Mr. Wilson's War

by John Dos Passos

  The weather continued fine. All night and during the morning of June 1 marine and infantry units of the 2nd Division kept arriving in the vicinity of Montreuil-aux-Lions. As fast as they arrived they were moved into positions facing the rolling wheatfields and the wooded knolls that formed the watershed of a small tributary of the Ourcq known as Clignon brook.

  The first battalions were spread thin. One marine unit occupied so much of the line that their foxholes on the open hillside back of Les Mares farm had to be seven feet apart. The machinegun companies hadn’t arrived. They had only their rifles, and a couple of batteries of French seventyfives ensconced behind them. “Are you holding the line in depth?” asked a liaison officer from G.H.Q. “No, in width,” the marine C.O. snapped back.

  There the marines saw their first krauts, carefully spaced files of gray figures in coalscuttle helmets wading towards them through the wheat. A couple of heavy machineguns arrived in the nick of time. The marines were under shellfire. The village behind them was burning. They didn’t start shooting till the krauts had approached to a hundred yards. Their shooting was good. The files hesitated. The dead and wounded dropped out of sight into the wheat. The first German line melted. Now the second line was taking punishment. Suddenly they broke and ran. The wheatfield was empty. Fingers scorched and blackened from the heat of their rifles, the marines stayed in their foxholes.

  During the night of June 3 the rolling kitchens caught up. The men who had been living on bacon and hardtack and on what fowls and potatoes they could pilfer from abandoned farms, were served the first proper rations many of them had eaten since Chaumont.

  There followed a few days breathing spell. It was a period of suspense. From dawn to dark and dark to dawn they lay in their positions waiting for the onrushing German army. Stragglers and refugees had drained away down the roads. A weird quiet gripped the countryside.

  The French were still being pushed out of a string of small villages beyond the ridges that faced the 2nd Division. Occasional detachments of chasseurs in their black berets came through in fair order. Falling back was all they could think of. One French officer went so far as to order a marine battalion he came across to join in the retreat. Their captain made the retort that soon became legendary: “Retreat hell, we just got here.”

  Belleau Wood

  By June 5 General Degoutte, who commanded the French corps to which the 2nd Division was attached, felt he had the situation well enough in hand to order some small advances to improve his defensive positions. He had enough artillery available to give support for a limited attack.

  Part of the American lines was uncomfortably overlooked by a dense growth of hardwoods on the crest of the long smooth rise the boche occupied as soon as they ran the French out of the villages along Clignon brook in the valley beyond. This was Belleau Wood. General Bundy was ordered to take possession of it.

  American staffwork was still rudimentary. Requests for topographical maps of the region met with shrugs at French headquarters. Maps could only be procured through certain army departments which were not in evidence on the battlefield. Billy Mitchell’s airforce was promising observation planes but none had appeared. The Americans were utterly ignorant of the lay of the land. Maybe the way to find out what was in the wood was to go up there and look. The job fell to Harbord’s marine brigade.

  The morning of June 6 the Americans and the French on their flanks began a general advance to seize the higher ground. Most of the operation was successful. To the east of the Metz-Paris road elements of the 3rd Division helped capture at least part of the bare hill, marked 204 on the military maps, which dominated Château-Thierry and the road along the valley of the Marne.

  At the same time the marines attacked the innocentlooking wood in front of them. Behind a brisk artillery barrage they deployed as they had been taught in manoeuvres, in four skirmish lines. When they reached the edges of the wood, fire from machineguns invisible amid the dense foliage cut them down like a scythe. The survivors kept on going and vanished among the trees.

  The attack on either side of Belleau Wood moved with such dash that at the western end of the line some companies loped past the road where they were supposed to dig in and charged into the outskirts of Torcy in the valley beyond. There the krauts picked them off at their leisure. To the east the marines poured over the hill without too much loss and occupied the village of Bouresches. For hours there was no news from the battalion in the center which had disappeared into the wood.

  The first reports to brigade headquarters were encouraging indeed. Harbord was in high spirits. “He is happy as a clam,” a liaison officer wrote back to Chaumont, “even though he has about ten batteries so close to his p.c. that it sounds as if the guns were all in his bedroom.”

  During the afternoon Harbord’s command posts began to piece together a picture of what was happening in Belleau Wood. The great trees that looked so harmless through the glasses extended much further than anybody had imagined. Under their shade was a nightmare of sudden ravines and boulders and mossy outcroppings masked in dense undergrowth. The enemy had the broken ground organized into a network of machinegun nests placed so that as soon as one machinegunner was overpowered others to the flank and rear could make the position untenable. Their mortars and minenwerfers were craftily hidden in hollows and behind jutting rocks. The artillery barrage had done them no harm.

  The marines were suffering punishment. Their commander Colonel Albertus Catlin was severely wounded early in the day. Many companies lost officers and noncoms. One had only ten men left. The chain of command broke down. Isolated companies and isolated individuals roamed on as best they could without guide or chart among the trees and boulders, firing at an enemy they never could see. Men lost their sense of direction. Occasionally they strayed into their own machinegun fire. The nearer German machineguns were ringed with circles of dead marines. The lucky ones found spots of soft loam where they could dig themselves in among the rocks and the brambles. Wounded and bleeding men struggled ahead. If they were licked they did not know it.

