Mr. Wilson's War

by John Dos Passos

  The Drive for Peace

  In Germany and Austria the early days of July were a time of scarcity, of explosions of pacifist sentiment in the Reichstag, and of open defiance of edicts of the Imperial Government. The Brest-Litovsk peace and resulting measures taken to include the old dominions of the Czar in the Mittel-Europa trading complex only resulted in spreading the Bolshevik contagion through the kingdoms, dukedoms and city states of the central empires. The imperial confederation that Bismarck cemented was shaking apart. Even Prussia, the cornerstone, was cracking.

  The Kaiser had assured his subjects that Ludendorff’s spring offensives would bring peace with victory, but all the German workingpeople could see was an immense new butcher’s bill, and hunger and stringency. It was the turn of the Germans to get tired of being killed. They were beginning to listen to Bolshevik agitators whispering that peace lay in defeat.

  Ludendorff’s first three drives were smashing successes, but they only resulted in consolidating the Allies and in speeding the shipment of American troops. The fourth offensive, launched during the period of the bitter struggle for Belleau Wood, proved a failure.

  The aim of this offensive, now known as “Project Gneisenau,” was to capture Compiègne, and to take over the main trunk line of railroad between Paris and Cologne. It was to be the westward prong of the pincers around Paris. The operation was entrusted to General von Hutier himself. The attack was made at dawn on June 9 after the usual gas and artillery saturation on a twenty mile front between Noyon and Montdidier.

  This time Foch correctly gauged Ludendorff’s intentions. Seventyfives and howitzers were lined hub to hub behind his defenses. His troops escaped the initial bombardment by falling back from lightly held advance posts to entrenchments in the rear. The most the boche gained, after suffering crushing casualties, was six miles. The American operations on both banks of the Marne were part of a general French counterattack which stalled the enemy in his tracks.

  Ludendorff was baffled. Indecision seized the High Command. Their strategists were torn between their original plan to drive the British into the Channel, and the tempting bait of Paris, Europe’s capital city, lying at a mere fifty miles from their firing lines. While they prepared, with ever more meticulous care, for their final drive towards Paris, the Germans allowed the Allies a month’s respite in which to regroup their armies according to Foch’s ideas. Perhaps Ludendorff missed the keen mind of his adviser Max Hoffmann who was bogged down in the contradictions of his victory over the revolutionary Russians in the east. Ludendorff was picking his way cautiously. A new spirit of caution was spreading through his armies. This fifth offensive, which the General Staff named “the drive for peace,” must not be allowed to fail.

  The Midsummer Lull

  Pershing now had twenty combat divisions under his command, Some of them were hampered in their effectiveness because, due to the British obsession that only infantry should be shipped, their artillery and other supporting services had not yet arrived. In spite of obstruction from both the British and French, who were still showing reluctance to give up their scheme to use American recruits as replacements for their own armies, a purely American service of supplies was functioning and beginning to function well. Twenty thousand tons of supplies were being unloaded daily in the American-managed ports. American railroadmen were re-equipping the lines that led into Lorraine. American locomotives were pulling longer freights than had ever been seen on the continent. French railroad yards resounded with the root-to-toot-toot of their whistles. Tours, the hub of the S.O.S. was as much an American city as Chaumont.

  On July 10 Pershing had a long conference with Foch at his château at Bombon. He wanted Foch to consent to pulling his American divisions out of the French and British sectors. He wanted them reorganized right away in an American army, at first on the Marne where they were needed in view of the coming German offensive, and later in Lorraine which was to be the point of departure for his drive planned for 1919 into the industrial heart of Germany. Already he was setting up American corps headquarters under which to group them. He urged on Foch his project for an American attack on the St. Mihiel salient.

  Foch was keeping his own council. He was determined that this time there should be no leaks. He had no intention of letting either Pershing or Haig in on his real plans. He had grouped his mass of manoeuvre back of Compiègne and Soissons between the two German salients. He gave no inkling of where they would strike. He agreed vaguely with everything the American general said but he kept pushing back the date for independent American operations. He talked about a French drive to free the Marne in September. After that maybe.

