"In future the troops of this command will be held at all times to the strictest observance of that rigid discipline in camp and on the march which is essential to their maximum efficiency on the day of battle."
The first of the fighting troops arrived on the British front on the morning of April 10, after an all-night march. They were grimed and mud-spattered, hungry, and tired, and cold. But the cheering that rose from the Tommies when they recognized the American uniforms at the head of the column would have revived more exhausted men than they.
The first comers were infantry, a battalion of them. Others came up during the day, with artillerymen and machine-gunners. The celebration of their coming lasted far into the next night, and the commanders of the British front exchanged telegrams of congratulation with the commanders of the French front that they were to be so welcomely refreshed.
But Generalissimo Foch, with his stanch determination not to be done out of his reserve, held the Americans back, and they were destined to remain behind the main battle-line for three and a half months longer.
Meanwhile the American strength was piling steadily up in the reserve, and in mid-May a large contingent of the National Army, said to be the first of them to land in Europe, reached the Flanders front and began to train at once behind the British lines, without preliminary work in American camps in France.
These men had what was probably the most exhilarating welcome of the war. The Tommies, many of them wounded and sick, poured out into the roadways as the new American Army arrived, and threw their caps into the air and split their throats with cheers. The British had been terrifically hard pressed in the German offensive. They had given ground only after incredible fighting. They were, in the phrase of General Haig, at last "with their backs to the wall." They held their line magnificently, but they could not have been less than filled with thanksgiving that they were now to have the help of the least war-worn of all their allies.
CHAPTER XX
THE FIRST TWO BATTLES
WHILE Generalissimo Foch was strengthening his long line, with American troops as flying buttresses, those sectors delegated to the Americans in their own right saw two battles, within a few weeks of each other, which attained to the dignity of names. The battle of Seicheprey, the first big American defensive action, and the battle of Cantigny, the first big offensive, the one in the Toul sector, the other in Picardy, were the occasions of the American baptism of fire. The one was so valiant, the other so brilliant, and both were so reassuring to the high commands of the Allies, that they would deserve a special emphasis even if they had not the distinction of being America's first battles.
On the night of April 20-21 the German bombardment of Seicheprey, a village east of the Renners wood, and just northwest of Toul, grew to monstrous proportions. Frenchmen who had seen the great Verdun offensive, in which the German Crown Prince had made a new record for artillery preparation, said that the heavy firing on the American sector eclipsed any of the action at Verdun.
The firing covered a front of a mile and a quarter. The bombardment was of high explosive shells and gas, apparently an effort to disable the return fire from American artillery. But all through the night the artillerymen sent their shells, encasing themselves in gas-masks.