Part 30

After I had returned home, I heard one day on an elevated train a young woman telling, in radiant importance, of her "wonderful experience" as an auxiliary worker of the type to which I have referred, and of all the officers she had met. Seated near her were two nurses in uniform, furtively watching her between glances at each other. There were lines in their faces, though not in hers--lines left by their service. What she was saying went very well with her friends, but not with us who know something of who won the war in France. Many of these nurses--working double shifts in a calling which is short-lived for those who pursue it for any length of time--will not recover from the strain on mind and body of the generous giving of the only capital that most of them had. If you were not in France--in case you were and were wounded, you need no reminder--when you meet a woman who was in France, ask if she were an army nurse. If she says that she was, then you may have met a person who deserves to outrank some gentlemen I know who have stars on their shoulders.

Then there were the chaplains. General Pershing had his own ideas on the subject. The chaplain was simply to be the man of God, the ministrant of religion, the moral companion without regard to theological faith, who might show, under fire, his greater faith in the souls of men fighting for a cause.

Bishop Brent, the chief chaplain, was not a militant churchman, but a man of the gospel militant; and so was Father Doherty, on his right hand, and all the other chiefs. You ceased to ask whether a man was Catholic or Protestant, Baptist or Methodist, Christian or Jewish. Clergymen at home might wonder about this, but they would not after they had served for a while as our chaplains served, close to the blood-stained gas-saturated earth, with the eternal mystery of the sky overhead. The chief chaplains were hard disciplinarians. The punishment which they meted out to one chaplain who strayed from the straight and narrow path was not comprised in army regulations. "Wasn't he a chaplain?" the chaplains argued. Hardest of all on him were the men of his own church. He had disgraced his church as well as his fellows.

Yet despite the chaplains the men developed the habit of swearing; soldiers always have. War requires emphatic expressions. It destroys flexibility of expression--and "damn" and "hell" do seem the fittest description of a soldier's occupation.

"It's an innocent kind of swearing, though," said a chaplain. "It does not really blaspheme. It may help them in fighting the battle of the Lord against the German."

In the assignment of chaplains, of course, the plan was to place a Catholic with a regiment which was preponderantly Catholic; a Protestant with a regiment that was preponderantly Protestant; a rabbi with a regiment that had many Jews. When it was reported that the majority of the men of a certain regiment were not of the same church as their chaplain, a transfer was recommended. The colonel wanted to keep his chaplain, and suggested that he put the question to a vote, which he did: with the result that all the men of the regiment declared themselves of the same faith as their chaplain. This chaplain's religion, as it worked out in the daily association of the drudgery of drill and the savage ruck of battle, was quite good enough for them, without regard to the theological label he bore. He had faith, simply faith, and he gave them faith through his own work.

Division commanders who were not religious men, but hard-hitting fighters, thinking only of battle efficiency, used always to be asking for more chaplains. I recollect during the Meuse-Argonne battle a division commander exclaiming: "Why don't we get more chaplain replacements? I'm right up against it in my division. I've had one killed and one wounded in the last two days. I'm going to recommend both for the Cross, but there's nobody come to take their places. You stir them up on this question at Headquarters."

The chaplain stoutened the hearts of the fighters against hardship, cheered the wounded, administered to the dying, wrote letters home to relatives, went over the fields after the battle with the men of the Graves Registration Service, which had the pitiful and reverent task of gathering and burying the dead.

Our soldiers who knew religion at home as repeating "Now I lay me down" in childhood and the Lord's Prayer when they were older, as grace before meals, going to Sunday school, sitting in pews listening to sermons, and as calls from the clergyman, now knew it as the infinite in their souls in face of death, exemplified by the man of God who was wearing the uniform they wore, who was suffering what they suffered, who kept faith with the old thought that "the blood of the martyr is the seed of the church."

XXX

THROUGH THE KRIEMHILDE

No thought of peace at Souilly--The third attack--The Rainbow Division before Chatillon ridge--Three days of confused combat--Over the ridge--The Arrows sweep through Romagne--Outflanking the Dame Marie ridge--The new Ace of Diamonds Division--In and out--A corridor of fire--Knitting through the Pultière Wood--A fumble in the Rappes Wood--Which is finally "riveted"--The long-enduring Marne Division--Knits further progress.

On the late afternoon of October 13th I happened to be in the stuffy little ante-room at Souilly, when, his great figure filling the doorway, Liggett came out from a conference with Pershing. His face was glowing, his eyes were sparkling as if he had seen a vision come true. We were planning to have four million men in France in the summer of 1919. Its new commander might think of his First Army, after three weeks of battle in the Meuse-Argonne, as only the nucleus of our growing strength.