  The little Frenchman made up for his lack of candor by gusts of cordiality. Pétain would see to it that the American divisions would not lack for artillery, he said in his lordly way. “Today when there are a million Americans in France I am going to be still more American than any of you.” He overwhelmed the tightlipped Pershing with staccato sentences. “America must have her place in the war … The American army must become an accomplished fact.” By the end of July perhaps, or by September or certainly by the following year.

  That afternoon General Pershing was up on the Marne at La Ferté-sous-Jouarre where the 2nd Division was recuperating behind the lines from Belleau Wood. The troops were paraded, citations read, decorations awarded. One marine gunner swam across the Marne to receive his.

  A couple of days later the Commander in Chief lunched with Harbord at the headquarters of his marine brigade. Harbord boasted that one of his men had captured four German officers and seventyeight privates. Pershing retorted drily that no wonder Harbord was popular with the marines if he told such tall stories about them. At the same time he announced Harbord’s promotion to Major General in command of the 2nd Division.

  Behind the lines men kept listening for the roar of artillery that would announce an attack. “If the Germans do not bring off a very heavy offensive in the region between Château-Thierry and Reims within the next few hours our French allies are going to explode, blow up, disintegrate,” wrote Harbord. “It has been announced daily for days, but the Boche must know how we are worrying about it for he has so far failed to produce either the heavy offensive or any visible usual preparations for it.”

  The streets of Paris had a feverish gaiety that July. Everybody who planned to leave had already left. The Bertha dropped in a shell every twenty minutes regular as clockwork. Except for a slight quickening of the pulse men and women laughed off the danger. When a shell exploded in the Seine, within minutes people were out in skiffs scooping up the fish killed by the concussion.

  Appetites were good. When a shell burst in front of Foyot’s sacred old restaurant across from the Senate Chamber, two American officials for whom an elderly waiter was pouring wine from a bottle of vintage burgundy noticed that his hand never quivered. “This wine is too good to shake up,” he explained.

  Nightlife was vivid. Venery reigned. All the women looked pretty in the dark streets. The boulevards were enchanting in the blackout. In shuttered halls entertainers sang to packed benches “Suis dans l’axe du gros canon.”

  The celebration of Bastille Day on July 14 was the climax. The morning shone bright and clear. French airplanes filled the sky over the city. The streets were full of flowers. There was a smell of strawberries in the air.

  A brilliant military parade was deployed down the Champs Elysées. All Paris dressed in its best to crowd the wide sidewalks.

  Preceded by the Garde Republicain in their gleaming helmets, riding their fine horses, detachments from all the Allies, carrying their national colors and led by bands playing their national airs, marched in dress uniforms from the Arc de Triomphe to the Place de la Concorde. There were French Chasseurs Alpins in bérets and black tunics, British Lifeguards, Italian Bersaglieri in roostertail hats, Portuguese, an anti-Bolshevik unit of cossacks in astrakhan, representatives of the Bohemian and Slovak regiments that had thrown off the Austrian yoke, Poles, Ro
manians, Serbs, Montenegrins, Greeks in their stiff white kilts. The United States was represented by units of the 1st Division.

  Towards midnight American M.P.’s with a tense look on their faces darted out from their headquarters on the rue St. Anne. They went through hotels and nightspots rounding up officers and men on leave. All leaves were cancelled. The offensive had begun.

  The Crossing of the Marne

  Colonel Billy Mitchell was in Paris that afternoon trying to speed up the shipment of planes promised his brigade which was now attached to Hunter Liggett’s I Corps. He was eating a late snack before hurrying back to his headquarters at Coulommiers about thirty miles to the eastward. In the restaurant he met a Red Cross man who was a friend of his and as they sat eating they speculated on the location of the coming offensive. It had to be against Reims because the Germans would not dare advance further south without having the use of the trunk line of the railroad to Paris.

