Part 35

By this time on that shell-cursed western slope of the Meuse where many of our divisions had fought under the cross-fire from the galleries, there was only an occasional burst. Apart from the taking of the whale-back, there was another reason--the action east of the Meuse, where our divisions, coöperating with the French, had sprung to the attack on the morning of November 1st no less energetically than on the main battlefield. The Yankees of the 26th, as the only National Guard division then in the front line, sharing the freshened confidence of the hour, put the survivors of all four regiments in line, their sector being now farther south, over the ridges and through the woods north of Verdun, where they were hampered by bad roads and mud, which was to give them a part in keeping with their record in the last acts of the drama. The 79th was making a maneuver up the slopes of the bowl which called for initiative and consummate tactical resourcefulness. Kuhn, who had formed the division and led it, knew his men. There was nothing they would not attempt. He knew his enemy, too. A great honor had come to the 79th, the honor of storming the Borne de Cornouiller, or Hill 378, the highest of all the hills we took in the battle,--"corned willy," as the soldiers fighting for it on cold corned beef called it.

There was no rapid pursuit for them, but wicked uphill work all the way, in three days of repeated charges. Starting from the Molleville farm clearing, they had to ascend the steep, wooded slopes of the Etraye and Grande Montagne ridges, and struggle down one side and up the other of that deadly Vaux de Mille Mais and other ravines, before they were in sight of the Borne. The German grew bitter in his resistance at the thought of having to yield this favorite height, which had given his observers a far-flung view, and his artillery cover to swing the volume of fire into the flank of our Third Corps. The Borne was a bald and gently rounded ridge, with the undulating plateau-like crest, facing the bare and steep slope which the 79th had to ascend, peculiarly favorable for machine-gun defense in front, while along the bordering road to the west, in the edge of the Grande Montagne Wood, machine-guns could sweep in flank the road and the whole slope. Piles of cartridge cases which had been emptied into our waves were silent witnesses of the fire the assaults of the 79th had endured when every khaki figure was exposed on the blue sky-line, a pitilessly distinct silhouette at close range.

Checked at this point and that, taking advantage of each fresh gain in gathering their strength for another effort, the men of the 79th kept on until they had worked their way through the woods and finally overrun the crest. There in their triumph, as they looked far across the Meuse over the hills and ridges and patches of woods, they might see the very heights of the whale-back which had been their goal when they charged down the valley of Montfaucon on September 26th in their baptism of fire. That Borne was the crowning point of those frowning hills and ridges east of the Meuse, which bullet-headed Prussian staff officers, who dreamed of fighting to the last ditch, had foreseen as a line of impregnable defense on French soil, which should become as horrible a shambles as their neighbors, the hills of Verdun. They had a new and inexpressibly grateful relation now to the vineyards of France, her well-tilled fields, her flower gardens of the Riviera, and the security of the whole world--for everywhere the bullet-headed Prussian officer was becoming the protesting flotsam in the midst of a breaking army which he could not control. The 79th had gone as far as it was wanted to go in following north the course of the Meuse in that movement begun on October 8th when the 33rd crossed the Meuse and advanced on the flank of the 29th toward the Borne.

Now another division, the 5th, was to cross the Meuse. The Meuse bottoms were broad, as I have hitherto noted, and swampy in places under the heavy rains, and required that the Meuse canal as well as the river should be bridged. There were many points on the river bottoms as well as on the hills on the east bank where machine-gunners might hide. German units still being urged to stand felt the appeal to their skill of such an advantage of position; their commanders the value of holding all the Meuse heights they could to assist the retreat of the Germans on the west. The 5th, despite its daring efforts, was not to achieve a crossing until the 90th on its left had finished its longer swing. On the night of the 3rd our Third Corps measured eight miles of front on the river bank. For the 5th and the other divisions, as their fan-shaped movement toward the bend brought each in turn to the river, it was a case of patrols finding openings by night between the tornadoes of machine-gun fire, where the engineers might do the building under the protection of our artillery. Material for the bridges had to be found or brought from the rear. In this our initiative and resourcefulness were at their best.

At dark on the night of the 3rd the attempts began. The engineers went to their hazardous task of working under fire, which is harder than shooting back at your enemy. They stealthily managed to put a footbridge across the river, but when they started to build another across the canal, they met a hurricane of machine-gun and rifle fire, while the German guns concentrating upon them forced their retirement. The engineers are a patient and tireless lot, who can wait until a burst of fire has died down and then start work again. By 2 A.M. they had two footbridges across the canal. When a small column of infantry tried to cross, they were blown back by the enemy, who had evidently been watching for the target to appear. The infantry dug in between the canal and the river. This much was gained at all events.

