OUR GREATEST BATTLE

BOOKS BY
FREDERICK PALMER

THE VAGABOND
WITH KUROKI IN MANCHURIA
THE LAST SHOT
MY YEAR OF THE GREAT WAR
MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR
WITH OUR FACES IN THE LIGHT
AMERICA IN FRANCE
OUR GREATEST BATTLE

OUR GREATEST BATTLE
(THE MEUSE-ARGONNE)

BY
FREDERICK PALMER
Author of "The Last Shot," "America in France," etc.

NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1919

Copyright, 1919
By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, Inc.

TO THE READER

During the war we had books which were the product of the spirit of the hour and its limitations. Among these was my "America in France," which was written, while we were still expecting the war to last through the summer of 1919, to describe the gathering and training of the American Expeditionary Forces, and their actions through the Château-Thierry and Saint-Mihiel operations. Since the war and the passing of the military censorship, we have had many hastily compiled histories, and many "inside" accounts from participants, including commanders, both Allied and enemy, whose special pleading is, to one familiar with events, no less evident in their lapses than in their tone.

This book, which continues and supplements "America in France," is not in the class of the jerry-built histories or the personal narratives. It aims, as the result of special facilities for information and observation, to give a comprehensive and intelligent account of the greatest battle in which Americans ever fought, the Meuse-Argonne.

In the formative period of our army, I was the officer in charge of press relations, under a senior officer. I was never chief censor of the A. E. F.: I had nothing to do with the censorship of the soldiers' mail. After we began operations in the field, my long experience in war was utilized in making me an observer, who had the freedom of our lines and of those of our Allies in France. Where the average man in the army was limited in his observations to his own unit, I had the key to the different compartments. I saw all our divisions in action and all the processes of combat and organization. It was gratifying that my suggestions sometimes led to a broader point of view in keeping with the character of the immense new army which was being filled into the mold of the old.

Friends who have read the manuscript complain that I do not give enough of my own experiences, or enough reminiscences of eminent personalities; but even in the few places where I have allowed the personal note to appear it has seemed, as it would to anyone who had been in my place, a petty intrusion upon the mighty whole of two million American soldiers, who were to me the most interesting personalities I met. The little that one pair of eyes could see may supply an atmosphere of living actuality not to be easily reproduced from bare records by future historians, who will have at their service the increasing accumulation of data.

In the light of my observations during the battle, I went over the fields after the armistice, and studied the official reports, and talked with the men of our army divisions. For reasons that are now obvious, the results do not read like the communiqués and dispatches of the time, which gave our public their idea of an action which could not be adequately described until it was finished and the war was over. We had repulses, when heroism could not persist against annihilation by cross-fire; our men attacked again and again before positions were won; sometimes they fought harder to gain a little knoll or patch of woods than to gain a mile's depth on other occasions. Accomplishment must be judged by the character of the ground and of the resistance.

As the division was our fighting unit, I have described the part that each division took in the battle. The reader who wearies of details may skip certain chapters, and find in others that he is following the battle as a whole in its conception and plan and execution, and in the human influences which were supreme; but the very piling up of the records of skill, pluck, and industry of division after division from all parts of the country, as they took their turn in the ordeal until they were expended, is accumulative evidence of what we wrought.

The soldier who knew only his division, his regiment, battalion, company, and platoon, as he lay in chill rain in fox-holes, without a blanket, under gas, shells, and machine-gun fire, or charged across the open or up slippery ascents for a few hundred yards more of gains, may learn, as accurately as my information warrants, in a freshened sense of comradeship, how and where other divisions fought. He may think that his division has not received a fair share of attention for its exploits. I agree with him that it has not, in my realization of the limitations of space and of capacity to be worthy of my subject.

There are many disputes between divisions as the result of a proud and natural rivalry, which was possibly too energetically promoted by the staff in order to force each to its utmost before it staggered in its tracks from wounds and exhaustion. One division might have done the pioneer hammering and thrusting which gave a succeeding division its opportunity. A daring patrol of one division may have entered a position and been ordered to fall back; troops of another division may have taken the same position later. There was nothing so irritating as having to withdraw from hard-won ground because an adjoining unit could not keep up with the advance. Towns and villages were the landmarks on the map, with which communiqués and dispatches conjured; but often the success which made a village on low ground tenable was due to the taking of commanding hills in the neighborhood. Sometimes troops, in their eagerness to overcome the fire on their front, found themselves in the sector of an adjoining division, and mixed units swept over a position at the same time. In cases of controversy I have tried to adjust by investigation and by comparing reports. I must have made errors, whose correction I welcome. To illustrate the full detail of each division's advance would require several maps as large as a soldier's blanket. The maps which I have used are intended to indicate in a general way the movement of each division, and our part on the western front in relation to our Allies.

There may be surprise that I have not mentioned the names of individuals below the rank of division commander, and that I have not identified units lower than divisions. The easy and accepted method would have been to single out this and that man who had won the Medal of Honor or the Cross, and this or that battalion or company which had a theatric part. Indeed, the author could have made his own choices in distinction. I knew the battle too well; I had too deep a respect for my privilege to set myself up in judgment, or even to trust to the judgment of others. Not all the heroes won the Medal or the Cross. The winners had opportunities; their deeds were officially observed. How many men deserved them in annihilated charges in thickets and ravines, but did not receive them, we shall not know until our graves in France yield their secrets.

I like to think that our men did not fight for Crosses; that they fought for their cause and their manhood. A battalion which did not take a hill may have fought as bravely as one which did, and deserve no less credit for its contribution to the final result. So I have resisted the temptation to make a gallery of fame, and set in its niches those favored in the hazard of action, when it was the heroism and fortitude of all which cannot be too much honored. I have written of the "team-play" rather than the "stars"; of the whole—a whole embracing all that legion of Americans at home or abroad who were in uniform during the war. If I have been discriminate about regulars and reserves, and frank about many other things, it is in no carping sense. We fought the war for a cause which requires the truth, now that the war is over.

I regret that it is not possible for me to give due acknowledgment to the many officers of our army who, during the actual campaign and since their demobilization, have facilitated the gathering of my material. For the preparation of the book I am indebted to the continued assistance, both in France and at home, of Mr. George Bruner Parks.

Frederick Palmer.

September, 1919.

