"I see America entering upon the field of war as does the shadow in an eclipse. At first the orb of the moon seems barely touched. There is only a slight irregularity perceptible on the outline of the sphere, but gradually the inexorable shadow spreads and spreads till the crisis of totality is reached; in the words of the Chinese astrologers, the dragon has eaten the moon.
"What could be more soul-shaking or could bring home the sense of a force that cannot be denied than the advance of the shadow! Nothing can hurry it, nothing can delay it, nothing can avert it. The process is begun; the doom will be accomplished.
"So be it, so it must be, so it will be with America and Germany in 1918."
CHAPTER VIII
ON THE LORRAINE FRONT
The American expeditionary force in France were still in process of being "broken in" when the war entered upon its fourth year. They remained well behind the firing lines in their training camp, continuing their education in trench warfare. The manipulation of the hand grenade, rifle, bayonet, trench mortar, and machine gun under conditions to which the British and French had long been inured, and, most irksome and unpopular task of all, trench digging, formed the order of the day. Contingents gradually progressed toward the stage closely approximating real warfare by undergoing the ordeal of "gassing" in order to be equal to the quick adjustment of masks when gas shells were fired in action. Other companies found their way behind the British lines to drill their nerves to withstand scenes of ruin and desolation, the whine of high-explosive shells, and the rattle of shrapnel. All these preliminaries were directed toward a modest aim—storming a trench line. Formerly troops were trained for undertaking rapid marches and complicated maneuvers. In this war their endurance and fighting spirit became restricted to a narrow field—that of penetrating enemy lines on a front of ten kilometers, whose depth did not extend beyond one kilometer.
The American troops did not take kindly to "digging in." Their officers found great difficulty in impressing them with the importance of taking cover. They were like their Canadian brothers-in-arms, of whom it was said that they would die in the last ditch but never dig it. They were averse to submitting to the unheroic obligation of learning to fight in ambush; they clung to primitive ideas of warfare and wanted to spring upon and charge the enemy in the open. Only bitter losses finally persuaded the Canadians, French, and Australians that fighting the Germans from a hole in the ground was the only way of fighting them at all; but the Americans had yet to pay their toll for yielding to their natural antipathy to fighting underground. Their zeal for the pick and shovel, despite the war's terrible object lessons, remained lukewarm.
"It seems a shame to curb the fine fighting spirits of our troops," an American training officer said; "but they must be made to understand as far as possible that impetuosity must be subordinated to steadiness. This has become a time-clock war. The men must advance in given time and go no further. Every step of infantry advance must first be worked out with the artillery, and when the plan is arranged it must be strictly adhered to.
"We realize that it will be difficult to hold our men to this plan. If they see a battle going on, their favorite impulse will be to push on as fast as they can, and some are bound to do so, just as the Canadians did in the earlier stages. We will undoubtedly have big losses in this way, but the men who come through our first battles will be worth their weight in gold thereafter. They will learn quickly the value of steadiness and absolute discipline under fire, and they will be the steadying influence we can distribute through the newer units of our great army as they get their final preparation for trial by fire."
More to their taste was the training practice of charging dummy Germans in specially prepared trenches under the direction of an English sergeant major. At one camp three short lines of such trenches were constructed in a dip in the ground, ending at a rise some hundred yards off, with tin cans on sticks dotting them. The charge was thus undertaken: