On the morning of May 27 they sprang out of nowhere behind a tornado of gas and shrapnel. The weary British disintegrated. By dusk Ludendorff’s assault columns had moved twelve miles. They crossed the Vesle River and surged on, hobnail boots thumping and gray coats swishing weirdly in the sunshine, and by the third day, when Soissons fell, they had overrun five French lines. There were no defenses after that. They were on the Marne, the tip of their salient at a place called Château Thierry. The Allied Supreme War Council met hurriedly. The marshals had agreed U.S. troops wouldn’t be really dependable until 1919, but there was no one else handy, so they sent in the United States Marines.
The battle that followed has been so blurred by legend and sentiment that the truth is almost irretrievable. Despite a contemporary myth, the American troops didn’t shout “Remember the Lusitania!” Nor were they the first Yanks to engage the enemy; three days earlier the First Division had taken a town elsewhere called Cantigny and beaten off seven counterattacks. The Leathernecks weren’t even the first doughboys in Château Thierry—an Army machine-gun unit from the Third Division reached it first and retired slowly through the streets, covering the French retreat across the river. The Marine Corps has beatified its Fifth and Sixth regiments as the noblest of professionals; but when war was declared most of the enlisted men had been in campus blazers. The proportion of college men in the Sixth Marines was put at sixty percent. They had enlisted before the Plattsburg Plan diverted students into ninety-day Officer Training Schools, and they were American counterparts to the young English toffs who had gone off to vindicate their Kipling heroes four years before. Sergeant Alexander Woollcott of Stars and Stripes had heard them sing “Fair Harvard” and “Old Nassau” in camp, and now they were going into battle, and they were going to give it the old college try.
Arriving near Château Thierry after an all-night march, they were thrown across the road to Paris. Opposite them was a rolling field of summer wheat, thick with scarlet poppies, and four hundred yards beyond lay a forbidding Dante thicket of dark, tortured trees. That was Belleau Wood. The Germans had two divisions there. They were expected to break out in mass formation at any time. There wasn’t any Allied line, an excited French officer told the marines, and there wouldn’t be any unless they formed one. It was hard to hear him, because refugees were fleeing past with bird cages and clothing packed in rattling baby carriages. One of them shouted “La guerre est fini!” at the Yanks, and some truant from an American French class shouted back “Pas fini!” giving the sector its name.
For five days the marines held five miles of Pas Fini against the solid gray columns that came hurtling across the field. The Germans reported encountering a “shock unit.” Clemenceau announced the Americans had saved Paris. That wasn’t all. On June 6, in the waving wheat, the marines were fixing bayonets, preparing to storm Belleau Wood.
It took more than storming. Their first charge crumpled among the poppies, doomed by a weak barrage. The casualties were greater than those in all previous Marine Corps battles combined. Nevertheless, they reformed and tried again. By nine o’clock that night they had a toehold in the wood, and in the next three weeks they doggedly cleared the boulder-strewn, gully-laced warren of the enemy. The Germans tried a high-explosive shell bombardment, went to mustard, then withdrew. After searching the German dead for souvenirs the marines also withdrew, turning Pas Fini over to the Yankee Division.
Of the eight thousand men who had straddled the road in the crisis, only two thousand were left. More than a hundred were awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. The French renamed the wood for them. At home they were all national heroes—“OUR GALLANT MARINES DRIVE ON 2 ½ MILES, NOTHING STOPS THEIR RUSH,” cried a New York Times streamer—and, in Chaumont, Pershing felt he had won a point. He had. The British Admiralty, which had discovered that convoys could cope with U-boats, was prepared to provide a bridge of ships. Camouflaged transports were ferrying 120,000 Americans a month across the Atlantic. By midsummer this had risen to 300,000. Ports worked around the clock. Boys from Montana farms and Louisiana swamplands were trudging up gangplanks endlessly and it was “Goodbye Broadway, Hello France,” We’re gonna pay our debt to you, and Wait and pray each night for me, Till we meet again.
