Part 33

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 crush the 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 nucleus of 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 one target 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 concentrations of 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 both sides 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 outnumbering guns 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.

XXXII

THE FINAL ATTACK

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-General William 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 shown in 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 their fine 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 in the 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 were near, 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 fighting spirit 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 into battle, 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.