Even in quiet sectors there was a steady toll of shellfire casualties—the methodical British called it “normal wastage.” The survivors were those who developed quick reactions to danger. An alert youth learned to sort out the whines that threatened him, though after a few close ones, when his ears buzzed and everything turned scarlet, he also learned that the time might come when ducking would do no good. If he was a machine gunner he knew that his life expectancy in combat had been calculated at about thirty minutes, and in time he became detached toward death and casual with its appliances. He would remove cartridges at the right places in cartridge belts so that the machine gun would rap out familiar rhythms. Enemy lines would be sprayed with belt after belt from water-cooled barrels to heat the water for soup. If the Germans were known to be low on canister and improvising, the trenches would be searched eagerly after a shelling to see whether they had thrown over anything useful. Sometimes you could find handy screws, bolts, the cog wheels of a clock, or even a set of false teeth that just might fit.
***
After the Germans’ failure to take Verdun, this had become a quiet front for their assault troops. Their communiqués customarily reported that all was quiet on the Western Front. Elsewhere there was plenty of news, however, nearly all of it good for them. Blessed with interior lines, they needed no risky amphibious operations, England’s undoing at the Dardanelles. They could strike anywhere by rescheduling a few trains, and as the deadlock continued in the West they crushed a weak Eastern ally each autumn—thus releasing more troops for France.
In 1914 they mauled the Russians in East Prussia at Tannenberg, where Hindenburg and Ludendorff made their reputations. In 1915 Bulgaria joined them to knock Serbia out of the war. In 1916 Rumania, encouraged by temporary Russian gains and hungry for land, threw in her lot with the Allies, with fiasco as the result. Rumania had doubled her army during the preceding two years, but strategically she was isolated, and her officer corps strolled the streets of Bucharest, wearing rouge and propositioning each other while spies blew up a dump of nine million shells outside the city and a dozen enemy divisions, drawn from the Western Front, swarmed up the Carpathian Mountains. Just before winter snows sealed the passes the Germans broke through and Rumania quit.
The Middle East was the same story—only the camel-mounted raiding parties of a young English archaeologist named T. E. Lawrence offered a ghost of hope—and in 1917, with a succession of revolutionary governments sidestepping to the left in Russia, Germany sent a phalanx of picked divisions to reinforce Austria’s Caporetto sector in Italy. On October 24 they attacked out of the Julian Alps in a thick fog. In twelve hours the defenders were on the run; by November terrified Venetians were hiding the bronze horses of St. Mark’s and preparing to flee. When the Italians finally rallied they had lost 600,000 men and were back on the Piave. The most ardent disciple of la gloire agreed it looked like a bad war.
Nor was that the worst. In France 1917 had been a freak of horror. Both the French and British had felt bullish in the spring. Each had planned independently to make this the year of the decisive battle in the West, and each had massed its biggest battalions for a breakthrough. The French were to open with an “unlimited offensive” under their swashbuckling new constable, Robert Georges Nivelle, who had replaced the bovine Joffre. Even English generals liked Nivelle (his mother had been British), and the châteaux and horse shows thrilled to his battle cry, “One and a half million Frenchmen cannot fail.”
Unfortunately the excitement, the cry and even the plan of attack reached Ludendorff. The offensive had been predicted in French newspapers and orders circulated as low as company level, which meant the Germans picked up prisoners carrying them. Nivelle knew this. He also knew Von Hindenburg and Ludendorff were riposting with a strategic withdrawal called Alberich (after the evil dwarf of the Nibelungen legend), fouling wells and sowing booby-traps as they went. This didn’t change a thing, Nivelle insisted. In fact, it ruined everything. The new Hindenburg Line was a defender’s dream. It turned Nivelle’s drive into a welter of slaughter. He made no real gains, and the moment he stopped, revolt spread among French troops. At the height of the mutiny fourteen out of sixteen divisions on the Champagne front were disabled. France had been virtually knocked out of the war. She had lost nearly a million men in the retreat of 1914 and now, with these new losses, she didn’t have the manpower to build a new striking force. The rest of her army huddled sullenly in the trenches, and to anoint its wounds the government named a tranquil new maréchal, Henri Philippe Pétain.