A few minutes after he had left the ante-room General Pershing's aide received an item of news over the telephone from Paris. This announced that the Germans had provisionally accepted President Wilson's Fourteen Points. Thought turned from our own to other battlefields. Austria had practically thrown up her hands. Turkey was isolated and demoralized. Bulgaria had surrendered; the Serbs and Allied troops were marching to Belgrade; the Belgians were at the gates of Bruges, the British four days later were to enter Lille, and the French had taken Laon in the sweep across the open country. Was the end in sight? So long and so stubbornly had the German armies held out, so habitual had war became, that we who were close to the front saw vaguely as yet the handwriting on the wall which was so distinct to the German command. We knew that the Germans had many times dallied with peace proposals in the hope of weakening Allied morale.

When I went in to see General Pershing, he turned to his big map on the wall, and ran his finger over the Romagne positions. "Liggett is losing no time. He's attacking tomorrow," he said. After he had referred to the plan, he fell to talking of the young reserve officers, their courage, the rapidity with which they had learned their lessons, of the fortitude and initiative of the men, who produced leaders among themselves when their officers fell in action. He had had to drive them very hard; this was the only way to hasten the end of the war. His voice trembled and his eyes grew moist as he dwelt on the sacrifice of life. For the moment he was not a commander under control of an iron purpose, but an individual allowing himself an individual's emotion. Then his aide came in and laid a little slip of paper on his desk, remarking that it contained the news of the German acceptance. I asked the general what he thought of the chance of peace.

"I know nothing about it," he said. "Our business is to go on fighting until I receive orders to cease fire. We must have no other thought, as soldiers."

The only negotiations in his province and in that of the Allied armies were of the kind they had been using for four years: the kind which had brought the Germans to their present state of mind. The prospect of peace should make us fight all the harder, as a further argument for the enemy to yield speedily. Not until the day of the armistice did our preparations diminish, at home or in France, for carrying on the war on an increasing scale of force. Throughout October and the first ten days of November our cablegrams to Washington continued to call for all the material required for four million men in the summer of 1919. Indiscreet as it would have been to encourage the enemy by confessing to our paucity of numbers and lack of material in the summer of 1917, we might lay all our cards on the table in the autumn of 1918.

Liggett's attack of October 14th was our last effort which could be called a general attack before the final drive beginning November 1st, which broke the German line. The general attack of September 26th had broken through the old trench system for deep gains; that of October 4th, with the driving of two wedges on either side of the whale-back, had taken the Aire valley and the gap of Grandpré, and brought us up to the Kriemhilde Stellung, or main line of resistance of the whale-back; that of October 14th aimed to drive a wedge on either side of the Romagne heights, taking the Kriemhilde, the two wedges meeting at Grand Carré farm in their converging movement to deliver the heights into our hands. Thus Army ambition was soaring again. If it had succeeded, we should have been up to the Freya Stellung, another fragmentary trench system, the second and inferior line of resistance of the whale-back, and we might not have had to wait another two weeks for victory. The progress of the other armies summoned us, as it had at every stage of the battle, to a superhuman effort to reach the German line of communications, which might now mean a complete military disaster for the enemy.

The 32nd was still facing the Côte Dame Marie and the town of Romagne in front of the loop in the Kriemhilde. On its left was the 42nd, which had just relieved the exhausted 1st and was to drive the western wedge through the trench system of the Chatillon ridge and on through the Romagne Wood and the large Bantheville Wood.

I have written so much in my first book about the 42nd, in its Baccarat sector, in its "stone-walling" against the fifth German offensive, in the Château-Thierry counter-offensive, that it seems necessary to say only that it was the Rainbow Division, the second of National Guard divisions to arrive in France, which had shown such mettle, immediately it was sent to the trenches, that it was given every test which a toughened division might be asked to undergo. Major-General Charles T. Menoher, who had been in command throughout its battle service, had the poise requisite to handling the infantry regiments from Alabama, Iowa, New York, and Ohio, and all the other units from many States, in their proud rivalry.

The Arrows of the 32nd, from Michigan and Wisconsin, now on the Rainbows' right, had been on their right when both divisions crossed the Ourcq and stormed the heights with a courage that disregarded appalling casualties. Neither the 42nd nor the 32nd would admit that it had any equals among National Guard divisions. After their weeks of fighting in the Marne region, the Rainbows had come out with staggeringly numerous gaps in their ranks as a result of their victory, which had been filled by replacements who were not even now fully trained. They had been in line for the Saint-Mihiel attack, but were brought to the Argonne to be ready in reserve when a veteran division should be required for a vital thrust. No sooner had they gone into line than they found that the enemy, taking a lesson from the success of the 1st and the 32nd and the 3rd, which had entered the Kriemhilde, had been improving his Kriemhilde line, concentrating more artillery and establishing machine-gun posts to cover any points where experience had developed weakness. The Kriemhilde had thus far resisted all our attacks. It combined many of the defensive advantages of the old trench system with the latest methods of open war defense upon chosen and very formidable ground. The 42nd was to storm one of its key points, the Chatillon ridge.