  As they talked they heard a rumbling sound. Guns to the north. Mitchell glanced at his wristwatch. It was 12:10 precisely.

  Out on the street they could see a great flicker and glare in the northern sky. Mitchell told the Red Cross man to come along with him if he wanted to see the greatest battle in history.

  They jumped into the air service colonel’s fastest staffcar. A little before 3 A.M. they were at Mitchell’s headquarters.

  At the airdrome they could look about them. The flash of guns lit up the clouds. The colored signals from bursting rockets and the white glow of starshells hovered over the whole length of the lines. Searchlights dissected the sky. There was a continual buzz and whine of airplanes overhead. The thud of airplane bombs sounded out now and then against the pounding surflike roar of artillery.

  Since few Americans as yet had training in night flying, Mitchell telephoned his pursuit and observation groups to be ready to operate with the first light. The news from his French liaison officers was disturbing. The French air division’s orders had gone astray and their planes were not ready for combat. The Germans were attacking along the Marne. The only immediately available aviation on this part of the front consisted of American pursuit and observation groups, and a British brigade.

  After a few winks of sleep Mitchell took up one of his pursuit planes and flew to the American lines beyond La Ferté-sous-Jouarre. The morning was overcast, the ceiling low. No German planes bothered him. Except for the artillery fire all along the lines he could see nothing particular going on.

  Then he turned east and flew through low scudding clouds with occasional patches of clear sky up the valley of the Marne. Approaching the Jauglonne bend he met a few Fokkers but they paid no attention to him. To see anything he had to fly under the clouds. The river here was hemmed in by high hills. East of Dormans he found himself skimming above violent artillery fire. The Germans were crossing the river on five bridges. They were crossing in perfect order.

  He was flying at about five hundred feet. There was no antiaircraft. “Looking down on the men marching so splendidly I thought to myself what a shame to spoil such fine troops.”

  He cruised a little further up the river, then swung north towards Reims. A terrific battle was going on in that vicinity. The air hummed with German planes. He spun around and headed back to the bridges. There seemed to be hand to hand fighting on the hill just south of a pontoon bridge swarming with boche.

  “The opposing troops were almost together. This was the nearest to a hand-to-hand combat than anything I had seen so far. I thought they were Americans and later found it was our Third Division.”

  Mitchell had to duck into the clouds to escape a swarm of boche planes on the way back to his airdrome. He sent out his whole pursuit group to attack the bridges, and relayed the information to the nearest available French on the Champagne front east of Reims. They turned out in force, and, in spite of the distance they had to come, disturbed the perfect order of the Germans. By the end of the day American, French and British planes had dropped a recordbreaking fortyfour tons of explosives on the Marne bridges.

  Defense in Depth

  The Americans that Colonel Mitchell saw so heavily engaged were companies of Colonel Ulysses Grant McAlexander’s 38th Infantry, from General Dickman’s 3rd Division. Since the division’s first precipitate appearance at Château-Thierry the combat units had had six weeks, under pretty continuous German shellfire from commanding positions on the northern bank, to dig into entrenchments along the river between Château-Thierry and the Jauglonne bend. They formed part of the French Sixth Army.

  This time there was no surprise. In a raid across the river a couple of weeks before, the French had captured a German engineer officer with meticulous plans on him for two of the crossings, and the Americans had made prisoners of a boatload of patrolling krauts during the preceding night. The only unknown factors were the day and the hour of the attack.

  McAlexander’s men had been digging riflepits down to the water’s edge, stringing barbed wire and making all the defensive preparations they had been taught by their French instructors. Due to a startling failure in liaison they had not understood the new tactics promulgated by Foch and Pétain by which the Germans were to be made to expend their artillery preparation on lightly held front positions while the real defense line was to be established several thousand yards to the rear. When the German attack came the Americans stayed put.