CONTENTS

TABLE OF MAPS

OUR GREATEST BATTLE

I
A CHANGE OF PLAN

The original scope of Saint-Mihiel—A winter of preparation for a spring campaign—Which is cut down to two weeks—The tide turning for the Allies—The advantage of a general attack—And especially of numbers—The tactician's opportunity—Why the Meuse-Argonne—The whale-back of Buzancy—Striking for the Lille-Metz railway—All advantage with the defense—The audacity of the enterprise—The handicaps—A thankless task at best.

We were in the fever of preparation for our Saint-Mihiel attack. Divisions summoned from the victorious fields of Château-Thierry, and divisions which had been scattered with the British and French armies, were gathering in our own sector in Lorraine. The French were to assist us with ample artillery and aviation in carrying out our first ambitious plan under our own command.

After cutting the redoubtable salient, which had been a wedge in the Allied line for four years, we were to go through to Mars-la-Tour and Etain, threatening the fortress of Metz itself. This was to be the end of our 1918 campaign. Instead of wasting our energy in operations in mud and snow, we should spend the winter months in applying the lessons which we had learned in our first great battle as an army. Officers who had been proved unfit would be eliminated, and officers who had been proved fit would be promoted. All the freshly arrived divisions from home camps and all the personnel for handling the artillery, tanks, and other material of war which our home factories would then be producing in quantity, would be incorporated in a homogeneous organization.

MAP NO. 1
AMERICAN OFFENSIVES AND OTHER OFFENSIVES IN WHICH AMERICAN TROOPS PARTICIPATED, MAY-NOVEMBER, 1918.

The spring would find us ready to play the part which had been chosen for us in the final campaign. On the left of the long line from Switzerland to the North Sea would be the British Army, striking out from the Channel bases; in the center the French Army, striking from the heart of France; and on the right the American Army, its munitions arriving in full tide to support its ceaseless blows, was to keep on striking toward the Rhine until a decision was won.

In the early days of September, with our troops going into position before the threatening heights of the salient, and with the pressure of the effort of forming in time an integral army increasing with the suspense as the 12th, the day set for the attack, drew near, some important officers, at the moment when their assistance seemed invaluable, were detached from the Saint-Mihiel operations. Their orders let them into a portentous secret. They were to begin work in making ready for the Meuse-Argonne attack. While all the rest of the army was thinking of our second offensive as coming in the spring of 1919, they knew that it was coming two weeks after the Saint-Mihiel offensive.

This change of plan was the result of a conference between Marshal Foch and General Pershing which planned swift use of opportunity. The German Macedonian front was crumbling, the Turks were falling back before Allenby, and the Italians had turned the tables on the Austrians along the Piave. Equally, if not more to the point for us, the Anglo-French offensive begun on August 8th had gained ground with a facility that quickened the pulse-beat of the Allied soldiers and invited the broadening of the front of attack until, between Soissons and the North Sea, the Germans were swept off Kemmel and out of Armentières and away from Arras and across the old Somme battlefield.

The communiqués were telling the truth about the Allies' light losses; at every point the initiative was ours. The Germans were paying a heavier price in rearguard action than we in the attack. It was a surprising reaction from the pace they had shown in their spring offensives. All information that came through the secret channels from behind the enemy lines supported the conviction of the Allied soldiers at the front that German morale was weakening.

Ludendorff, the master tactician, was facing a new problem. That once dependable German machine was not responding with the alacrity, the team-play, and the bravery which had been his dependence in all his plans. He had to consider, in view of the situation that was now developing, whether or not the Saint-Mihiel salient was worth holding at a sacrifice of men. He knew that we were to attack in force; he knew that in an offensive a new army is bound to suffer from dispersion and from confusion in its transport arrangements. If he allowed us to strike into the air, he could depend upon the mires of the plain of the Woëvre to impede us while the defenses of Metz would further stay our advance, with the result that his reserves, released from Saint-Mihiel, might safely be sent to resist the pressure on the Anglo-French front, either in holding the Hindenburg line or in the arduous and necessarily deliberate business of covering his withdrawal to a new and shorter line of defense based on the Meuse River. The German war machine, which had been tied for four years to its depots and other semi-permanent arrangements for trench warfare, could not move at short notice.

A generalization might consider the war on the Western Front as two great battles and one prolonged siege. For the first six weeks there had been the "war of movement," as the French called it, until the Germans, beaten back from the Marne, had formed the old trench line. Throughout the four years of siege warfare that had ensued, the object of every important offensive, Allied and German, had been a return to the "war of movement." After a breach had been made in the fortifications, the attacking army would make the most of the momentum of success in rapid advances and maneuvers, throw the enemy's units into confusion, and, through the disruption of the delicate web of communications by which he controlled their movements for cohesive effort, precipitate a disaster. The long preparations which had preceded the offensives of 1915, 1916, and 1917 had always given the enemy ample warning of what to expect. He had met concentrations for attack with concentrations for defense. The sector where the issue was joined became a settled area of violent siege operations into which either side poured its fresh divisions as into a funnel. Succeeding offensives, in realization of the limitations of a narrower sector,—which only left the advance in a V with flanks exposed,—had broadened their fronts of attack; but none had been broad enough to permit of vital tactical surprises after the initial onset. The attrition of the man-power of the offensive force had so kept pace with that of the defensive that the offensive had never had sufficient reserves to force a decision when the reserves of the defensive were approaching exhaustion. Moreover, the Allies had never had sufficient preponderance of men, ordnance, and munitions to warrant undertaking the enterprise, which was the dream of every tactician, of several offensives at different points of the front at the same time or in steady alternation.

Now from Soissons to the sea the French and British were developing a comprehensive movement of attacks, now here and now there, in rapid succession. This drive was not a great impulse that died down as had previous Allied offensives, but a weaving, sweeping, methodical advance. Not only was German morale weakening and ours strengthening, but attrition was now definitely in our favor. Ludendorff's reserves were all in sight. His cards were on the table; we could feel assured that we knew fairly well how he would play them. Our own hand was being reinforced by three hundred thousand men a month from the immense reserves in the American training camps. We could press our initiative without fear of being embarrassed by serious counter-attacks taking advantage of our having overextended ourselves.

Thus far, however, the Germans were still in possession of their old trench system, except at a few points; our counter-offensive had only been recovering the ground which the Germans had won in their spring and summer offensives. Now that the tide had turned against him, Ludendorff, if his situation were as bad as we hoped, had two alternatives, and a third which was a combination of the two. One was to fall back to the proposed shorter line of the Meuse. This would give him the winter for fortifying his new positions. As a shorter front would allow him deeper concentrations for defense and the Allies less room for maneuvers in surprise, it must be their purpose to prevent his successful retreat by prompt, aggressive, and persistent action. The other alternative was to make a decisive stand on the old line, where for four years the Germans had been perfecting their fortifications. If we should overwhelm them when he was holding them rigidly, we should have the advantage of a wall in fragments when it did break. The third plan was to use the old fortifications as a line of strong resistance in supporting his withdrawal. Broadly, this was the one that he was to follow.

