Our Army at the Front Part 17

The infantry attack was made with little or no artillery preparation.

The German general, Von Boehm, was plainly caught napping.

The communiques of both sides were for once in agreement. The French said: "After having broken the German offensive on the Champagne and Rheims mountain fronts on the 15th, 16th, and 17th, the French troops, in conjunction with the American forces, attacked the German positions on the 18th, between the Aisne and the Marne on a front of forty-five kilometres [about twenty-eight miles]. We have made an important advance into the enemy lines, and have reached the plateau dominating Soissons ... more than twenty villages have been retaken by the admirable dash of the Franco-American troops.... South of the Ourcq our troops have gone beyond the general line of Marizy, Ste.-Genevieve, Hautvesnes, and Belleau."

The German communique said: "Between the Aisne and the Marne, the French attacked with strong forces and tanks, and captured some ground." Later in the same communique the conclusion was drawn: "The battle was decided in our favor."

On the second day, while the march under Soissons continued, and there were scattering gains on the Marne side, the number of Allied prisoners grew to 17,000, and the number of guns captured to 360. n.o.body could tell, at this point, whether the crown prince's army was retreating voluntarily or involuntarily. In many places the Germans were taken by American soldiers from the peaceful pursuit of cutting wheat behind the lines. Some high officers were nabbed from their beds. On the other hand, the fact that the German rear-guard actions were chiefly with machine-guns seemed to indicate that they were moving their heavy pieces back in fair orderliness.

On the third day the Germans were thrown back over the Marne, and the crown prince, having sent an unavailing plea to Prince Rupprecht for new troops, suddenly showed fight with the crack Prussian guards.

These guards had their worst failure of the war when they met the Americans. It is difficult to prevent the statement from sounding offensively boastful. It is, none the less, true. The Germans, having decided that their retreat was wearing the look of utter rout, and that they must resist fiercely enough to stop it, risked a British break-through to the north by throwing in Ludendorf's prize soldiers above the Marne. And although the American total of prisoners around Soissons had risen to nearly 6,000, and though they did force back the Prussian guard, they did not make prisoners from their number. One American after another told, afterward, with a sort of reluctant admiration, that the Prussian guard had died where it stood. This fighting near the Ourcq, and fatally near the vitals of the encircled crown prince, was the most desperate of the second Marne battle.

On July 21 Chateau-Thierry was given up by the Germans, and the pursuing Allies, French and American, drove the enemy beyond the highroad to Soissons, and threatened the only highway of retreat, as well as the German stores. The supply-centre within the salient was Fere-en-Tardenois, and it was being raked by Allied guns from both sides of the salient.

The character of the fighting changed again, so that again it was impossible to make sure if Von Boehm intended to stand somewhere north of the Marne and put up a fight, or if he intended to make all speed back to a straight line between Soissons and Rheims. The resistance was by machine-gun, so that Americans, having their first big experience with the enemy, insisted that he had nothing but machine-guns to trust to. It is, of course, possible that the crown prince and Von Boehm knew no more than anybody else whether they were going to clear out, men and supplies, or whether they would stop again and fight face foremost.

On July 22 the German command answered the question at least partially.

On a line well above the Marne, they brought the big guns into play, and poured in shock troops. Airplanes from the Allied lines discovered, however, that the Germans were burning towns and store-houses for many miles behind the line.

The pressure on the Germans was being brought from the south, where the Americans were six or seven miles above Chateau-Thierry, and from the west and north, where the Franco-American troops were flaying the exposed side.

The stiffened resistance and the German artillery slowed, but could not stop, the Allied advance. The eastern side of the salient, from the Marne to Rheims, bore some desperate blows, but did not give way. As the pincers closed in, at the top of the salient, the German command appeared to go back to its original plan of attacking Rheims from the south.

This was the side on which British and Italian troops were co-operating with the French, and the German command got for its pains in that direction a counter-attack which narrowed the distance from battle-line to battle-line across the top of the salient. The French menaced Fere-en-Tardenois, the German base of supplies.

Allied aviators bombed these stores, the long-range guns pounded at them, and what with these and the conflagrations started defensively by the Germans the Marne salient was a caldron which turned the skies blood-red.

On July 24 the ground gained all along the line averaged two miles. The British southwest of Rheims made a damaging curve inward, and the shove around the other two sides was fairly even.