  Come nightfall the walking wounded started to trickle back, grimy ash-faced men with bandaged heads, men with arms in slings improvised out of web belts, men hobbling on rifles for crutches. Colonel Catlin was brought out on a stretcher. Lieutenant Colonel Lee took his place. Morale remained high. The machinegunning was tremendous, reported the marines, but if you got within bayonet range of a kraut the kraut would surrender. A little more time and they’d clean out that wood.

  Reinforcements were sent into Bouresches under cover of darkness. A party of volunteers ran in a truckload of ammunition and rations through heavy German fire.

  Next day the marines were encouraged by the sight of a real American airplane. From then on American pursuit and observation planes that had been training in French and British machines back of Toul became more common overhead. They continued to be outnumbered and outclassed by the Germans who had faster planes and more experienced pilots.

  On June 8 the marines made another attempt to storm Belleau Wood. German machineguns too well placed. Casualties; but no results except for two minenwerfers and some machineguns captured. Harbord had to pull his marines back into a ravine on the edge of the wood so that the artillery could give the place a thorough shellacking.

  June 10 after a stepped up barrage, the marines attacked again and reported optimistically as they had so often before that they held the entire wood. Still they had stopped short of the main German defense line in the northeast corner.

  The marines were game. Next day another attack drove clean through to the north side but after the smoke cleared it was discovered the Germans hadn’t budged. Still no accurate maps.

  The men were wearing out. General Bundy telegraphed Pershing’s headquarters asking for relief: “The Second Division has been marching, entrenching and fighting since May 30. During that time few of the men have had a night’s rest … For the past five days it has been engaged in close combat, offens
ive and defensive. The division holds a front of ten kilometers. There are no troops to relieve them.”

  After a number of such messages, and one from Harbord pointing out that many of his men had not even taken their shoes off in two weeks, an infantry regiment from the 3rd Division was sent in to relieve the contingents that had suffered most casualties.

  The usual confusion ensued. The officers were so green that they didn’t know they had to keep their men out of sight of the sausage balloons that were directing the German artillery fire. The boche took the occasion to mount a brisk raid on Bouresches. A box barrage cut off the garrison for a while, and an officer fresh from the rear sent back word that Bouresches was overwhelmed. A little later a runner appeared with the message “Nothing but marines in Bouresches” and asking for hot coffee and drinking water.

  By this time a little more than half of Belleau Wood was in American hands. Prisoners were accumulating, but still no one had an accurate idea of its topography. The marines sent in skirmish line after skirmish line of infantrymen to grope their way through ravines and underbrush into savage machinegun fire. By June 13 they were sure the wood was theirs.

  That very day the boche, who had used little gas thus far, made a sudden and saturating bombardment with mustard gas. Eight hundred American casualties. Lines of blinded men came stumbling back to the dressing stations with their hands on eachother’s shoulders, led by a wounded man who still had his sight. Though gasmasks gave good protection against the effect on the lungs, wherever there was moisture on the skin either from sweaty clothing or dew on the grass, the gas left painful burns. The mustard gas made Belleau Wood untenable. Next day Harbord had to pull his marines out to positions on the fringes of the thickets they had lost so many lives to conquer.

  It wasn’t until an Alsatian deserter was brought into headquarters during the night of June 21 and pointed out the German defenses on the map that Harbord’s staff got a clear idea of their location. The garrison, they learned, was under the command of a Major Bischoff who had a reputation for the skill in bushfighting he had gained in colonial wars. He had suffered heavy losses from the fury of the marines’ assault but his positions were impregnable to infantry.

  Clearly this had been all along a job for the artillery. On June 25 the northern fringe of Belleau Wood was shelled for fourteen hours. In the late afternoon the marines advanced again behind a rolling barrage. “Come on you sonsofbitches do you expect to live forever?” the sergeants yelled. This time the losses weren’t too heavy.

  They found the great trees blasted to splinters, the German defenders stunned and helpless. By 9:30 that night Belleau Wood really was in American hands. Two hundred and fifty German prisoners and many machineguns. The Germans fell back on a defensive line along Clignon brook, and gave little more trouble in that sector.

  The commanding officers of the 2nd Division had learned a great deal about warfare, at a cost as high, in proportion to the number engaged, as at Gettysburg or Chickamauga. During the month of June they lost roughly a third of their effectives in dead, wounded, and gassed.

  The French lavished citations on the survivors. Since the American censorship deleted the identifying numbers of the infantry regiments, the American press gave the impression that a brigade of marines had stopped the German drive on Paris singlehanded. Actually two divisions had distinguished themselves. The French added to the misapprehension by courteously renaming le bois de Belleau, le bois de la Brigade de Marine.

  Even the Germans were impressed. Ludendorff remarked that the Americans attacked bravely, “but they were unskillfully led, attacked in dense masses and failed.” Hindenburg wrote with grudging admiration of the quality of the American troops which he described as being “clumsily but firmly led.” A staff report described the 2nd Division as a very good one which might possibly be rated as a storm troop. “The moral effect of our gunfire cannot seriously impede the advance of the American infantry.”

