Mr. Wilson's War

by John Dos Passos

  “We emerged from the woods,” wrote Lieutenant Marvin H. Taylor of the 23rd Infantry, “upon a broad stretch of wheatfields as flat as a table, which was bounded by a wide deep valley, in the bottom of which was the main position of the town of Vierzy. The houses were built in a series of terraces along the opposite side and each one offered excellent protection for Boche machine guns which opened up a murderous fire upon us, exposed as we were crossing the open fields. Our advance was a quick rush down the slope into the town, then a short delay caused by lurking snipers who were disposed of, after a bit of house to house fighting, and then the arduous climb up to the opposite slope again. There were fences and walls enclosing the grounds of each house and they were still intact. The destruction of war had apparently skipped that little town for some unaccountable reason, and all of these structures made progress extremely difficult. A formation of any sort was quite impossible, and we struggled forward in groups made up of men of all outfits, infantrymen, marines and Moroccans, in a strange hodgepodge …

  “At the summit we came upon a strange scene. There on the very edge of the hill, somewhat concealed by shrubbery, a German machinegunner had been engaged in taking advantage of an unobstructed field of fire as we crossed through the wheat. But now retribution had been meted out and the German gunner was dead at his gun. Seated as in the act of firing, his finger on the trigger, his head bent forward on the breech, a bullet hole in the forehead and gaping bayonet wound in the throat. I never thought I would reach a point where I would glory in death but the sight of that fellow positively caused a thrill of exaltation to sweep over me and tired as I was I laughed aloud … When I laughed every man in the platoon caught the spirit of it and laughed a grim short laugh.”

  Night found the men of the 2nd Division scattered in exhausted disorder over a great segment of the battlefront. They had crossed the Soissons-Villers-Cotterets railroad and blocked off the northern end of the Vierzy tunnel and were occupying objectives which had been set for the third day, many of them in territory assigned to their allies.

  Meanwhile the 1st Division to the north of the Moroccans advanced doggedly, with more order and less speed, against energetic German resistance, in a valley which sloped towards Soissons and the little river Crise, a tributary of the fateful Aisne. The hamlet of Missy-aux-Bois was fiercely contested. By night they had Missy and were among the gardenwalls of Breuil a short distance to the east.

  For a brief respite exhausted marines and doughboys dug into funk-holes. Lucky was the man who could catch an occasional catnap. “The night was cool and clear,” wrote Sergeant McCone, “the stars shining. Wounded marines lay groaning in the fields because there were not enough stretchers to care for all.”

  “By night,” noted Harbord, “we had three thousand prisoners; eleven batteries of German artillery, hundreds of machineguns and dozens of minenwerfers: had pushed the enemy before us six miles and were a mile ahead of the best shock troops in France, the fanatical Moslems from Morocco. But some of the best men America ever produced had watered with their blood those sunny slopes and wooded crests.

  “At 10 P.M.,” continued the general’s diary, “I moved Division Headquarters forward to Beaurepaire farm … It was an advanced dressing station and a very distressing scene. The congestion on the one country road prevented ambulances from getting to the front and men had lain there in the yard of farm buildings all day, and were to continue to lie there twelve or fourteen hours longer. Water was unobtainable, the buildings were in ruins from shell fire, and the boche still dropped an occasional bomb from his airplanes as they circled over. But from these wounded there was no word of complaint, nothing but patience in suffering. There were wounded Germans, Americans and darkskinned Moroccans side by side on the ground, blood over everything, clothes cut away, some men dead, and a ceaseless stream of traffic still pouring to the front with ammunition and supplies for fighting … No sleep, of course, and at 2 A.M. of the 19th an order to push on the attack that day.

  “The division had outrun its communications. There was no wire connection at all to the rear. The corps order was brought by a French officer who was very much surprised to find the division where it was.”

  That day German aviation turned out in force. Resistance stiffened, particularly in front of Berzy-le-Sec on a range of hills which dominated the Soissons-Château-Thierry road. All day, in liaison with the French on both flanks, units of the 1st Division advanced in short rushes against some of the best troops in the German Army.

