On August 30th-September 1st the two fought side by side for the first time as divisions in the Ypres salient offensive. They advanced for the depth of a mile, the 27th until its outposts were on the famous Kemmel Hill which the German attacks had won in the preceding April, and the 30th taking the village of Voormezeele. They were now withdrawn and sent into training to digest the lessons of their first battle and to learn in practice maneuvers how to coöperate with tanks. After that post-graduate course they might be considered "shock" divisions, having the freshness of new troops plus an instructive experience. When they received their next order to move, they knew that they were to be used as such; they were going into a "big fight."
Late in September they started across the old Somme battlefield, which the Germans had devastated in their retreat in the late winter of 1917 in face of the Anglo-French offensives. Here the results of war on the largest integral area in France were seen at their worst in a dismal, treeless landscape, pitted by the bursts of the countless shells fired in the Somme and Cambrai battles and the fighting in the period between them, and in the tidal wave of the great German offensive of March, 1918, which overflowed the desert of their making. The subsoil, having been mixed with the loam that once nourished succulent pasturage and rich fields of grain, now responded to sun and moisture in a subtropical growth of weeds and grass in a grizzly carpet, variegated by the gaping wounds in the earth of crumbling trench walls and great mine craters. Deserted tanks, and remnants of sheet-iron dugout roofs and of gun-carriages and caissons recalled as the débris of a dead world ghostly memories to all British soldiers, for at one time or another all had fought there, enduring the powers of destruction that made the wreckage.
Troops marching in this area, where man had at such labor and cost imitated the forces of earthquakes, volcanoes, and of chaos, found few billets. The villages were mostly level with the roads. Temporary buildings, with corrugated iron roofs and tar-paper walls, which would be called "shacks," had risen as the landmarks of pioneer hospitality. The two divisions marching toward the sound of guns through the silence where there was neither woman nor child living could people it with what reflections they chose on their way to battle.
They were attached to the Australian Corps, which was company to their taste. There were no better soldiers than the "Aussies." Our men liked them not only for this but for other qualities which have a man-to-man appeal when men from the ends of the earth meet. In the coming attack we were to have more intimate reasons for liking them: the reasons born of the gratitude which one brave man owes to another who does not hesitate at hell's door to come to his aid when he is hard pressed.
Beginning with the Anglo-French offensive on August 8th, the five divisions of the Australians in their "leap-frogging" advance—and they were very expert at "leap-frogging"—had not been out of line as a Corps until they had fought their way clear across the devastated region from the high-water mark of the German tidal wave of March to the point from which it had started. In the free stride which they had brought overseas from their island continent thousands of miles away, now guided by a veteran's wisdom and cunning, they had won back all they had fought for on these Somme fields with an enemy whose measure they had always taken—an enemy who they knew now could never fight on the offensive again. They had suffered for four years the fatigue, the shell-fire, the machine-gun fire, the gas, which our army was to know for a brief period of intensity. Long service and army discipline, accepted as a means to an end, had no more influence in making them militaristic than a course in boxing changes the anatomy of the kangaroo. They were ever the Australians.
Though the British had regained what they had lost in the spring, they were only back before the line to which Hindenburg had given his name, after he came with his Ludendorff from their victories in the east to prove that the western front was not necessarily the grave of German military reputations. German staff experts had chosen the ground which they had fortified at leisure behind their old Bapaume defenses during the winter of 1916-1917. German industry was then at its height, and German material was ample to carry out the plans for that elaborate system which was advertised by German propaganda as impregnable. In those days when all offensives in the west had failed, many military experts were inclined to accept this view.
