VII
IN THE WAKE OF THE INFANTRY
A successful surprise—The importance of traffic control in maintaining the advance—The "show" in the air—How the engineers built roads—And traffic blocked them—And colonels showed the traffic police how.
The veteran accepts his long service as a guarantee of efficiency; the novice is patient under instruction and open to suggestion. Our desire to do everything in the book, our painstaking individual industry under a meticulous discipline, and our willingness as beginners to learn had served us well before the battle in the concealment of our strength and plans from the enemy. There were so many of us and we were so swift in our onset that we gave the enemy the benumbing shock which on many occasions the newcomer, springing aggressively into the arena, has inflicted by a rain of blows upon a hardened adversary who has appraised him too lightly.
If the Germans had made the most of their fortifications with their customary skill, the dam might have held against the flood; for it is the touch and go of impulse that decides in the space of a second between docile hands up begging for succor and a fury of resistance to the death. Suddenly brought to face overwhelming formations, the answering sense of self-preservation prevailed in the German trenches before the German officers and non-commissioned officers, had they been in the mood, could overcome the mass instinct of their men.
The French on our left had presumably met more resistance than we in the first-line fortifications. Their attack was doubtless more professionally skillful than ours. Had they failed, for no other reason than that they had fewer men to the mile, the cost of a repulse would have been less for them than it would have been for us. The Germans knew that the French were massing west of the Argonne, and apparently accepted their attack as serious, while they thought that we would make only a demonstration. We had been right in our anticipation that they would not consider, for one thing, another major offensive by our army feasible so soon after Saint-Mihiel; or, for another, that Marshal Foch, while he was carrying on extensive operations in northern France, would have the temerity or the forces to undertake in addition such an extensive effort as that of September 26th.
Despite the honor in which open warfare was now held, a first line was still a first line, with its wire, deep dugouts and strong points, and all the approaches accurately plotted by the artillery through long practice in fire. A part of it might be readily taken at any time by thorough artillery preparation, but the victors in the early offensives had suffered enormous toll of casualties from shell-fire in organizing their new positions. Though the short artillery preparation, without registering, had proved efficacious against the Germans on July 18th and August 8th, when they were holding shallow trenches in ground which they had won in their spring offensives, it had not as yet been tried by the Allies—I may mention again—over any such length of front against the old trench system as in the Meuse-Argonne. It is only fair to say that we were not opposed in strong force, but, make any qualification you choose, by conquering twenty miles of first-line fortifications we had won a signal triumph which must have been a distressing augury to the German command.
After our "break through" there was little answering artillery fire. We had drawn the teeth of immediate artillery resistance by going through to the guns. We had captured many guns; others were forced to fall back to escape capture, and they, or any that were hurried forward, would have had to fire, not at a settled trench line, but at infantry deployed and on the move. Meanwhile our infantry must be driven to the utmost of its capacity to make the most of the headway that we had gained.
We had also to consider the dispersion and the fatigue which bring loss of momentum in an attack, just as a tidal wave spends itself in flowing inland. The farther our infantrymen went, the farther our transport must go to provide them with rations and ammunition. Thus the ability of our organization to continue the advance after the "break through" included the indispensable factor of efficient arrangements at the rear. As a division has twenty-seven thousand men, its daily food requirements are equal to those of a good-sized town, without including small arms and artillery ammunition and other material. People at home who were surprised at the length of time it took a division to march by on parade, without its artillery or transport, will have some idea of the road space required for a single division fully equipped for action and in motion.
Behind the old trench system traffic movement had settled into a routine, under the direction of policemen at the crossings, resembling that of a city. In our mobilization for the attack we had brought, aside from corps and army troops, nine divisions into the Meuse-Argonne sector. This led to the pressure which would appear in suddenly trebling the traffic of a city. Though the roads were insufficient, they were kept systematically in repair; quantities were known; we were forming up on a definite line of front. After the attack was begun, the defensive force was falling back upon its established and dependable arrangements. The offensive force—and this cannot be too clearly or vividly stated—had to build a city, as it were, by establishing new depots and camps, repairing old roads and building new roads, while traffic control in the area of advance was subject not only to the calculable requirements of a great street parade in a city, but to the incalculable requirements of a great fire and other emergencies which switch concentrations from one street to another.