector.

Sterner fighting was to follow from October 17th for the weakened divisions, which had received no replacements to bring them up from half strength, and which could therefore, together, take over little more than a mile of front. Starting from the Selle river south of Le Cateau, they met a stubborn resistance until the stand made by the enemy in that town, which had seen a fierce British resistance in 1914 in the retreat from Mons, was overcome by the Thirteenth British Corps; then our Southerners and New Yorkers, having advanced four miles in three days, were relieved and sent back to the dreary Somme fields east of Amiens. Had it been necessary to fight a way into Germany, they would probably have been called on again for their manly share.

As it was, they were the only American troops, aside from scattered units, which were not to be gathered into the fold of the main American forces. That this isolation did not please them is understandable; but I suspect that it was good for them. There could not be the exaggeration of their part in the final victory which there might have been if they had had American food and had seen none but American activity about them. If officially the British made much of them, they realized that it was not only for what they had done but in honor of the country which had sent them forth to fight for the common cause.

XIV

DISENGAGING RHEIMS

The race-horse division in another spearhead action--Regulars and Marines--A division that had learned coördination--Trying for Blanc-Mont--One attack that cost nothing--An exhausted division reinforced by the new Southwestern division--Which keeps up with the Marines--The 36th learns fast--And pursues the enemy to the Aisne.

Ever the demand from all parts of the Allied line was for American troops. Their speed in attack had become a recognized factor in the plans of the unified command, which moved them about with an inconsiderate rapidity which was hard on shoe-leather and most uncomfortable. The very sight of the soldiers of our young army moving into a sector of their line before an action quickened the spirits of the veterans of the old armies.

If Sir Douglas Haig had two American divisions for storming the Hindenburg line, then General Gouraud, whose Fourth Army had broken the trench line for gains west of the Argonne Forest, in conjunction with our advance between the Forest and the Meuse, must have two divisions for the next step in the general offensive movement which was to disengage Rheims, in a drive northward from Somme-Py to the Aisne. These two included the 2nd, Marines and Regulars, the race-horse division, which had the longest experience in France of any regular division except the pioneers of the 1st. Our sore need of its veteran skill in the Meuse-Argonne had to yield to an urgent request, which amounted to a command, from higher authority. Naturally, the 2nd would have preferred being with our own army; but wherever it was it would fight well. It was to add to its laurels now in the rolling country of Champagne, where the deep strata of chalk under the light subsoil formed solid walls for defenses, accrued through four years of digging, as distinct on the background of the landscape as the white tape on a tennis court or the base-lines on a baseball diamond. Soldiers in blue or khaki, after fighting in this region in rainy weather, looked like men who had just come from work in a flour-mill, where they had been wrestling with the splashing mill-wheel. It was a custom to rub helmets with the chalk of parapets for the sake of invisibility.

The action in which the 2nd was again, as on July 18th, to play the part of the spearhead was to cut the Rheims salient by thrusts on the sides, much as one would push in the roofless walls of a house on a man within, which is much more reasonable than trying to break up through the floor to get at him. The third German offensive of May had all but encircled Rheims from the west; had the last and unsuccessful offensive attained its end of a deep advance east of the city, Rheims would have been far behind the enemy's line. As it was, heroic resistance had saved the city, at the price of leaving it for four months in a salient as pronounced and as dangerous as the Ypres salient, which must be reversed and then broken. The reversal which would put the enemy in turn into a salient was started west of Rheims, on September 30th, by General Berthelot's Fifth Army; in a three days' advance his line, pivoting on the city, swung up from an east-west direction to a northwest-southeast direction, effectively turning the salient inside out. The line now ran for some twenty miles southeast past the edge of Rheims, turned east through Champagne for another fifteen miles to Aubérive, and then, as a result of General Gouraud's advances from September 26th, turned northeast to the northern end of the Argonne. A simultaneous attack by Berthelot, on the west face of this flat arc with a thirty-mile chord, and by Gouraud on the east face, would send the enemy scurrying back to a maximum depth of twenty-five miles to the line of the Aisne river, which here runs roughly east and west.

From just north of Somme-Py, in the center of the up-slanting east face of the salient, the 2nd Division, attached with French divisions to the Twenty-first Corps, was to strike over chalk ridges and through woods northwest toward Machault. The attack was first set for October 2nd, but was postponed while the division spent this day in cleaning German recalcitrants out of a portion of the trench system taken over from a French division which had captured it. The Corps orders for the attack were then issued so late that there was not time to have them translated and written out, as the custom was, for the sake of accuracy which was considered indispensable to the team-play of units; but they had to be sent orally to our two brigades.

In the center of the field of attack was the Vipère Wood, which was known to hold many machine-gun nests. By a converging movement the Marine brigade was to pass this wood on the left, and the Regular brigade to pass it on the right in flank, and form line beyond it,--which was not a mission a general would assign to tyros who had not yet learned to maintain the _liaison_ of their units in difficult fighting. In order to go into position, the Regular brigade had a night march around the rear of the line. Happily the men of the 2nd Division had had experience of this sort of thing. They had gone in on the run at Château-Thierry, and again in the crucial drive at Soissons on July 18th. It had been said that they did things best in a hurry, which may have led to their being relied on as "hit-and-run"-experts; nevertheless they had an idea of their own that if they might have moved into line and looked over the ground a few hours before going into an attack, instead of charging when they were breathless from sprinting, they might have done equally well with slightly less nerve strain.

