Part 34

It was these two influences in the latter part of October and early November which were weakening the enemy's spirit on our front. Our conviction that this time we would break through waxed stronger every day. Our men thought of the enemy as groggy; another smashing blow would topple him. We, too, wanted to go home; we wanted an end of the horror and the hardship, as the days grew colder and the ground a moister bed. One supreme effort, and the orgy might be finished. The second stage of the battle had already passed, in our thoughts. We were entering a new stage, which should free us from the grim routine of siege. Something of the fervor of our preparations for the first stage, tempered and strengthened by the experience gained in the second, was in our preparation for the third.

Originally Marshal Foch had set the attack for October 28th; but postponement to November 1st was found to be better suited for his plans. This gave us time to take Aincreville and Brieulles, to bring up still more material, and further improve our arrangements. This time we were to have enough guns. More divisional artillery had come from the French foundries to the training camps, whence the waiting gunners brought them to the front. We had an increase of Army and Corps artillery, while Admiral Plunkett's bluejackets, with their long-range naval pieces which they wanted to take up as close to the enemy as if they were machine-guns, were cheering to the eye. Yet altogether we were to have only one hundred guns of American make in the battle; all the rest were of French make. Our columns of ammunition trucks, increased by the recent arrival of large numbers from home, seemed endless. Great piles of shells were rising beside the roads. The artillery of the 90th Division alone was to fire over 68,000 rounds in twenty-four hours on November 1st. All the artillery of divisions in reserve and in rest were brought up to the line. Artillerymen could endure longer service than the infantry. Those off duty might steal some sleep under shell-fire. This time we were to make a shield of shells, and a bridge of shells, too, for our troops. Despite our deep concentrations and the quantity of supplies moving, there was none of the confusion of the early days of the battle. Our staff heads had learned in a fierce school to control traffic. The machine was running comparatively smoothly--no military machine can ever run exactly so except in inspired accounts--equal to the extra and foreseen demand upon it. Our officers in the different headquarters were making their tables of barrages and the dispositions for attack with the routine confidence of clerks balancing a ledger. We were no longer new to war.

The plan for November 1st was only carrying out the final stage of the first plan which our ambition had dared: a sweep over the last of the crests of the whale-back, and down the irregular descents toward the westward course of the Meuse and the Lille-Metz railway. On the left, the French Fourth Army was pressing against the western edge of the Bourgogne forest. Our left flank and their right flank were to "scallop" the forest, while it was filled with gas, instead of accompanying the flanking movement by a frontal drive, as we did in the Argonne.

Our National Army divisions had come into their own, the National Guard divisions, which in the first and second stages had helped to pave the way for a glorious day, being in reserve, or "resting" in that muddy Saint-Mihiel sector. In Dickman's First Corps, at the left, were the 78th Division, still in line after the taking of the citadel and its ordeal in the Loges Wood; the 77th, come into line for a second time, after it had been in camp in its own Argonne Forest; and the peripatetic 80th, which had swung round from the Third Corps, come into line for the third time. Two divisions formed Summerall's Fifth Corps in the center: the veteran 2nd, which, after its service in helping to disengage Rheims, was back "home" in our army; and the 89th, which had made Bantheville Wood secure as its "jumping-off" place. In Hines' Third Corps on the right were the 90th Division, which had taken Bantheville, and the 5th, now masters of Brieulles of evil repute and of Aincreville. Across the river with the French Second Colonial Corps, as an influential and thoroughly inclusive part of the whole movement, the 79th was preparing to start from Molleville farm to storm the Borne de Cornouiller, and the 26th, the only National Guard division in the front line, clinging to Belleu Wood and the edge of Ormont Wood, preparatory to rushing the eastern rim of the bowl.

We know all these divisions of old. Their spurs had been won; they had tasted what Lord Kitchener called the salt of life in his message to the little British expeditionary force in August, 1914,--if the mud, the blood, the lice, the gas, the evisceration of battle is to have this name rather than that of the acid of death. We know, too, the three divisions in reserve, which had had a longer experience. Some of their survivors had been toughened to the point of pickling by the salt of life. Two of them were National Guard, and one regular--the old dependables of the pioneers. It was good that they, and the 26th and the 2nd, too, among the pioneers, were to be in at the finish. Back of the Third Corps, in reserve on the right, was the 32nd, and of the First Corps on the left was the 42nd, both fit for any duty after the rest following their smashing blows which went through the Kriemhilde; and back of the Fifth Corps was the 1st, which, with usual promptness, had trained in its ways the replacements who filled the gaps of its more than 8,000 casualties in its October 4th-11th drive. It was now under command of Brigadier-General Frank Parker, who was a soldier of the school of the 1st, and as knightly a young officer as ever won promotion in battle.