Everything pointed to the time as ripe for the fulfilment for the Allies of the tactical dream which had called Ludendorff to his own ambitious campaign in the spring of 1918. Marshal Foch would now broaden his front of alternating attacks from Verdun to the North Sea, in the hope of freeing the Allied armies from trench shackles for a decisive campaign in the open. The American part in this bold undertaking was to be its boldest feature.

If a soldier from Mars had come to Earth at any time from October, 1914, to October, 1918, and had been shown on a flat map the fronts of the two adversaries, he would have said that the obvious strategic point of a single offensive would be between the Meuse River and the Argonne Forest. This would be a blow against the enemy's lines of communication: a blow equivalent to turning his flank. If the soldier from Mars had been shown a relief map, he would have changed his mind, and he would have perfectly understood, as a soldier, why all the offensives had been in the north, from Champagne to Flanders, where breaking through the main line of defenses would bring the aggressor to better ground for his decisive movement in the open. He would also have understood why the front from the Argonne to the Swiss border had been tranquil since the abortive effort of the Germans at Verdun.

When Ludendorff undertook his great offensive of March, 1918, he did not repeat Falkenhayn's error, but turned to the north, where the Allies had made their attacks. In that Lorraine-Alsatian stalemate to the south, with the Vosges mountains and interlocking hills from Switzerland to the forts of Metz as the stronghold of the Germans, and the forts of Verdun, Toul, Epinal, and Belfort as the strongholds of the French, the odds were apparently too much against an offensive by either side to warrant serious consideration. Yet a watch was kept. Over the French mind was always the shadow of a possible German offensive toward Belfort; and, when the sector which our young army was to hold in Alsace and Lorraine had been first discussed in July, 1917, the French excluded the defense of a portion of the front opposite Belfort, with the polite explanation that they preferred to hold that themselves. But the Germans never did more than make the feint of an offensive in the south, which Ludendorff used in the winter of 1918 to draw off French troops and guns from the north: for the army with the numbers and the initiative of offense can always force the defense to waste movements to meet threats of attack. This was another advantage which the Allies could now use in keeping Ludendorff in doubt as to where our real blows were to be struck.

The heights of the Saint-Mihiel salient, which look directly across the plain of the Woëvre to the fortress of Metz, may be said roughly to have formed the left flank of the Lorraine-Alsatian stalemate. They continue onward in the hills which are crowned by the forts of Verdun, and then across the Meuse River for a distance of twenty miles through the bastion of the Argonne Forest, where they gradually break into the more rolling country of Champagne. The Meuse winds past Saint-Mihiel and through the town of Verdun, and then, in its devious course, swings gradually to the northwest until, at Sedan, it turns full westward.

Our new offensive was to be between the Meuse River and the western edge of the Argonne Forest. East of the forest is the little river Aire, and between its valley and the valley of the Meuse rises back of the German front a whale-back of heights, as I shall describe them for the sake of bringing a picture to mind, though the comparison is not absolute. The practical summit of the whale-back is to the eastward of the village of Buzancy. We may use Buzancy as a symbol: for it is only in a highly technical history that the detail of names, confusing to the general and even the professional reader, is warrantable. The summit of the whale-back gained, you are looking down an apron of rolling ground and small hills toward the turn of the Meuse westward past Sedan, where the German Army surrounded the French Army in the Franco-Prussian War.

To the northeast, readily accessible to attack, are the Briey iron-fields, which were invaluable to the Germans for war material. Along the valley of the Meuse after it turns westward, and along the Franco-Belgian frontier runs the great railroad from Metz to Lille, which is double-track all the way and in large part four-track. Incidentally this connected the coal fields of northern France with Germany, but its main service was to form the western trunk line of communication for the German armies in Belgium and northern and eastern France. It was linked up with the railways spreading northward into Belgium and southward toward Amiens and Paris in the arterial system which gave its life blood to the German occupation. If this road were cut, the German troops in retreat would have to pass through the narrow neck of the bottle at Liége.

The dramatic possibilities of gaining the heights of Buzancy and bringing the Lille-Metz tracks under artillery fire had the appeal of a strategic effect of Napoleonic days. The German staff had been fully aware of the danger when, in their retreat after their repulse on the Marne, which the world saw only as the spectacle of the French Army inflicting a defeat on an advancing foe, it used its tactical opportunity for choosing, with comparative deliberation, advantageous defensive positions from the Argonne Forest to the Meuse at the foot of the whale-back.

For future operations it was depending upon more than the elaborate fortifications of that line. Every hundred yards from the foot of the whale-back to the summit was in its favor in resisting attack. Higher ground leads to still higher ground, not in a regular system of ridges but in a terrain where nature cunningly serves the soldier. Nowhere might the defense invite the attack into salients with a better confidence, or feel more certain of the success of his counter-attacks. All roads, and all valleys where roads might be built, were under observation. Heights looked across to heights on either side of the two river troughs, heights of every shape from sharp ridges and rounded hills to peaked summits crowned by woods. Tongues of woods ran across valleys. Patches of woods covered ravines and gullies where machine-gunners would have ideal cover and command of ground. Reverse slopes formed walls for the protection of the artillery. The attack must fight blindly; the defense could fight with eyes open.

Had the Allies attempted an offensive in the Meuse-Argonne sector in the first four years of the war, the long and extensive preparations then regarded as requisite for an ambitious effort against first-line fortifications would have warned the Germans in time to make full use of their positions in counter-preparations. All the advantage of railroads and highways were with them in concentrating men and material. It might not be a long distance in miles from the Argonne line to the Lille-Metz railway or to the Briey iron-fields, but it was a long distance if you were to travel it with an army and its impedimenta against the German Army in its prime. When attrition was in his favor in the early period, the German might well have preferred that the Allied offensive of Champagne, or Loos, or the Somme, or Passchendaele, should have been attempted here: thus leaving open to him, after he had inflicted a bloody repulse in this sector, the better ground in the north for a telling counter-offensive.