  Pershing smiled his thinlipped smile. “Our first three divisions to participate in active operations had all distinguished themselves,” he wrote. “The First at Cantigny, the Second at Belleau Wood, the Third at Château-Thierry.” He started pressing Foch and Pétain for the formation of an American corps under which the divisions that had proved their mettle might be grouped in the neighborhood of Château-Thierry in preparation for the counterattack south of Soissons, which he was already talking up with Pétain’s staff.

  The warmhearted Harbord, closer than Pershing to the blood and guts of the fighting front, let himself go in notes he jotted down in the ramshackle fieldstone and mortar farmbuilding bedded between batteries of one hundred and fiftyfive millimeter-howitzers, where he made his brigade headquarters: “What shall I say of the gallantry with which these marines have fought? I cannot write of their splendid gallantry without tears coming to my eyes. There has never been anything better in the world … Literally scores of these men have refused to leave the field when wounded. Officers have individually captured German machine guns and killed their crews. Privates have led platoons when their officers have fallen … We are some 3400 fine officers and men less than we were a month ago … It is a dear price to pay for a bit of French territory but somewhat compensated for by the fact that the little bit of lovely France was at the very apex of the German push for Paris and that we exacted a toll from four German divisions that outbalanced our own losses … There are hundreds of cases of individual heroism and not one of misbehavior.”

  The American counterattacks were not the only factors that threw Ludendorff’s plans into disarray but they surely helped. His new strategy, hastily improvised at a conference with von Hindenburg and the Kaiser in the first heady days of victory in the Chemin des Dames, was to encircle Paris with a pincers movement. He was meeting with increasing resistance from the French along the necks of his salients. The British were showing their usual obstinacy. The Americans cost him time and irreplaceable manpower. The dash and youthful recklessness of the American assaults, combined with news of the hardly believable speedup in the transportation of American troops to Europe, which the U-boats were proving helpless to hinder, had an impact on the German will to fight more far reaching than the results of a few tactical successes. Cantigny and Belleau Wood and the Marne bridges were seen by the German strategists as the first gusts of a coming storm. If the war were to be won it had to be won quickly.

  Chapter 19

  LUDENDORFF’S BLACK DAY

  AMERICANS celebrated July 4, 1918, in various ways.

  In Washington President Wilson, accompanied by Mrs. Wilson and the customary covey of relatives, by members of the cabinet and of the diplomatic corps and by a group of leaders of foreignlanguage societies, carefully picked by Creel and Tumulty in view of their usefulness in the forthcoming congressional elections, proceeded to Mount Vernon on the Mayflower.

  The afternoon was a furnace. There was no air even on the river. The President showed his popular touch by moving among his sweating guests and urging them to doff their frockcoats and silk hats. Ferried ashore in launches they found a crowd of two thousand people trampling the shrubberies of George Washington’s old plantation. Wilson addressed the throng from a stand set up beside Washington’s tomb.

  He spoke poetically of the quiet of the spot “serene and untouched by the hurry of the world.” When he excoriated the central powers his eyes flashed with cold anger behind his noseglasses. There must be no peace of compromise. He proclaimed four more principles to reinforce his Fourteen Points:

  “The destruction of every arbitrary power everywhere that can, separately, secretly and of its single choice, disturb the peace of the world.”

  The settlement of questions of territory and sovereignty “upon the basis of the free acceptance of that settlement by the people immediately concerned.”

  Government of nations “by the common law of civilized society.”

  The establishment of an international organization to preserve the peace.
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br />   “… The blinded rulers of Prussia have aroused forces they know little of,” —his voice rang through the little Virginia burying ground in the hollow among the trees by the riverbank—“forces which, once roused, can never be crushed to earth again.”

  “Four more nails in the coffin of German militarism,” proclaimed Creel’s propagandists.

  The representatives of the European minorities, who had climbed back into their frockcoats to listen to the President’s speech, expressed themselves as delighted: each man heard in those tolling words the call of his national aspirations.

  Meanwhile the new shipyards, having applied massproduction methods to the construction of oceangoing freighters, were managing on that glorious Fourth to launch ninetyfive ships. “The great splash.” Their target had been a hundred.

  In the Amiens salient four companies of the recently disembarked 33rd Division, made up of Illinois militiamen, some of them wearing Australian uniforms in complete disregard of General Pershing’s orders, joined the Aussies of General Richardson’s Fourth Army in a successful coup de main against Hamel and were saluted by their allies as “fighting fools.”

  In Paris marines from the 2nd Division paraded down the Champs Elysées and were almost kissed to death by applauding crowds.

  Back of Cantigny the 1st’s artillery saluted the German positions with fortyeight salvos in patriotic bombardment. Later in the day, sheltered from German planes by the spreading oaks of the park that surrounded an ancient château, they put on, for the benefit of a superannuated French general who lived there and of a number of admiring ladies, a remarkably fine horse show.