The boche had command of the air. His sausage balloons placidly directed the fire of his gunners. Since there was as yet no effective American airforce the division had to depend on French planes for protection and observation. At night the Germans bombed at will. The Americans’ only experience with their British allies was a lone plane which appeared over their lines one day and resolutely strafed the trenches with machineguns. The Americans thought he must be a Heinie using a British plane for deception, but when a French aviator shot the stranger down he turned out to be a Britisher sure enough. He’d lost his way and thought he was machinegunning a boche position singlehanded. A few days later a British liaison officer appeared redfaced and profuse with apologies.
Life was sheer hell in the Cantigny sector. The Germans had plenty of gas and the American artillery had none. All movement had to be at night. Kitchencarts and watercarts drawn by a single mule could only be moved up after dark through the slimy chalk of the access trenches so the food was cold and the water muggy before it reached the men in the advanced positions. Watering horses and mules was a risky business as the boche knew the locations and no matter how often the hour was changed seemed to be always ready with a few wellplaced shells. Stretchercases had to be taken to the rear through long slippery cuts in the chalky hills. Field hospitals and ammunition dumps were often under fire. While their attack on Cantigny was being planned the Americans were suffering sixty casualties a day merely holding their defensive positions.
From buck private to General Bullard there was no difference in opinion: the Germans had to be driven out of Cantigny. While the staff, working in a deep stinking cellar under an old manor house back near the demolished railroad station, planned the attack, the men in the front lines executed small nightly patrols, and what they called silent raids, without artillery buildup, in the nomansland between the two armies. There the Americans rapidly gained the ascendant. Prisoners were brought in. Bits of information were picked up from which the staff could plot out the terrain to be covered in the coming attack.
The 28th Infantry was selected to make the assault. For several days they practiced in a position twenty kilometers to the rear where the topography of Cantigny was duplicated as nearly as possible. Meanwhile the French moved up a hundred and thirtytwo seventyfives, thirtysix one hundred and fiftyfive millimeter howitzers and thirtyfour trench mortars in addition to the regular divisional artillery. A dozen tanks and a contingent of flamethrowers were ready to support the infantry. The division was furnished with an unlimited supply of gas and high explosives. The French were as anxious as the Americans that there should be no slipup in the Cantigny operation.
May 27 in cooperation with the Crown Prince’s offensive away to the east on the Chemin des Dames, the Germans in Cantigny put on a heavy bombardment with gas and explosives. This was followed by a number of raids on the Americans and on the French to the right and to the left of them. In repulsing one of these raids the French made a small advance. They had already captured a wooded hill to the northwest. Though casualties were considerable the arrangements for the American attack were in no way disrupted.
The night that followed was calm and clear. At 4:45 on the morning of the twentyeighth, when the mist was rising out of the valleys, the artillerymen of the supporting batteries verified their adjustments by firing a few rounds at their assigned targets. An hour later every gun behind the 1st Division broke loose. French airplanes took control of the air. Areas where German troops were expected to be massed were heavily gassed. At 6:45 the seventyfives changed their angle of fire to a rolling barrage which moved at the rate of a hundred meters in two minutes. Behind it the infantry advanced supported by machinegun units and mortars. The French Renault tanks operated without a hitch. Flamethrowers followed to clean out deep shelters and trenches. By 7:20, exactly on schedule, the entire objective was gained.
Strong points were established in the cemetery and in a wood on the ridge north of the town and in the shelter of the stone walls of the château. Every German in Cantigny was dead, wounded or captured.
Two hundred and twentyfive prisoners were marched to the rear to be shown to General Pershing and members of the French Army Command who had come up for the show. In the actual attack casualties were light indeed. The success seemed almost too good to be true.
General Bullard remarked in his notes that his Commander in Chief seemed unimpressed by the 1st Division’s fine performance. Pershing was worried for fear they might not hold their gains.
