Part 7

From a ridge in the midst of the old trench system in the center of our line, the nature of our task appeared as a picture, which my observation in threading my way through the streams of traffic in the rear filled in with detail. Ahead, except for occasional groups and lines appearing and disappearing in the wooded, undulating landscape, our advancing infantry seemed to have been dissipated into the earth. Their part after they were through the fortifications I shall describe in another chapter. The bridge between them and the rear was for the moment in the air, where Allied and German planes in prodigal numbers came and went on their errands of combat and observation. In the jam on the roads back of the trenches, thousands of men, of waiting machine-gun battalions and of stalled artillery, and drivers and helpers attached to traffic of all kinds, were looking aloft at a "show" which was worth the price of being packed in darkened transports, and almost worth the price of enduring army discipline.

If they might see nothing of the battle going on behind the ridge, they had grandstand seats for the theatrics of war in the air, staged on the background of the blue ceiling of heaven. I was not to see the like of this scene again in such bright sunlight. The most jaded veteran never failed to look up at the sound of machine-gun firing, which signaled that the aces might be jousting overhead. Would one be brought down? There might be only an exchange of bullets between planes in passing; then one might turn to give chase to the other; or both begin maneuvering for advantage. In shimmering flashes the sunlight caught the turning wings of planes that tumbled in a "falling leaf" when at a disadvantage, caught the wings of planes that were crippled and falling to their death.

Duels were forgotten when a German plane with no Allied plane across its path swept down toward the huge inflated prey of an observation balloon. His telephone told the observer in the basket that it was time to take to his parachute. The sight of the figure of a man, harnessed to a huge umbrella, leisurely descending from a height of a thousand feet, divided attention with watching to see whether or not the gas within the thin envelope overhead broke into a great ball of flame. If not, it was brought down to take on its passenger again; and it could be lowered with incredible rapidity for such an immense object, as the wire which anchored it was reeled in on the spinning reel on the motor-truck. There was something very modern and truly American about a motor-truck in a column of traffic towing a balloon.

Most fortunate of all the spectators were the men with machine-guns for aërial defense mounted on trucks. They both observed and participated in the game. Many of them were in action for the first time with a new toy. They did not propose to miss any opportunity to make up for having come late into the war.

"Haven't you learned the difference between an Allied and a German plane? You're shooting at an Allied plane," an officer called to a machine-gunner.

"Yes, sir," was the reply, and he stopped firing.

"Why didn't you tell him you couldn't hit it anyway?" remarked a passing wounded man, after the officer had passed on. "But don't worry. If they miss the plane, the bullets can still hit somebody when they fall."

Entranced as they were by the spectacle, all the men who had to do with the moving of the wheels of all the varieties of transport which overflowed the roads were only the more eager to press forward. The air was not their business. Their duty was over the ridge toward the front. The artillerists had particularly appealing reasons for impatience, as we shall see. They were using rugged language, which relieved their steam-pressure without changing the fact, which was being burned into the consciousness of the whole army, that as surely as a chain is no stronger than its weakest link, a road is no stronger than any slough which holds up traffic.

The engineers had no time to spare for observing blazing balloons. Their labors in the old trench system, in contrast to the florid drama of the air, were a reminder of how completely earth-tied the army was, and how small a part of its effort was above the earth, even in the days when communiqués paid much attention to aces. For a mile or more every road in the immediate rear of the old French trenches had been in disuse for four years while it was being torn by shell-bursts. For the distance across No Man's Land, it had become part of the sea of shell-craters. On the German side of No Man's Land were more trench chasms, and another stretch which had been blasted in the same fashion as the French side.

Shoveling would fill many of the holes; but shoveling required labor when we were short of labor, and time when every minute was precious. It was increasingly evident every minute, too, that trucks that carry three tons, and six-inch mortars, and heavy caissons were not meant to pass over any piece of mended road that had its bottom two or three feet below the surface. They insisted upon finding the bottom and remaining there until pulled out by other traction than their own.

The division engineers were supposed to keep on the heels of the infantry, which they did with a gallantry which made amends for the inadequacy of their numbers and material. Their efficacy was dependent upon these two features and upon the prevision of the division command in mastering the problem beforehand. There were critics who said that some division staffs evidently expected their artillery and rolling kitchens to take wing; but the division staffs produced by way of answer the unfailing list of written orders on the subject, which could not be carried out. If the infantry were repulsed or checked, the engineers might share some of the fighting, as they had on more than one occasion. There seemed to be a universal apprehension, the engineers said, that an engineer might have a chance to sleep or rest, which would obviously ruin his morale. If, after the infantry had passed on, the enemy concentrated the fire of a battery on the road-builders, they were not supposed to be diverted from their labor, but to be prompt in filling new shell-craters.

The lack of material ready on wagons for immediate movement to the front left them to gather what material they could on the spot. They could not use barbed wire, and in places that seemed the only thing in sight. They tore out trench timbers, which often proved rotten from four years in moist earth, they gathered stones where stones could be found and used these to make something more solid than loose earth turned by the shovel; and they sent hurry calls to the rear for trucks of material, which themselves might be stalled on the way forward in the jam of waiting traffic. The more sticks and stones filled in a bad spot, the more were needed as the earth underneath continued to yield. When a truck-driver saw that the truck in front, which belonged to his convoy, had passed through a rut, he determined that where his leader could go he could follow, and he drove ahead, cylinders roaring with all their horse-power. When he was stuck, he spurred them to another effort. Meanwhile his wheels were probably sinking, and he had delayed the mending of the break in any satisfactory way while the truck in front backed up to put out a towline, and all hands in the neighborhood added their muscular man-power to cylinder horse-power. The Germans had raised in the shell-torn earth of the trench system another barrier than that of their fortifications to a swift drive for their lines of communication.

Their own limited opportunities in "passing the buck" did not exclude the engineers from easing their own mental, if not physical, burden by remarking with acid intensity that a little better traffic control on the part of some of the people who were complaining would help matters. No one who had been along the roads could deny that this point was well taken. If not the experience of other offensives, our traffic demoralization at Saint-Mihiel should have been a warning to us, though most of the men who had learned their lessons in that sector were still occupied there. We had the admirable example of the British transport, which, after confusion in the Somme battle resembling ours at Saint-Mihiel, had developed in practice under fire a system which seemed automatic.

The number of guns and ammunition-caissons and the length of a column of divisional transport were calculable quantities. Their order of precedence behind the infantry was largely a settled formula. The number of roads and their state of repair must be known not only on the map but by practical observation. Some were narrow country roads, which would accommodate only "one-way" traffic, and others would accommodate traffic going both ways. Having all these factors in mind, the program must include the disposition of labor battalions where they would be needed in making prompt repairs, when heavy trucks cut up roads, especially one-way dirt country roads.

We had written out extensive instructions for traffic regulation, which were to be enforced by military police who were new to the task and insufficient in numbers. The same thing happened to the military police on September 26th as happened to the New York City police during the parade of the 27th Division, when the crowd broke through the police lines into the line of march. In this instance, when aggressive commanders of artillery and convoys saw an opening, they made for it without regard to traffic regulations, though their ardor may have meant only delay in the end.

Thus the military police had paper authority which they could not enforce. Their minds were kept in confusion by the confusion of personal directions they received from volunteer experts. They were overwhelmed in rank; and respect for rank had been drilled and drilled into them. A colonel is a colonel and a mighty man; a lieutenant-colonel is a mightier man than a major, who in turn outranks any captain in charge of a section of road. What was the use of proclaiming a road "one-way," when a staff officer appeared and declared it "two-way"? What was there to do when another staff officer appeared with an outburst against the disobedience of regulations that had interlocked traffic going both ways on this same one-way road?

This is not saying that the personal initiative of a passing senior officer was not serviceable, when he confined his effort to breaking a jam, without reorganizing the system in one locality, and thereby throwing it out of gear in other localities. With the best of intentions, colonels fresh from home who had not seen a large operation before were particularly energetic. Some of their remarks stirred memories of Philippine days when the transport of an expeditionary battalion was in difficulties. The burden of the world was on their shoulders. When they gave an order, they wanted no suggestive "But, sir----" from any captain or major, though they complained that reserve officers lacked both initiative and discipline. As each colonel departed in the blissful consciousness that it had taken a trained soldier to "straighten things out," the traffic officers, in the interval before another appeared with contradictory orders, might indulge their sense of humor with the reflection that numerous "fool colonels" must be wandering about France with a free hand in impressing their rank upon juniors.

The biggest "fool colonel" or general was he who, to avoid walking, took his car in the early part of the day across the freshly made road over the trench system, thereby delaying the carts of machine-gun battalions. When his car was stalled, he received about as much sympathy as the driver of a truck stalled on a road which did not belong to his division. Not being a colonel, the driver might be made the public object of language which did not consider rank or human sensibilities.

