The taking of Blanc Mont is the greatest single achievement of the 1918 campaign—the Battle of Liberation.
—MARSHAL PÉTAIN.
III
MARINES AT BLANC MONT
The battalion groped its way through the wet darkness to a wood of scrubby pines, and lay down in the slow autumn rain. North and east the guns made a wall of sound; flashes from hidden batteries and flares sent up from nervous front-line trenches lighted the low clouds; occasional shells from the Boche heavies whined overhead, searching the transport lines to the rear. It lacked an hour yet until dawn, and the companies disposed themselves in the mud and slept. They had learned to get all the sleep they could before battle.
A few days before, this battalion, the first of the 5th Regiment of Marines, a unit of the 2d Division, had pulled out of a pleasant town below Toul, in the area where the division rested after the Saint-Mihiel drive, and had come north a day and a night by train, to Chalons-sur-Marne. Thence, by night marches, the division had gathered in certain bleak and warworn areas behind the Champagne front, and here general orders announced that the 2d was detached from the American forces and lent by the Generalissimo as a special reserve to Gouraud’s 4th French Army.
Forthwith arose gossip about General Gouraud, the one-armed and able defender of Rheims, who had broken the German offensive in July. “A big bird with a beak of a nose and one of these here square beards on ’im—holds hisself straighter than the run of Frog generals,” confided a motorcycle driver from division headquarters. “Seen him in Challawns. They say he fights.”
“Yeh, ole Foch has picked the right babies this time,” observed the files complacently. “Special reserve—that’s us all over, Mable! Hope they keep us in reserve—but we know they won’t! The Frogs have got something nasty they want us to get outa the way for them. An’ we see Chasser d’Alpinos and Colonials around here. Somethin’ distressin’ is just bound to happen.”
“Roll your packs, you birds! The lootenant passed the word we’re goin’ up in camions to-night!”
The battalion got aboard in its turn, just as dusk deepened into dark, rode until the camion train stopped, and marched through the rain to its appointed place.