He had hardly left Bullard’s command post when a written message came from him emphasizing his orders that Cantigny must be held at any cost. Some French general must have raised a doubt in his mind. Bullard remembered Pershing’s having asked him whether the French ever patronized him. “Do they assume superior airs with you?”
Bullard answered no sir they did not; he’d been with them too long and knew them too well.
“By God they’ve been trying it with me,” said Pershing vehemently, “and I don’t intend to stand a bit of it.”
“He inspires no enthusiasm, ever,” Bullard noted of his Commander in Chief; “respect, yes.”
The 1st Division gave no Allied officer the opportunity to assume superior airs. Although the counterattacks were heavy; and, after the extra French artillery was withdrawn, the German guns administered bitter punishment, the Americans held on. When they were finally taken out of the sector in early July they had suffered nearly five thousand casualties, killed, wounded, and gassed. Of prisoners they lost very few.
“A year, a month, a week and a day after we came into the war we took enemy ground and held it,” the word spread like a flash through the A.E.F., to Chaumont, and down the line of communication to the ports where files of khakiclad men were shambling off the transports; to Washington, where sallow officeworkers struggled redeyed into the night with the problems of procurement and supply; to the mines and steel-plants and the shipyards. The phrase went from mouth to mouth. “A year, a month, a week and a day.”
Among the hardpressed French reeling back from the fresh German offensive the victory at Cantigny was exaggerated to almost miraculous proportions. The Americans Pétain had promised them the year before were in the war at last. The Americans had counterattacked and won.
Chapter 18
THE KAISER’S LAST VICTORY
THE 1st Division’s feat of arms at Cantigny never got the play it deserved in the American press because it was overshadowed by frightening headlines reporting a new German breakthrough. Operation “Roland.”
Ludendorff’s generals managed to assemble fortytwo divisions and nearly four thousand guns in the neighborhood of Laon without the French command being any the wiser. These were poised against the Chemin des Dames front which was considered so impregnable it was lightly held by four French divisions and three English divisions sent there for a rest after the pounding they had taken in Flanders. Only Pershing’s intelligence, studying such reports as were available of German troop movements, came to the conclusion that the boche was preparing an attack along the Aisne. When word was passed along to the French they paid no attention.
Foch, at his new headquarters in a small brick cháteau named Bombon a good fifty kilometers to the rear of Paris, was busy with his plans for a counteroffensive between Montdidier and Noyon. He announced in his most oracular vein that no such attack was pending.
Von Hindenburg told in his memoirs of having visited Laon at the time of Nivelle’s failure the spring before. It was a sunny morning. He found the views from the highset hill town delightful. Walking out on the terrace of the prefecture he carefully surveyed the landscape to the south. He described the ridge of the Chemin des Dames cutting across the green wellwatered plain like a wall that joined the hill masking Soissons to the southwest to the high land along the valley of the Aisne that sheltered Reims to the eastward. He remembered Napoleon’s battle against the Prussians in that difficult terrain. Only with complete surprise would success be
possible.
Ludendorff reassured him: even if the attack were only partly successful it would draw off French support from the British against whom the final knockout was being prepared. The German generals gloated a little over the prospect of mounting Krupp’s new longrange guns, improved versions of the three Berthas that terrorized the Parisians, and bombarding England from the Channel ports.
The German Commander in Chief went on to repeat a humorous tale brought back to him from the front: the croaking of the frogs was so loud on the marshy little stream that for a ways separated the opposing armies that the German engineers were able to set up their portable bridges right under the noses of the French outposts. He remembered with pride how a captured Prussian noncom hoodwinked the French by telling them not to worry about the coming barrage because German morale had been so lowered by their losses in the Flanders offensive that they would refuse to advance.
Whether it was the croaking of the frogs or the fabrications of the Prussian noncom that lulled them, the French commanders took no precautions. It turned out later that the general in charge was in Paris that night visiting his light o’ love. Surprise was complete.
