V
One American woman volunteer saw this cataclysm from a uniquely terrible viewpoint. Shirley Millard was a New Yorker whose heart “thumped admiringly to the tune of Over There.” Her parents kept telling her she was much too young to go to war, and she did not have an iota of training to drive an ambulance or nurse wounded men. But she had two valuable assets, “a fair knowledge of French and the determination that goes with red hair.” when she heard the French were recruiting Americans to serve in their depleted nursing corps, she volunteered. On March 16, 1918, her awed fiancé, about to begin training as a lieutenant at New York’s Camp Upton, saw her off with kisses and presents, urging her “not to win the war” before he got there.
Millard enjoyed every minute of her eight-day voyage across the Atlantic, in spite of the ubiquitous submarines. She read a handbook on nursing in secret, still pleased that she had managed (so she thought) to bluff the French recruiters into taking her. She assumed she would be given some sort of training when she arrived in France. She had no idea that France had been chronically short of nurses since the war began. Nursing was not an accepted profession for Frenchwomen. It had been left to nuns—and in France’s ongoing war between the secular left and the religious right, many religious nursing orders had been driven out of the country.
On March 24, 1918, Millard and the nine other members of her unit landed in Bordeaux. They were instantly ordered aboard a train to Paris, where they were told they were needed at an emergency hospital near the front. Soon they were in an odoriferous, covered camion (truck) that had just carried a load of mules to the front. They shrugged into their uniforms as the camion roared through the night at headlong speed. They told each other how lucky they were to get to the front without boring delays.
As darkness fell, they reached their hospital, a big, rambling old château near Soissons. Around it on the lawns loomed numerous barracks for wounded enlisted men. Wounded officers were treated in the château. In the distance, the newcomers could hear the boom of artillery. Heavy fighting was obviously in progress. On the grounds between the château and the barracks were hundreds of men, who they assumed were sleeping.
A French doctor looked them over and beckoned them to follow him. Often they had to step over the men on the ground as they hurried toward the barracks. Their ears picked up pathetic cries for water, food, a priest. They realized the prone soldiers were all wounded, lying there waiting for treatment. Moments later, an airplane exploded and burned in the black sky above them. By that time, Shirley Millard was at the door of Barracks Forty-Two. The doctor opened the door only wide enough to shove her inside. She would soon learn that lights drew German bombers.
She found herself in a long, low room, with cots so jammed together it was hard to walk between them. Light came from flickering candles. Nurses, doctors, orderlies rushed up and down the center aisle. Someone shoved a huge hypodermic needle into her hand and told her every man who came in must have a tetanus shot. Then she was to get them ready for the operating table. Millard stared at the hypodermic. She had no idea how to use it. “I’d never even had one [an injection],” she thought.“And what did ‘get them ready’ mean?”
She watched another nurse snap on the glass tube containing the antitoxin, fill the syringe and give a man his injection. She followed the same procedure, but when she tried to plunge the needle into her man’s arm, it bent. A passing orderly told her the man was an Arab, with skin as tough as leather. She found another needle and tried again. It worked! Ditto the second, third and fourth times.“Soon I am going like lightning.”
Then she found out what getting them ready meant. She watched a French nurse as she undressed several wounded men,“removing all their clothing, boots leggings, belts, gas-masks.” then she washed their wounds and wrapped them in a clean sheet to prepare them for surgery. Taking a deep breath, Millard went to work. Most of the men were caked with mud from head to foot; they screamed and cursed her as she struggled to undress them without causing more pain.
Beneath one set of blood-and mud-soaked bandages, she found an arm hanging by a tendon. Roses Are Blooming in Picardy. The plaintive British war song started wailing in her head as she went on to the next man. She bathed a “great hip cavity” where a leg once was. Next was a man with no eyes. She could see into the back of his head.
She stared at a chest ripped open by a shell as the exposed lungs slowly shuddered to a stop. Next came a burly Breton, who reminded her of the porter in the hotel in Dinard where she had stayed with her parents years before.“I slit him open!” he babbled.“Open I tell you! Goddamn his soul!”