Now the Allies turned desperately to Haig. He responded by giving them the nightmare of Passchendaele. Attacking out of the old Ypres salient in Flanders, the British leaped toward the German submarine ports in Belgium. They never had a chance. There wasn’t a flicker of surprise. A long preliminary bombardment merely destroyed the Flemish drainage system. The water, having nowhere else to go, flooded the trenches, and to make things soggier the rains were among the heaviest in thirty years. After three months in this dismal sinkhole Haig had barely taken the village of Passchendaele. His army was exhausted. In London the ambulance trains unloaded at night, smuggling casualties home out of consideration for civilian morale, and in Flanders fields the poppies grew between the crosses, row on row, that marked 150,000 fresh British graves.
***
The American Congress was fit to be tied. Traditionally, it blamed whatever went wrong abroad on the administration, and there was angry talk of a committee on the conduct of the war. That conduct wasn’t all it might have been. America hadn’t exactly sprung to arms. There was only one division in France, the First, defending six quiet miles near St. Mihiel. Pershing had wrung a pledge of twenty-four divisions by June, yet he was getting only seven hundred men a day. American unpreparedness looked bad, but the blame was divisible. The country had entered the war with 550 artillery pieces and 55 planes, 51 of them obsolete. Congress was responsible for that, and in the spring it had been as anxious as everyone else to make the A.E.F. a mere token force.
The big bottleneck was still in Europe. A million Americans were in camp now, being jabbed with paratyphoid shots, but not many were getting past Hoboken or Newport News. The Allied generals weren’t balking anymore. After Nivelle, Passchendaele and Caporetto, the high commands were eager to welcome an A.E.F. “Our only hope lies in American reserves,” said Sir William Robertson, Chief of Britain’s Imperial General Staff, and Pétain said, “I shall wait for the Americans and the tanks.” The rub was that America hadn’t the ships. British bottoms were needed to send men and the fifty pounds of supplies required every day for each American soldier in France. The Admiralty, battling the recrudescent submarine attack, said none could be spared. The future remained bleak. The best Pershing could do was send the trickle of men he was getting into the forests of France to fell trees and build docks for the ships that just might come in time.
Meanwhile America was busy being American—bustling around, making sure the boys in camp were being entertained by Odd Fellows and Maccabees (and their minds kept clean by the Salvation Army), plastering the country with James Montgomery Flagg and Charles Dana Gibson posters, and organizing everything with pep, know-how and get-up-and-go.
The air was full of slogans. It was Work or Fight, Build a Bridge of Ships, and, after a food administration had been set up by Herbert Hoover, that fellow who had done such a grand job in Belgium, there was the Gospel of the Clean Plate and Food Will Win the War. Paring potatoes carelessly became unpatriotic. There were wheatless days and meatless days, and for a time, when the rumor spread that pro-German bakers were mixing ground glass with their flour, there were a few voluntary breadless days.
Never had a war been so well advertised. Hoover and Bernard Baruch were the big volunteers, but there were badges for everyone: service flags, kitchen-window posters, thrift stamps, committee buttons. The committees were endless. Mothers collected cherry pits for gas masks. Boy Scouts planted vegetable gardens. Clothing
manufacturers who didn’t realize what they were starting saved cloth by cutting yardage from women’s clothing, and there was even a Brassiere War Service Committee. Corset manufacturers completely redesigned their product, letting out waists, and announced they had saved thousands of tons of steel for shells. Of course there were blunders. Men who had no business on these panels were appointed because they had volunteered. One who clearly knew nothing about such things recommended that corsets be further simplified by discarding the laces. “They can just as well wear them without any trimming,” he said.
Everybody hated the Hun. The President might talk all he liked about fighting a government and not a people, but Americans were down on all Germans. The Kaiser, of course, was known to be insane. The goose-steppers he led were regarded as sadistic. You didn’t dare admit that some of your friends were of that tainted stock. Hadn’t you seen the drawings of Belgian babies skewered on Prussian bayonets? Hadn’t you read Sgt. Arthur Guy Empey’s Over the Top, By An American Soldier Who Went? It was all there in black and white.