On July 25, one week from the beginning of the offensive, the Americans and French from the Soissons side and the British and French from the Rheims side had squeezed in the neck of the trap till it measured only twenty-one miles. The French arrived within three miles of Fere-en-Tardenois, and although the German resistance increased again, the evacuation of Fere and the removal of stores to Fismes, far up on the straight line, were foreshadowed.

The road leading between the two supply-bases was sh.e.l.led incessantly, and the difficulties of resistance within the fast-narrowing salient became almost superhuman. But the rear-guard of the Germans "died to a man," to quote the observers, and the rear action held the Allied gains to a few miles daily.

A definite retreat began on the morning of July 27, with what the airmen reported as an obvious determination to make a stand on the Ourcq. The forest of Fere was taken, and many villages, but the fighting was insignificant because, in the language of the communiques, "our forces lost contact with the enemy." Possibly this is what the famous phrase of the Ludendorf communique, "The enemy evaded us," had in mind.

There was a certain psychological stupidity in this German decision to make a stand on the Ourcq. It was on the Ourcq that Joffre and Foch made the fatal stroke of the first Marne battle, and the very name of the river inspired France.

While this retreat was in progress, the swiftest of the battle, the German communique read: "Between the Ourcq and the Marne, the enemy's resistance has broken down. Our troops, with those of our allies, are in pursuit."

On the 29th the Germans crossed the Ourcq, with the Americans behind them. The "pursuit" continued. The American troops, with French to the right and left of them, forced the enemy to within a mile of the Vesle, where his halt had no hope of being more than temporary. The brilliant charge across the Ourcq was done by New Yorkers--the "fighting 69th,"

which refuses to be known by its new name of "165th." Edwin L. James, writing of this charge for the New York _Times_, said: "There is doubt if any chapter of our fighting reached the thrills of our charge across the Ourcq yesterday. Americans of indomitable spirit met a veritable h.e.l.l of machine-guns, sh.e.l.ls, gas, and bombs in a strong position, and broke through with such violence that they made a salient jutting into the enemy line beyond what the schedule called for."

This American charge cured the Germans of any intention to stay on the Ourcq. The resistance, after that first attack, was sporadic and ineffectual. Village after village was reclaimed.

It became plain that the whole Marne salient was to be obliterated, and that the Germans could not stop till they reached the thirty-six-mile stretch directly from Soissons to Rheims, at which they had strong intrenchments.

One terrific stand was made by the Germans at Sergy, just above the Ourcq. It changed hands nine times during twenty-four hours, with Americans fighting hand to hand with the Prussian guards. Sergy was taken in the first rush over the Ourcq, but a counter-attack by the Prussian Fourth Guard Division, under artillery barrage, gave them the city. Once these guards were in the city, the artillery barrage could no longer play over it, and to the stupefaction of the Germans, the Americans rushed in and fought hand to hand till they cleared the town, while the German guns were powerless. Time and again this process was repeated, till at last the Germans gave it up and joined the general retreat. This counter-attack is believed, however, to have enabled the crown prince to reclaim great stores of supplies in a woods north of the village.

At the end of these two weeks of infantry fighting the artillery took up the task, and the infantry rested for a day, though on August 2 they made a two-mile gain.

The total of German prisoners for that fortnight was 33,400.

The hideous fighting above the Ourcq between the Americans and the picked German divisions continued for days, with each day marking a small advance for the Americans. On August 2 the French regained Soissons.

On August 3 the Allies advanced six miles, retook fifty villages, and reached the south bank of the Vesle. American forces entered Fismes. The salient was annihilated.

On August 4 Fismes fell, and the great supply and ammunition depot became Allied property. The enemy was forced to cross the Vesle, and victory on victory was reported along the line which so lately had dipped into the nerve-centres of France.

The second battle of the Marne had been won.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The capture of Sergy.

"The Americans rushed in and fought hand to hand till they cleared the town."]

The part of it achieved by America could not fail to stir her heart to pride and to exaltation. Though numerically the troops were few enough, not more than 270,000, they traversed the longest distance of the salient, from Vaux, at its lowest tip, to Fismes, on the straight line. Their fighting called forth comment from French officers who had been through the four years of the war, which could not be called less than rapturous. "They are glorious, the Americans," rang through France.

Clemenceau, speaking of Foch at the end of the battle to which the Americans had contributed so much, said: "He looks twenty years younger." He had both found and proved his "army of manuvre."