Pershing had his million men now. He was taking over more and more of the Allied line—soon he would hold a fifth of it—and when the Germans tried to take advantage of Bastille Day by attacking the day after July 14 (“Sort of a frog Fourth of July,” one American commander explained to his men) three divisions of doughboys counterattacked. The First and Second Divisions jumped off from a poplar forest, waded through waist-high wheat and forced the enemy to evacuate Soissons. By the beginning of August the Allies were back on the Vesle; Belleau Wood was twenty miles behind them now, and they were across the Ourcq, which the Fighting Sixty-ninth regiment—now part of the Rainbow, and redesignated the 165th Infantry, though the Irish still wore rosaries hooked through the left shoulder straps of their blouses—insisted on calling the O’Rourke.
Ludendorff’s hopes were fading with the summer poppies. He had made a big thing of his July 15 drive. It had been christened the Siegessturm, the stroke of victory, and he had built a tall wooden tower behind the lines so the Kaiser could watch. Wilhelm perched there for six days, squinting through telescopes, trying to figure out which army was his. When he climbed down stiffly the news was all bad. This time the Germans didn’t even have a bulge. Their morale was sinking fast; pitiful letters told the troops of hunger at home, and quartermasters with bare shelves were issuing commandeered women’s clothing to soldiers.
Then came what Ludendorff called the “black day” of the war. On August 8 the British massed nearly five hundred tanks in front of Amiens, cracked the German line, and gained over eight miles. It was an omen. Ludendorff didn’t miss it. That week he offered to quit and suggested the Kaiser ask for terms. He was put off, but a corner had been turned. Henceforth the general staff would be occupied with thoughts not of victory, but of striking a bargain and saving the army.
The Allies didn’t know this. The German soldiers were fighting as stubbornly as ever, and Foch’s immediate plans were to smash in all German salients, improving communications for the campaign that everyone assumed they would be fighting in 1919. One of these salients, cutting the main railroad between Paris and Nancy, had been a threat since the early days of the war. The French had lost 60,000 men trying to take it in 1915 and had called it “the hernia of St. Mihiel” ever since.
The only maps available to American officers before they entered the war had been of this sector. Pershing stalked it now. Feinting toward Belfort, he struck on September 12 with nine divisions. Despite heavy rain and bad roads—Stars and Stripes charged they hadn’t been repaired since Joan of Arc advanced along them—success was stunning. The most hopeful appraisal had allowed two days for the attack. It took one. Entire Lehr, Saxon and Landwehr regiments were herded into prisoner pens; the defeated Germans claimed they had been preparing to withdraw anyway, but captured orders contradicted this. In St. Mihiel embarrassed doughboys were embraced by French patriarchs who toasted them with hoarded kirsch and displayed American flags copied from photographs, the stripes all black.
Elsewhere other local offensives also had gone well for the Allies. Ludendorff’s spring gains had disappeared from the war maps. Germans were being pinched off all along the front, and Foch was charting an “arpeggio” of drives against the Hindenburg Line. “Everyone is to attack as soon as they can, as strong as they can, for as long as they can,” he said, and L’édifice commence à craquer. Tout le monde à la bataille!” Actually it was better organized than that. There was a plan, and the American army was its fulcrum. Pershing’s troops held ninety-four miles on the extreme right of the Allied line. In the center were the French, with the British to their left and King Albert of Belgium on the sea, leading a combined group which included two American divisions. Much was expected on Albert’s end, less from the other
. Pershing was to be the Allied anchor. He had used his veteran divisions at St. Mihiel, and they needed time to reorganize. Moreover, he faced the toughest link in the Hindenburg Line, the one part the Germans could not yield and retain any hope of winning the war.
Before him lay a twenty-four mile front; in its center was the fortified alp of Montfaucon, from whose height the Imperial Crown Prince had watched the siege of Verdun in 1916. On the right were the entrenched heights of the river Meuse; on the left, the fantastic Forêt d’Argonne, a wild Hans Christian Andersen land of giant trees cunningly interwoven with nests of machine-guns.
German strategists had prepared four defense positions behind one another in this fastness, stretching back fourteen miles and manned by double garrisons. The reason was the Sedan-Mézières railroad in their rear. It was their only line of escape to Liège and Germany. Once it was broken their army couldn’t be withdrawn; it would lie at the mercy of the Allies. Foch knew how strong Ludendorff’s defenses were here; that was why the chief American mission was to hold. The Yanks would join in the tattoo of attacks, but their big job was to crack the whip, with the Belgians swinging free on the other end.