  By that night casualties of the 2nd Division had mounted so high and the men were so exhausted that Mangin decided to replace them by a rested French division. “The loss has been almost five thousand officers and men,” noted General Bullard, now in command of the American corps which had supervision over the operation. “But what they did was worth any price to the Allied cause.”

  “The loss was heavy but the effect for the Allied cause was worth it all,” wrote Harbord. “For over an hour this morning,” he went on, “Brown and I stood by the roadside and watched the troops march back towards the Forêt de Retz. Battalions of only a couple of hundred men, companies of twenty-five or thirty, swinging by in the gray dawn, only a remnant, but a victorious remnant, thank God. No doubt in their minds as to their ability to whip the Germans. Their whole independent attitude, the very swagger of their march, the snatches of conversations we could hear as they swung past, proclaimed them a victorious division.”

  The First Sight of Soissons

  Ever since the offensive began the French had been trying to take the upland village of Berzy-le-Sec and the little knolls to the south of it which dominated the outskirts of Soissons. Possession of this high ground would deny to the Germans the use of the Château-Thierry road in their retirement from the Marne. As well as being a railroad center, Soissons was the crossroads of six converging highways essential to the enemy’s transport system.

  The boche had placed his batteries and machinegun nests with his usual ingenuity. The French units were making no headway. On the morning of July 20 General Summerall received word from Mangin’s headquarters that his 1st Division, which had been showing the same reckless dash as the 2nd during the past two days of fighting, should, as a reward for gallantry, have the honor of taking Berzy-le-Sec.

  Take it they did.

  The first attempt failed. A group of officers watching through field-glasses from a hill above the hamlet of Chaudun, which had been captured at heavy cost during the first day, saw the 2nd Brigade march out in column formation from the shade of the lines of lacerated poplars where the main road to Soissons emerged from the forest. At first the men’s faces, shadowed by their helmets in the hot July sun, looked black. A French officer thought they were Algerians, but as they advanced, in perfect order at about the pace at which a barrage rolls, the observers on the hill began to make out the American box respirator hanging on each man’s breast and the broad flash of American bayonets. As they advanced up over the bare hillside, dust and smoke rose from Allied shells pounding the village. There was as yet no sound from the German guns.

  The formations went out of sight behind a fold in the land. Now the observers could see the leading ranks following their barrage across a ridge above the roofs and steeple of the village. Each individual soldier stood out against the grassy hillside. When the first rank, advancing in perfect order, reached the crest a few shells from large caliber howitzers exploded among them. The boche were testing the range.

  “The accuracy of preparation of this fire was such that practically no adjustment was required, and almost immediately our infantry was shrouded in smoke and dust,” the observer noted in his report. “Great gaps were left in the ranks as the shells crashed among them. Nevertheless the advance continued in the most orderly way … Many of our infantry passed out of sight over the ridge accompanied by the devastating fire of the enemy’s artillery. Men struck by the enemy’s fire either disappeared or ran aimlessly about and toppled over.”
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  Now the observers were hearing the rattle of the enemy’s machineguns. The lines of tiny figures dropped into shellholes. Files of wounded were seen hobbling painfully back. “Individual men and groups of twos or threes began to wander about all over the field. They were the unit leaders, reorganizing their groups against counterattack. The attack had met the resistance of a strong position occupied in great force by the enemy … Thus the afternoon passed and night fell.”

  Next morning at dawn the attack was renewed with Brigadier General B. B. Buck himself leading the first wave. Although depleted by three days of constant fighting the 1st Brigade, leapfrogging the survivors of the 3rd, crossed the deep gully of the Crise and planted itself on the heights clear across the Soissons-Château-Thierry road.

  An hour later units of the 2nd Brigade swept through Berzy-le-Sec. They first had to capture a deadly battery of German 77s that had been firing on them at point blank range.