Thus an Allied effort toward Mézières, Sedan, and Briey would have been madness until the propitious moment came. Had it really come now? Anyone who was familiar with the history of warfare on the Western Front might ask the question thoughtfully. Bear in mind that we had not yet taken Saint-Mihiel and were not yet certain of our success there; and that from Soissons to Switzerland the old German line was intact. North of Soissons we had broken into it at only a few points. In the event that they had had to make a strategic withdrawal, the Germans had always followed the tactical system of a full recoil to strong chosen positions, where they resisted with sudden and terrific violence and held stubbornly and thriftily until they began one of their powerful counter-thrusts.

MAP NO. 2
WHERE AMERICAN DIVISIONS WERE IN LINE, FROM OUR ENTRY INTO THE TRENCHES UNTIL THE ARMISTICE.

Thus they had fallen back after their defeat on the Marne, from before Warsaw, and from Bapaume to the Hindenburg line. Again and again their morale had been reported breaking, and they had seemed in a disadvantageous position, only to recover their spirit as by imperial command and to extricate themselves in a reversal of form. The German Staff was still in being; the German Army still had reserve divisions and was back on powerful trench systems with ample artillery, machine-guns, and ammunition. Whether Ludendorff was to stand on the old line or withdraw to a new line, either operation would be imperiled by the loss of those heights between the Argonne and the Meuse. He must say, as Pétain had said at Verdun: "They shall not pass!"

In my "America in France" I have told of our project, formed in June, 1917, when we had not yet a division of infantry in France and submarine destruction was on the increase, for an army of a million men in France, capable of the expansion to two million which must come, General Pershing thought, before the war could be won. That far-sighted conception and the decision which was now taken are the two towering landmarks of the troublous road of our effort in France. By July 1st, 1918, we had a million men in France, or nearly double the number of the schedule arranged between the French and American governments. We should soon have two millions.

When the Allies called for more man-power, in the crisis of the German offensive of March, 1918, the British had supplied the shipping that brought the divisions from our home training camps tumbling into France. They were divisions, not an army; and in equipment they were not even divisions. They had been hurried to the front to support the British and French as reserves, and they had been thrown into battle to resist the later German offensives. There had been no niggardliness in our attitude. We offered all our man-power as cannon-fodder to meet the emergency. Across the Paris road behind Château-Thierry we had given more than the proof of our valor. In the drive toward Soissons and to the Vesle we had established our personal mastery over the enemy. We had pressed him at close quarters, and kept on pressing him until he had to go. The confidence inherent in our nature, strengthened by training, had grown with the test of battle. We had known none of the reverses which lead to caution. More than ever our impulse was to attack.

Château-Thierry had taught Marshal Foch that he could depend upon any American division as "shock" troops which would charge and keep on charging until exhausted. Now he would use this quality to the utmost. To the American Army he assigned the part which relied upon the call of victory to soldiers as fresh as the French on the Marne, and, in their homesickness for their native land, impatient for quick results. If a Congressional Committee, knowing all that General Pershing knew, had been told of the plan of the Meuse-Argonne, they would probably have said: "No leader shall sacrifice our men in that fashion. We will not stand by and see them sent to slaughter."

The reputation of a commander was at stake. Should we break through promptly to the summit of the heights, then we might take divisions, corps, even armies, prisoners; but that was a dream dependent upon a deterioration in German staff work and in the morale of the German soldier which was inconceivable. The great prize was the hope of an early decision of the war; in expending a hundred or two hundred thousand casualties in the autumn and early winter, instead of a million, perhaps, during the coming summer. At home we should be saved from drafting more millions of men into our army; from the floating of more liberty loans; from harsher restrictions upon our daily life; from the calling of more women and children to hard labor; from the prolongation of the agony, the suspense, the horror, and the costs of the cataclysm of destruction.

There were more handicaps than the heights to consider: those of our unreadiness. If we had failed, this would have meant the burden of criticism heavy upon the shoulders of the commander-in-chief, who would have been recalled. Dreams of any miraculous success aside, it was not the example of the swift results in a day at Antietam, or the brilliant maneuver of Jackson at Chancellorsville, but the wrestling, hammering, stubbornly resisting effort of the men of the North and South in the Appomattox campaign which was to call upon our heritage of fortitude. In that series of attacks which Marshal Foch was now to develop, our part as the right flank of the three great armies was in keeping with the original plan of 1917: only we were facing the Meuse instead of the Rhine. Without sufficient material or experience, we were to keep on driving, not looking forward to the dry ground and fair weather of summer but toward the inclemency of winter. There against the main artery of German communications we were to launch a threat whose power was dependent upon the determined initiative of our men. Every German soldier killed or wounded was one withdrawn from the fronts of the British and French, or from Ludendorff's reserves which must protect his retreat; and every shell and every machine-gun bullet which was fired at us was one less fired at our Allies. It was to be in many respects a thankless battle, and for this reason it was the more honor to our soldiers.

II
INTO LINE FOR ATTACK

The Meuse-Argonne and the Somme Battle of 1916—The British had four months of preparation—And a trained army—But a resolute enemy—Our untried troops—Outguessing Ludendorff—Prime importance of surprise—Blindman's buff—What it means to move armies—Fixing supply centers—Staffs arrive—Their inexperience—Learning on the run—Our confidence—Aiming for the stars—Up on time.

Comparisons with the Battle of the Somme, the first great British offensive, which I observed through the summer of 1916, often occurred to me during the Meuse-Argonne battle. In both a new army, in its vigor of aggressive impulse, continued its attack with an indomitable will, counting its gains by hundreds of yards, but never for a moment yielding the initiative in its tireless attrition.

The British were four months in preparing for their thrust on the basis of nearly two years' training in active warfare, with all their arrangements for transport and supply settled in a small area only an hour's steaming across the Channel from home. Behind their lines they built light railroads and highways. They had ample billeting space, and their great hospitals were within easy reach. They gathered road-repairing machinery and trained their labor battalions; built depots and yards; established immense dumps of ammunition and engineering material; brought their heavy guns into position methodically, and registered them with caution over a long period; set an immense array of trench mortars in secure positions; dug deep assembly trenches for the troops to occupy before going "over the top"; and ran their water pipes up to the front line, ready for extension into conquered territory.

MAP NO. 3
OFFENSIVES OF SEPTEMBER, 1918. RELATION OF MEUSE-ARGONNE BATTLE TO THE DECISIVE ALLIED OFFENSIVE MOVEMENT.