At 1 A.M. the morning of May 27 the Germans began the heaviest bombardment they’d hitherto used in the war on the entire front from Soissons to Reims. Three and a half hours later seventeen divisions, preceded by the first German tanks to appear in force, attacked on a forty kilometer front.
The thinly strung French gave way. The British to the eastward managed to fall back in fair order in the direction of Reims. At noon the Germans were crossing the Aisne on bridges the Allies had neglected to blow up. By nightfall they had ploughed through a second range of defensible hills and were crossing the Vesle west of Fismes. Two days later they took the important supply centers of Soissons and Fère-en-Tardenois. By the end of the month they occupied most of the country between the Ourcq and the Marne.
As on the Somme and the Lys the very magnitude of the German victory threw Ludendorff’s plans out of kilter. The Crown Prince’s armies took sixtyfive thousand prisoners, scores of airplanes nested in their hangars and immense quantities of guns and ammunition. Discipline broke down when the German divisions found themselves unopposed in the rich unspoiled countryside.
The German soldiers were hungry. They were greedy for fats. Four years of wartime stringency had left them starved for every kind of goods. This was the champagne region. There were cellars stocked with wine in every village. While the more levelheaded officers were rounding up needed military equipment, the troops were slaughtering chickens and pigs in the barnyards and scattering to eat and drink and loot in the dwellinghouses. Re-establishing order became a major problem.
At the same time the advanced assault troops were moving so fast they outran their supply. The British, as ever stubborn in defeat, held with their backs to Reims. To the west of the Ourcq fresh French divisions, hastily entrenched in the wooded region of Villers-Cotterets, blocked advance down the Soissons-Paris railroad. The Germans found themselves squeezed into the wedgeshaped pocket between the Ourcq and the Marne. It was a rough farming region of low irregular hills, illprovided with highways and served only by a branch line of railroad. As they advanced towards Château-Thierry on the main road to Paris along the Marne the Crown Prince’s armies found themselves stalled and squeezed between the two rivers.
In the rear of the defeated armies there was panic. More than a million people left Paris that spring. Big Bertha’s bombardment redoubled. On the Bourse and in the Chamber of Deputies the word was Bordeaux. At Versailles the Supreme War Council went from one session of confused wrangling to another. It was as much as the grayfaced old Tiger could do, moving ceaselessly between the front and the rear, his mustache bristling and an old slouch hat pulled down on his head, to bully and cajole the politicians into staying put. While privately he speeded arrangements for removing the government departments, in public he repeated endless variations of Foch’s declaration: they would fight in front of Paris and in Paris and behind Paris. They would fight on the Seine and they would fight on the Loire. For the present the battle was on the Marne.
Again on the Marne
On May 30, the day the American 2nd and 3rd Divisions received their orders to move up to the Marne, Pershing had eleven combat divisions under his command in the A.E.F. Three divisions, recently landed, were receiving hasty instruction between the British lines and the Channel coast. Another three were on inactive fronts in Lorraine and the Vosges mountains and the rest were billeted around in training areas. Elements of seven more were beginning to disembark in French and British ports.
The 2nd Division, going through final manoeuvres near Gisors, was being readied to relieve the 1st at Cantigny. The 3rd, made up mostly of regular army men, was waiting near Chaumont to move up to Lorraine when the orders came. Since this division had never been under fire, it was decided to parcel its units out among the French forces being marshalled to dispute a German crossing of the Marne. The 7th Machinegun Battalion, which was motorized, set out ahead and reached Château-Thierry late in the afternoon of May 31.
Château-Thierry, where la Fontaine was born, was a tranquil little town of seventeenthcentury French houses nestling among walled gardens between the slick green river and the mossy walls of Charles Martel’s castle now landscaped as a park on the hill.
Caked with dust after twentyfour hours of travel in open trucks, the American machinegunners arrived on the stone bridge across the Marne in time to be met with a wave of his kepi by the general commanding a French colonial division which was advancing in the wrong direction. The French were being dislodged by German gunfire. The arriving Americans were hailed with enthusiastic shouts, but there was little time for cheering. Already the roofs and chimneypots of the town were being knocked down about their heads. In the confused fighting while the Germans were held off long enough for the bridge to be blown up the machinegunners gave a good account of themselves.
