Our Greatest Battle (The Meuse-Argonne)

by Frederick Palmer

By accepted canons this misfortune might have ruined the whole movement, or at least led to delaying the movements of the other units; but delays were out of the question. There was no time to communicate counter-orders to the 28th, which had gathered all its strength for a supreme effort whose success depended upon the coöperation of the 82nd. If the whole line could not go forward at daylight, then all of it that could must go. Fortunately the dark night, which had screened their movement from accurate fire by the enemy, was followed by a thick morning fog. This was opportune in partially screening an attack which must cross the river in face of the heights which they were to storm. The right, or north, regiment, as it started on time, had the advantage of the fog in its first rush. The men forded through water two and three feet deep; the officers who were leading pulled them up the steep banks on the other side. By 8.30 Hill 180, with its machine-gun nests, which had been one of the bulwarks defying the thin line of the 28th for nearly two weeks, was no longer in German hands. The men of the left regiment, starting at 9 o'clock against a still higher hill, 223, overlooking Châtel-Chéhéry, were swept at the fords by enfilade shell-fire and storms of machine-gun bullets in front, which made fearful gaps in their ranks. Under the spur of their delay, considering nothing except that they must make up for lost time, they plunged ahead, and once across they did not bother with any deliberate infiltration around machine-gun nests, but simply swept over them in headlong impatience. By one o'clock they had the hill, a portion of which had been reached by a small detachment of the 28th. They did not know whether or not the 28th had reached Châtel-Chéhéry until they saw soldiers of the 28th climbing the steep sides of Hill 244 back of the town. The fact that two-thirds of the men of two of the companies of the 82nd were killed or wounded was evidence enough that the 1st was not the only division willing to pay a price for gains when it was called upon to be a human wedge. This finished the day's work for the left regiment, except for a German counter-attack which received such prompt and efficacious attention that another was not attempted.

The 82nd having taken over a portion of its line, the 28th had been able to concentrate its forces on the remainder. Though by all criteria the 28th should have been counted as already "expended," it had an access of energy at the prospect of attacking under more favorable circumstances the positions which had so long held it back. After building a footbridge across the Aire, the right regiment charged across the level toward the village of Châtel-Chéhéry, at the base of the heights. This time the Pennsylvanians meant to put more than patrols into the village. Lashed by gun-fire and whipped by machine-gun fire from the heights which had them seemingly at their mercy, units were riddled and their officers killed, with resulting dispersion as undaunted survivors sought for dead spaces and cover. The colonel in command fell mortally wounded by a machine-gun bullet while directing his men. His soldiers avenged him not only by taking and holding Châtel-Chéhéry, but that night they took Hill 244, the ridge following south to the Taille l'Abbé, silencing its galling fire on the river bottoms.

So much for the right. The left regiment was again to attack the Taille l'Abbé. This, being farther south, and toward the rear, than Châtel-Chéhéry, which was in turn south of the 82nd's front, further illustrates the anomalous tactical situation and the interdependence of all the diverse and treacherous elements of ground and dispositions in the problem of supporting the driving of the 1st's wedge. In the course of their arduous ten days' effort to carry out the original plan of "scalloping" the Forest edge to protect the frontal attack of the 77th through the Forest, the Pennsylvanians had developed a sinuous line around the slopes which in places ran at right angles to our battlefront as a whole. It was a line with outposts holding ravines, and groups clinging to vantage points of all kinds, who, in their fox-holes, were the present masters of their destiny, isolated from communication by day and approachable only by silent crawling under cover of darkness. This process of infiltration had bent a shepherd's crook around the Taille l'Abbé. All the whittling of ten long days came to a head in the attack of October 7th, whose ax's blow cut deep into the Forest to La Viergette, past the south flank of the Taille l'Abbé, whose defenses must now crumple under the additional pressure from the north.

While we are with the 28th, we shall follow its career through the Aire valley to the end. On the 8th neither the general situation in relation to the neighboring divisions nor its exhaustion warranted a general attack by the 28th; but it did not neglect a little chore, which gave it retributory satisfaction, in cleaning up the last of the machine-gun nests and any vagrant Germans remaining on the hateful Abbé. Its goal won, its honor avenged, it was now to have the rest which it had as fully earned as the name of the "Iron Division," which it was now being called. It was relieved on the night of the 8th-9th by the 82nd. In a marvelous endurance test of twelve days, in which the men had gone without cooked food under continual rains, the Pennsylvanians had suffered 6,149 casualties, while 1,200 officers and men had been sent to hospitals, ill as the result of the terrible strain and exposure. They had advanced over six miles. They had taken 550 prisoners and 8 guns in their plodding gains against fearful odds; and do not forget, as they will tell you, that they had also taken two German locomotives, most useful for bringing up supplies on a captured section of railroad which the engineers had repaired. The engineers particularly, and all the Pennsylvanians, were proud of that railroad—the 28th's own trunk line; but the proudest thought of these emaciated Guardsmen, as they marched away, was that they had not had to leave the conquest of the Taille l'Abbé to a fresh division. They had taken it themselves.