Their divisions had been seasoned by long trench experience, tested in the terrific fire of the Ypres salient and trained in elaborate trench raids for a great offensive. All their methods were as deliberate as British thoroughness required. Units were carefully rehearsed in their parts, and their liaison worked out by staffs that had long operated together. Commanders of battalions, brigades, and divisions had been tried out, and corps commanders and staffs developed.

On the other hand, the Germans knew that the British attack was coming. Their army was in the prime of its numbers and efficiency. They had immence forces of reserves to draw upon to meet an offensive which was centered in one sector, with no danger of having to meet offensives in another sector. We were striking in one of several offensives, each having for its object rapidity and suddenness of execution, over about the same breadth of front as the British in 1916; and against the Germans, not in their prime, as I have said, but when they had lost the initiative and were deteriorating.

The increase of the skill of infantry in the attack, in their nicely calculated and acrobatic coördination with protecting curtains of accurate artillery fire, had been the supreme factor in the progress of tactics. As a young army we had all these lessons to learn and to apply to our own special problems. As we could not use the divisions that were at Saint-Mihiel in the initial onset in the Meuse-Argonne, we had to depend upon others from training camps and upon those which were just being relieved from the Château-Thierry area. Two of them had never been under fire; several had had only trench experience. They had not fought or trained together as an army. Many of our commanders had not been tried out. Some of the divisions were as yet without their artillery brigades; others had never served with their artillery brigades in action. By the morning of September 25th, or thirteen days after the Saint-Mihiel attack, all the infantry, the guns, the aviation, and the tanks must be in position to throw their weight, in disciplined solidarity, against a line of fortifications which had all the strength that ant-like industry could build on chosen positions.

We had neither material nor time for extensive preparations. We must depend upon the shock of a sudden and terrific impact and the momentum of irresistible dash. If we took the enemy by surprise when he was holding the line weakly with few reserves, we might go far. Indeed, never was the element of surprise more essential. We were countering Ludendorff's anticipation that, if he withdrew from the salient, we should stall our forces ineffectually in the mud before Metz: countering it with the anticipation that he would never consider that a new army, though it grasped his intention, would within two weeks' time dare another offensive against the heights of the whale-back.

For our dense concentrations we had only two first-class roads leading up to the twenty-mile front between the Meuse and the Forest's edge. These were ill placed for our purpose. We might form our ammunition dumps in the woods, but nothing could have been more fatal than to have built a road, for to an aviator nothing is so visible as the line of a new road. Where aviators were flying at a height of twelve thousand feet in the Battle of the Somme, they were now flying with a splendid audacity as low as a thousand feet, which enabled them to locate new building, piles of material, even well-camouflaged gun positions; and the minute changes in a photograph taken today in comparison with one of yesterday were sufficient evidence to a staff expert that some movement was in progress. An unusual amount of motor-truck traffic or even an unusual number of automobiles, not to mention the marching of an unusual number of troops along a road by day, was immediately detected.

All our hundreds of thousands of men, all the artillery, all the transport must move forward at night. To show lights was to sprinkle tell-tale stars in the carpet of darkness as another indication that a sector which had known routine quiet for month on month was awakening with new life that could mean only one thing to a military observer. With the first suspicion of an offensive the enemy's troops in the trenches would be put on guard, reserves might be brought up, machine-guns installed, more aviators summoned, trench raids undertaken, and all the means of information quickened in search for enlightening details.

It was possible that the German might have learned our plan at its inception from secret agents within our own lines. If he had, it would not have been the first time that this had happened. In turn, his preparations for defense might be kept secret in order to make his reception hotter and more crafty. He might let the headlong initiative of our troops carry us into a salient at certain points before he exerted his pressure disastrously for us on our flanks. Thus he had met the French offensive of the spring of 1917; thus he had concentrated his murder from Gommecourt to La Boisselle in the Somme Battle.

Not only had our army to "take over" from the French in all the details of a sector, from transport and headquarters to front line, but the Fourth French Army, on our left, which was to attack at the same hour, must be reinforced with troops and guns. The decision that the Saint-Mihiel offensive was not to follow through to Etain and Mars-la-Tour meant that French as well as American units and material must move from that sector to the Argonne. Immediately it had covered the charge of our troops the heavy artillery, both French and American, was to be started on its way, and, after it, other artillery and auxiliary troops and transport of all kinds as they could be spared.

"It sounds a bromide to say that you cannot begin attacking until your army is at the front," said a young reserve officer, "but I never knew what it meant before to get an army to the front."

He had studied his march tables at the Staff School at Langres; now he was applying them. Young reserve officers had a taste of the difficulties of troop movements. They had to locate units, see that they received their orders, and set them on their way according to schedule, with strict injunctions from "on high" to see that everybody was up on time. They had lessons in the speed of units and the capacity of roads which, at the sight of a column of soldiers on the march, will always rise in their recollections of anxious days.

When haste is vital, unexpected contingencies due to the uneven character of men and materials break into any system. That is the "trouble" with war, as one of these young officers said. Everything depends upon system, and system is impossible when the very nature of war develops unexpected demands that are prejudicial to any dependable processes of routine. With urgent calls for locomotives and rolling stock coming from every quarter to meet the demands of the extension of the Allied offensive campaign over an unexampled breadth of front, the railroads, which were few in this region, could not transport troops and artillery which ordinarily would have gone by train.

Three road routes were available from the Saint-Mihiel to the Argonne region. Artillery tractors that could go only three were in columns with vehicles that could go ten and fifteen miles an hour. Field artillery regiments, coming out from the Saint-Mihiel sector after two weeks of ceaseless travail, were delayed by having their horses killed by shell-fire. The exhaustion of horses from overwork was becoming increasingly pitiful. They could not have the proper rest and care. In some instances they made in a night only half the distance which schedules required. When the deep mud, and outbursts of bombardment from the enemy, retarded the relief of troops, motor buses, which were waiting for them, had to be dispatched on other errands, leaving weary legs to march instead of ride. Military police, army and corps auxiliaries of all kinds, and various headquarters must be transferred.

Officers who had hoped for a little sleep once the Saint-Mihiel offensive was under way received "travel orders," with instructions to reach the Argonne area by hopping a motor-truck or in any way they could. Soldiers, after marching all night, might seek sleep in the villages if there were room in houses, barns, or haylofts. Blocks of traffic were frequent when some big gun or truck slewed into a slough in the darkness.