All along the placid Marne American doughboys, as fast as they piled out of their trucks, were jogtrotting into position to oppose German crossings. The sector in front of Château-Thierry became known as the “Pas Fini” sector, because the poilus there kept trying to tell the Americans as they arrived: “Guerre finie.” The Americans, most of whom had never seen combat outside of the motion picture screen, roared them down. “Pas finie. We’ve just begun our guerre.”
While contingents of the 3rd were taking up positions on the south bank of the Marne to the east of the German point of deepest penetration, the 2nd Division, under the command of General Omar Bundy, leaving the tired 1st to hold on as best it could at Cantigny, was hurried by truck and train towards Meaux.
Meaux, famous as a market for Brie cheeses, was a farming center frequented by Sunday excursionists from Paris, who liked to row on the quiet Marne and to picnic and eat fried gudgeons on its wooded banks. At Meaux the Americans had their first experience with the backwash of defeat. The place was in confusion. Shopkeepers were putting up their shutters. The narrow streets were locked tight in a tangle of military vehicles headed to the rear and contesting the way with farmers’ carts and wagons loaded with household goods. Many houses had been wrecked by an airraid the night before.
Decoration Day was sweltering hot. James S. Harbord, who had managed to get himself replaced as Chief of Staff and was now acting Brigadier General in command of the marine brigade of the 2nd Division, after fighting his way from Paris through encumbered roads in his staffcar, reached Meaux about noon. While he waited for the arrival of the officer detailed to let him know his brigade’s destination, he went into a hotel for lunch.
The tables were crowded with hungry French officers rapping on their plates for attention. The food was giving out. The waiters were rattled. Nobody was getting served. Harbord fell to talking to a grayhaired American lady wearing the armband of the Y.M.C.A., who turned out to be from Ohio and William Howard Taft’s sisterinlaw. As soon as she’d eaten she star
ted pinch-hitting as a waitress. Before the general’s meal was over she had coolly taken over management of the kitchen and diningroom. Everybody got fed. When the last plate was served the proprietors closed the hotel up and the whole staff departed.
By this time Harbord had his orders (of which details kept being changed in the course of the afternoon) to proceed some thirty or forty kilometers to the north into a region to the west of Château-Thierry where French detachments, that had been fighting a losing battle for six days without relief, were hard pressed by the Germans. Eventually during the night the divisional command was set up at Montreuil-aux-Lions on the main highway from Paris to Metz. The orders were to deploy one brigade to the north and another to the south of this arterial road. At French corps headquarters there was considerable doubt as to whether the raw American troops could hold. The French general was assured that these were American regulars and that in a hundred and fifty years they had never been beaten.
As they scoured the countryside for locations for bivouacs and billets the marines felt the full impact of the retreat. Every southbound road was crowded with a tangled mass of carts, trucks, barrows, artillery caissons, people on bicycles, flocks and herds, old and young fleeing as they could. The soldiers mingled with the civilians. Under roadside trees lay the untended wounded and the sick and helpless who could drag themselves no further. Every little gully was full of abandoned equipment, wrecked trucks, machineguns, rifles, coats, blankets, boots.
As the soldiers fled they plundered the villages, drank up the wines and liquors in the taverns, ate everything that could be eaten. They threw away ammunition belts and entrenching tools to load their knapsacks and musettebags with loot. Farmhouses were gutted, milk and wine spilled on the floor, drawers and cupboards ransacked for valuables, pictures torn off the walls, mirrors and windows smashed with riflebutts. What had been an army was a whimpering, sweating, drunken rabble spreading more terror than the advancing Germans, whose presence was made known by increasing shellfire at every crossroad, and by reconnaissance planes marked with the black German cross that skimmed unopposed overhead.
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