For three sleepless days and nights, Millard lived this nightmare on the edge of the Kaiserschlacht. She watched Dr. Le Brun, a brilliant young surgeon from Lyons, who stayed on his feet, gulping black coffee, operating, operating, for the entire seventy-two hours. Toward the end, he hung onto the door of the operating room and muttered, “La gloire, la gloire! Bah! C’est de la merde!” (Glory, glory, it’s all shit!)
Finally, one of the French nurses led Millard away to a bedroom in the château. She lay there, listening to “Roses Are Blooming in Picardy” wailing in her head and Dr. Le Brun saying, “La Gloire . . . la gloire . . . ” She thought of her fiancé at Camp Upton. She felt years and years older than him. She had crossed a river of blood since she had seen him.“How would I feel about him when we met again?” she wondered.29
VI
The Smith College volunteers also had a terrifying brush with the Kaiserschlacht. They were working at Grecourt, a French town in the path of the oncoming Germans, close to the hinge between the two Allied armies. They received all sorts of assistance from both French and British officers who admired their work in eleven surrounding villages.
The Smithies had organized local women into a sewing and knitting industry, replanted fruit trees, set up libraries, and restocked farms with cows, goats and pigs. At first their worst enemy was the cold. A woman correspondent from the New York Evening Sun lived with them for a while and reported on the weather, among other things.“After your first day there, you’ve discarded silk stockings and are wearing one if not two pair of the heaviest made woolens, and you’ve borrowed every available woolie not in use.”30
On March 21, the crash of Bruchmuller’s guns was soon followed by a British officer who told them to flee. The Germans had broken through and were coming on like a tidal wave. There was no hope of stopping them. Instead, the Smith women decided to stay and help their villagers to escape. They drove down roads jammed with retreating troops and fleeing civilians to take old people to hospitals and railroad stations. They also fed hungry exhausted Tommies. Mile by mile, often with German shells falling close, they retreated with the British to Amiens. There they endured an air raid that had bombs “popping like cannoncrackers” from 8:30 P.M. until 4 A.M. The next day they decided to find safer quarters and settled in Beauvais, where they did their best to feed refugees and wounded Tommies as they were loaded on hospital trains for evacuation to England. Gradually the Smithies realized there would be no more reconstruction work until the war was over. But they remained determined to stay in France, no matter how many miles the Germans gained. Grimly, they headed back to Paris and began volunteering as ambulance drivers, canteen workers and nurses.31
VII
In Paris, the Smith women found a city in a state of near hysteria. To keep the French off balance while the storm troopers demolished the British army, General Ludendorff had moved three gigantic guns into the forest of Crépy-en-Laonnois, near Laon, seventy miles from Paris. Called Wilhelm Geschütze in honor of the kaiser, the superguns were manned by German sailors, who nicknamed them “Big Berthas,” after a member of the Krupp family. The specially designed 112-foot-long barrels fired a 200-pound shell into the stratosphere, from whence it descended into the middle of Paris.
The first shell landed at 7:26 A.M. on March 23 and was followed by twenty-two others, killing sixteen people and injuring twenty-nine.
Three days later, another shell struck the crowded church of Saint-Gervais during services, killing seventy-five worshippers and wounding ninety. The bombardment continued through March 30. By that time, the Parisians had calmed down and decided the Berthas were no worse than the sporadic German air raids. The civilians accepted the inevitable casualties with the same stoicism that the poilus displayed at the front.