The processions on these three roads from Saint-Mihiel represented only one of many movements from all directions to the Argonne sector. French units had to pass by our new front to that of the Fourth Army. A French officer at Bar-le-Duc, who had charge of routing all the traffic, was an old hand at this business of moving armies. He perfectly appreciated that curses were speeding toward his office from all four points of the compass where traffic was stalled or columns waited an interminably long time at cross-roads for their turn to move, or guns or tanks or anything else in all the varied assortment were not arriving on schedule time. By telephone he kept in touch with American and French units in the process of the mobilization, while he moved his chessmen on the rigid lines of his map.

The "sacred road" from Bar-le-Duc to Verdun coursed again with the full tide of urgent demands; only this time the traffic turned off on the roads to the left instead of going on to the town. With each passing day, as the concentration increased, daylight became a more portentous foe. "No lights! No lights!" was the watchword of all thought which the military police spoke in no uncertain tones to any chauffeur who thought that one flash of his lamps would do no harm; some of the language used was brimstone and figuratively illuminating enough to have made an aurora borealis. Camouflage became an obsession of everyone who had any responsibility. Discomfort, loss of temper and of time were the handicaps in this blind man's buff of trying to keep the landscape looking as natural by day as it had in the previous months of tranquil trench warfare.

Traffic management was only one and not the most trying or important part of the problem. If the demands upon the Services of Supply were not met, failure was certain: our army would be hungry and without ammunition. In no department was the additional burden of the Meuse-Argonne more keenly felt than in this. New railheads must be established, and additional vehicular transport sent forward to connect up with the new front. Though the mastering of the objective in the Saint-Mihiel operation released a certain surplus, it was disturbingly small. The line established after the salient was cut had become violent. It would require large quantities of supplies as long as we should hold it; and it was already evident that the Meuse-Argonne offensive was to be a greedy monster which could never have its hunger satisfied.

Every hour that we kept the enemy ignorant of the strength of our concentration was an hour gained. The one thing that he must not know was the number of divisions which we were marshaling for our effort. They were the sure criterion of the formidability of our intentions. The most delicate task of all was the taking over of the front line from the French. Not until the stage was set with the accessories of the heavy artillery, the new depots, and ammunition dumps did the roads near the front, cleared for their progress, throb under the blanket of night with the scraping rhythm of the doughboys' marching steps, infusing in the preparations the life of a myriad human pulse-beats in unison. Our faith was in them, in the days before the battle and all through the battle to the end. Their faces so many moving white points in the darkness, each figure under its heavy equipment seemed alike in shadowy silhouette. In the mystery of night their disciplined power, suggestive of the tiger creeping stealthily forward for the spring on his prey, was even more significant than by day.

The men were prepared in the red blood that coursed young arteries, in their litheness and their pride and will to "go to it." They had their rifles, their belts full of ammunition, their gas masks, and their rations. It was not for them to ask any questions—not even if the barrages which would cover their charges would be accurate, if the tanks would kill machine-gun nests, if the barbed wire would be cut, and if their generals would make mistakes. Suspense, not of the mind but of the heart, lightened at the sight of their movement, so automatic and yet so stirringly human. The gigantic preparations of dumps, gun positions, and trains of powerful tractors became only a demonstration of the mighty energy of our industrial age beside that subtler endeavor which had formed them for their task and set them down as the pawns of a staff in a gamble with death. Might the big guns that the troops passed, grim hard shadows in ravines and woods, do their work well in order that the empty ambulances at rest in long lines might have little to do!

By battalions and companies the marching columns separated, taking by-roads and paths, as their officers studied their maps and received instructions from French guides who knew the ground. By daylight they were dissipated into the landscape. The hornets were in their hives; they would swarm as dawn broke to the thunders of the artillery. Attacks were always at dawn; and dawn had taken on a new meaning to us since the morning of July 18th, when our 1st and 2nd Divisions, in the company of crack French divisions, had started the first of the counter-offensives.

The success of Saint-Mihiel had developed corps staffs which must now direct the Meuse-Argonne, while others took over the arrangements at Saint-Mihiel. Major-General Hunter Liggett, pioneer of corps commanders, with the First Corps was to be on the left; Major-General George H. Cameron, with the Fifth Corps in the center; and Major-General Robert L. Bullard, with the Third Corps on the right. Groups of officers making a pilgrimage in automobiles to the new sector were to be the "brains" of the coming attack; for our corps command was an administrative unit which took over the direction of a different set of divisions from those under it at Saint-Mihiel.

The corps staffs had only four or five days for their staff preparations for the battle. It was Army Headquarters in the town hall of Souilly which set the army objective, the corps limits, and the tactical direction of the attack as a whole, while the corps set the divisional limits and objectives to accord with the army objective. At our call we had French experience of the sector, and in this war of maps we had maps. Our prevision in this respect was excellent. The French furnished us with millions of maps in the course of the war; we had our own map-printing presses at Langres; and we had movable presses in the field for printing maps which gave the results of the latest observations of the enemy's defenses. A snowstorm of maps descended upon our army, and still the cry was for more. Not only battalion and company, but platoon and even squad commanders needed these large-scale backgrounds marked with their parts.

Yet maps have their limitations. They may show the ground in much detail, but, even when the blue diagrams and symbols are supposed up to date, not the bushes where the enemy's machine-gun nests are hidden, or what the enemy has done overnight in the way of defenses. Nor are maps plummets into human psychology. Even when they have located machine-gun nests they cannot say whether the gunners who man them will yield easily or will fight to the death. If the British on the Somme, after months of preparation and study of the defenses of the sector, had more elaborate directions for their units than we, it does not mean that, considering its inexperience, our staff did not accomplish wonders.

Our corps commanders may have known their division commanders in time of peace, but they had never been their superiors in action of any kind. Their artillery groupings and aviation arrangements included French units as well as their own. There was no time for considering niceties in dispositions. Division commanders who had to arrange the details of their coöperation had never served together. They had scores of problems, due to the haste of their mobilization, to consider; for the burden of apprehension that pressed them close was of apprehension lest they should not be up on time. They and their officers went over the ground at the front, but they had not the time to make the thorough observation that any painstaking and energetic division commander would have preferred.

A division with all its artillery, machine-guns, and transport is a ponderous column in movement, with every part having its regulation place. One day in one set of villages and the next in another, the communication of orders and requirements down through all the branches is difficult, and the more so when you are short of dispatch riders, and there is a limit to what can be done over the field telephone. The unexpected demand for wires for our second great offensive must not find the signal corps unprepared; or a people as dependent on telephones and telegraph as we are, and so accustomed to having them materialize on request, would have been helpless in making war. The deepest tactical concern was, of course, the coördination of the artillery with the infantry advance. It is only a difference of a hundred yards' range, as we all know, between putting your shells among your own men instead of the enemy's.