I should have said that these three veteran divisions were to be in at the finish only in the event of the checking or exhaustion of one of the divisions in front. Their part was to follow up the advance, ready to spring into an opening. They were a whip from behind in the Army policy, which meant this time not only to go through the enemy's final defense line, but to keep on going. The 42nd seemed to have drawn the most favorable position for its ambition, as the 78th was worn down by its attacks on the citadel and Loges Wood, and might have an initial nervous voltage to drive its legs, but not the reserve strength to remain long in pursuit. The 1st's prospects seemed very dismal. Do you suppose that Kansans and Missourians of the 89th were going to yield place to any division? As for the 2nd, fresh in line, it was the "best" of the older divisions. You may have that on official authority from its headquarters, and on the informal authority of every officer and man of the 2nd, and also from every transport horse or mule, if they could have spoken. The 1st was also the "best" division, as we know from equally numerous and valiant authorities. Anyone who cares to dispute either set of authorities, lacking, of course, information to justify his opinion, is left to his fate.

Was the race-horse 2nd to allow the 1st to take one rod of its line of advance? Not while the 2nd had a corporal's guard able to march and fight; not unless the 1st could leap-frog the 2nd in aeroplanes. The 1st might do police duty and repair roads after it was tired out in trying to keep in sight of the 2nd's heels. Were the Texans of the 90th, who were just becoming warmed up to the Argonne battle, to allow the 32nd to do anything but trail in their wake? Was the regular 5th, which had taken a lien on the west bank of the Meuse, to accept assistance from National Guardsmen, even if they were the greedy and swift Arrows?

We had in this array of divisions--to pass a general compliment, as they passed few compliments to one another because the "bests" were so numerous--infantry which thrilled the most stale of observers with admiration apart from national pride. I had heard much of the "trench look" and the "battle face," which, as seen by civilians, sometimes puzzled men long at the front. I saw it, as I understand it, at Château-Thierry and during the Meuse-Argonne battle; I saw it, too, in the Ypres salient and at Verdun. It was sharp-featured, in keeping with lithe muscular bodies, with a smile that possibly took its character from that "salt of life," a direct look in the eye in answer to a challenge,--the face of a man who has seen the flight of things more dangerous than baseballs, who knows grinding discipline, roofless, fireless billets in midwinter, and the submission of self to a cause in the grimmest of team-play.

Our infantry were ready, resolutely and confidently ready. All our gunners, there on the slopes, in the ravines and woods, in the midst of that array of guns, were ready to pour forth their hurricane of shells. Our machine-gun battalions, our medical, engineer, and salvage units, our ammunition trains, our rolling kitchens, were ready. General Maistre, who came from Marshal Foch to Fifth Corps headquarters the night before the attack, asked if we would "go through."

"We will go through," Summerall replied.

"Do you want to see my plans?" Summerall asked Pershing.

"No. I know them."

Summerall went out with him to his car.

"Will you go through?" Pershing asked him.

"We will."

Pershing put the same all-embracing question to Hines and Dickman, and received the same resolute answer. Corps commanders were only repeating the messages of division, brigade, and battalion commanders, who were speaking the thought of the men.

"We will go through."

XXXIII

VICTORY

A march of victory in the center--Held on the left--But full speed on the second day--The 89th stays in--Veterans in leash--The 90th to the river wall--The 5th pivoting--The Borne at last taken by the 79th--The 5th gets across the Meuse--Varying resistance to the main advance--Rainbows give way to French entry into Sedan--In motion from Meuse to Moselle on the last day--Isolated divisions in Flanders--Every village in France--The folly of war.

One who moved about in the days before and the night before the attack, from the railheads to the front, his vision embracing the whole panorama, no longer need talk of what America was going to do in the war. He saw what America had done since September 26th between the ruins of the old trench system and the Kriemhilde Stellung, and he knew that the army which was to spring into action at dawn on the morning of November 1st was the greatest in our history.

When the simmering volcano of routine artillery fire broke into eruption at 3.30, racking the earth with concussions and assaulting the heavens with blinding flashes, as the stream of shells from the larger caliber of the forest of guns passed over the streams from the smaller caliber, it seemed that all the Germans in the front line must be mashed into the earth. If the preliminary bombardment left any alive, then that monstrous curtain of shell-bursts in front of the advancing infantry, and the trench mortar fire, and the sheets of machine-gun bullets that increased the strength of the shield, must hold them trussed to the earth until it passed over them and our men were upon them.