Technical problems with the Big Berthas soon limited their rate of fire. One gun exploded, killing or wounding seventeen of its crew. The guns were erratic. On some days, shells missed Paris entirely, exploding in the countryside beyond the city. French long-range guns and planes retaliated with shells and bombs that forced the Germans to move the guns to new positions. The Berthas would fire again in coming weeks, but there was no longer any danger of panic. Subways and buses continued to run, Parisians went about their business, more or less ignoring the rain of random death. But this brutal weapon deepened French hatred of Germany and spelled future trouble for Woodrow Wilson’s dreams of world peace.32
VIII
For the moment, peace was not on anyone’s mind. The success of the storm trooper tactics in the first Kaiserschlacht encouraged Quartermaster General Ludendorff and Field Marshal von Hindenburg to attempt one of their wildest dreams—the isolation of the British army in France by cutting its supply lines to the channel ports. The Germans were aware that the French army had lost its enthusiasm for the war. A British defeat would virtually guarantee an early French surrender. So Ludendorff ordered Colonel Bruchmuller to work on another section of the British front.
At 4:15 A.M. on April 9, which happened to be Ludendorff ’s birthday, Bruchmuller unleashed another rain of steel and gas on a mere eleven miles of a far more crucial British sector—Flanders. Little more than fifteen miles behind the lines lay Hazebrouck, a rail center through which was funneled almost all the supplies for the British Expeditionary Force. Without it, General Haig’s army would become a marooned whale, bereft of food and ammunition.
Four attack divisions of General Ferdinand Quast’s Sixth Army converged on a single Portuguese division holding a central piece of this eleven-mile front. The Portuguese were a 20,000-man token force, sent by their government to affirm their centuries-old alliance with England. The men had no enthusiasm for this murderous war, nor did their officers; their commanding general spent most of his time in Paris. Why the British entrusted such a vital part of the line to them can only be explained as further proof of Field Marshal Haig’s appalling generalship.
Their uniforms stained yellow with gas, the men from the Iberian Peninsula sprinted for the rear at a pace that made the soldiers of the British Fifth Army look like slowpokes. Not a few of them stole the bicycles of a British cycle battalion that rushed forward to support them and did not stop pedaling until they reached the English Channel at Le Havre. Another 6,000 surrendered on the spot.33
Storm troopers poured through the gap and assaulted British divisions on the flanks, producing more panic and a less rapid but no less ominous retreat. The British First Army fell back five miles, while General Sir Herbert Plumer’s Second Army was thrown back from Messines Ridge, which the British had captured at horrendous cost in the battle of Passchendaele. Soon Quast’s Sixth Army had linked up with General Sixt von Armin’s Fourth Army, which had joined the offensive north of Armentières. By April 12, the breach was thirty miles wide and ten miles deep. Hazebrouck was only five miles away.
A desperate Haig issued an order that had the trumpet of doom in it. “There is no other course open to us but to fight it out. Every position must be held to the last man; there must be no retirement. With our backs to the wall, and believing in the justice of our cause, each of must fight on to the end. The safety of our homes and the freedom of mankind alike depend on the conduct of each one of us in this crucial moment.”34
Haig did more than write apocalyptic orders. He put Plumer, his best general, in charge of the battle, and rushed Australian reinforcements from Amiens. The Aussies had become the storm troopers of the British army. When the going got tough, Haig invariably turned to them. They paid a horrendous price for their devotion to the empire. Their casualties at war’s end were a staggering 87 percent of their expeditionary force.
Fighting stubbornly and at times ferociously, the British began making the storm troopers pay for every foot of ground. The French also moved several divisions into Flanders. Although they did not go into action, they threatened the German left flank, forcing Ludendorff to divert troops from the drive on Hazebrouck. Slowly, as the month of April dwindled, the storm troopers ran out of steam again. On April 29, Ludendorff called off the offensive, with Hazebrouck uncaptured. But in a final show of confidence, the German commander ordered an attack on a French division holding Mount Kemmel, one of the key heights in the monotonously flat Flanders plain. The poilus fled in disorder, convincing Ludendorff that a blow at the French lines near Paris would panic them into withdrawing their forces from Flanders. Then he and Colonel Bruchmuller would swing north to throw a final haymaker at the British Expeditionary Force.35
IX
These German victories added up to bad news for General John J. Pershing in more ways than one. After the first Kaiserschlacht had annihilated the British Fifth Army and mauled the Third Army, the frantic Allies convened a summit conference at Doullens, to which they did not even bother to invite Pershing or any other American. The only general who seemed interested in fighting was short, fiery Ferdinand Foch, until recently in disgrace for squandering his men in slaughterous attacks. The politicians persuaded Haig and Pétain to accept him as a supreme commander to coordinate the collapsing battle line.
