Our Greatest Battle (The Meuse-Argonne)

by Frederick Palmer

With its transport moving in good order and with its objectives taken, the 33rd might say, in the language which it had learned in training at the British front, "We've finished our job, and we're feeling quite comfortable, thank you." Except to put in a brigade to relieve the 80th and join up with the 4th Division—which was no small exception to the brigade—the 33rd had nothing further to do until, on the strength of the way it had carried out its mission of the 26th, it was ordered to cross the Meuse on October 8th in order to stop some of the flanking fire from the other bank—which belongs to another chapter.

Cronkhite's 80th, or "Blue Ridge" National Army Division, which was the center division of the Third Corps, was also to swing toward the Meuse, and had farther to go, though the Meuse bends inward toward its line of advance. According to the Army plan, the 80th was to have only one day's intensive fighting and swift advancing. On the night of the 26th the narrowing front of attack was to "squeeze" it out. Immediately ahead of them the Blue Ridge men had two miles of open hilly country, which facilitated maintaining their formations. Beyond this was a series of woods forming practically a belt, which offered cover at every point for machine-gun nests. Better still for the enemy's purpose in holding up a persistent attack—of the kind the Blue Ridge men were under orders to make and would make—beyond this, separated by another open space, was another belt of woods. When hard pressed in the first belt, the enemy could withdraw to the second, where his machine-guns would have another free field of fire.

The Blue Ridge men were not abashed by hills and woods. They had been brought up among hills and woods. After breaking through the trench system in a clean sweep, by noon they were in the first belt of woods, though they had flanking fire from the Juré Wood on their right. They were up to schedule no less than the 33rd; but they had had only an introduction to what was in store for them. With the left of the intrenched 33rd as their pivot, they must take the second belt of woods between them and the river. On the river bank was the town of Brieulles, where they were supposed to rest their left when the task was finished. Brieulles did not appear to be far away on the map; but we were to be a long time in taking it.

Fortunately the engineers—who deserve much credit for this—had a bridge over the Forges brook by nine in the morning for the artillery. This was good news to men looking across the open into the recesses of that second belt of woods, which appeared as peaceful from that distance as a patch in the Shenandoah valley. In a race against time—with the schedule burned into every officer's brain—the 80th could not wait for all the guns to come up. In the attack at three in the afternoon the front line of the division moved forward with drill-ground precision and the confidence of its morning's success.

Since the 80th's movement had stopped at noon, the enemy had had three hours in which to prepare his reception of the charge. In a sense the success of the 33rd was a handicap to the 80th that afternoon. It aroused the enemy to the gravity of his situation along the Meuse. His remnants of units retreating before the 33rd were swinging round in front of the 80th; reserves had been hurried across the river and from Brieulles. By this time our plan was revealed to him along our whole front. The loss of more river bank had an important tactical relation to his defense of Montfaucon and the covering positions of the whale-back, toward which our Fifth Corps in the center was advancing rapidly. If he could hold his ground from the river bank to Cuisy, he might have our center in a salient. His determination to hold it blazed out from that soft carpet of green in cruel machine-gun fire, raking the open spaces. His artillery on the opposite bank of the Meuse, as well as on the near bank behind the second belt of woods and around Brieulles, opened fire immediately our charge developed under its observation. Undaunted, the Blue Ridge men pressed on across the open toward the machine-gun nests in the edge of the second belt, as toward a refuge in a storm. They took these, only to find that more machine-guns were echelonned in the recesses of the woods. Gas as well as high-explosive shells were falling in the first belt and at points where our reserves were concentrated. In openings or narrow stretches of the second belt where units were able to drive through, they looked out on more open spaces under command of machine-guns from ridges and thickets, while right and left any unit whose courage or opportunity had carried it too far was caught in enfilade by the fire of machine-guns which had not been mopped up.

That night the 80th had its right up with the 33rd's intrenched left on the river. Its brave accomplishment on the remainder of its front was best measured by the powerful resistance it had met. The division, which was to have been squeezed out by the narrowing front, had to remain in line because the front had not been narrowed, after far harder fighting than it had anticipated. Transport congestion on the road which the 33rd as well as the 80th was still using was extreme. If the Blue Ridge men could not bring their supplies up by wheel they might by hand. Carrying parties brought up food and small arms ammunition by fording the brook past the stalled trucks.

There could be no question about the character of the next day's fighting. The enemy was serving notice of it throughout the night. The 80th's line needed re-forming. Its commander did not mean to send his sturdy, willing, lithe men to slaughter in the fulness of their youthful energy and ambition. They must have artillery protection. Their divisional artillery, operating with the division for the first time, required daylight for going into position and mastering its problems of fire in a task which was both beyond its strength and complicated, as was all the other detail of preparing for the attack, by the terrific enemy artillery fire spread from the roads in the rear to the front line.

The shells from the German field-pieces were "small potatoes" compared to the "big fellows" that were arriving in increasing numbers. As the men listened to the scream of the large calibers and studied their bursts, they learned that these were coming not only from the front but from both sides. Enfilade machine-gun fire is bad enough, but enfilade artillery fire is still harder to bear. You may at least charge the machine-guns, but you cannot charge the distant unseen powers hurling high-explosive shells into your flank.

The Borne de Cornouiller, or Hill 378, which I took pains to describe in a previous chapter, was now having its first of many innings at the expense of the Third Corps at its feet in the trough of the Meuse. This bald height on the other side of the river looked across the river bottoms and the rising valley walls to the heights of the whale-back. If the observers on the Borne de Cornouiller saw a target which their guns could not reach, they signaled its location to the whale-back, which might have it in range; and the observers of the whale-back were responsively courteous. This accounted for the cross artillery fire which for weeks was to knife our men of the Third Corps with the wickedness of assassin's thrusts in the ribs.