"Your signals enable us to take the news of your location to the rear," read the communication, "to report if the attack is successful, to call for help if needed, to enable the artillery to put their shells over your heads into the enemy. If you are out of ammunition and tell us, we will report and have it sent up. If you are surrounded, we will deliver the ammunition by airplane. We do not hike through the mud with you, but there are discomforts in our work as bad as mud, but we won't let rain, storms, Archies (anti-aircraft guns) nor Boche planes prevent our getting there with the goods. Use us to the limit. After reading this, hand it to your buddie and remember to show your signals." It was signed: "Your Aviators."
"You bet we will, all of that," was the heartfelt comment of the soldiers. Such was the splendid spirit of co-operation built up by General Pershing among the branches of the service.
To this great American army was assigned the tremendous task of striking at the enemy's vitals, striking where it was known he would defend himself most passionately. The German defensive lines converged toward a point in the east like the ribs of a fan, drawing close to protect the Mezieres-Longuyon railroad shuttle, which was the vital artery of Germany in occupied territory. If the Americans could force a break through in the Argonne, the whole tottering German machine in France would crumble. Whether they broke through or not, the smallest possible result of an advance there would be the narrowing of the bottle-neck of the German transport lines into Germany and a slow strangling of the invading forces.
After the first tempestuous rush, there was no swift movement. The Yanks gnawed their way to the vaunted Kriemhilde line, hacked and hewed their way through it, overcoming thousands of machine guns, beset by every form of Hun pestilence. Even conquered ground they found treacherous. The Germans had planted huge mines of which the fuses were acid, timed to eat through a container days after the Germans had gone and touch off the explosive charge to send scores of Americans to hospitals or to soldiers' graves.
To the Americans, not bursting fresh into battle as they had done at Château-Thierry, but sated and seasoned by a long summer of campaigning, fell the tough, unspectacular problem of the whole western front. While the world hung spellbound on the Franco-British successes in the west and north, with their great bounds forward after the retreating Germans, relatively little attention was paid to the action northwest of Verdun, and not until the close of hostilities did America begin to awaken to the fact that it was precisely this slow, solid pounding, this bulldog pertinacity of the Americans that had made possible that startling withdrawal in the north.
So vital was this action in the Argonne that the best divisions the German high command could muster were sent there and, once there, were chewed to bits by the American machine, thus making possible the rapid advances of the Allies on other parts of the long front.
The Pennsylvania men looked back almost longingly to what they had regarded at the time as hard, rough days along the Marne, the Ourcq and the Vesle. In perspective, and from the midst of the Argonne fighting, it looked almost like child's play. Back home over the cables came the simple announcement that a certain position had been taken. Followers of the war news got out their maps and observed that this marked an advance of but a mile or so in three or four days and more than one asked: "What is wrong with Pershing's men?" It was difficult to understand why the men who had leaped forward so magnificently from the Marne to the Aisne, traveling many miles in a day, should now be so slow, while their co-belligerents of the other nations were advancing steadily and rapidly.
A very few minutes spent with any man who was in the Argonne ought to suffice as an answer. Soldiers who were in the St. Mihiel thrust and also in the Argonne coined an epigram. It was: "A meter in the Argonne is worth a mile at St. Mihiel." The cable message of a few words nearly always covered many hours, sometimes days, of heroic endeavor, hard, backbreaking labor, heart-straining hardship and the expenditure of boundless nervous energy with lavish hand, to say nothing of what it meant to the hospital forces behind the lines and to the burial details.
September 24th, division headquarters of the Twenty-eighth moved up to a point less than two miles back of the front lines, occupying old, long-abandoned French dugouts. That evening Major-General Charles H. Muir, the division commander, appeared unexpectedly in the lines and walked about for some time, observing the disposition of the troops. He was watched with wide-eyed but respectful curiosity by many of the men, for the average soldier in the ranks knows as little of a division commander as of the Grand Llama of Tibet. Frequently he cares as little, too.
The General cast a contemplative eye aloft, to where countless squirrels frolicked among the foliage of the great old trees, chattering in wild indignation at the disturbers of their peace, and birds sang their evensong upon the branches.