  The boche managed to move up a stunning preponderance of artillery. Starting at midnight they shelled with high explosives. Then they drenched the whole countryside with gas and smoke bombs that smothered most of the French and American batteries. The gas and smoke mingled with the morning mist to form a dense fog so that the Germans could launch their pontoons, which had been hidden by the reeds and bushes, without being detected. They were halfway across the river before the Americans caught sight of them.

  “Day was just breaking,” wrote a lieutenant who was in one of the outposts, “and through the mist, fog and smoke one could see the boats and rafts loaded to the gunwales with enemy infantrymen and machinegunners set out for the southern bank … Men of the 38th, who had escaped the hours of shelling, met every attempt with rifle and automatic weapon fire. Scores of these boats were shattered or sunk or else disabled and sent drifting harmlessly down the river. Hundreds of Huns jumped into the water and were drowned. Those who reached our side by swimming were either killed or captured.”

  Soldiers wounded in the early morning remained in their riflepits firing as best they could until they were killed. One man was found dead with his rifle and pistol empty, and in front of him a heap of twelve dead Germans.

  The advance posts along the riverbank were overwhelmed. The Germans swarmed up the hill and met the main line of American defense behind the embankment of the Paris-Metz railroad, which was the German objective for the first rush.

  The Americans held their position while the French on their flanks fell back according to plan on a further line of hills. McAlexander’s outfit found itself enfiladed by the boche on each flank.

  The 38th did not budge. Their accurate riflefire caused heavy losses to enemy troops marching forward in formation on either side of them. Their most painful casualties came from a French barrage dropped between the railroad line and the river on the theory that all Allied troops had already fallen back. A lieutenant of the field artillery had several horses killed under him and was himself wounded in the numerous dashes he made back through the zone of fire to try to correct the range of the guns.

  Costly as it was in lives, the 3rd Division’s obstinate resistance managed to throw two crack German divisions into confusion. The Americans ended the day with a third of their number killed or wounded but holding their positions along the railroad and with three hundred kraut prisoners on their hands.

  At the same time some companies of the 28th Division of the Pennsylvania National Guard were receiving their baptism of fire on the crest of a hill two miles south of the Marne to the eastward. Again there was a misunder
standing of the new French tactics. The four companies stayed in their positions instead of retiring with the French before the German assault and were killed or captured to a man, except for one small group, led by officers who had never seen combat in their lives, who managed to fight their way back to the new French entrenchments.

  The German penetration south of the Marne amounted to five miles in some places, but their pontoon bridges took such punishment from Allied aviation that by July 16 their advance had lost momentum and by the seventeenth they were stalled.

  This German crossing of the Marne was intended as the western prong of a new pincers operation directed at the railroad center of Reims and the high ground to the south of it. While the western prong was making great sacrifices for an initial success, the eastern prong was faring badly indeed.

  The American 42nd, the Rainbow Division made up of a conglomeration of National Guard outfits under General Menoher, was turned over to onearmed Gouraud’s French Fourth Army which was ordered to hold Reims at any cost. Here the liaison was good. Gouraud carefully instructed all the elements under his command as to the tactics about which he was particularly wellinformed.

  In the Reims sector there was clear moonlight the night of July 14. Gouraud’s artillery laid down a terrific barrage at ten minutes before the time they knew the German bombardment was scheduled to start. The boche troops were taking punishment long before their zero hour.

  The French and Americans knew exactly what to expect. Every detail had been correctly predicted. When the German rolling barrage moved forward and the storm troops jumped off they retired, leaving sacrifice groups to signal the whereabouts of the attackers, to a rear defensive position. When the boche reached the Allied front lines, a curtain of fire descended on them from the Allied artillery. The attacking waves never reached Gouraud’s fortified entrenchments. At ten in the morning the Germans were still trying to consolidate the gains that Gouraud had intentionally yielded to them. Next day a series of counterattacks pushed them back to their starting place. The 42nd Division’s part in this most successful defensive operation in the entire war cost them fortythree officers and sixteen hundred and ten men in total casualties.