  In the slanting light of late afternoon the Americans on the hills above the village could see the railroad yards of Soissons in the distance. That night as they lay in their positions awaiting a counterattack that never came they watched, in the misty valleys to the east and southeast, great fires rise from burning munitions dumps and villages put to the torch as the Crown Prince’s armies retreated from the Marne.

  The men were numb with the exhaustion of five days of fighting. It wasn’t until dusk on July 22 that they heard the welcome bagpipes of a Scottish division marching in to relieve them.

  When the soldiers of the 1st reassembled by companies around their rolling kitchens back in the forest out of range of the German guns, officers and men were aghast at what they saw.

  Hardly a handful remained of each of the four regiments of infantry. Scarcely a company had an officer left to command it. A sergeant, a corporal, in one case a private was in command. Every battalion commander was a casualty. The 26th Infantry had lost all its field officers and came out commanded by a captain in his second year in the service. When the acting sergeants called the roll of their companies barely half of the enlisted men were there to answer Present.

  Mangin was lavish in his congratulations to the two American divisions. “You rushed into the fight as though to a fête,” he declaimed in his general orders … “91 guns, 7200 prisoners, immense booty, ten kilometers of country reconquered: this is your portion of the spoil of victory … I am proud to have commanded you during such days and to have fought with you for the deliverance of the world.”

  Once they recovered from the shock of defeat, the Germans carried out their retreat with coldblooded skill. It was not until August 2 that Soissons was actually reoccupied, though heavy artillery brought up to the heights round Berzy-le-Sec soon ruined its effectiveness as a transportation center for the boche.

  To Clear the Railroads

  The commanders in chief of the Allied armies, their spirits for once matching the glitter of gold braid on their caps, met on July 24 at Foch’s headquarters at Bombon. Foch read a summary of the strategic situation. The Germans were in retreat. The Allied generals at last had more manpower at their disposal than did the German High Command. Two hundred and fifty thousand American troops arriving each month were tipping the scales. To meet this increased riflepower the Germans had a muchweakened defensive army holding their lines, and behind that front, a shock army of stormtroops still capable of delivering dangerous blows.

  The Allies had seized the initiative, said Foch. His eyes flashed. He puffed out his bantam chest with an arrogant smile under his bristling gray mustache. They must never let it go.

  He outlined three operations that must be completed in preparation for the great final offensive. He was taking it for granted that this final offensive would take place in the spring or summer of 1919. He had been steeped in war so long it was hard for him to imagine that it would ever end.

  The first operation was already on: to drive the enemy off the Paris-Metz main line of railroad in the valley of the Marne.

  Second operation: The northern trunk line through Amiens and Hasebrouck to the Channel coast must be cleared of enemy interference. This was up to Haig and the British forces north of Amiens. General Debeney’s army in the southern part of the sector would cooperate.

  Third operation: The eastern section of the Paris-Metz railroad must be restored to Allied use by the reduction of the Saint Mihiel salient east of Verdun. This would be the business of the Americans.

  When Foch asked for comments from the Allied commanders—so the story was told at Chaumont—each spoke in his customary roles. Haig complained that his armies were not yet re-established after the shocking blows they had suffered in March and April. Pétain grumbled that the French were bled white. Pershing blurted out that his men asked nothing better than to get into the fight, but added, in a sour tone, that the only thing holding them up was that no American army had been formed for them to fight with.

  Foch could be diplomatic when he wanted to be. He quieted their complaints with his confident smile. It was decided that the next move must be to disengage Amiens. That was the affair of the valiant British. It was hinted that the safety of the British Expeditionary Force might well lie in anticipating the offensive that was brewing against them in Prince Rupert’s group of armies. Surprise, tirelessly repeated Foch; the watchword was surprise.

  Again the Tanks

  Haig entrusted the Amiens operation to General Sir Henry Rawlinson’s Fourth Army.