Reliable communication from the infantry to the aviator and his reliable report of his observations to the artillery and infantry is one of the complicated features in that team-play, which, in the game of death, needs all the finesse of professional baseball, a secret service, and a political machine, plus the requisite poise, despite poor food and short hours of sleep, for worthily leading men in battle. Some divisions that went into this action had not yet received their artillery; or again their artillery arrived from the training camp, where the guns had just been received, barely in time to go into position, so that an inexperienced artillery commander reported to an inexperienced division commander with whom he had never served. There were batteries without horses, which the horses of other batteries pulled into position after they had brought up their own. Battery commanders received their table of barrages and their objectives of fire, and, without registering, had to trust to observation by men untried in battle or by aviators who had never before observed in a big operation. Aviators had been trained to expect the infantry to put out panels, and they might say that the infantry did not show their panels, while the infantry would deny the charge. Such things had happened before. They would happen this time. They happen to the most veteran of armies, whose long experience, however, may have an excellent substitute in other qualities which we had in plenitude, as we shall see.

All our own guns were of French make, with the exception of a few howitzers. The gun-producing power of the French arsenals supplying us with our artillery and our machine-guns—the Brownings were only just beginning to arrive—in addition to supplying all their own forces over the long front of their offensive was one of the marvels of the war and an important factor in victory. The majority of our planes were also of French make: not until August had the Liberty motors begun to arrive. The French had supplied us with additional aviation and tanks, as well as artillery, from their own army; but much of this was new. All the Allies, indeed, were robbing their training camps for the supreme effort that was about to be made from the Meuse to the Channel.

While the public, which thinks of aviation in terms of combat, admired the exploits of the aces in bringing down enemy planes, which they looked for in the communiqués, the army was thinking of the value of the work of the observers, whose heroism in running the gamut of fire from air and earth in order to bring back information might change the fate of battles. Training for combat, perhaps, more nearly approximated service conditions than training for observation. A fighting aviator, with natural born courage, audacity, and coolness, who goes out determinedly to bring down his man, makes the ace. These qualities were never lacking in our fliers. They went after their men and got them, in a record of successes which was not the least of the honors which our army won in France. The observer had no public praise; he was always the butt of the complaint that he did not bring enough information, or that he brought inaccurate information. His complex responsibilities were singularly dependent upon that experience which comes only from practice.

Instead of applying the lessons of Saint-Mihiel at leisure, as we had hoped, to the whole army, we had to apply them on the run in the rapid concentration of divisions which had not been at Saint-Mihiel. Yet the supreme thing was not schooling. It was a seemingly superhuman task in speed. It was to have the infantry up on time even if the other units were limping. In this we succeeded. On the night of September 24th, from the Meuse to the Forest's western edge every division was in position. We had kept faith with Marshal Foch's orders. We were ready to go "over the top."

The Marshal postponed the attack for another day. Rumor gave the reason that the French Fourth Army was not ready; possibly the real reason, or at least a contributory reason, was in the canniness of such an old hand at offensives as Marshal Foch. Ours was a new army under enormous pressure. Veteran armies were always asking, at the last moment, for more time in which to complete their preparations before attacking. Possibly the Marshal had set the 25th as the date with a view to forcing our effort under spur of the calendar, while he looked forward to granting the inevitable request for delay. At all events the respite was most welcome. Our staff had time for further conferences and attention to their arrangements for supplies, and our combat troops a breathing spell which gave their officers another day in which to study the positions they were to storm.

When I considered all the digging necessary for making the gun positions, or had even a cursory view of the parks of divisional transport, of the reserves crowded in villages and woods, of the ammunition trains, and of the busy corps and division headquarters, I wondered if it were possible that the Germans could not have been apprised that a concentration was in progress. Not only did pocket lamps flash like fireflies from the hands of those who used them thoughtlessly, but despite precautions careless drivers turned on motor lights, and some rolling kitchen was bound to let out a flare of sparks, while the locomotives running in and out at railheads showed streams of flames from their stacks, and here and there fires were unwittingly started. An aviator riding the night, as he surveyed the shadowy landscape, could not miss these manifestations of activity. If he shut off his engine he might hear above the low thunder of transport the roar of the tanks advancing into position, of the heavy caterpillar tractors drawing big guns. When the air was clear and the wind favorable, the increasing volume of sound directed toward the front must have been borne to sharp ears on the other side of No Man's Land. All this I may mention again, without reference to observations by spies within our lines.

On our side, we might try to learn if the enemy knew of our coming, and how much he knew. A thin fringe of French had remained in the front-line trenches, with our men in place behind them. Thus our voices of different timbre, speaking the English tongue in regions where only French had been spoken, might not be heard if we forgot the rules of silence, which were as mandatory by custom as in a church or a library; and besides, if the Germans made a raid for information they would not take American prisoners. They did make some minor raids, capturing Frenchmen who, perhaps unwittingly when wounded or in the reaction from danger, and subject to an intelligence system skilled in humoring and indirect catechism, told more than they thought they were telling. Information that we had from German prisoners left no doubt that the Germans knew at least that the Americans were moving into the sector, but did not expect a powerful offensive. This, as we had anticipated, was discounted as being out of the question on the heels of the Saint-Mihiel offensive. Our new army, the Germans thought, had not the skill or the material for such a concentration, even if we had the troops.

In our demonstration that we did have the skill and the energy, and that in one way and another we were able to secure the material even though it were inadequate, we were peculiarly American; and we were most significantly American in the adaptable exercise of the reserve nervous force of our restless, dynamic natures, which makes us wonderful in a race against time. We strengthen our optimism with the pessimism which spurs our ambition to accomplishment by its self-criticism that is never satisfied.

On all hands I heard complaints by officers concerning lack of equipment, of personnel, of training, and of time. But no one could spare the breath for more than objurgations, uttered in exclamatory emphasis, which eased the mind. I could make a chapter out of these railings. Yet if I implied that the unit, whether salvage or aviation, hospital or front-line battalion, tanks or signal corps, or any other, would not be able to carry out its part, I was assailed with a burst of outraged and flaming optimism. And optimism is the very basis of the psychologic formula of war. Americans have it by nature. We lean forward on our oars. Optimism comes to us from the conquest of a continent. It presides at the birth of every infant, who may one day be president of the United States.

