Our Army at the Front
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On February 26 the Americans on the Toul front had their first experience with a serious gas attack. Of course, gas-shells had been thrown at them before, but this was the first time they had been subjected to a steady bombardment. Some of the men were not sufficiently cautious. A few were slow in getting their masks on and others took theirs off too soon. The result was that five men were killed and fifty or sixty injured by the gas. Two days later the Americans on the Chemin-des-Dames were heavily attacked, but the Germans were driven off.
March found the Toul sector receiving more attention than usual from the Germans. The Germans made a strong thrust on the morning of March 1. The raid was a failure, as three German prisoners remained in American hands and many Germans were killed. Gas did not prove as effective as on the last occasion. The doughboys were quick to put on their masks and as soon as the bombardment ended they waited for the attacking-party and swept them with machine-guns. About 240 Germans participated in the attack. Some succeeded in entering the American first-line trench, but they were expelled after a little sharp fighting. An American captain who tried to cut off the German retreat by waylaying the raiders as they started back for their own lines was killed. On the same day a raid against the Chemin-des-Dames position failed. The Germans left four prisoners.
Two days after the attempted Toul raid Premier Clemenceau visited the American sector and awarded the Croix de Guerre with palm to two lieutenants, two sergeants, and two privates. The premier, who knows American inhibitions just as well as he knows the language, departed a little from established customs in awarding the medals. Nobody was kissed. Instead Clemenceau patted the doughboys on the shoulder and said: "That's the way to do it." One soldier was late in arriving, and he seemed to be much afraid that this might cost him his cross, but the premier handed it to him with a smile. "You were on time the other morning," he said. "That's enough." In an official note Clemenceau described the action of the Americans as follows: "It was a very fine success, reflecting great honor on the tenacity of the American infantry and the accuracy of the artillery fire."
The Americans made a number of raids during March, but the Germans were holding their front lines loosely, and usually abandoned them when attacked, which made it difficult to get prisoners. An incident which stands out occurred on March 7, when a lone sentry succeeded in repulsing a German patrol practically unaided. He was fortunate enough to kill the only officer with his first shot. This took the heart out of the Germans. The lone American was shooting so fast that they did not realize he was a solitary defender, and they fled. On March 14 American troops made their first territorial gain, but it can hardly be classed as an offensive. Some enemy trenches northeast of Badonviller, in the Lunéville sector, were abandoned by the Germans because they had been pretty thoroughly smashed up by American artillery fire. These trenches were consolidated with the American position.
April saw the first full-scale engagement in which American troops took part at Seicheprey, but earlier in the month there was some spirited fighting by Americans. Poilus and doughboys repelled an attack in the Apremont Forest on April 12. The American elements of the defending force took twenty-two prisoners. The German attack was renewed the next day, but the Franco-American forces dislodged the Germans by a vigorous counter-attack, after they had gained a foothold in the first-line trenches. The biggest attack yet attempted on the Toul front occurred on April 14. Picked troops from four German companies, numbering some 400 men, were sent forward to attack after an unusually heavy bombardment. The Germans were known to have had 64 men killed, and 11 were taken prisoner.
Numerous stories, more or less authentic, were circulated after this engagement. One which is well vouched for concerns a young Italian who met eight Germans in a communicating trench and killed one and captured three. The remaining four found safety in flight. The youngster turned his prisoners over to a sergeant and asked for a match. "I'll give you a match if you'll bring me another German," said the non-commissioned officer. The little Italian was a literal man and he wanted the match very much. He went back over the parapet, and in five minutes he returned escorting quite a large German, who was crying: "Kamerad."
While American soldiers on the front were gaining experience, which stood them in good stead at Seicheprey and later at Cantigny, great progress was made in the organization of the American forces. Late in the spring the first field-army was formed. This army was composed of two army corps each made up of one Regular Army division, one National Army division, and one division of National Guard. Major-General Hunter Liggett became the first field-army commander of the overseas forces, and it was his men who covered themselves with so much distinction in the great counter-blows of July.
CHAPTER XVIII
A CIVILIAN VISITOR
DESTINY always plays the flying wedge. There is always the significant little happening, half noticed or miscalculated, which trails great happenings after it. On March 19, 1918, a derby hat appeared in the front-line trenches held by the American Army in France. This promptly was accorded the honor by the army and the Allied representatives of being the first derby hat that had ever been seen in a trench. The hat had the honor to be on the head of the first American Secretary of War who had ever been in Europe in his term of office. And this first American Secretary of War away from home was presently to have the honor of helping to create the first generalissimo who had ever commanded an army of twenty-six allies.