Will any officer or man of the division forget the days of October 14th, 15th, and 16th? At the very start they were at close quarters, their units intermingling with the Germans in rush and counter-rush, in the midst of machine-gun nests, trenches, and wire entanglements, where man met man in a free-for-all grapple to the death. The rains were at their worst. Every fighter was sopping wet. It was impossible to know where units were in that fiendish battle royal, isolated by curtains of fire.

Summerall was now in command of the Fifth Corps. "Per schedule" and "go through" Summerall, who had driven a human wedge as a division commander, was to drive another as a corps commander. His restless personal observation kept touch with the work of brigade and regiment; his iron will was never more determined.

The 42nd did not keep to the impossible objective beyond, but it did "go through" the formidable Kriemhilde, which had been our nightmare for three weeks, in one of the most terrifically concentrated actions of the battle. There was hard-won progress on the first day on the bloody slopes of Hill 288, while patrols, pushing ahead, found themselves under cross-fire which could not be withstood. When night came, the units in front were already exhausted in a day of fighting of the most wearing kind. "Attack again!" Wire which was not on artillery maps, swept by machine-gun fire, meant delay, but no repulse. The German resistance was unusually brave and skillful in making the most of positions as vital and well-prepared as they were naturally strong. The right, its units rushing here and crawling there to avoid the blasts of machine-gun fire, had put Hill 242 and Hill 288 well behind it on the second day, and had reached the gassed Romagne Wood. The center was held up on the slippery and tricky ascents of the Chatillon ridge, where the German machine-gunners stood until they were killed or so badly wounded that they could not serve their guns; and the German infantry, literally in a fortress stronghold, became more desperate with every hour throughout the afternoon, while dusk found the shivering and tenacious Rainbows dug into the sodden earth and holding their ground. Shattered units were reorganized, and fresh units sent forward for the attack of the next day, which took the ridge. The Kriemhilde Stellung was won.

Those three days had been more horrible than even the Rainbows had known: days which have either to be told in infinite detail, or expressed as a savage wrestle for mastery. Few prisoners might be taken in such confused fighting, when the Germans stuck to the last to their fox-holes and their fragments of trenches. The path of the advance was strewn with German dead. Army ambition had gained much, if not its extreme goal. It had a jumping-off place for a final and decisive general attack. There remained nothing further for the 42nd during the next two weeks except to make sure that its gains were not lost. This required constant patrols and costly vigils under gas, artillery, and machine-gun fire, which were very wearing. On October 30th the division was relieved by the 2nd, which passed through it for the great advance of November 1st. The 42nd had suffered 2,895 casualties in this operation. It could retire after its victory, in full confidence that it had kept faith with the high expectations of its future from the day of its organization. It had brought great honor to itself as a division, to the whole National Guard, and to the replacement officers and men who had served in it.

The 32nd's attack on October 14th was of course intimately connected with that of the 42nd. Having assisted the 1st to drive the wedge over the wall of the Aire, the Arrows had still enough vitality left to carry out their eager desire to complete the conquest of the section of the Kriemhilde on their front. They knew that they had a hard nut to crack, and they began its cracking by turning all the power of their artillery on to the German positions from noon of the 13th until 5.30 on the morning of the 14th, when, under as deep a barrage as the tireless artillery could make, they started for the entrenchments on the Dame Marie ridge, and the town of Romagne. Their left struggled up the slopes of the ridge, but had to halt and dig in, waiting for more artillery preparation to silence the array of machine-guns and guns which, despite the eighteen hours of bombardment, began firing almost as soon as the charge began.

On the right success was more prompt. By noon a battalion was past the village which had resisted so many attempts to capture it. Knowing Romagne of old, the right had executed a clever flanking movement, under the special protection of a flexible barrage, which outwitted the enemy. By 11.30 the village was in the hands of the swiftly moving Arrows, and entirely mopped up. Its name might now be inscribed on the division banners with those of Fismes and Juvigny. The Germans had arranged many bloody traps in the streets, but the men of the 32nd had taken too many positions from the enemy to be fooled by such tricks.