Teutonic names were automatically suspect. If you were a Viereck or Dreiser or Mencken you really had to watch yourself. Your neighbors might hale you before a kangaroo court, splash your front door with yellow paint, or make you march in a Liberty Loan parade wearing a humiliating placard. Two men, in Illinois and Montana, were lynched, and Lutheran ministers delivered their sermons in English to prove they weren’t making obscene remarks about the flag.
The German language was suspect everywhere. In several states its teaching was prohibited even in private schools. German music also was boycotted, and people who didn’t know what philosophy meant could tell you all about Nietzsche, that poisonous prophet of Der Tag. True patriots wouldn’t rest until Baltimore’s German Street was renamed Redwood Street, or until a derrick had lifted the statue of Frederick the Great in Washington from its base and deposited it in a dark basement; nor would they eat sauerkraut until it was rechristened liberty cabbage.
The wave of resentment against everything German was chiefly an escape valve when we were doing so little at the front. Often it was also cruel. The loyalty of German-born professors was under constant investigation. Men who had relatives in uniform were expelled from their clubs; mothers were insulted even as their sons filed into trenches with the German-speaking Wisconsin regiment attached to the First Division.
Pershing’s force grew slowly. The First was followed by the Second (Indianhead), Twenty-sixth (Yankee), and Forty-second (The Rainbow, picked National Guardsmen from twenty-six states), and in Europe a popular image of Americans was beginning to form. At first they hadn’t even a nickname. The French tried Sammies, then les amies, and finally, after George M. Cohan’s song, Yanks.
Yanks were considered very odd. They all seemed unsophisticated, wiry and very young—at this late date they were, in fact, the only youthful army in the field. Their language was like English, but different really. Lice were “seam squirrels,” dice were “galloping dominoes,” and everyone was “Buddy” to everyone else. They spoke their pidgin French with a peculiar twang, looked like cowboys in their broad-brimmed campaign hats, and would pay almost any price for a souvenir—a meerschaum, an iron cross, or a pair of woman’s garters with Gott mit uns clasps.
Allied commanders thought all doughboys were pampered. Their officers never kicked or struck them, and the troops were accompanied by an amazing array of creature comforts. They had no wine, like poilus, or daily tot of rum, like tommies, but they had just about everything else. One major became a Parisian legend; he arrived with a terrier and a piano and set up a permanent billet in the Ritz. He was a banker in civilian life and therefore privileged. Even private soldiers carried $10,000 government life insurance, a preposterous figure on the Western Front. In camp they were serenaded by a gigantic army band led by Walter Damrosch, and in the field they were attended by solicitous auxiliaries with Y.M.C.A. chocolate, Knights of Columbus cigarettes and Salvation Army doughnuts.
Strangest of all, however, was American wit. Yanks joked about everything, including some things that weren’t really funny. Europeans laughed politely, but were secretly baffled. The commander of the Seventy-seventh Division (New York’s Own), arriving with his pitifully green draftees, lightly described them as “hardy backwoodsmen from the Bowery, Fifth Avenue and Hester Street.” Doughboys turned their own homesickness into a wisecrack—“Hell, Heaven or Hoboken by Christmas.” Coffins to them were “wooden kimonos,” and front-line combat didn’t sober them much. They kept making flippant remarks about the little streams the French called rivers; when one badly wounded man was offered a canteen he said with a faint smile, “Give it to the Ourcq. It needs it more than I do.” They even bantered with rank—and about la gloire, of all things. General Pershing approached a private with three wound stripes on his arm. “Where did you get those?” he asked gently. The man grinned and replied, “From the quartermaster, sir.”
The Yanks’ image of themselves was caught in a German intelligence report on the first American prisoners: “They still regard the war from the point of view of the ‘big brother’ who comes to help his hardpressed brethren and is therefore welcomed everywhere.” Doughboys assumed they would be popular, just as their generals expected that the American infantryman’s fighting qualities would be respected.