So it was with the 2nd Division, where I followed up the advance. With the seeming facility with which the easier hurdles are taken in a steeple-chase, the wave of the 2nd had swept over the fragmentary trenches of the Kriemhilde system beyond Sommerance, where the great attacks of the 1st and the 82nd had died down, and our line had been little changed by the general attack of October 14th, which had mastered the Kriemhilde in the center. There were occasional enemy shell-bursts in patches of woods and on obvious points, fired by German guns, halting in retreat or before withdrawal from their old positions, and occasional bullets cracked by from the left in the region of the Bourgogne forest; but all this seemed only the venomous and hopeless spite of a rearguard action that was breaking into a rout. Only at long intervals did you see a prone, still figure in khaki on the earth; and our wounded were not numerous. German prisoners were being rounded up from bushes and gullies, and in gray files they were crossing the fields to the rear, as the combings of a drive which was moving as fast this time as the pencilings on the map of high ambition. Admired by the Allies for our speed, we were showing it now in legs unlimbered and free of the chains that had encompassed us for over a month.

It had ceased to be a battle on the way to Bayonville-et-Chennery. It was a march, a joyous march of victory, more appealing than any city parade, you may be sure. Our guns and transport were coming along roads which were free of any except a rare vagrant shell-burst. Indeed, everything in the 2nd's sector was going according to schedule. It was good to be with the 2nd, as I had learned in June and July in the Château-Thierry operations. One stopped and watched for the figures ahead to appear in their mobile swiftness in open spaces, as they came out of woods and ravines. One knew by instinct that we were going over the heights and down the apron this time. The weather was with us, too. After the long period of chill rains and hardships, a kindly sunshine filtered through the leaden sky. There had been more thrilling days in the war, thrilling with triumph and apprehension for me: when I was in Brussels, before the German avalanche arrived; when I saw the British battle fleet go out to sea; when I saw the French driving the Germans back in the first battle of the Marne; when I saw the British and French in their retreat before the German offensives of 1918; when I saw our first contingent land in France. But the crowning day was the one which brought forth the confession of the German communiqué that we had broken the German line.

This is not saying, though the Fifth Corps in the center reached its objectives, except for a few hundred yards at some points, that everything in the schedule went without a hitch along the whole front. Our movement was fan-shaped, swinging toward the loop of the Meuse in its bend westward. The center of gravity, as I understood the plan, was to pass from the Fifth Corps to the First on the left, whose flank was on the Bourgogne forest, with an intricate tactical problem to solve in scalloping and flank maneuvers. Here we met severe resistance from the Germans, who were still inclined to hold their bastion. Though the 78th had pounded its old enemy, the Loges Wood, with shells of big calibers from heavy American and French batteries assigned to it, the Germans still clung to their machine-guns; and though the Bourgogne Wood was thoroughly gassed, it poured in a strong flanking fire, and even sent out one counter-attack. The 77th was checked by heavy casualties in its effort to storm Champigneulle. The 80th, also fresh and impetuously determined to let nothing stop it, found the Germans showing their old form in defending woods and hills, and had to repeat their attacks and repulse counter-attacks; for our left, which had the longest swing to make, was delayed, while our center, taking over the center of gravity as the result of its advance, had gone ahead for four and five miles.

The Rainbows of the 42nd, in reserve with the First Corps, were fractious. Weren't they in sight of the rainbow's end of their year in France? Let them in, and they would take it. Fine troops the 78th, 77th, and 80th, no doubt, thought the Rainbows, but the 42nd was the 42nd, and belonged to a class by itself for this kind of work. The three divisions of the First Corps were not offering iridescent travelers in the rear a holiday on the path they had blazed. They were about to enjoy it themselves.

The enemy was making his stand on the left to prevent our wholesale capture of prisoners, when he found that the combined movement of the French and American armies would put him into a trap; but the next day he was out of the Loges Wood and Champigneulle, and retreating through the Bourgogne forest. All three divisions took up the pursuit, to make up for lost time--and catch up with the procession. They were to show that they could move fast, too. On the 2nd they made four and five miles, and on the 3rd they kept up the same gait, which was a marvelous performance in deployment and contact and endurance.

The Fifth Corps in the center faced the final heights of the whale-back, the Barricourt crest. For its support it had an overwhelming concentration of artillery fire, which Summerall, the gunner, required in order to keep his word to "go through." Lejeune's race-horse 2nd surpassed its own record for speed, as we have seen. Not only did it take its own objectives, but it was called on to send support elements over to assist the left. It was glad to send support elements anywhere, if they filled a gap which the 1st might have filled.