At 9.30 the next morning came a message from the Corps, directing that "the crossing will be effected regardless of loss, as the movement of the entire Army depends upon this crossing, and it must be done at once."

There was nothing to do, then, but cross or die in the effort, without waiting for darkness. All available artillery was asked to pound the east bank of the Meuse until eight in the evening. At four in the afternoon the 5th started to lay a pontoon bridge across at Cléry-le-Petit, where the river was 110 feet wide and 10 feet deep. The pontoons were not blown up by shell-fire quite as fast as they were put in the water. Therefore the bridge was finally completed. Under a barrage of artillery fire two battalions made a rush to cross the bridge. The German artillery began tearing them to pieces at the same time that it was tearing the bridge to pieces.

Happily the 5th was not putting all its eggs in one basket. At 6.20 another party, without any artillery preparation, succeeded in crossing the canal as well as the river at Brieulles, and once on the other side would not be budged from maintaining their narrow bridgehead in face of the plunging fire from the heights. Just below Brieulles, another battalion, which was also favored, no doubt, by the German attention being drawn to the fragile targets of the pontoons, in the most unostentatious but expeditious manner got across by using rafts, duckboards, poles, and ropes, and by swimming. The water of the river was bitter cold, but we were winning the war, and every soldier in the Meuse-Argonne was used to being wet by rain. This sopping battalion made a lodgment in Chatillon Wood, and kept warm during the night by cleaning the Germans out of it.

It appeared at midnight that the whole division would have to swing round to cross the river by way of Brieulles; but before morning the left brigade, on the north, put pontoons over successfully during the night, and crossed a battalion; for the Aces of the 5th had taken the Corps order to heart. Never let it be said that the 5th was holding up the entire Army--if it really were. General Hines was a very taciturn man, as I have remarked; and the Army staff had studied foreign methods in propaganda.

By 8 A.M. there were artillery bridges over the Meuse at Brieulles. Such speed as this ought to be encouraged by calling for more speed. Two brigades had detachments across the river. The next thing was to join up the bridgeheads and take Dun-sur-Meuse, and this immediately. General Ely, of square jaw and twinkling blue eyes, did not care who took it, so it was taken.

"Take Dun-sur-Meuse and the hill north of 292, and from there go to the east," he told one brigade. "Do not wait for the other brigade. Keep pushing up with that one battalion, and take that place."

"Keep shoving your battalions through," he told the other brigade. "Don't stop, but go through Dun. Take the shelling, and take the machine-gun fire, and push things along. You are to go to Dun unless the other fellow gets there first."

Thus Dun and the heights were taken that day, and the 5th fully established on the east bank of the Meuse. It was an accomplishment admirable in courage and skill.

The spirit of rivalry shown by the battalions rushing for Dun was that of all the divisions sweeping down the apron of the reverse slopes of the whale-back toward the river. This apron was not a smooth descent, but undulating, broken by hills, ravines, and woods, where machine-gunners could take cover and force deployment. In many instances advancing was no mere maneuver. The 89th ran into strong opposition on the heights overlooking the Meuse, and in common with all other divisions could not answer the enemy artillery, as we did not want to fire into the inhabited villages on the other bank. The 2nd met strong resistance on the 4th, which required organizing a regular attack; but, of course, it went through. Lejeune was not a man to consider any other result, or his men inclined to waste time when the 1st Division was waiting in the rear to take the 2nd's place if it so much as stubbed its toe. As we know, on critical occasions, the 2nd did not worry about casualties. Its casualty list, whose total was the heaviest of any division in France, for the final drive was over four thousand.

Enemy resistance varied with the mood of individual units. A few answered the professional call and the call of fatalism not to miss an opportunity to turn their machine-guns upon our advancing troops. Others asked only to escape or to surrender. The harder we pressed, the larger would be this class. Our own mood was that of the soldier who has his enemy in flight. Every blow was another argument for an armistice, and a further assurance of an early passage home. The elation of the chase eliminated the sense of fatigue. Abandoned guns, rifles, bombs, trench mortars, worn-out automobiles and trucks, all the stage properties of retreat were in the wake of that German army whose mighty organization had held the world in a fearful awe. We were passing through a region where houses were intact and only a few shells had fallen in the course of our advance. Villagers in a wondering delirium of joy were watching the groups of German prisoners, too weary for any emotion except a sense of relief, of officers with long faces and a glazed, despairing look in their eyes, officers who were indifferent, and occasional ones in whom the defiance of Prussian militarism still bore itself in ineffectual superciliousness; and watching these strange Americans going and coming on their errands, and the passage of our troops, guns, and transport in an urgent procession which thought of nothing except getting ahead.

