IX
THE ATTACK SLOWS DOWN
The call goes back for artillery—And at night for the rolling kitchens—The staff interferes with sleep—Our part meant no stopping—Keeping at the roads during the night—Montfaucon on the second day—Then drive for the whale-back—Enemy resistance holds our exhaustion—Settling down in the rain to slow progress.
Moving on their feet, with each man's course his road through the trench system and across the country beyond, the infantrymen, as they hourly increased their distance ahead of the part of the army moving on wheels, were calling oftener for artillery than for reserves. They needed shells to destroy machine-gun nests, to silence enemy batteries, and to make barrages to support their farther advance as resistance began to develop. There were equally urgent appeals for machine-gun battalions to meet the German machine-gun opposition in kind. Their spray of bullets, in indirect fire over the heads of the men in a charge, was another form of shield, the more desired when the protection of the artillery was lacking.
The machine-gunners, who called themselves the "Suicide Club," were soldiers both of the wheel and the foot. Their light carts did not have to wait on the stout passageway over the trench system which even the light artillery required. Yet some of them had been marooned, to their inexpressible disgust; for it was their part in an emergency to press on to the firing line through the shell-fire which may sweep the roads back of the infantry. The place of the artillery was as near the actual front as orders and traffic jams would permit.
How the artillery chafed on the leash! Not only duty but the gunner's promised land was beyond the barrier of the trench system which stayed his progress. Open warfare called to him from the free sweep of the landscape. The seventy-fives had come into their own again as mobile living units which would unlimber in the fields close behind the moving infantry, instead of playing the part of coast artillery behind fortifications. There would be no need to bother about camouflage. They would move about so rapidly that the enemy could not locate them; or if he did—well, that was all in the game. Their protection and the protection of the infantry would be in the blasts overwhelming the enemy's fire.
"Why in ——" the infantry was calling to the artillery. "Why in ——" the artillery was calling to the engineers. You may fill out the blank space of this cry of mutually dependent units with the kind of language which was not supposed to be, but sometimes was, used in the presence of chaplains. The infantry changed the object of their impatience when night stopped them wherever the end of that long day's work found them. They were not thinking of supporting artillery fire for the moment. The late September air was chill, the ground where they lay was cold. Their appetites were prodigious from their hard marching and fighting. Their hearts and thought were in their stomachs. Wasn't it the business of rolling kitchens to furnish them warm meals? It was past supper-time. Where in —— were those rolling kitchens? After dark they surely need not be held back in apprehension of being seen by the enemy's artillery.
Night had laid its supreme camouflage over all the area of operations. Under its mantle an activity as intense as that of the day must continue for all who supported the infantry. We might take an account of stock. Regimental, battalion, and company officers might move about freely along the front in familiarizing themselves with the situations of their commands. Liaison which had been broken between different units must be re-established. The ground ahead must be scouted. Platoons and companies which had become mixed with their neighbors, and individual men who had strayed from their units, must be sorted out and returned. Gaps in the line must be filled; groups that had become "bunched" must be deployed; groups whose initiative had carried them forward to exposed points might have to be temporarily withdrawn,—all by feeling their way in the darkness. The sound of machine-gun fire broke the silence at intervals as the watchful enemy detected our movements. A shadowy approaching figure, who the men hoped was the welcome bearer of that warm meal from the rolling kitchens, might turn out to be an officer who directed that they stumble about in woods and ravines to some other point, or creep forward in the clammy dew-moist grass with a view to improving our "tactical dispositions," which does not always improve the human dispositions of those who have to carry out the orders.
Army Headquarters wanted information from the three Corps Headquarters. Each Corps wanted information from its three Division Headquarters, which in turn were not modest in asking questions of the weary fellows at the front. Exactly where was your line? What was the morale of the men? Were they receiving ammunition and food? When would the guns be up? What identifications of the enemy forces in your sector? Had many machine-gun nests been located? Was the enemy fortifying, and where? What was the character of his shell-fire? The high command had to consider the corps summaries of the answers in relation to its own news from other sources, communications from the French staff, reports from Army aviation and artillery, conjectures of the enemy's strength and probable intentions, and the general situation of transport in the Army area and the flow of supplies from the rear.
The lack of information on some points was no more puzzling than the abundance of contradictory information on others. Staff heads must work into the small hours of the morning. They might rest after they had arranged their program for the morrow. The men at the front who were to carry it out were supposed to rest at night to refresh themselves for another effort at dawn. This was a kindly paternal thought, but how, even in the period of daylight saving, they were to find the time for sleep in the midst of re-forming their line and answering all those questions was not indicated. Whether they slept or not, whether their shields and food were up or not, they were supposed to fight from dawn to dusk on the 27th.
Our army, though our situation perhaps warranted it, might not dig in along the new line and hold fast while it recuperated after that long first day. Other double doors from Verdun to the sea were about to be swung open; other armies must be considered. Indeed the decision in this respect was not with our army. In a sense it was not with Marshal Foch, for the forces which he had set in motion to carry out his great plan had already prescribed our part, as we know. On September 28th the Franco-Belgians were to attack in Flanders, and Mangin's army was to move on Malmaison; on the 29th the Anglo-French armies, including our Second Corps, were to storm the Hindenburg line in the Cambrai-St.-Quentin sector; on September 30th Berthelot was to free Rheims from the west; and on October 3rd, Gouraud, with our 2nd Division, was to storm the old trench system east of Rheims. We must hold off reserves from their fronts. The more determined were our attacks, the more ground we gained on the way to the Lille-Metz railroad in this critical stage of Allied strategy, the more perturbed would be the enemy's councils in adjusting his combinations to deal with the other offensives. Though it might have been better for us to have taken two or three days in which to gather and reorganize deliberately our forces for another powerful rush which would have been a corresponding shock to the enemy, this was no more in the psychology than in the calculations of the moment. We were winning; we meant to keep up the winning spirit of our army. What we had done one day we should do the next. We and not the Germans must take possession of the commanding position of Montfaucon as the first great step in gaining the heights of the whale-back, should their resistance require delay in reaching our goal.