In no result was the fact more evident than in our traffic direction that in making a large army we must crack the mold of a small army. In time our capacity for organization would make a new mold. Meanwhile, though it might be applied at cross-purposes, our American energy, adaptable, tireless, furious, and determined, must bring results. The many broken-down trucks in ditches beside the road were only the inevitable casualties of a prodigious effort. Let the infantrymen keep on advancing; we would force their supplies up to them in one way or another.

VIII

THE FIRST DAY

Out in the open--The enemy limited to passive defense--And relying on machine-gunners--Their elusiveness--Problems of the offense--Slowing down--Up with the infantry--Why dispersion--_Liaison_ up, down, and across--How keep the staff informed?--The spent wave before Montfaucon.

What of the infantry lost to view in the folds of the landscape? They were confronting the originals of the hills, woods, and ravines, whose contours on paper had been the definite factor in making plans, while the character and resistance of the enemy had been the indefinite and ungovernable quantity. As the day advanced, irregular pencilings, reflecting the reports of the progress of the fighters, moved forward on the maps of the different headquarters toward the heavy regular lines of the objectives which were the goals of our high ambition.

The loss of the first-line fortifications to the Germans could not be considered as serious as in an offensive in the first years of the war. Even as early as the Verdun battle, proponents of the mobile school of warfare, who had never been altogether silenced by the engineering school, had advocated a yielding elastic defense, which, after drawing the Crown Prince's Armies away from their depots, would counter by a sudden attack of the gathered French forces; but such a maneuver was too daring and contrary to the thought of the time, with its dependence upon rigid defense. Infantry had fallen into the habit of feeling "undressed" and helpless unless in trenches. When the soldier was forced into the open, he had hastened to hide his "nakedness" in a shell-crater, or instantly, in the very rodent instinct that he had developed, set to digging himself a pit. Since the German offensive of March, 1918, all the practice had been to wean the infantry away from settled defenses to the supple use of light artillery, trench mortars, and machine-gun units. Happily, as we know, the basic training of our infantry had been in keeping with this idea.

In the palmy days of German numbers and vigor, the German High Command might have met our Meuse-Argonne offensive by the prompt marshaling of reserves for a decisive counter-attack against our extended forces with inadequate roads at their backs; but if Ludendorff realized the errors which our fresh troops might commit from inexperience, we realized, on our part, that he was too occupied elsewhere by Allied attacks to consider any considerable aggressive action on our new front, where his tactics must have in mind, obviously, the protection with a minimum cost of men and material of his lines of communication, in order to assure a successful withdrawal from northern France and Belgium. With our attack developed, his subordinate in the Meuse-Argonne sector, in carrying out this policy, would choose the points where he could gain the best results by concentrating the fire of the artillery at his command, and then depend upon the expert German machine-gunners for defensive warfare in the open, supported by such fragmentary defense lines as might be hastily constructed.

According to the German intelligence report of our operation at Saint-Mihiel, our staff work had been immature, while our line officers did not know how to make the most of our gains. Without considering that at Saint-Mihiel we were under orders to stop on our limited objectives, and granting the Germans their view, no one will deny them the credit of knowing how to make the most of their tactical opportunities. The bellows of our accordeon was being drawn out as theirs was drawn in. With every hundred yards of advance our men were farther from their communications. Reports were accordingly the longer in reaching headquarters, and orders for future moves the longer in reaching the line, while those of the Germans, as they fell back on their communications, were prompt.

It was not the first time that they had lost first-line fortifications. They knew by experience as well as observation what had happened to their first line under the powerful initial assault; and they knew what they had to do, in full dependence upon a staff system trained in practice to meet this as well as the other vicissitudes of war. The failure of their men in the front line to stand to the death was an irritating exhibition of deteriorating morale, which must be taken into consideration not only by the subordinate but the higher commands. Scattered and demoralized individuals and groups, filtering back in retreat, might be re-formed, or passed through advancing reserves to the rear for reorganization. Fresh machine-gun units, which had almost the mobility of infantry, could be readily placed at points already foreseen as most suitable. One machine-gun might hold up the advance of a company of infantry. The enemy was fully familiar with the details of a landscape studded with ideal machine-gun positions, the choicest being the edge of a woods on a hillside overlooking an open space.