All of which is to say that Newton D. Baker, on a tour of inspection of the A. E. F., whose visit was to have such terrific fruition, repudiated the war counsels which would have kept him out of the trenches on this gusty March day, and went down to see for himself and all the Americans at home how the doughboy was faring, and what could be done for him.
And as he peered over the parapet into No Man's Land, Secretary Baker said: "I am standing on the frontier of freedom." The phrase grew its wings in the saying, and by nightfall it had found the farthest doughboy.
The Paris newspapers announced, on the morning of March 12, that Secretary Baker was in France. The troops had it by noon. And questions flew in swarms. It was discovered that he would review the brigade of veterans who had returned from service at the front on March 20, and that meanwhile he would investigate the lines of communication.
After a few days in Paris, during which Secretary Baker delivered all the persuasions he had brought from President Wilson on behalf of a unified command of the Allied armies, and had, it was rumored, turned the scale in favor of a generalissimo, the distinguished civilian went to the coast to see the port city which was the pride of the army and the marvel of France.
The secretary rode to the coast on a French train, but, once there, he was transferred to an American train, which had to make up in sentimental importance the large lack it had of elegance.
A flat car was rapidly rigged up with plank benches. This had the merit of affording plenty of view, and, after all, that was what the secretary had come for.
After rolling over the main arteries of the 200 miles of terminal trackage, Secretary Baker inspected the warehouses, assembling-plants, camps, etc., and walked three mortal miles of dock front which his countrymen had evolved from an oozing marsh. He paid his highest compliments to the engineers and the laborers, and amazed the officers by the acuteness of his questions. If his visit did nothing else, it convinced the men on the job that the man back home knew what the obstacles were.
Secretary Baker's next visit was to the biggest of the aviation-fields, where again his technical understanding, as it came out in his questions, astounded and cheered the men who were doing the building.
Secretary Baker carried his office with him, a delightful discovery to the men in the aviation-fields, who had some problems sorely pressing for decision, and who found, when they told them to Mr. Baker, that he had no aversion to taking action on the spot. For example, at aviation headquarters, Mr. Baker asked if the fliers who came first from America were the first to have their commissions after the final flights in France. He learned that because of some delay in giving final instruction, through no fault of the aviators, these first commissions had not been given. Mr. Baker instituted a full inquiry at once, and at the end of it directed that the commissions, when finally awarded, should bear a date one day in advance of all others, so that the priority rightfully earned should not be lost.
After hours in the field, during which hundreds of machines with American pilots flew in squadron formation, and many experts did spectacular single flights, Mr. Baker made a short speech to the fliers. A French officer, who had been instructing at the field, said to Mr. Baker: "With all these machines in the air, you see no more than a tenth of what America has in this one school. You will soon have no more need of French instruction. We have shown everything we know, and your young men have taken to the art with astonishing facility, as well as audacity, nerve, and resource. The danger and difficulties fascinate and inspire them. I think it must be what you call the 'sporting spirit.'"
As he was leaving the aviation-field Secretary Baker said: "The spirit of every man in this camp seems in keeping with the mission which brought him to France. The camps, appointments, and organization are admirable. It is gratifying to learn from their French instructors that our young aviators are proving themselves daring, cool, and skilful."
On the night of March 18 Secretary Baker began his preparations for a visit to the trenches. With a general commanding a division and one other officer he motored to the farthest point, where he dined and stayed the night in a French château. At dawn the next morning the party made ready to go on. But the Boches appeared to have a hunch. They shelled the road on which Secretary Baker had planned to travel with such ferocity that the officers in command refused to take the risk of permitting Mr. Baker to go over it. The American general and all the French officers then begged Mr. Baker to give up the trip to the trenches. They wasted a lot of persuasion. Mr. Baker just went by another road. A colonel of about Mr. Baker's build had loaned him a trench overcoat, and some rubber boots, and the secretary had a tin helmet and a gas-mask, but he would wear the tin helmet only for a moment, and the mask not at all.
The officers in charge of the party found presently, to their acute horror, that even the trenches were not enough for Mr. Baker. Nothing would do him but a listening-post. And when he had finally got back safe, and had come back to the communication-trenches from the front, everybody breathed a sigh of relief. The relief was premature, for the liveliest danger of all was on the return motor trip, when an immense shell buried itself in a crater not fifty yards from the secretary. Fortunately, the débris flew all in the opposite direction, and nobody was hurt.
The First Division heard an address the following day from Secretary Baker. "It would seem more fit," he said, "and I should much prefer it, if, instead of addressing you, I should listen to your experiences. Your division has the distinction of being the first to arrive in France. May every man in your ranks aim to make the First Division the first in accomplishment. With you came a body of the marines, those well-disciplined, ship-shape soldiers of the navy.