As the French guides who were to meet the Regular brigade at dark and show it the way did not appear, which was a common failing with guides, the brigade had to grope about among shell-craters and communication trenches to find its jumping-off place, which was still partly occupied by the enemy. By 5 A.M. only six companies were in position; but by 5.50, the hour for attack, thanks to the owl's eyes and instinct of direction which seemed to be a part of the equipment of the 2nd, every company was up in order, ready for the charge. With tanks assisting against its machine-gun nests, they swept past the Vipère Wood. A loss of twenty per cent of their infantry did not interfere with their reaching their two-mile objective on schedule time at 8.30.

The race-horse proclivities of the 2nd, having been developed on no level speedway but over all the hurdles of modern defense against all arms of fire, were accentuated by the rivalry of the Regular and Marine brigades. The Marine was the better brigade of the two. All the Marines say so. I agree with them. The Regular brigade was also the better. All the Regulars say so. I agree with them. If the Marines were up to their objective, the Regulars must be; and if the Regulars were up the Marines must be, or die in the attempt. No ifs, or buts, or excuses of any kind except casualties were ever accepted in the 2nd for not advancing. And you must not lose life unskillfully, or your brigade might be convicted of not being as professional as the other,--and that would be a disgrace. The 2nd had been fortunate in its commanders. Major-General Harbord, a Regular, had leaned backward toward the Marines; and Major-General Lejeune, a Marine officer, who was now in command, leaned backward toward the Regulars. They were wise men, occupied with making the 2nd the "best" division in the army.

Despite the trouble it met on the way from cross-fire and machine-gun nests in the Somme-Py Wood, the Marine brigade was also up on schedule time at 8.30. The two brigades had not been thinking much of their flanks; they were concerned in racing each other. While either considered the other incapable of its own stride, neither thought that any brigade in the world except itself could keep pace with the other. They were not surprised to find that the French were not up on their flanks; and the fact that the French were not, interfered with the success of another advance planned for 11 A.M., unless the 2nd were to drive into a salient which increasing machine-gun fire indicated as an unprofessional effort,--suicide not being professional with the 2nd unless one brigade should make it a custom which the other would have to follow.

Though the French on the right might hold up their end in a further attack before noon, there was no chance that the French on the left could: with the Marine front line more than two miles in advance, the French were still occupied in trying to conquer the sinuous warrens of the Essen trench, which was acting an assassin's part in the rear of the Marines. Indeed, the Germans were counter-attacking, further intensifying the seriousness of the situation. The reserve regiment of Marines had other work to do than assisting the front-line regiment in a further advance. While its men, in helping the French division, were breaching dugouts, using their bayonets, throwing and dodging bombs as they rushed around traverses and met counter-rushes in an infernal hand-to-hand wrestle, and sending out chalk-plastered Germans in torn uniforms to join the groups of prisoners and wounded coming from the front, Marshal Foch sent a telegram of congratulation to the Corps, with word to press the advance.

At 4 P.M., when the reserve regiment of the Marines had finished its task in applying in savage hand-to-hand fighting, characteristic of the old days before open warfare became the rule, all its training in trench warfare, an order was given to obey that of the Marshal; but it hardly concerned the front regiment of Marines, which was without the support of the reserve regiment, while the retarded French on the flank, still fighting hard for their gains, were well to the rear. The reserve regiment of the Regulars, passing through the front regiment, made three-quarters of a mile, where it met machine-gun fire from both flanks. At 7.30, the French on the left having made progress, the reserve regiment of Marines, passing through the front regiment, made another hard-won gain against flanking fire, and in the darkness had to repulse two counter-attacks.

It had been a great day even for the 2nd Division, with four miles of advance and a toll of two thousand prisoners; a day of systematic and masterly fighting which had added to its list of honors that of forcing the Germans forever out of the deep maze of the Champagne trenches. The trucks and the rolling kitchens as well as the artillery, which had never been far behind the infantry, were up that night; and the ambulances, in keeping with the race-horse spirit, running close up to the front, had made a record in their expeditious care of the wounded, who had been gathered with a promptness, in the fields under fire, worthy of a show drill at maneuvers. For if we had any division which knew how, and had reasons of long service for knowing how, to coördinate all its branches in action, it was the division which had learned its lessons in the taking of Belleau Wood, Vaux, and Vauxcastille.

It need not be said that the program was to continue the advance the next day; but the Germans had been preparing overnight to impede its fulfillment with something of the same ferocity they had shown in the Essen trench. As usual in these days, after the Allied attack had spent its initial momentum in breaking them out of their fortifications, the Germans reacted by applying open warfare tactics on a second line of resistance. While the French were striving to come up on both flanks, the whole line was being deluged with shells and machine-gun fire. On the afternoon of the first day, the Marines by their customarily swift tactics had taken a portion of Blanc-Mont--the adjective being used before the name, contrary to modern French fashion--a hill which ran back in an irregular shelf covered by patches of sparse woods. Well-made trenches, dugouts, and communicating trenches so easily dug and kept up in the firm chalk, were evidence of the German's appreciation of the hill's importance in the defense of their positions east of Rheims.