Some of our officers and men had met German machine-gun practice in open warfare in the Château-Thierry campaign and at the British front. As others knew it only under the limitations of trench warfare, the resistance which they now must face was familiar to them only through instruction. The German machine-gunner, having learned as the survivor of many battles the art of self-preservation at his adversary's expense, would wait all day and all night and even longer without a shot, until his target appeared in the field of fire assigned to him; wait as a Kentucky feudsman waits behind a rock for his enemy to appear on a road. Each gun was only one in a well-plotted array covering all the avenues of approach which any attacking force must follow. The guns disposed in front might precede or wait on the guns in flank in opening fire.

There was nothing new or wonderful in this arrangement. Any soldier with a sense of ground and of natural combative strategy could work out a plan of interlocking fire; but the discipline and the training requisite to its proper execution, and the stubborn phlegmatic bravery which sticks to a machine-gun to the death, are not to be found at random on any page of a city directory or social register. The fact that a gun had begun firing did not mean that it could be immediately located. Sometimes when light conditions were right the flash was visible, unless the gunner had hung a piece of bagging, through which he could aim, to conceal the flash. The direction of the fire might be judged somewhat by sound, and also by observing the spits of dust in the earth or on the wall of a building. Judgment on this score was affected by the proximity of the passing bullets to the observer's person.

The more machine-guns were firing from different angles, the more difficult it was to locate any one of them by either method; and the more influential the human element. In the midst of their fire imagination easily multiplied the number of guns, which is one of the moral effects of their use. When a gun was located, the gunner might slip back behind the crest of a ridge, or he might have moved as a precaution, before he was located, to another position which had been chosen as his next berth, with pit and camouflage in readiness.

An experienced aviator--always there is that word "experience" which has no substitute--might detect a machine-gun nest if he flew low; but not as a rule in woods or in bushes, or even in the open when covered with green branches. There were many machine-gunners and relatively few aviators. If a gunner thought that an aviator who flew low had seen him, he might have taken up a new position before the aviator's information had brought down artillery fire. The machine-gunner was a will-of-the-wisp with a hornet's sting, which could be thrown a mile and a half. Usually the price of locating him was casualties to the infantry, and still more casualties before he was taken, if he stood his ground. If the Germans had not enough machine-guns back of their first line for a complete interlocking defense on the first day of the battle--and they certainly had later--they aimed to place them where they could do the most good.

Naturally the American Army, studying its chessboard, had taken into consideration the counter-moves of the enemy which would result from its attack. Of course the passage through the entanglements would lead to the first dislocations of _liaison_; the storming of the trenches to more; and the passage over the shell-craters to still more. After every offensive against the trench system, officers had studied how to avoid the slowing down of the attack after the first line was taken. This had led to passing the first wave promptly through the trenches and leaving a second wave to "mop up" by "breaching" dugouts and cleaning up points of resistance; and then to the system of "leap-frogging," in which, when the men in front had been weakened in numbers by casualties and lost their aggressive cohesion, fresh troops went through them to carry forward the attack. Reserves in passing through the lanes of the barbed wire and over the trenches and on to catch up with an advancing line also suffered from disorganization, which might be increased by strong concentrations of enemy shell and machine-gun fire.

A division commander had discretion as to how he would gain his objectives, which brings us into the field of tactical direction, as technical as it is vital to success. His dispositions were a test of his knowledge of his profession, and his handling of the division after it was engaged of his qualities of generalship. In some instances villages and strong points were passed by the main line of advance, and left to be conquered by special attacking forces. Instructions had not only to be elaborate but practical.

Those captains and lieutenants, the company and platoon commanders, who were carrying out the instructions, must each be a general in his own limited field. The less experience his seniors had in preparing practical instructions, the more he might suffer for his want of experience in leading men in battle. With the conquered trenches behind him, he had to make sure that his men were in hand, and if he had been allowed no time for reorganization behind his shield, that was an error; for barrages might move too fast, in expressing the desire of commanders for speed. At the same time, the line officer had to identify by the map the ground on his front which he was to traverse and the positions he was to take as his part in that twenty miles of pulsing, weaving, and thrusting line.

When you are seated before a table in calm surroundings, trying to follow the course of one company in an advance, you realize the limitations of your 1 to 20,000 map. It ought to be 1 to 10. More elements than any layman could imagine entered into the problem of the location of the command post from which a battalion commander was to direct the movements of one thousand men, or a regimental commander of three thousand, in action. All this, of course, represents sheer fundamentals in thoroughgoing military science; but we must have the fundamentals if we are to appreciate the accomplishment of our young army in the Meuse-Argonne battle.