It didn’t appeal to Pershing. He had liked Belleau Wood better. Amassing more artillery shells than the Union army used in the entire Civil War, he rushed all available troops to the front in camions—French trucks with little wheels and no springs worth mentioning—and threw nine fresh divisions against the Germans on the misty morning of September 26. The enemy was stunned. He hadn’t thought anyone would dare attack here. His forward positions were overrun, and the doughboys surged up Montfaucon and took it. There, however, the Germans’ center stiffened. They retired to their third defense line, named Kriemhilde Stellung for the bouncing Nibelungen lady, and held. Yank dreams of orders home and Gay Paree vanished in a growing orchestra of battle. The old Sixty-ninth of New York was cut to pieces. Father Duffy was to see “Wild Bill” Donovan carried down the grim crest before Landres-St. Georges on a blanket. Donovan survived, but many in the regiment had gone forever, including Joyce Kilmer, poet laureate of the A.E.F.
Meanwhile another New York outfit was in deep trouble on the left. The battle wasn’t easy for anybody, but the Seventy-seventh Division had drawn the most difficult assignment of all. They had been ordered to charge down the Argonne hogback while Pennsylvanians of the Twenty-eighth and Missourians of the Thirty-fifth outflanked the defenders. It didn’t work. The Thirty-fifth was almost wiped out, but the flankers couldn’t even get far enough in to establish liaison with the Seventy-seventh.
One band of hardy backwoodsmen drafted from New York’s Lower East Side became celebrated as the “lost battalion” when they were surrounded and held out for six days, but in a sense the entire Seventy-seventh was lost. For two weeks its men fought their own private war in the wilderness, without contact and without artillery support, since no one could be sure just where they were. Every mile gained complicated supply problems; a company starved for four days and then returned to the rear to fetch its own corned Willy. The forest was cloaked and soaked in blinding fog. Runners, officers, command posts got lost. One patrol literally vanished Indian-file into the mist—the men didn’t return, their bodies were never found, they weren’t in P.O.W. camps after the war, they are listed as missing to this day.
Then, abruptly, on October 7, the weather cleared. The trees were revealed in their October splendor—coppery, golden, purplish, deep scarlet. Even better, the spent Gothamites were reinforced by the Eighty-second Division (All-American), including a Tennessee sergeant named Alvin C. York, who captured a hundred and thirty-two prisoners and thirty-five German machine guns—the “greatest single thing,” said Foch, “accomplished by any private soldier of all the armies.”
Snaking from bole to bole, cleaning out ravines and machine-gun nests, the two divisions drove the enemy from the forest and joined their flanks to a new line at Grandpré, ten miles from the jump-off, on October 14. The same day, doughboys in the center of the sector took Romagne and stormed Côte Dame Marie, which Pershing regarded as the most important strongpoint in the Hindenburg Line. For the moment, however, that was that. His army was exhausted; there were more than a hundred thousand American stragglers. He was approaching the complex defenses in front of the railroad, and he had to regroup his tattered regiments before officers could shrill their whistles for a new attack.
Pershing was lining his sights on Sedan and Metz. Yet they didn’t much matter now. The war maps had changed vastly since the first wave of the Seventy-seventh had disappeared into the hazy boscages. On the fourth day of that lonely struggle Hindenburg, brooding over his shrinking front, had notified Berlin that an armistice must be sought at once, and three days later he had reported in despair that there was no hope of stopping the Allied tide. The Imperial Chancellor was frantically trying to reach Wilson through Switzerland, suggesting a truce based on his proposals made nine months before. Wilson coldly referred the note to Foch. The President could read maps, too.
The war was rapidly approaching a solution in the field. There wasn’t much left to bargain over. In the North Sea the anti-sub barrier was nearly tight. Albert was reentering his channel towns in triumph, the French were ringing their own church bells in the long-lost villages around Lille, the British were approaching Mons. Everything was slipping away from the Kaiser, including the other Central Powers. An Allied army which had been mired in Salonica since 1915 sent a spearhead of Serb mountain fighters against Bulgaria, and on September 29 the Bulgarians quit. That same day the British took Damascus; Turkey bowed out at the end of October. Even the Italians were attacking, which meant Austria’s end was near.