The Commander-in-Chief having on the 5th directly urged all possible speed on the left toward the Meuse at Sedan, which was of course the farthest objective from our starting-point, those mouth-watering veteran hounds in reserve of the First and Fifth Corps at last had their leashes removed, and joined the pack in full cry. Taking the place of the 78th, the men of the 42nd knew now that there was a rainbow's end, and they meant that it should go to none other than the Rainbow Division. March is hardly the word for their speed; gallop is a better one. On the 8th they had reached Wadelincourt, a suburb across the river from Sedan, in their wonderful dash. Their Rainbow ambition having considered all northern France as their objective, they found that they were out of the American sector, and accordingly must be "side-slipped." The French took Sedan. There was historical fitness in the French poilus, in their faded blue, being the first troops to enter that town, where a French disaster, due to a travesty of imperial leadership, had glorified the Hohenzollern dynasty, which was now a travesty with its armies in dissolution.

The 1st, swinging over to the left but still remaining with the Fifth Corps, had a long march before reaching the front of the 80th, which it relieved. When it received the word to go, it developed a speed which was sufficient reason for its being in at the finish, without depending upon its record in previous actions. Our pioneer veterans had two days and two nights in line, advancing ten miles. Then they were "squeezed out" by the "side-slipping" of the 42nd from before Sedan. From the morning of November 5th, when the call came to them, until midnight of November 7th-8th, their units had fought for forty-eight hours, and marched from thirty to forty-five miles. Will the race-horse 2nd please take note of this?

If the Arrows of the 32nd, the third of the veteran divisions in reserve, had had to go home without being in the final drive, when the 42nd was in it, our army staff would have been even more unpopular than it was. They, too, had this chance. As the Third Corps' front broadened with its advance over the heights on the other side of the river they took over a portion of the sector of the 15th French Colonials, where they were driving the enemy in most uncivil fashion when the flag fell.

The Texans of the 90th had to swing their right flank to the river bank in _liaison_ with the flank of the 5th, and keep firm _liaison_ with the 89th on their left. They faced very resolute fire from the other bank in their bridge-building, which had to be done under most troublesome conditions after some expensive reconnoitering, in which the Texans did not allow artillery or machine-gun fire to interfere with their pioneering audacity. On the 9th they had orders to cross. That night they went over their new bridge under a pitiless fire. While one detachment went into Stenay, which lies under a bluff, where it had a busy time in cleaning up the town, the other detachment pressed on into Baalon Wood.

Meanwhile the Kansans and Missourians of the 89th had been preparing, at the same time with the 2nd of the Fifth Corps, to cross and take the heights of Inor. As soon as their outposts reached the bank, their patrols had begun swimming the river under machine-gun fire. They were assigned some German pontoons, which they transformed into rafts. The first was rowed across; the others were pulled across with ropes. Seventy-five men being crowded on each raft, they put one whole battalion on the opposite bank while footbridges were being smashed by the enemy artillery as fast as the engineers could build them. The battalion, having taken over a hundred prisoners, pressed on to Autreville. It goes without saying that the 2nd had also effected a crossing--and under equally trying conditions.

Every battalion over the Meuse, every rod of ground gained, was considered a further argument for the Germans to accept the terms of the armistice now in their hands. Until the word to cease fire came, the Army would go on fighting; at dawn on the 11th, when the German delegates were signing their names on Marshal Foch's train our Second Army, weak in numbers and strong in heart, began carrying out the orders that had been planned in the Saint-Mihiel sector, where several of our veteran divisions had been resting after being expended in the Meuse-Argonne, and we had the 7th and 88th among our new divisions. On the right was the 92nd, colored, National Army, nearest of all our troops to the former German frontier, who were the first to cross it, I understand, in their successful charge. To say that the 28th and the 33rd were also in the action is sufficient. They were going ahead, and the German infantry was resisting with machine-gun fire which caused numerous casualties, and the German artillery was responding with a heavy bombardment at some points, when word was flashed through from Marshal Foch to our General Headquarters, and through to the Second Army, and out to the regiments and battalions, that at 11 A.M. hostilities would cease.

The Second Army advance was immediately stopped. Everywhere east of the Meuse our troops were advancing on the morning of the 11th. The 81st was engaged on the flank of the veteran 26th, which had been ceaselessly pushing the enemy over the hills since November 1st, and was now approaching the plain. The 79th, after taking the Borne de Cornouiller, had faced round in a rapid and brilliant maneuver, pressing over the rim of the bowl from the Grande Montagne and from Belleu Wood, in whose fox-holes three of our divisions had suffered, and moving down into the plain had taken Damvillers, and was now storming the last of the three hills between its line and the plain of the Woëvre. The men were wrathful at being stopped. They wanted to finish the job: to take the last of the hills.

