I may add that this was the Australians' last action. After thirteen months of continuous fighting they were sent into winter quarters. The men who had been out from home since 1914—and the Americans who were homesick after three months in France can imagine what this meant—were just starting on their first home leave when the armistice came. May the recollection of how they fought at our side in a war to end war keep the friendship of the two peoples secure.
On the night of October 5th the 30th Division, which had suffered far less than the 27th, relieved the Australians. The job was finished; on this part as on the rest of the British front, the once glorious Hindenburg line was left behind, suddenly become a somewhat frowsy irrelevance of deserted trenches, dugouts, shell-craters, and tangles of barbed wire. With its passing one knew that, for the northern half of the front, there was no question of stopping; careful, methodical planning, mindful of the necessary vigorous thrusts at the key positions of railway centers and canal and river defenses, would irresistibly sweep the enemy back to the Meuse line, while the slower movement "down below"—as the French and American fronts seemed from the north—would question his ability to stand even there.
Not that there was to be any spectacular rush about the movement, though one looked expectantly at the fitness of the British cavalry, which was always kept ready; the German staff could be expected to handle itself in this its most serious emergency. The spectacular and amazing thing was the steady, unruffled forward movement of millions of men, glacier-like in its assuredness. The temper of victory revealed itself in the eyes and bearing of the men who had waited four years, and who now saw Ypres disengaged, Lille on the point of recovery, Lens, Cambrai, Saint-Quentin restored to France. Americans might feel out of place in the midst of rejoicings, the depth of which they could not measure because they had not known the suffering which had gone before.
The Second Corps was now to take part in the advance of one French and three British armies which, by November 1st, was to expand until the whole line from the sea to the Argonne was in motion. From north of Cambrai to south of Saint-Quentin the line was to reach its apex before Le Cateau in the attack of October 8th-10th; on the 14th the Franco-Belgian and British attack north of Lille was to start bringing the line up to this level; from the 17th to the 25th the southern British and French armies would again take up the offensive to the gates of Valenciennes, while the French armies "around the corner" on the right would have passed over the Saint-Gobain bastion and straightened out the corner.
The plan of the advances in which the Second Corps took part was simple. The enemy had none but hastily organized defenses, and if he were pushed hard enough he would go. So the artillery was to be moved as far forward as possible to give the necessary protection to the infantry; the attack would start all along the thirty-mile front for generous objectives, and could be expected to go fairly well for two or three days, when stubborn resistance at various points would make it necessary to halt the advance until supplies were brought up and the resistance overcome in another general effort. The artillery declared that this was getting to be too much of an infantry war, nothing counting except keeping up with their giddy romp across fields. The infantry might have replied that they were pushing on so fast in order to keep the Germans from destroying the roads and light railways which the artillery and transport would be using. Not that I wish to imply that the infantry found it a giddy romp; there were always the machine-guns and the front-line artillery batteries, and, especially on the first day of the attack, a considerable quantity of "h-vic" shells, as they were called on the British front, from the large-calibre guns which were protecting the withdrawal of field-guns and material.
There was no question, however, of the withdrawal. When the 30th Division, after two days of waiting on the two miles of Corps front which the Australians had handed over, started forward on October 8th along the south edge of the Roman Road to Le Cateau, it was able to cover three miles by noon, taking the fair-sized towns of Brancourt and Prémont, and a number of solid farmhouses and small copses, on the way. Enough guns were moved up over virtually undamaged roads to permit another start at dawn on the 9th; and the end of that day found the Southerners four miles farther on and in possession of the important railway center and large town of Busigny, which the enemy had relinquished practically without a struggle. Another mile was gained on the 10th, and the division line brought to the Selle river, which was not much of a river in the eyes of the Americans, but on which the enemy had obviously intended to call a halt. The railway yards in front of Le Cateau, in the sector of the Thirteenth British Corps on the left, gave violent resistance to any further progress on that side; the rearward movement of enemy field-guns had apparently stopped, to judge from the quantity of shell-fire and gas which now came over; and worried intelligence officers were doing their best to decipher the mystery of prisoners from eleven German divisions who had been taken on the two-mile front. Incidentally, it should be said that the Southerners had gathered in 1,900 Germans in three days, which was more than their share of the total of 12,000 prisoners captured by the three British armies.
One who knew the dreary waste of the Somme battlefield, or indeed the level ruins of any part of the old trench line, might well rub his eyes when he came into this fresh landscape, where the Southerners seemed as much at home as if they had never seen mountains. One had forgotten, it seemed as if one had never known, that you could have war in a country where women and children walked about the streets, and lived in intact houses, and even went to shop, to school, and to mass. A Corps officer who had worked with Hoover in Belgium found a familiar task in distributing food to the four thousand civilians in the sector.
Sterner fighting was to follow from October 17th for the weakened divisions, which had received no replacements to bring them up from half strength, and which could therefore, together, take over little more than a mile of front. Starting from the Selle river south of Le Cateau, they met a stubborn resistance until the stand made by the enemy in that town, which had seen a fierce British resistance in 1914 in the retreat from Mons, was overcome by the Thirteenth British Corps; then our Southerners and New Yorkers, having advanced four miles in three days, were relieved and sent back to the dreary Somme fields east of Amiens. Had it been necessary to fight a way into Germany, they would probably have been called on again for their manly share.
As it was, they were the only American troops, aside from scattered units, which were not to be gathered into the fold of the main American forces. That this isolation did not please them is understandable; but I suspect that it was good for them. There could not be the exaggeration of their part in the final victory which there might have been if they had had American food and had seen none but American activity about them. If officially the British made much of them, they realized that it was not only for what they had done but in honor of the country which had sent them forth to fight for the common cause.