In the West, Pershing’s advance was renewed on November 1. The enemy’s last scribbly ditches caved in that afternoon, and four days later he had no front at all. Apart from stolid machine gunners, who kept their murderous barrels hot to the end, German soldiers had become a disorderly mob of refugees. They had lost heart. Reports from the fatherland were appalling. Ludendorff had been sacked, there was revolution in the streets, the fleet had mutinied when ordered off on a death-or-glory ride against the British.
In this final agony the rearguard in France, Sergeant Woollcott wrote, resembled an escaping man who “twitches a chair down behind him for his pursuers to stumble over.” Each chill dawn doughboys went roaring over the top in fighting kit, driving the fleeing wraiths in field gray away from their railroad and up against the hills of Belgium and Luxemburg. It was a chase, not a battle. The galloping horses and bouncing caissons could scarcely keep up with the racing troops. Pershing told his generals to forget about flanks, light up the trucks at night, and see how far they could go—an order which touched off a frantic race for Sedan. Nobody won it, because the French were being sticky, but in the excitement the First Division forgot itself and broke all the rules of military courtesy. Vaulting out of its own sector, it crossed the boundaries of the Seventy-seventh and the Rainbow, taking Father Duffy prisoner in a hollow square and actually challenging the leader of the Rainbow on his own front line. It was an indignity no general officer could take lightly, and this one was young, proud, and named Douglas MacArthur. His protests were lost in the news of another border crossing. Kaiser Wilhelm, the Supreme War Lord, had abdicated and entered Holland as a political refugee.
Even as the First and the glowering Rainbow jointly occupied the heights opposite Sedan, the Eiffel Tower in Paris was beaming directions to German envoys, telling them which trenches to approach and where to pick up their guides. In Foch’s railroad car the first of them signed his dictated terms at five o’clock on the morning of November 11. All firing was to cease six hours later; and the moment the hills were tinged with the first faint promise of morning, motorcycles spluttered up and down the American front, passing the word that the guerre would be finee at eleven sharp.
After ten o’clock the front grew noisy—everybody wanted to get in that last shot—but eyes glued to a million watches
finally saw minute hands creep upright, and then there was a tremendous silence. It lasted but a moment and was followed by a deafening cheer on both sides. Generals might haggle over words, but soldiers knew this was more than an Armistice. It was a surrender. It was the end of the war, of all wars, and it had come, as editorial writers everywhere noted profoundly, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
Yet for once the generals were right. It was to be a long truce, but it wouldn’t be peace, because more than the guerre was finee. There were omens, for those who could read them. The belfries Edith Wharton heard calling joyously to one another across Paris that morning might also have been tolling for a French army broken in spirit and left to politicians like André Maginot. Something had died in France, just as something had been born in Russia. That very morning, as rockets of victory streaked innocently over Mézières, Bolshevik troops mounted an offensive against five thousand American soldiers who had been unwisely diverted to Archangel in the hope of restoring the fallen government there.
The administration that had sent them was no blinder than its people. American voters had just defied the Spanish flu to crowd polling places and discredit Woodrow Wilson, crippling his League of Nations and confirming the fears of Winston Churchill, who wondered, as he stood in a London window and heard Big Ben strike eleven, whether the world would return to international anarchy.
It would. But it would not be the same anarchy. An age had reached Journey’s End. The door of history had shut on the princes and potentates and plumed marshals and glittering little regular armies—on all the elegance and fanfaronade that had marked that disciplined, secure world. The grinning doughboys stacking their arms and swapping cigarettes for Fritz’s souvenirs might not know it; the new Congress back home certainly didn’t, and the hysterical crowds in Times Square, the Champs Élysées and the Buckingham Palace grounds knew it least of all, though the English had a kind of sign. As they romped over the mall with firecrackers and confetti the sky suddenly darkened. It began to rain, hard. Some of the celebrators climbed into the arms of Queen Victoria’s statue, but after huddling a few minutes in its arms they crept down. They had found little shelter there, and less comfort. The arms had been stone cold.
Controversy And Other Essays in Journalism (1950–1975) Page 14