"Yours was the first experience in being billeted, and in all the initial details of adjusting yourselves to new and strange conditions. In this, as in developing a system of training, you were the pioneers, blazing the way, while succeeding contingents could profit by your mistakes.
"Day after day and week after week you had to continue the hard drudgery of instruction which is necessary to proficiency in modern war. You had to restrain your impatience to go into the trenches under General Pershing's wise demand for that thoroughness, the value of which you now appreciate as a result of actual service in the trenches.
"If sometimes the discipline seemed wearing, you now know you would have paid for its absence with your lives.
"If I had any advice to give, it is to strike hard and shoot straight, and I would warn you at the same time against any carelessness, any surrendering to curiosity, which would make you a mark needlessly. The better you are trained the more valuable is your life to your country, as a fighter who seeks to make the soldier of the enemy, rather than yourself, pay the supreme price of war.
"On every hand I am told that you are prepared to fight 'to the end,' and I see this spirit in your faces. Depend upon us at home to stand by you in a spirit worthy of you."
Next Secretary Baker spoke, though informally, to the Forty-second Division, far better known as the Rainbow Division. There he explained some of the reasons for military secrecy.
"While it was in training at home I saw a good deal of the Rainbow Division," he said "Then, one day, it was gone to France, where it disappeared behind the curtain of military secrecy which must be drawn unless we choose to sacrifice the lives of our men for the sake of publicity. The enemy's elaborate intelligence system seeks at any cost to learn the strength, the preparedness, and the character of our troops. Our own intelligence service assures us that the knowledge of our army in France which some assume to exist does not, in fact, exist.
"If we were to announce the identity of each unit that comes to France, then we would fully inform the enemy of the number and nature of our forces. Published details about any division are most useful to expert military intelligence officers in determining the state of the division's preparedness, and the probable assignment of the division to any section.
"But now it is safe to mention certain divisions which were first to arrive in France and have already been in the line. This includes the Rainbow Division, famous because it is representative of all parts of the United States. This division should find in its character an inspiration to esprit de corps and general excellence. It should be conscious of its mission as a symbol of national unity.
"The men of Ohio I know as Ohioans, and I am proud that they have been worthy of Ohio. A citizen of another State will find himself equally at home in some other group, and the gauge of this State's pride will be the discipline of that group of soldiers, its conduct as men, its courage, and its skill in the trenches. You may learn more than war in France. You may learn lessons from France, whose unity and courage have been a bulwark against that sinister force whose character you are learning in the trenches. The Frenchman is, first of all, a Frenchman, which stimulates, rather than weakens, his pride in Brittany as a Breton, in Lorraine as a Lorrainer, and his loyalty and affection for his own town, or village, or home. In truth he fights for his family and his home when he fights for France and civilization. Thus, you will fight best and serve best by being first an American, with no diminution of your loyalty to your State and your community.
"With us at home the development of a new national unity seems a vague process compared to the concrete process you are undergoing. You are uniting North, East, South, and West in action. We aim to support you with all our resources, to make sure that you do not fight in vain."
The brigade of the veterans was reviewed on the last day of the camp inspection.
Secretary Baker went by motor, with officers and aides, as far as the foot of the hill from which he was to review the troops deploying in the Marne valley. Twenty days of rain had made the hilltop inaccessible by motor. As Secretary Baker started up one slope, General Pershing and his aides ascended another, and the two men met at the top.
The brigade swept by at company front, with full marching equipment. They were the first brigade to be reviewed after it had been in action, and they held to their flawless formation, chins up and chests out, in spite of clogging mud that was almost too much for the mules.
The review ended in compliments all around. Secretary Baker's enthusiasm was conveyed even to the lesser officers. General Pershing said: "These men have been there and know what it is. You can tell that by the way they throw out their chests as they swing by."
America at last had her veterans. They were to dignify the coming gift of them to heroic size.
CHAPTER XIX
A FAMOUS GESTURE
WHEN America had put the power of all her eloquence into the growing demand among the Allies for a unified command, and when, as a result of this pressure, General Foch, chief of staff of the French Army and hero of the battle of the Marne, had been made generalissimo, General Pershing put into words in what the French called a "superb gesture" the final sacrifice his country was prepared to make.
The first of the great German drives of 1918 had halted, but the battle was nowhere near its end. General Foch was sparing every possible energy on the battle-front and heaping up every atom of force for his reserve.
And on the morning of March 28 General Pershing went to headquarters and offered the American Army in full to General Foch, to put where he pleased, without any regard whatever for America's earlier wish to fight with her army intact.
It was the final sacrifice to the idealistic point of view. It had indisputably the heroic quality. And as such it was rewarded in the countries of the Allies with appreciation beyond measure.
"I have come," said General Pershing to General Foch that morning, "to say to you that the American people would hold it a great honor for our troops if they were engaged in the present battle. I ask it of you in my name and in that of the American people.
