It may not be amiss to recall the general situation on the Western Front at this time. After a winter of boastful preparation, during which they advertised in every possible way that they expected to launch in the spring the greatest effort they had yet put forth to break through the Allied lines, the Germans, on March 21st, strengthened by hundreds of thousands of veteran soldiers released from Russia through the farcical Brest-Litovsk treaty, boiled forth from their lines on the fifty-mile front from Arras to La Fere.
This was an effort to force a break at the juncture of the French and British lines about St. Quentin. It did not succeed in this, but a great wedge was thrust out to become a grave menace to Amiens, an important British distribution center.
Very shortly after this move was checked, the British army in Flanders was heavily attacked, on April 9th, in the region of Ypres, and thrown back so badly that Field Marshal Haig issued his famous appeal to the troops "fighting with their backs to the wall."
The British line finally held, and, French reinforcements arriving, began to react strongly in counter-attacks. Again the boiling western line simmered down, but on May 27th the German Crown Prince's army flung itself out from the Chemin des Dames, in Champagne, and by June 3d had reached the Marne at Château-Thierry. Here forces which made their way across the river were hotly attacked and driven back, and this drive came to a halt.
One week later, on June 10th, the fighting was renewed from Montdidier to Noyon in a thrust for Compiegne as a key to Paris. This was plainly an effort to widen the wedge whose apex was at Château-Thierry, but Foch had outguessed the Germans, knew where they would strike and held them. The attack was fairly well checked in two days.
This was the situation, then, in those late June days, when our Pennsylvania soldiers pined for action within sight of Paris. The American army had been blooded in the various drives, but the Twenty-eighth Division had not yet had a taste of the Hun action. Marines, the First and Second divisions of the Regular army, engineers and medical troops, had had a gallant part in the defense of Paris, and even in defense of the channel ports, in the Flanders thrust.
Dormans, Torcy, Bouresches, Bois de Belleau, Cantigny, Jaulgonne, these and other localities had won place in the annals of American arms. Wherever they had come in contact with the enemy, without exception, the American troops had "made good," and won the high encomiums of their British and French comrades. Is it any wonder, then, that the Pennsylvanians chafed at the restraint which held them far away from where such great things were going forward?
It was at the critical juncture in March, the darkest hour of the Allied cause, that President Wilson, waiving any question of national pride, directed General Pershing to offer such troops as he had available to be brigaded with the French and English to meet the German assaults.
The reason for this was simple. The American army had not yet been welded into a cohesive whole. Its staff work was deficient. It was merely a conglomeration of divisions, each possibly capable of operating as a division, but the whole utterly unable to operate as a whole. By putting a brigade of Americans in a French or British division, however, the forces of our co-belligerents could be strengthened to the full extent of the available American troops.
The American offer was promptly and gratefully accepted. Came the day, then, when our Pennsylvania men were ordered to move up to a sector below the Marne, there to be brigaded with a French army. The artillery brigade had not yet come into the divisional lines and few, even of the officers, had seen their comrades of the big guns since leaving Camp Hancock.