Our Greatest Battle (The Meuse-Argonne)

by Frederick Palmer

This was in keeping with the formula which had been studied and worked out through experience. No one not firing shells could be of any service in smashing in strong points or cutting barbed wire. Particularly it behooved high staff officers and commanders to lie down, with minds closed to all thoughts of mistakes already made or apprehensions of future mistakes, in order to be fortified with steady nerves, clear vision and stored vitality for the decisions which they would have to make when they had news of the progress of the action. The plans for the attack were set; they might not be changed now; the attack must be precipitated. Aides protected their generals from interruption, and arranged that they should have food to their liking, and as comfortable a bed as possible. No genius composing a sonnet or a sonata could have been more securely protected in his seclusion than a corps commander. The rigorous drill which had formed the men in the front line to be the pawns of superior will was applied to keep the superior will in training for its task.

General Pershing kept faith with the formula, and many others followed his example, though junior staff officers worked through the night. They were plentiful, and "expendable," as the army saying goes, as expendable in nervous prostration as were in wounds and death the young lieutenants who were to lead their platoons into the hell of machine-gun fire. Waiting—waiting—waiting while the guns thundered were the ambulances beside the road, the divisional transport, the ammunition and engineer trains, the aviators with their planes tuned up and ready, the doctors and nurses at the dressing-stations and evacuation hospitals, and the reserve troops in billets. Officially through his orders everyone concerned knew only his own part, but all knew without asking that an unprecedented ordeal was coming.

It was easier for French and British veterans, familiarized by other offensives with the roar and the flashes of artillery, to relax than for Americans who were having the experience for the first time. With sufficient practice one may learn to sleep with a six-inch howitzer battery in an adjoining field shaking the earth. Many times during the Meuse-Argonne battle I have seen our own veterans giving proof of such hardihood; but on this night of September 25th it was not in human nature for all the thousands who were to have no sleep the next day or the next night to summon oblivion to their surroundings. Those who fell asleep slept with nerves taut with anticipation and in the consciousness of a nightmare, in which the rending thunders were mixed with reflection upon their own arduous efforts and their part in the future. Everyone was a runner crouched for the pistol-shot, as he awaited the dawn. The great test for which all had prepared individually and collectively for two years was coming tomorrow.

With the first flush of thin light the observation balloons had risen in stately dignity from the earth mist, and the planes had taken to the sky and swept out over the enemy lines: the combat planes seeking foes and the observers to watch the progress of the charge or enemy movements or the location of batteries or of machine-gun nests which were harassing our infantry. Mobilization by the aviators for the offensive had not been hampered by the problems of one-way and two-way roads. They flew over from Saint-Mihiel the afternoon before or on the morning the battle began.

At 5.30, just as a moving man would be visible a few yards away, from the Meuse to the western edge of the Argonne, where we had our liaison with the French who advanced at the same moment, our men left the old French trenches and started for the German trenches. Everyone is familiar with the phrase "going over the top," yet despite the countless descriptions everyone who saw an attack for the first time remarked, "I didn't know it was like that!" The system of the advance on the morning of September 26th accorded with the accepted practice of the time. In their familiarity with the system soldiers and correspondents have taken it for granted that what was common knowledge to them was common knowledge to all the world. Only when they returned home did they realize their error, and learn that ignorance of fundamentals ingrained in army experience had made their narratives Greek to all who had not been in action.

The average man is slow to yield his idea that a charge is an impetuous sweep. It sounds more real to say that "the boys rushed" than to say that they advanced with the sedateness of a G. A. R. parade on Decoration Day, which is more like what really happened. Indeed, they simply walked, unheroic as that may seem; and from high ground, or better still from a plane flying low, an observer saw to the limit of vision right and left men proceeding at a set and regular pace. The more uniform and the more automatic this was, the better. On closer view every man, except in height and physique, was a duplicate of the others, in helmet, in pack, in gas mask, in every detail of uniform, even in the way he carried his rifle with its glistening bayonet, which was the only relief to khaki on the background of somber-tinted earth.

Every man, every platoon, and on through the different units to divisions and corps, was moving on a time schedule. A competition between companies to "get there" first would have resulted from the start in a hopeless tangle. If not literally, it may be said broadly that each company was to be at a given point on the map at a given hour; and if one company, or battalion or regiment, for that matter, outdistanced another, it was because it had kept its schedule and the other had not. In case it became "heady" and was on its objective in advance of schedule, it ran the risk of "exposing its flanks." At least that is the theory of the staff in its essence. An ideal army, according to the staff, would be at a given line on the map at 10.30, at another at 11.30, and so on. This might be possible if there were no enemy to consider, although it would require an adept army, as everyone who has ever drilled recruits well appreciates. He knows how long it takes to train them, and to learn how to direct a small force in carrying out satisfactorily a practice skirmish evolution over slightly uneven ground. The gregarious instinct of itself seems to break uniformity by drawing men into groups in face of infantry fire in battle for the first time, as well as eagerness to close with the enemy and gravitation away from the points of its concentration. Shell-bursts scatter them, casualties make gaps which lead to further disorganization.

Could our army have had reproduced for its edification the confusion of the battle of Bull Run or of Shiloh, it would have realized the purpose of all the painstaking drill, the monotonous and wearing discipline, which made the well-ordered movement possible. Its very deliberateness in maintaining the coördination of all its units gave it a majesty in its broad and mighty sweep, which was more like the sweep of a great river than the cataract rush of the small forces of the old days, which the public still continued to visualize as a charge. I thought of it too as in keeping with the organization of modern life, in the trains entering and leaving a great city station or the methodical processes of a vast manufacturing concern.

How did our men know whether or not they were keeping their schedule? Did they look at their watches as they counted their steps? They had a monitor at first in the rolling barrage, that curtain of fire which preceded them. This was their moving shield which the guns far in rear provided for their guidance as well as protection. If they came too close to the barrage, they were exposed no less than their enemies to death from its hail.