At many points where our infantry units were far beyond our communications and infiltrating around hills and through woods, it took some time to reach the rapidly moving advance detachments with the news that they were to cease firing and go no farther. Particularly was this true in front of the Fifth Corps, whose skirmishers, having just crossed the river, were taking the bit in their teeth. A few elements were still engaging the German rearguard at eleven, unaware that the war was over, while on all the remainder of the front from Switzerland to Holland there was silence for the first time in four years--and the mills of hell had ceased grinding.

Two of the divisions which had been in line on the first day of the Meuse-Argonne battle were in line on the last. Two others which had helped break the old trench system on September 26th, the 37th and the 91st, were to see the finish far from our army family, on the plains of Belgium. Isolated in an odd Flemish world of level fields broken by canals, the two were attached to different French corps in that Allied force of British and French and Belgians under the Belgian King, and under the direct command of General Degoutte, which had disengaged Ypres, recovered Ostend, Bruges, Roulers, and Courtrai, when on October 31st our men joined in that tide of victory which was soon to flow into Brussels itself. In three days they made eight miles against irregular rearguard action. In taking the low ridge commanding the Scheldt, they were under a heavy artillery reaction of the Germans in protecting the retreat across the river. The Ohioans on November 2nd, in face of the concentrations of gun-fire, were able to slip small detachments across on bridges improvised from tree-trunks and timbers taken from shattered houses, and eventually, that night, to pass over several battalions on a temporary footbridge; the 91st and the French divisions were unsuccessful in reaching the other bank except by this one bridge. The Pacific Coast men, with their usual intrepidity, were planning to swim the river, but after three days of continued advance, which included the capture of the large town of Audenarde, they and the Ohioans were given a rest by the corps commands. On the 10th they were put in line again, but they did not overtake the line pursuing the retreating enemy before his capitulation.

Some American units, besides the 27th and 30th Divisions with the British, had been isolated from the first from the American family. American hospitals in base towns on both the British and French fronts were an evidence, from the days of our neutrality, of that work of war which knows no national allegiance. Volunteer ambulance sections, maintaining the traditions of the American Field Service, continued to the end to serve with French divisions; and indeed, many of the former volunteers who had preferred to prepare for commissions in the French army might be come upon unexpectedly in the horizon blue uniform. Engineer troops for which our Allies had made an early request might be buried in obscure parts of the front, to come to light only in the shadow of an emergency which, as at Cambrai and in the German March offensive, turned engineer troops into combatants; or again, as our own demands grew, to return to our own fold. Air squadrons, as well as individual aviators, served in valiant anonymity on Allied fronts, in many cases never seeing the American front, which yet wanted for aviation. So wide was the dispersion of Americans throughout France that it is safe to say that hardly a single commune of the country has gone without sight of the soldier from overseas. In due time the far-flung legions would all have come home to an integral army; but the problem of keeping in touch with units which believed themselves lost to the sight of their comrades was not a simple one, and yet a problem that must be faced. How was the motor park, isolated in French barracks at Epinal, or the forestry unit in the Jura or the Pyrenees, to be assured that somewhere in the inner circles of hierarchy its faithful service was being noted and appreciated?

Most isolated of all, though they received due meed of honor from the French with whom they served, were certain colored regiments. Recruited from various National Guard organizations in northern States, they had arrived in a training area in France after a usual period of service as labor troops in the S. O. S., and were formed into a provisional 93rd Division, which was not, however, to be assembled. In the spring the regiments were assigned to various French divisions for trench service, at the request of the French staff, which had developed long experience with colored troops in many African campaigns. For this service the Americans were equipped throughout with French mustard-colored khaki uniforms, French rifles, packs, gas masks, and helmets, which still further accentuated their isolation. The varying fortunes of trench warfare in the Argonne and about Saint-Mihiel seasoned their experience for a due part in the repulse of the last German offensive, and in the offensive begun by General Gouraud's army west of the Argonne, at the same time with our attack to the east. Withdrawn with their divisions after a few days of advance which counted them as "expended," the regiments were sent to recuperate in the Vosges, whence they started on the short march to the Rhine after the armistice.

We know how, in framing the armistice terms, as one after another strong demand was included, an apprehension developed in certain Allied quarters lest the Germans, with such a large army still in being, might become desperate and continue the war. When one read the terms, which surrendered the German navy and placed us in command of the Rhine bridgeheads, he knew how deep the two-edged sword had cut, and that the Allies had power in their hands to force complete submission to their will. It was a skillful and wise peace, bringing an end to the bloodshed and the agony.