The left meanwhile was burrowing into the steep and slippery sides of the Dame Marie ridge, with a blast of machine-gun fire grilling every head that showed itself. There are occasions when officer and soldier know that the odds are too great against them; when they halt and dig, from the same instinct that makes a man step back from a passing train. This was such an occasion. It looked as if the ridge could not possibly be taken in front, when the men on the extreme flank, quick to press forward instantly there was any opening in the wall of fire, saw their opportunity. The 42nd, with their first onrush halted, had kept on pushing, and they were driving the Germans off Hill 288, which had been pouring its fire into the ranks of the 32nd men facing the Dame Marie. This gave a purchase for a tactical stroke, which was improved before the German realized that he had fumbled, and could retrieve himself. A reserve battalion which was hastened forward slipped around to the left of the Dame Marie. With its pressure on the flank, and that of the center regiment, which had lost _liaison_ on the left but had no thought of stopping while it could keep up with the right, the enemy was forced completely off the ridge by dark, and the advance pressed on into the woods beyond. The Arrows had now not only penetrated the Kriemhilde, but had gone clear through it. Too much gold can not be used in State capitals in inscribing the Dame Marie beside the heights of the Ourcq to glorify the deeds of the 32nd for the admiration of future generations. Despite its two weeks' hard service, it was to remain in line,--or rather to continue advancing for four days longer, as it grappled with the machine-gun nests in Bantheville Wood.

On the night of the 19th-20th it was relieved by the 89th. All the survivors among numerous replacements which it had received after Juvigny could claim to belong to that fraternity of veterans, which, from the hour they marched down the apron of the Ourcq in parade formation in the face of the enemy's guns, had shown the qualities which make armies unconquerable. No division ever stuck to its knitting more consistently, or had been readier to take the brunt of any action. Its part in the Meuse-Argonne battle had been vital and prolonged. The number of its prisoners, all taken in small groups in desperate fighting, was 1,095, its casualties were 5,019, and it had identified the elements of nine German divisions on its front.

On its right in the attack of October 14th a division new to the great battle had come into line--the regular 5th, under command of Major-General John E. McMahon. Its emblem was the ace of diamonds. The 5th was just as regular as the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, or 4th, and it had no inkling of a doubt that it could prove as ably as the other four that it was the "best" regular division. As a basis for its confidence was its record in Lorraine, where it had preparation for a larger role in its faultless taking of the village of Frapelle, when for the first time in two years the Vosges mountains had resounded with the bombardment of an offensive action. Officers and men had been thoroughly drilled. Uniformity had not suffered from the injection of inexperienced replacements. The 5th had both the ardor of the fresh divisions which had gone in on September 26th without having previously been under fire, and long trench service, which made the Aces the more eager to be in the "big show."

The command took them at their own estimate in a characteristic--an aggravatedly characteristic--fashion. If ever a division were warranted in losing heart on the ground that their superiors were "not playing the game" with them, it was the 5th, which was submitted to everything in the way of changing orders that is ruinous to morale. It was moved about without any regard to the chessboard rules of war. Doubtless this was necessary; but it was hard on the 5th, though it was only to confirm other people, including the Germans, in the opinion that the 5th was a great division.

On the night of October 11th-12th a brigade of the 5th was ordered to take over the line of the 80th and a part of the line of the 4th. The sector was on the Cunel-Brieulles road, where the 80th had been checked, and under the flanking fire of the galleries of guns, on the right from east of the Meuse, on the left from the whale-back, as well as in front, which I have described fully in my account of the 4th division. Relief was not completed until after daylight, at 6.30 in the morning. Patrols were sent forward into the Pultière Wood when word came that the Germans were massing for a counter-attack. The 5th was preparing to receive them, and establishing itself in its sector, when orders came that it was to withdraw. Nothing irritates a soldier of spirit more than to be sent into position for action, and then to turn his back upon the enemy. Withdraw! The aces of diamonds to withdraw! They were willing to play the game, but they were filled with disgust at such an order. After long marches from the rear, after spending the whole night in effecting a most difficult relief under continuous fire, after a day full of annoyances in organizing an uncertain line swept by shell-bursts, they were to march back, through the night in the gamut of the enemy artillery, which became increasingly active in evident knowledge of their exposure. Units had as much reason for becoming confused as they would have in a night attack.

Disheartened at having to retreat--for that was the word for the maneuver--some showed less alacrity than in going to the front, while the filtering process of withdrawal under the cross-fire was bound to separate men from their commands. The language they used of course was against the German artillery, not against high commanders. A part of the relief had to be carried out in broad daylight in sight of the German artillery observers; indeed, it was not finished until noon. Without having made a single charge, the brigade had been exhausted and suffered many casualties.