The story of this first battle's heroes must wait, though it will be long enough when it comes, and can include something more heartening than that "a boy from New England did thus and so," and "the army is thrilled by the heroic feat of---- of Michigan."

Probably the first death in France in which the whole nation grieved was that of young Quentin Roosevelt, aviation lieutenant, son of the ex-President, who fell in an air fight in the preliminary to the battle on July 17. He was last seen in a fight with two enemy planes. His machine fell within the German lines. Weeks later the onward Allied army found his grave, marked, in English, "Lieutenant Quentin Roosevelt, buried by the Germans," and an official despatch from Germany stated that he had been buried with full military honors.

Colonel Roosevelt made a brief statement: "Quentin's mother and I are very glad that he got to the front, and had a chance to render some service to his country and to show the stuff there was in him before his fate befell him." The news of his death arrived just a few weeks after the news that he had downed his first German plane. The simple sincerity of this statement, and its courage, gave an example to the mothers and fathers of fighters which no one feared they would fail to come up to.

And when the casualty lists from the second Marne battle came in, every bereavement was stanched by the fact that "they had shown the stuff there was in them."

Certainly not least in importance was the fact that they had shown it to the Germans. An official German Army report was captured, July 7, on an officer taken in the Marne region. After giving a prodigious amount of detail concerning the American Army, its composition, destination, and so on, it appended the following opinion:

"The 2d American Division may be cla.s.sified as a very good division, perhaps even as a.s.sault troops. The various attacks of both regiments on Belleau Wood were carried out with dash and recklessness. The moral effect of our firearms did not materially check the advance of the infantry. The nerves of the Americans are still unshaken.... Only a few of the troops are of pure American origin; the majority is of German, Dutch, and Italian parentage, but these semi-Americans, almost all of whom were born in America and never have been in Europe, fully feel themselves to be true-born sons of their country."

CHAPTER XXIII

ST. MIHIEL

Historians and military experts are fond of taking one particular battle or campaign, and saying: "This was decisive." It enables one to simplify history, to be sure, but often any such process is more simple than truthful. After all, every battle is to some degree decisive, and the great actions of the war are so closely connected with smaller ones that it is difficult to separate them. It is the fashion now to speak of the second battle of the Marne as the deciding factor in the war. Indeed, there is one school of strategists which goes back to the first Marne, and speaks as if nothing which happened after that really mattered.

In this spirit, it is true, that the great tide in the allied fortunes which began at Chateau-Thierry and swept higher and higher until the Germans had been smashed in the second battle of the Marne, did put a new complexion on the war. The battle definitely robbed the German offensive of its threat. Paris was saved, in all human probability, from ever coming into danger again during the course of the war.

Nevertheless, it is far-fetched to take the att.i.tude that the war had already been won early in August. It was evident by this time that the German Army had suffered a great defeat. Perhaps a great disaster would be better. And yet other armies have suffered great disasters and grown again to power and success. The plight of the Germans was certainly little worse than that of the Italians after the German offensive, and yet everybody knows that the Italian Army came back from that defeat to final victory.

Morale is subject to miracles, and soldiers can be born again. There might have been combinations of circ.u.mstances which would have permitted the German Army to recover from its fearful defeat and find again its old arrogance and confidence. Only it had no rest. It is fitting, then, that the men of all the armies who completed the downfall of the Germans in the marvellous campaigns at the close of the year 1918 should have due credit. Their work was also decisive. No one can tell what would have happened to the German Army if it had not been subjected to the steady pounding of the allied armies.

No attempt will be made here to estimate the relative importance of the work done by the various allied armies in the closing campaigns of the war. This is an interesting, although somewhat ungrateful, task for military experts. In this account we are dealing simply with the fortunes of the American Army. It might not be amiss to suggest that the final victories of the war were won by team-play, and that in such combinations of effort the praise should go to all, just as the labor does.

There need be no controversy, however, about the battle of St. Mihiel.

This was an American action. It was under the command of General Pershing himself, and his forces were made up almost entirely of Americans. The French acted in an advisory capacity, and we were dependent, in part, upon them for certain material. General Pershing in his official report says: "The French were generous in giving us a.s.sistance in corps and army artillery, with its personnel." We were also under obligation to the French for tanks, but here they were not able to a.s.sist us so liberally, because they had barely enough tanks for their own use. One of the surprising features of the St. Mihiel victory is that it was achieved with comparatively slight tank preparation.