On the right was Bell's 33d Division of Illinois National Guard. At its back was the famous Mort Homme, or Dead Man's Hill, where Frenchmen and Germans had struggled in the battle of Verdun, with its shell craters now fringed with weeds. The 33d had to cross the Forges Brook and swing in toward the Meuse River protecting the right flank of the whole movement which rested on the river. On the left of the 33d was the 80th, Cronkhite's Blue Ridge Division, trained at the British front and come from Saint Mihiel. Next in line was the 4th Regular Division, which, coming fresh from the British front, had fought magnificently in the Château-Thierry operations. On its left was Kuhn's 79th, the National Army Division from Camp Meade, which had never heard a shot fired until it marched up amidst the roar of guns and artillery preparation. Then we had Farnsworth's 37th, National Guard of Ohio, which with unconquerable persistence was to take the wicked Malancourt Woods; and then the 91st Division of the National Army from the Pacific slope which was to give such a remarkable exhibition of continued and determined advance. Next we had Traub's 85th Division, National Guard from Kansas and Missouri, which was set the dreadful task of taking the heights on the west of the Aire river and of crossing the Exermont ravine. Next was Muir's 28th, or "Iron" Division, National Guard of Pennsylvania, which was in the valley of the Aire and faced the wooded heights of the Argonne which were thrust out Gibraltarlike into the valley. Finally, on the extreme left was the 77th, National Army from New York (now under command of Alexander), facing the heart of the formidable Argonne Forest.
Some of these divisions had more difficult obstacles than others to overcome. Their relative position in line was due less to a strategic arrangement, with any view to their experience or to their exhaustion in relation to their objectives, than to the relation of their positions to the roads by which they had had to travel in reaching the front. Up to this time the 4th, the 77th, and the 28th had probably seen the most fighting. They had just come from the Château-Thierry operations and in common with all the other divisions, were short of transport and had to make forced marches.
All the men of all the divisions had either been sleeping in box cars on railroad trains or they had been in the miserable crowded billets of small villages, getting what rest, after marching at night, they could during the day, in the midst of the rumble of traffic. No corps, divisional, regimental, or battalion commander, no chief of one of the staff sections who had anything to do with the direction of traffic, could say quite how this was accomplished, except by sleepless vigil and grim, sweating effort, but the fact was that the miracle had happened; for on the night of September 24, 1918, every division was in position, with a thin fringe of the French remaining in the front line in order to prevent the Germans, if they took any prisoners, from identifying the number of American divisions which were present.
Marshal Foch had now postponed the attack until the 26th; this gave the men a day in which to rest as much as they could, and a little more time for the artillery and staff to make its preparation.
General Pershing, who was to direct the battle in person, had taken up his headquarters in the city hall of the village of Souilly on the "sacred road" from Bar-le-Duc to Verdun where the French commanders had planned the defense against the great German offensive of 1916.
On the morning of the 26th, after six hours of artillery preparation, the waves of infantry of these nine divisions which had now assembled in the front-line trenches, relieving the French, went over the top in beginning the greatest battle in American history. The fortifications which they attacked represented the result of all the experience which the Germans, in their antlike industry, had applied in preparing their defenses. No-man's-land had been pummeled by four years of shell fire until the rims of shell craters joined. The weeds which had grown up hid the rims, slippery in the morning mist, and made footing more uncertain on the soft turf. The barbed-wire entanglements were deep, in keeping with the formidability of the German trench system. When they built these works, the Germans rightly considered them impregnable. The story of every battalion that attacked that morning, as well as every battalion that participated in the Argonne Battle, is worthy of a lengthier description than I am giving to the whole operations of the American Expeditionary Force.
It is usual in such attacks that, at many points of the line where the enemy's barbed wire has not been cut by the artillery fire, or where machine-gun nests are strategically placed, portions of the advancing wave of infantry are held up with the result that succeeding portions push on until they are caught in salients in enfilade fire. This leads to confusion and frequently to arresting the whole attack, or at least to interfering with the plan, thus giving the enemy time to bring up his reserves and profit by his opportunity. This had happened in the Somme offensive, at Loos, at Passchendaele and in the fifth and last German offensive and, indeed, in every big offensive on the western front. There was every reason why it should happen this time to the eye of any experienced observer who had not the youthful enthusiasm of our soldiers, who in their ingrained American offensive spirit, attacked in a manner as confident as if they were used to breaking first-line trench systems as a part of their routine of drill.
It was this spirit, on that memorable morning, that carried the fortifications at every point. By every rule, by every precedent, after they had gone through the barbed-wire and in and out of the maze of trenches and then over the shell craters of No-man's-land they ought, even if they had not been under fire, to have lost their uniformity of line and formed into irregular groups. But instead of this they kept on going, overcoming the enemy's machine-gun nests and gathering in prisoners, when sheer fatigue ought to have stopped them. By night some of them had reached objectives five and six miles beyond the front line.
The daring stroke of throwing our army against the Meuse-Argonne line straight at the enemy's communications had already had its reward; although the Germans had been warned of the attack, they had no idea that it would be in such force. They recognized at once that the threat against the Lille-Metz railroad was serious. They must bring up good divisions and enough of them, and sufficient artillery, to make sure that it was arrested.
Our task, now, was the thankless one of continuing to draw more and more divisions against us in the consciousness that every German whom we held or whom we killed or wounded was one more removed from the British or French fronts. We were to have the stiffest fighting of any part of the line, and the value in what we did was not to be reckoned in ground gained, but in damage done the enemy. During the following days we continued to advance while the Germans settled down in strength in front of us and established themselves in the strong trench line of the Kriemhilde Stellung across a series of commanding heights. Our divisions, exhausted after a week or more of fighting, had to be relieved by rested divisions which were called to the front including the 3d and the 5th and 1st Divisions of Regulars. We had to weaken our line a little owing to the necessities of transport.