"Hell! no," said the fighting man; "they took my prisoner away from me."
Still another marine was captured while dazed by a blow on the head. He recovered in time to deal his captor a tremendous punch on the jaw, and made his way back to the American lines. The favorite slogan of the Americans was: "Each man get a German; don't let a German get you."
Early on June 8 the Germans launched a counter-attack against the American position between Bouresches and Le Thiolet. This attack broke down. The trenches which the Americans held were new and shallow, but the troops were well supplied with machine-guns, and the German infantry never got closer than within a couple of hundred yards of the position. The marines were not yet content with their success. They took the initiative again on June 10 and smashed into the German lines for about two-thirds of a mile on a 600-yard front. In this attack two minenwerfer were captured. The object of the attack was to clean out Belleau Wood. The Germans retained only the northern fringe.
By this time the offensive had ceased to be wholly a marine affair. The 9th and 23d Regiments of infantry, comprising what is known as the Syracuse Brigade, took up their positions on the right of the soldiers of the sea. During the next few days the Germans made several violent counter-attacks, but without success, and on June 26 the Americans pushed their gains still further by a successful assault south of Torcy, in which more than 250 Germans were captured. This victory gave Pershing's men absolute command of the Bois de Belleau, which was the strategic point for which the Germans had fought so hard.
It was after the Château-Thierry offensive that for the first time the American Army won a place in the German official communique. Before that they had been simply "the enemy," and once, upon the occasion of a successful German raid, North American troops. But now Berlin unbent a little and used the term "an American regiment." Germany was prepared to admit that America was in the war. It is just possible that some of their men who broke before the rush of the marines returned to give headquarters the information.
CHAPTER XXII
THE ARMY OF MANŒUVRE
WHILE the American Army was showing its quality in the minor battles of Seicheprey, Cantigny, Château-Thierry, and Vaux, and its quantity was showing itself in leaps of hundreds of thousands of men a month, a destiny was shaping for it, equally in circumstances and in the mind of Generalissimo Foch, which was to be even greater than that it had sacrificed in late March, when it submerged its identity and said: "Put us where you will."
For when, on July 18, the fifth German offensive suddenly shivered into momentary equilibrium and then rolled back, with Foch and the Allies pounding behind it, and when this counter-attack developed into a continuing offensive which was to straighten the Marne salient and throw back the Germans from before Amiens and do the future only knows what else besides, the Allied world said, in one voice: "Foch has found his army of manœuvre, and it's the Americans."
This "army of manœuvre" has always been the king-pin of French strategy. While the Germans were trying two systems—first, the broad front attack which trusted to overbear by sheer weight anything which opposed it, and, second, the so-called Hutier system of draining the line of all its best fighters, and organizing shock troops immeasurably above the average for offensive, while the line was held by the rag-tag and bobtail—the French stuck to their traditional system. This was to hold the lines with the lightest possible number of men, of the highest possible caliber, and to thrust with a mobile force, foot-loose and ready to be swung wherever a spot seemed likely to give way.
It was with the "army of manœuvre," thrown up from Paris in frantic haste by Galliéni, in taxicabs and trucks, that General Foch made the miraculous plunge through the Saxon army at Fère-en-Tardenois, in September, 1914, which saved the first battle of the Marne.