"There is at this moment no other question than that of fighting. Infantry, artillery, aviation – all that we have are yours, to dispose of them as you will. Others are coming, which are as numerous as will be necessary. I have come to say to you that the American people would be proud to be engaged in the greatest battle in history."
This offer was placed immediately by General Foch before the French war-council at the front, a council including Premier Clemenceau, Commander-in-Chief Pétain, and Louis Loucheur, Minister of Munitions, and was immediately accepted. American Army orders went forth in French from that day. And on those orders the army was presently scattered through the vast reserve army, from Flanders with the British to Verdun with the Italians and the French. They were not to go into actual battle, except near their own sectors, till the third monster drive, in July, for General Foch makes a religion of the reserve army and Fabian tactics. But they spread through the battle-line from Switzerland to the sea, as General Pershing had suggested, and "all we have" was at work.
Paris acclaimed the move royally. La Liberté wrote: "General Pershing yesterday took, in the name of his country, action which was grand in its simplicity and of moving beauty. In a few words, without adornment, but in which vibrated an accent of chivalrous passion, General Pershing made to France the offer of an entire people. 'Take all,' he said; 'all is yours.' The honor Pershing claims is shared by us, and it is with the sentiment of real pride that our soldiers will greet into their ranks those of the New World who come to them as brothers."
Secretary Baker, from American General Headquarters, gave out a statement. "I am delighted at General Pershing's prompt and effective action," he said, "in placing all the American troops and facilities at the disposal of the Allies in the present situation.
"It will be met with hearty approval in the United States, where the people desire their expeditionary force to be of the utmost service in the common cause. I have visited all the American troops in France, some of them recently, and had an opportunity to observe the enthusiasm with which officers and men received the announcement that they would be used in the present conflict. One regiment to which the announcement was made spontaneously broke into cheers."
The British Government issued an official statement on the night of April 1: "As a result of communications which have passed between the Prime Minister and President Wilson; of deliberations between Secretary Baker, who visited London a few days ago, and the Prime Minister, Mr. Balfour, and Lord Derby, and consultations in France in which General Pershing and General Bliss participated, important decisions have been come to by which large forces of trained men in the American Army can be brought to the assistance of the Allies in the present struggle.
"The government of our great Western ally is not only sending large numbers of American battalions to Europe during the coming critical months, but has agreed to such of its regiments as cannot be used in divisions of their own being brigaded with French and British units so long as the necessity lasts.
"By this means troops which are not sufficiently trained to fight as divisions and army corps will form part of seasoned divisions, until such time as they have completed their training and General Pershing wishes to withdraw them in order to build up the American Army.
"Throughout these discussions President Wilson has shown the greatest anxiety to do everything possible to assist the Allies, and has left nothing undone which could contribute thereto.
"This decision, however of vital importance it will be to the maintenance of the Allied strength in the next few months, will in no way diminish the need for those further measures for raising fresh troops at home to which reference has already been made.
"It is announced at once, because the Prime Minister feels that the singleness of purpose with which the United States have made this immediate and, indeed, indispensable contribution toward the triumph of the Allied cause should be clearly recognized by the British people."
Lord Reading, the British Ambassador at Washington, conveyed to President Wilson a message of thanks from the British Government, for "the instant and comprehensive measures" which the President took in response to the request that American troops be used to reinforce the Allied armies in France. The Embassy then gave out a statement that "the knowledge that, owing to the President's prompt co-operation, the Allies will receive the strong reinforcement necessary during the next few months is most welcome to the British Government and people."
The London papers reflected this sentiment in even stronger terms. Said the Westminster Gazette: "It seals the unity of the Allied forces in France, and so far from weakening the determination to provide all possible reinforcements from this country, it will, we are confident, give it fresh energy. All the big loans America has made to Great Britain and France, her heavy contributions of food, her princely gifts through the Red Cross, and the high, stimulating utterances of President Wilson, have done much to strengthen the Allied morale and lend material assistance to the war against autocracy, but none of these counts so heavily with the masses, because there are few families here or in France who have not a personal and intimate interest in the soldiers battling on the plains of Picardy."
The Evening Star wrote: "In a true spirit of soldierly comradeship they will march to the sound of guns, and will merge their national pride in a common stock of courage for the common good. It is a chivalrous decision, and President Wilson, Mr. Baker, and General Bliss have done a very great thing in a very great way. The British and French people are moved by this splendid proof of America's fellowship in the fight for world freedom."
If this gift was so significant in spirit, it was also bravely helpful in round numbers. At the end of March, 1918, General Pershing had 366,142 soldiers in his command in France, and of these, after nine months of training and adjustment, he could put about 100,000 in the line.