  Sir Henry, known as Rawly to his intimates in the upper echelons, was a British aristocrat brought up in the grand Victorian tradition. His father, as well as being an eminent servant of the empire, was a learned orientalist and one of the first students of Assyrian inscriptions. His mother was a Seymour of the great house of the Dukes of Somerset and a tolerable watercolorist besides. Rawly himself was no mean hand with a pencil and a man of some reading as well as of experience in the East. He served as aide to Lord Roberts in India. He was with Kitchener at Khartoum.

  Though, as an old poloplayer, he couldn’t bring himself quite to give up cavalry, he was one of the few British topdrawer generals who appreciated tanks. Furthermore he appreciated Anzacs. His army was made up of a corps of Australians, who were tough nuts to handle for officers who rubbed them the wrong way, a corps of Canadians and a corps of British. In reserve he had the American 33rd Division. He was broad-minded enough even to like Americans.

  The young men of Rawly’s Intelligence had for some time been bringing in reports of warweariness among the German troops opposing him. They were suffering from an epidemic of influenza. Their lines were thinly held. Long before the council of war at Bombon he had been prodding Haig to recapture the outer defenses of Amiens which the boche had held since March. He had attempted several tentative probes.

  Rawly’s Fourth of July operation was not only the first tryout of the Americans on the British front. It was the first tryout of the Mark V tank. Both experiments were successful. The Americans showed fight. The new tank proved faster and more easily manoeuverable than the old. The attack being planned would be led by Mark V tanks.

  The battle of Amiens was purely a British show. French cooperation was secondary. Only a single regiment of Americans was involved. The staffwork could hardly have been better. The concentration of men and armament was carried out at night or in cloudy weather under air cover that kept German observation planes out of the area. Batteries were reinforced with new guns without showing any increased fire power. While the three hundred and sixty heavy tanks and ninetysix whippet tanks were being moved into position, masses of airplanes were used to create a sound barrage so that the enemy should not hear the rattling and clanking of the unwieldy vehicles.

  Secrecy was so well maintained that not only Ludendorff’s staff but the war cabinet and the Australian Labor Prime Minister, William Morris Hughes, who was in London raising a storm about the excessive casualties his Aussies were suffering at the front, were kept in ignorance of what was being plann
ed. Canadian casualty stations were ostentatiously set up in Mount Kemmel area, with the result that the governor general of Canada protested publicly that his troops weren’t being used as a unit as had been promised.

  Everything led the Germans to expect an attack in the north. They were further lulled to security when the Australians extended their lines in front of Amiens to relieve part of a French division to the south of them. By zero hour the British had managed to move in unobserved not only the tanks, but a thousand extra guns and six fresh divisions. The final detailed orders were delayed to the last moment.

  On the morning of August 8, Sir Douglas Haig made one of his customary placid entries in his diary: “Glass steady. Fine night and morning—a slight mist in the valley. An autumn feel in the morning air.” He added that the Fourth Army reported a quiet night.

  An hour before dawn, muffled by a thick ground mist made thicker by smoke bombs, the British tanks swarmed across the German lines. When they were well started a barrage dropped in front of them. The Aussies and Canadians followed in their trail. The big guns of the British artillery concentrated on knocking out enemy batteries. Whippets and armored cars broke through and romped about behind the German lines. The surprise was so great that one corps headquarters was caught at breakfast.

  “Everywhere else the situation had developed more favorably for us than I, optimist though I am, dared to hope,” Haig noted. “The enemy was completely surprised, two reliefs of Divisions were in progress, very little resistance was offered and our troops got their objectives quickly with little loss.”

  The Cruise of the Musical Box

  “On August 8, 1918 I commanded Whippet tank ‘Musical Box,’ ” reported Lieutenant C. B. Arnold. He told of crossing the railway at Villers-Bretonneux, a town hotly contested ever since the German March attack. His formation proceeded due east. “I found myself to be the leading machine, owing to the others having become ditched. To my immediate front I could see more Mark V tanks being followed very closely by Australian infantry … We came under direct shell fire from a four gun field battery of which I could see the flashes.”