The portion of the Hindenburg line which the 27th and 30th Divisions were to attack had a distinctive character which might well relate its conquest to an action by such an integral force as our Second Corps, attached to another army. For six thousand yards the Saint-Quentin Canal, opened in Napoleon's time and used until the beginning of the war, runs in practically a straight line north and south under a ridge, whose crest, from the piling of the spoils of excavation, is almost as regular as an enormous parapet. The open canal being unfordable, this section, obviously inviting attack, was given particular attention in preparing the artificial defenses which the ground and the tunnel itself favored. The thickness of the earth over the stone arch was such that at no point had the largest caliber shell the slightest chance of successful penetration. In the tunnel, lighted by electricity, the number of reserves which could be accommodated was regulated by the extent of the wooden platforms laid across from wall to wall. It was said that there was room enough provided for a full division of infantry, which, while being entertained by moving pictures to while away idle hours, would be perfectly secure from any bombardment until such time as their services were required, when they had prompt egress to their places assigned for a crisis through the openings to the reverse slope of the higher irregular crest in front. It was a most comfortable and adaptable arrangement, for which the French a century ago had done the spading.
On the crest in front of the tunnel, of course, none of the provisions in dugouts, traverses, strong points, and barbed wire of a thoroughgoing trench system was lacking. In front of this crest over which the main Hindenburg line ran, at a distance of a thousand yards, was another ridge, which formed the first or outpost line. Any troops who took this forward line must move down an apron in full view of the trenches of the main system, in range of its machine-guns and rifles, and under its observation for the direction of artillery fire, which of course had this apron accurately plotted. Between the two ridges, utilizing the ravines, sunken roads, and irregularities of ground, the Germans had deep communication trenches, which, with the passages out of the tunnel, further connected up the system in facilities for the swift utilization of their troops in making the most of all the details of natural and artificial advantage of a position which had on its flanks the unfordable canal. But the defenses had not been well kept up, partly as a result of the deterioration of German industry in digging, and more largely because of Ludendorff's commitment to mobile warfare by his March offensive.
I recollect that the first news we had at Army Headquarters in the Meuse-Argonne of the progress of the Second Corps said that our troops and the Australians had surrounded a division of Germans. In view of what happened, this report now has a tragic mockery. The plan of the attack was made by the Australian Corps. The 30th Division was to be on the right; it went into position on the forward ridge, which in its sector was not as exposed as in that of the 27th. When the New Yorkers went into position, they faced the unpleasant fact that the British whom they relieved had not advanced beyond their own old outpost line. This meant that they must make a preliminary attack on September 27th in order to gain their assigned jumping-off place for the main attack on the 29th. Their daylight charge went home in gallant fashion, but, exposed, when they reached the crest, to machine-gun fire and to the blasts of artillery fire from behind the tunnel, they fought all day on the Knoll and among the ruins of the buildings of Gillemont and Quennemont farms. In and out of trenches, "mopping up" machine-gun nests only to have others reappear from sunken roads and subterranean passages which were said to lead back to the canal tunnel itself, they paid heavy casualties for a persistence which left them that night and the next day hugging the slopes with the crest still unmastered.
It was not on the cards that the main attack, which was only one of a sequence in the general offensive movement, should be delayed on this account. What was to have been taken in a small bite must now be taken in a big bite. The first ridge would be rolled under in the mighty wave which was then to sweep down the apron and through the barbed wire and trenches up the slopes and over the crest of the main ridge and of the tunnel and on into the open country beyond. The fighting vigor of our Second Corps, nursed in training for such a purpose, was to be expended in one morning's tremendous effort; and at noon the 3rd and 5th Australian Divisions were to pass through our two divisions and to continue the advance with all possible speed on the heels of the broken enemy. For the American was not the only ambitious staff when it took to marking objectives on a map. Most ambitious of all was Marshal Foch. Our two divisions had all the "Don Acks," or divisional artillery, of the Australians, a total, with the Corps artillery, of 438 guns, or one for every forty feet of their front, to make their shields; and beside an array of British tanks the only American heavy tank unit in France. With the American divisions' artillery brigades, which had never seen the British front, supporting other divisions in the Meuse-Argonne offensive, who shall say that there was not coöperation among the Allies?