VIII
THE FIRST DAY
Out in the open—The enemy limited to passive defense—And relying on machine-gunners—Their elusiveness—Problems of the offense—Slowing down—Up with the infantry—Why dispersion—Liaison up, down, and across—How keep the staff informed?—The spent wave before Montfaucon.
What of the infantry lost to view in the folds of the landscape? They were confronting the originals of the hills, woods, and ravines, whose contours on paper had been the definite factor in making plans, while the character and resistance of the enemy had been the indefinite and ungovernable quantity. As the day advanced, irregular pencilings, reflecting the reports of the progress of the fighters, moved forward on the maps of the different headquarters toward the heavy regular lines of the objectives which were the goals of our high ambition.
The loss of the first-line fortifications to the Germans could not be considered as serious as in an offensive in the first years of the war. Even as early as the Verdun battle, proponents of the mobile school of warfare, who had never been altogether silenced by the engineering school, had advocated a yielding elastic defense, which, after drawing the Crown Prince's Armies away from their depots, would counter by a sudden attack of the gathered French forces; but such a maneuver was too daring and contrary to the thought of the time, with its dependence upon rigid defense. Infantry had fallen into the habit of feeling "undressed" and helpless unless in trenches. When the soldier was forced into the open, he had hastened to hide his "nakedness" in a shell-crater, or instantly, in the very rodent instinct that he had developed, set to digging himself a pit. Since the German offensive of March, 1918, all the practice had been to wean the infantry away from settled defenses to the supple use of light artillery, trench mortars, and machine-gun units. Happily, as we know, the basic training of our infantry had been in keeping with this idea.
In the palmy days of German numbers and vigor, the German High Command might have met our Meuse-Argonne offensive by the prompt marshaling of reserves for a decisive counter-attack against our extended forces with inadequate roads at their backs; but if Ludendorff realized the errors which our fresh troops might commit from inexperience, we realized, on our part, that he was too occupied elsewhere by Allied attacks to consider any considerable aggressive action on our new front, where his tactics must have in mind, obviously, the protection with a minimum cost of men and material of his lines of communication, in order to assure a successful withdrawal from northern France and Belgium. With our attack developed, his subordinate in the Meuse-Argonne sector, in carrying out this policy, would choose the points where he could gain the best results by concentrating the fire of the artillery at his command, and then depend upon the expert German machine-gunners for defensive warfare in the open, supported by such fragmentary defense lines as might be hastily constructed.
According to the German intelligence report of our operation at Saint-Mihiel, our staff work had been immature, while our line officers did not know how to make the most of our gains. Without considering that at Saint-Mihiel we were under orders to stop on our limited objectives, and granting the Germans their view, no one will deny them the credit of knowing how to make the most of their tactical opportunities. The bellows of our accordeon was being drawn out as theirs was drawn in. With every hundred yards of advance our men were farther from their communications. Reports were accordingly the longer in reaching headquarters, and orders for future moves the longer in reaching the line, while those of the Germans, as they fell back on their communications, were prompt.
It was not the first time that they had lost first-line fortifications. They knew by experience as well as observation what had happened to their first line under the powerful initial assault; and they knew what they had to do, in full dependence upon a staff system trained in practice to meet this as well as the other vicissitudes of war. The failure of their men in the front line to stand to the death was an irritating exhibition of deteriorating morale, which must be taken into consideration not only by the subordinate but the higher commands. Scattered and demoralized individuals and groups, filtering back in retreat, might be re-formed, or passed through advancing reserves to the rear for reorganization. Fresh machine-gun units, which had almost the mobility of infantry, could be readily placed at points already foreseen as most suitable. One machine-gun might hold up the advance of a company of infantry. The enemy was fully familiar with the details of a landscape studded with ideal machine-gun positions, the choicest being the edge of a woods on a hillside overlooking an open space.
Some of our officers and men had met German machine-gun practice in open warfare in the Château-Thierry campaign and at the British front. As others knew it only under the limitations of trench warfare, the resistance which they now must face was familiar to them only through instruction. The German machine-gunner, having learned as the survivor of many battles the art of self-preservation at his adversary's expense, would wait all day and all night and even longer without a shot, until his target appeared in the field of fire assigned to him; wait as a Kentucky feudsman waits behind a rock for his enemy to appear on a road. Each gun was only one in a well-plotted array covering all the avenues of approach which any attacking force must follow. The guns disposed in front might precede or wait on the guns in flank in opening fire.
There was nothing new or wonderful in this arrangement. Any soldier with a sense of ground and of natural combative strategy could work out a plan of interlocking fire; but the discipline and the training requisite to its proper execution, and the stubborn phlegmatic bravery which sticks to a machine-gun to the death, are not to be found at random on any page of a city directory or social register. The fact that a gun had begun firing did not mean that it could be immediately located. Sometimes when light conditions were right the flash was visible, unless the gunner had hung a piece of bagging, through which he could aim, to conceal the flash. The direction of the fire might be judged somewhat by sound, and also by observing the spits of dust in the earth or on the wall of a building. Judgment on this score was affected by the proximity of the passing bullets to the observer's person.