The 89th, the other division of the Fifth Corps, was thrown head on against the Barricourt heights. Wright had been among his officers and men, making them feel that all the Mississippi valley was calling on them for all there was in them in this attack. They might have been gassed and mired in the Bantheville Wood, they might be tired; but their great day had come. They were "going through." The Stokes mortars kept up with the assault waves, even dragging wagons of ammunition with them; a brigade of artillery was following up the infantry two hours after the attack began. Prodigious effort had a road through the mire of Bantheville Wood by 10.30 in the morning, with all the divisional transport moving up. No less than those hard-shell veterans of the 2nd, the 89th went ahead from the start in the conviction that success was certain. Before that day was over they ran into nests of machine-guns which ordinarily ought to have repulsed the most gallant charge, but the waves of infantry, with supports fast on their heels, had tasted victory in its intoxicating depths, and they overcame every obstacle. That night the Barricourt ridge was ours; when the Germans stated that their line was broken, it meant that we had broken German resistance on the whale-back. The way was open to the Meuse, and Germans in front of the First Corps had better make the most of the darkness of the night of the 1st for retreat.

As the two divisions of the Fifth Corps, the 2nd and the 89th, in the pell-mell rush to get the final crest, which was of such decisive importance in the strategic plan, had become extended, the shorter advances required of them during the next two days, which included some stout, if uneven, resistance, by the Germans, allowed them time to get transport in order and bring up more artillery. Those old hounds of the 1st, with their mouths watering, were moving as close up to the front as their schedule would permit, and straining at the leash. The 89th, having had such a grueling time in going over the ridge, and such hard marching after the exhaustion of cleaning up Bantheville Wood, might be considered nominally expended, if not in fact. When the Fifth Corps gave an order that the 1st take over the 89th's place, General Wright objected. Take out his Kansans and Missourians! They were only getting their second wind. They were coming as strong as a flood on the Missouri. The order was revoked; a second one later was scotched by the same effective protest. Meanwhile the General was up at the front, urging on his tired men with the persuasive argument of the Corps threat. So the 89th was to remain in until the finish, while the 1st, licking its chops and panting, swinging this way and that, was begging: "Just give us one bite!"

Prospects were no better for the 32nd, in reserve with the Third Corps on the right. Everybody could not be in this battle; the 5th and the 90th were willing that the Arrows should study the ground they had won, but they might not participate in winning more. Ely's and Allen's men were preoccupied with that undertaking themselves, and too busy to look after tourist parties. Whereat the Arrows sharpened their points in impatience, as they pried forward, and tightened their bowstrings, ready for a flight if they could draw the bows which, if they had the chance, would show the divisions in front the character of veteran skill.

If the Fifth Corps took its objectives, you might be certain that General Hines of the Third Corps on the right would take his, and maintain his reputation for brevity by reporting the fact with no more embellishment than a ship's log. If he had written Cæsar's commentaries, they would have been compressed into one chapter. The former commander of the bull-dog 4th Division, who had been on the Meuse flank under the cross artillery fire from September 26th, knew his ground. As the Third Corps had its flank on the Meuse and was to swing in toward the river bank, it had the shortest advance of the three corps to make.

The Texans of the 90th, on the left of his Corps, had been fretting for a week in face of the Freya Stellung and the Andevanne ridge, which they were now to take. In one of his trips about the front, General Allen had had his artillery commander killed at his side by a shell. His Texans were the kind that would carry out his careful plans for the attack. Barrages were cleverly arranged; machine-gunners put on high points for covering fire. On the 1st the Texans made short work of the Freya Stellung, reaching their objectives at every point, and eager to go ahead. The Germans put in a first-class division against the Texans on the night of the 2nd; but that did not make any difference. It was a furious give and take at some points, but on the night of the 2nd they had Villers-devant-Dun and Hill 212. The next day, in face of only desultory shelling, it was a matter of tireless maneuver and scattered fighting, with the worst punishment from low-flying German planes, raking our lines with machine-gun bullets. That night the 90th was organizing on the Halles ridge, preparatory to striking for the river bank.

The 5th, the right division of the Third Corps, as it pivoted on the Meuse bank, had patrols studying the river for a crossing at Brieulles and beyond on November 1st. The next morning its left entered Cléry-le-Petit, a mile farther down the river from Brieulles, and cleaned up the horseshoe bluff known as the Punch-bowl. Now we had word that the Fourth French Army, on the west, and our First Corps, on the east, of the Bourgogne forest, in their rapid pursuit were out of touch with the enemy. This prompted energetic measures by the 5th in crossing the river, which General Ely was to apply in dashing initiative that will hold our attention later.