The generals were disappointed. Yanks were more liked than feared. German officers spoke contemptuously of “American bluff” and “a rabble of amateurs.” Allied observers watched the newcomers train and shook their heads. Pershing kept insisting that American “vigor and aggressive spirit” could replace “technical skill,” but the Allies thought they had better ideas. Pétain suggested that American regiments be attached to French divisions as they arrived, and Haig wanted them used as replacements, fed piecemeal into the British line.
Pershing bridled. He said flatly that Americans would fight as an army or not at all, and the next thing he knew he was mired in international politics. Thereafter he had to fight both to get an army and to keep it. Clemenceau protested that his “invincible obstination” was threatening the entire cause; he and Lloyd George appealed to Wilson behind Pershing’s back, and French and British generals kept trying to bargain with Chaumont. In the end Pershing had to compromise some, but not because he was intimidated by Pétain, Haig, Clemenceau or Lloyd George. The man who brought the first American detachments into action—and persuaded the Allies that they must have a supreme commander—was Erich Friedrich Wilhelm Ludendorff.
As German victories crowned one another through 1917 the Kaiser’s general staff felt increasingly confident of victory. By early in 1918 they thought the end was in sight. The capstone was a treaty with the Russian revolutionists signed in March at Brest-Litovsk, a railway center the Germans had occupied three years before.
Overnight it was a new war. The peace in the East freed three thousand German guns and a million men—enough to give Ludendorff the whip hand on the Western Front, provided he struck before America’s waxing strength eclipsed his edge. Ludendorff had designed a brilliant new attack technique, stressing stealth, surprise bombardment, gas and infiltration. He prepared a concert of thrusts in the West, and Hindenburg promised the Kaiser they would be in Paris by April 1.
Ludendorff’s first blow, delivered on March 21, fell on the weak seam between the French and British armies in the Somme valley. Its immediate objective was Amiens, through which ran the only line of communications between the two Allies. After a tremendous cannonade, the Germans lunged out of a heavy fog with five times their Verdun strength. By night the line had been broken in several places. During the second day the British, weakened by Passchendaele, fell back ten miles. The bulge grew deeper each hour; Krupp cannon began shelling Paris. On the sixth day one of the railways between Amiens and the capital was cut, the starved assault troops had turned aside to pillage and the tommies held on grimly.
Ludendorff’s next stroke, in April, was in Flanders. He had fog again, an
d again he broke through, this time on a thirty-mile front. Everything Haig had won six months before was lost. The enemy was within five miles of Hazebrouck, a vital railway junction and his goal. Then, at the critical moment, Ludendorff wavered. He couldn’t decide whether or not to exploit the capture of the tallest hill in Flanders, and by the time he made up his mind the stubborn British were dug in. All he had was a second salient, which wasn’t Paris.
No one doubted, however, that his masterpiece was yet to come. Marshal Foch, who in this dark hour had been made generalissimo of all the armies, called for a “foot-by-foot” defense of ground, and in Chaumont, where files were being packed, Pershing put his troops at Foch’s disposal. Curiously it was the Americans, the tyros, who picked the spot where the Germans’ greatest storm would break. The Chemin des Dames ridge, north of the Aisne, was so formidable a natural stronghold that the French had manned it with five exhausted British divisions. This was the closest sector to Paris. Ludendorff’s plan was to crash through and head for the capital. He knew that every reserve would be committed to the defense of the city, and when that happened he was going to wheel and drive on Haig’s channel ports.
His preparations were superb. No one took seriously the American guess that Ludendorff’s attack would come at Chemin des Dames because there wasn’t a trace of activity from the German lines. Observation posts reported nothing, aerial photographs were a blank. Apparently there weren’t even any batteries there. Actually there were nearly four thousand guns. You just couldn’t see them. Moving at night and hiding in the woods by day, their horses’ hoofs wrapped in rags to mute any sound, the Germans massed some fifteen crack divisions opposite the ridge.
Controversy And Other Essays in Journalism (1950–1975) Page 13