Elsewhere on the western front American forces, linked with the British lines, aided a body of Australians to attack Hamel. It was an early morning advance, extending one and a half miles on a four-mile front, including the village of Hamel and the trench system beyond it, south of the Somme.
It was the first time Americans had fought with the British. They comprised only a few companies fighting as platoons among the Australians; but upon them rested the honor of the United States in the adventure. The date, moreover, was July 4, 1918.
"You are going in with the Australians," their officers told them, "and these lads always deliver the goods. We expect you to do the same. We shall be very disappointed if you do not fulfill the hopes and belief we have in you."
The Americans listened with a light in their eyes. They went in, with "Lusitania!" as their battle cry, celebrating the Fourth of July with "astonishing ardor, discipline and strength," the Australian officers said. If the Americans had any fault at all, the Australians commented, it was overeagerness to advance; they could hardly be restrained from going too rapidly behind the wide belt of the British shell fire as the barrage rolled forward.
The Hamel episode projected as a reminder that American forces were clinching with the foe on other parts of the front as well as on the Marne. But it was on the latter battle ground that the eyes of the world were presently drawn. There the American army swung into its greatest stride at this stage of the war.
CHAPTER LIV
ACROSS THE MARNE AND BACK
Officially Germany had refused to recognize the growing weight of American belligerency. If she could evade alluding to American forces specifically in reporting events on the battle field, she did so. "The enemy," to be sure, covered a multitude of enemies—more than half the world—so why designate which one, and why designate the one now most feared, of whose mounting strength it was not expedient to enlighten the beguiled people at home?
The pretense could no longer be sustained after her abortive drive against the eastern and southern flanks of the Soissons-Rheims salient on July 14, 1918. There was a reason. Germany might ignore the presence of American detachments operating with the French or British and be airily blind to the activities of American patrols along the Lorraine or Alsace fronts. They were merely "the enemy." But in making this plunge to widen the salient by way of encircling Rheims and cutting another way to Paris she crashed into an obstacle that compelled recognition. It was the First American Army Corps, numbering some 250,000 men, under the command of Major General Hunter Liggett. If Americans, in her self-deceiving view, had before been as needles in a haystack, here they had become the haystack itself, and it was all needles!
The American army skirted the southern arc of the salient, eastward along the Marne somewhere beyond Jaulgonne, westward through Château-Thierry to Torcy, where it joined the French. Germany's first operation was to make a feint of attacking the American lines northwest of Château-Thierry by way of screening her major operation, which was to break through the American barrier guarding the Marne. The assault was especially violent in the Vaux area, which was enveloped in a heavy barrage following the usual bombardment of high explosives and gas. Under the barrage storming parties attacked the village. The system of infiltration by groups was followed and some of the groups succeeded in penetrating one of the American outposts on the northeast. The Americans swarmed out and poured a withering rifle and machine-gun fire on the assailants, and counterattacked on the latter's right, where the penetration had taken place. It was a direct and flanking fire, held in reserve until the foe had approached the American front-line trenches, from which the troops had withdrawn. Its effect was to demoralize the attackers, who retired in disorder.