Now Hills 223 and 180, which the 82nd had captured in its first day's fighting on the 7th, were as detached forts, nearer the eastern wall than the western, in a broad stretch of the valley. Their crests looked over a rolling stretch of bottom lands to the bluffs of the Forest's edge, which were so steep that the naked earth broken by landslides held only scattered dwarf trees and shrubs. Torrents dashed down the ravines during heavy rains. Scaling rather than assault was the word to describe an attempt at their mastery. Artillery was hidden on their crests, and machine-guns on their crests and in the favoring intricacies of the slopes.

Northwest from Hill 180 the village of Cornay nestled at the foot of an escarpment flung out from the Forest almost to the river's bank. This promontory made of the stretch of bottom a kind of bay. While commanding in rear and flank the farther advance of the 1st on the opposite river wall, it could also turn a flanking fire on any charge across the bay toward the bluffs in addition to the plunging frontal fire from the bluffs. Cornay must be taken in order to gain the valley as far as Fléville. On the way across the bay, either to Cornay or to the bluffs, any charge must cross the Boulasson creek, which was unfordable at points. Thus this bay was a cul de sac; but a visible one. The All-Americas knew what to expect on their way to the heights.

With its personnel varying from little men from the tenements to tall lean men of the cotton-fields, the 82nd had in its pride of corps the rivalry of community, region, and state. It was said that one city division had been careful in its sifting when it transferred an excess of its draft men to the 82nd. If so, the result shows how inspectors may err in judging by the measure of a recruit's chest whether or not he will have the heart of a warrior when good food reddens the blood pumped through the valves it strengthens, and drill and comradeship stiffen his fighting temper. The All-Americas might have no state or group of states that claimed them for its own; but the conviction that they were for all the states—all America—was the fostering spirit of the four days of unceasing attack, that were now to begin.

On the 8th the south regiment, moving down the slope of Hill 223 and crossing the level, had reached the ridge beyond in two hours. By 5 P.M. it had fought its way to the possession of a portion of the ridge. Bitterly yielding to the power of the enemy's fire after companies, in characteristic all-America bravery, had lost half their numbers, it retired down the slope during the night to dig itself protection. The north regiment bridged and forded and swam the creek, and fought all day for Cornay and the heights to the westward. The Germans did not depend alone upon fire from the heights. Their machine-gunners were under cover of the bushes and knolls of the bottoms, contesting the passage of the brook, sweeping stretches of its winding course with flanking as well as frontal fire. Their roving field guns attached to battalions fired at point-blank range upon the infantry wave as it appeared on a knoll on the other side of the brook before Cornay, and the men face to face with the gunners bore them down and passed on. By six that afternoon they were in the town and up the slopes of the adjoining heights. There were not enough of them to hold what they had taken. All but forty men of two companies had been killed or wounded in crossing those deadly reaches of the river bottom. As darkness fell, bullets were spattering in every street in Cornay, and pelting down from the crest upon the All-Americas, trying to dig into the slope. Orders had to be given for withdrawal from Cornay and the most exposed ground, for a night of reorganization in the valley of the brook.

A reserve regiment of the 82nd, having taken over the 28th's front, spent the next day under galling fire in swinging its line up level with the other regiments. Again a charge, running the gamut from the bluffs and in face of machine-gun nests in the village itself, entered Cornay at 11 A.M.; again we were slowly forcing our way up the heights where in places the men could climb only by drawing themselves up by bushes and dwarf trees. Reduced in number by the incessant drain of casualties, beginning to feel the exhaustion from three days' fighting and nights practically without sleep, they thought that this time they could hold their gains; but at dusk a German counter-attack launched right across the river bottom from Fléville to Cornay under a barrage of shells and machine-gun bullets, and by infiltration from the heights into Cornay, where our men fought from house to house in a confused struggle against odds, forced those of the advanced groups who did not remain to die in their tracks to fall back upon their reserves, who stood fast. The Germans depended much upon that counter-attack, and they made it at a time when the losses and exhaustion of the 82nd, of which they were fully aware, might well have led them to think that this young division would break under a sharp blow. Far from breaking, the 82nd, having savagely and promptly repulsed the counter-attack, was, despite its casualties, further to extend its front that night by taking over the eastern bank of the river from the 1st Division.

October 10th was to see the culmination of the movement in the trough of the Aire, when the 77th, the pressure on its flank released, was to begin its final sweep through the Forest. It was to be a day of such retribution for the 82nd as the 28th had had in the taking of the Taille l'Abbé; hills and woods are the landmarks of divisional histories in this battle. The dead of the 82nd were intermingled with the dead enemy on the slopes and in Cornay, and in that stretch of the river bottom which in its exposure resembles more closely than the background of any other charge in the Meuse-Argonne battle the open fields which Pickett's men crossed in their rush up the slopes of Seminary Ridge. The gallant officers who led these men knew that they would follow, and Major-General George B. Duncan, who had taken command of the division before the battle, was serene and resourceful in his confidence.