Instead of sulking for being ignored, Pershing made his only grand gesture of the war. He drove to Foch’s headquarters outside Paris and in reasonably good French declared: “I have come to tell you that the American people would consider it a great honor for our troops to be engaged in the present battle. I ask you for this in their name and my own.” Everyone applauded the performance. It made headlines. But Pershing soon learned he had embraced a rattlesnake.36
Pershing thought Foch would put the four available American divisions into line as an Army corps. Instead, Foch assigned them to quiet sectors, piecemeal, after the battle for Amiens subsided. Next Foch dispatched a cable behind Pershing’s back, telling President Wilson that unless 600,000 infantrymen were shipped to Europe in the next three months, unattached to any divisions for use as replacements in the French and British armies, the war was lost.37
Pershing fought the Frenchman with his only weapon—an immense stubbornness and rocklike faith in his vision of an independent American army. Even when Secretary of War Newton Baker was cajoled into backing Foch by the devious Tasker Bliss, who seized the first opportunity to revoke his capitulation to Pershing, the AEF commander clung to his determination.
In May, after the second German offensive, the Allies convened another conference at Abbeville. This time, Pershing was invited; in fact, he was the principal reason for the meeting. Every leading politician and general in France and England was determined to change his mind. Alone, Pershing faced Prime Ministers Lloyd George, Clemenceau and Italy’s Vittorio Orlando; plus Foch, Haig and a half dozen other generals and cabinet officers. Bliss, who was also present, did not say a word in Pershing’s support. The others raged, screamed, cursed and pleaded—but Pershing refused to let the Americans fight in units smaller than a division—and he insisted even this concession would be temporary, pending the formation of an American army.
“You are willing to risk our being driven back to the Loire?” Foch shouted.
“Gentlemen,” Pershing said. “I have thought this program over very deliberately and will not be coerced.”38
Pershing’s gamble was growing more awesome with every passing day. Even his chief of staff, James Harbord, admitted that if he had been British or French, he would have favored amalgamation. Only his old friend and shrewd head of the General Purchas
ing Board, Brigadier General Charles Dawes, retained his faith in Pershing’s judgment. “John Pershing, like Lincoln, recognized no superior on the face of the earth,” dawes wrote in his diary.39
X
A sense of foreboding was settling deep in the spirit of many Americans. Marian Baldwin had joined the YMCA and had been assigned to Aix-Les-Bains, a resort town where the AEF had taken over numerous buildings, including a mammoth gambling casino, for a leave center. On February 27, 1918, Baldwin wrote anxiously to her favorite correspondent:“The papers are certainly discouraging reading now, and the facts that don’t get printed make one sick. Great things are brewing up the line and the trainloads of boys that leave here every day to go back, carry the most determined lot you ever saw, although every one knows what his fate may be.”40
Aix-Les-Bains was Pershing’s solution to the social purity problem. He had emphatically endorsed the stateside ideal of a “clean” army, free of venereal disease. One of his early edicts was a regulation making venereal disease a court-martial offense, meaning it would go into a man’s permanent record. He also decreed ferocious punishments for any doughboy who molested an unwilling Frenchwoman.
The First Division had barely landed in France when a peasant girl claimed she had been attacked while bringing her cows in from her family’s pasture. The soldier claimed she had flirted with him and he had only been trying to kiss her. Within twenty-four hours, the stunned man was court-martialed and sentenced to thirty years in Fort Leavenworth, the army prison.41
The Illusion of Victory Page 27