Confidence was rock-ribbed in a commander-in-chief's square jaw; it rang out in voices over the telephone; it was in the very pulse-beats of the waiting infantry; it shone in every face, however weary. We had won at Château-Thierry; we had won at Saint-Mihiel; we should win again. The infantry might not conceive the nature of the defenses or of the fire they might have to encounter. So much the better. They would have the more vim in "driving through," said the staff.

The objectives which we had set ourselves on that first day, after the conquest of the first-line fortifications, which we took for granted, were a tribute to our faith in Marshal Foch's own optimism. On the first day we were striking for the planets. In our second and third days' objectives we did not hesitate to strike for the stars. This plan would give us the more momentum, and if we were to be stopped it would carry us the farther before we were. Of course we did not admit that we might be stopped. If we were not, the German military machine would be broken; and any doubts on the part of generals were locked fast in their inner consciousness, for uttered word of scepticism was treason.

On the night of the 25th, when all the guns began the preliminary bombardment, stretching an aurora from the hills of Verdun into Champagne, our secret was out. From the whirlwind of shells into his positions the enemy knew that we were coming at dawn. With thousands of flashes saluting the heavens it no longer mattered if a rolling kitchen sent up a shower of sparks or an officer inadvertently turned the gleam of his pocket flash skyward. Along the front our infantry slipped forward into the place of the French veterans, who came marching back down the roads.

"Gentlemen," said the French, "the sector is yours. A pleasant morning to you!"

III
NEW AND OLD DIVISIONS

A military machine impossible in human nature—Regular traditions—National Guard sentiment—National Army solidarity—Divisional pride—Our first six divisions unavailable to start in the Meuse-Argonne—British-trained divisions—What veteran divisions would have known.

The Leavenworth plan was to harmonize regulars, National Guard, and National Army into a force so homogeneous that flesh and blood became machinery, with every soldier, squad, platoon, brigade, and division as much like all the others as peas in a pod; but human elements older than the Leavenworth School, which had given soldiers cheer on the march and fire in battle from the days of the spear to the days of the quick-firer, hampered the practical application of the cold professional idea worked out in conscientious logic in the academic cloister. It may be whispered confidentially that all unconsciously their own training and associations sometimes made the inbred and most natural affection of the Leavenworth graduates for the regulars subversive of the very principle which they had set out to practise with such resolutely expressed impartiality. A regular felt that he was a little more of a regular if he were serving with a regular division.

"We're not having any of this good-as-you-are nonsense in this regiment," said its Colonel, talking to a fellow-classman who was on the staff. "We're filled up with reserve officers and rookies,—but we're regulars nevertheless. We've started right with the regular idea—the way we did in the old —th"—in which the officers had served together as lieutenants.

By the same token of sentiment and association the National Guardsmen remained National Guardsmen. They also had a tradition. If they were not proud of it they would be unnatural fighters. While the average citizen had taken no interest in preparedness, except in the abstraction that national defense was an excellent thing, they had drilled on armory floors and attended annual encampments. Sometimes the average citizen had spoken of them as "tin soldiers"; and they were conscious perhaps of a certain superciliousness toward them on the part of regular officers. Drawn from the same communities, members of the same military club that met at the armory, they already had their pride of regiment and of company: a feeling held in common with Guardsmen from other parts of the country, who belonged to the same service from the same motives. Should that old Connecticut or Alabama or any other regiment with a Civil War record, and, perhaps, with a record dating from the Revolution, forget its old number because it was given a new number, or its own armory, because it went to a training camp? Relatives and friends, who bowed to the edict of military uniformity and anonymity, would still think of it as their home regiment. If Minneapolis mixed its sons with St. Paul's, they would still be sons of Minneapolis.

While all volunteers felt that they were entitled to the credit of offering their services without waiting on the call, the draft men, who had awaited the call, had their own conviction about their duty, which, from the hour when they walked over from the railway stations to the camp, gave them a sense of comradeship: while they might argue that it was more honor to found than to follow a tradition. Their parents, sisters, and sweethearts were just as fond, and their friends just as proud, of them as they had been in the Guard. Aside from a few regular superiors, their officers were graduates of the Officers' Training Camps, who, as the regulars said, had nothing to unlearn and were subject to no political associations. Yes, the draft men considered themselves as the national army; and they would set a standard which should be in keeping with this distinction.

All the men assembled in any home cantonment, with the exception of the regulars, were almost invariably from the same part of the country, which gave them a neighborhood feeling. The doings of that cantonment became the intimate concern of the surrounding region. Its chronicles were carried in the local newspapers. There was a division to each cantonment; and in France the fighting unit was the division, complete in all its branches,—artillery, machine-guns, trench mortars, engineers, hospital, signal corps, transport, and other units. As a division it had its training area; as a division it traveled, went into battle, and was relieved.

Before a division was sent to France its men were already thinking in terms of their division; they met the men of no other division unless on leave, and met them in France only in passing, or on the left or right in battle. In the cantonment the division had its own camp newspaper, its own sports, its separate life on the background of the community interest, without the maneuvering of many divisions together on the European plan until they were sent into action in the Saint-Mihiel or Meuse-Argonne offensive. Each division commander and his staff, who were regular officers, conspired to develop a divisional pride, thereby, in a sense, humanly defeating the regular idea of making out of American citizens a machine which could be anything but humanly American. Within the division, pride of company, of battalion, of regiment, was instilled, and the different units developed rivalries which were amalgamated in a sense of rivalry with other divisions.

Every cantonment had the "best" division in the United States before it went to France, where rivalry expressed itself on the battlefield. The record of the war is by divisions. Men might know their division, but not their corps commander. Divisions might not vary in their courage, but they must in the amount of their experience and in the quality of their leaders. A division that had been in three or four actions might be better than one that had been in ten; but a division that had not been in a single action hardly had the advantage over one that had been in several. Our four pioneer divisions, which had been in the trenches during the winter of 1917-18 and later in the Château-Thierry operations, the 1st (regulars), and the 2nd (regulars and marines), and the 26th and the 42nd (both National Guard), were all at Saint-Mihiel. Their units were complete; their artillery had had long practice with their infantry; they had had long training-ground experience in France, had known every kind of action in modern war, and had kept touch under fire, rather than in school instruction, with the progress of tactics. If they were not our "best" divisions, it was their fault.

Of the two other divisions which had been longest after these in our army sector, the 32nd had just finished helping Mangin break through at Juvigny, northwest of Soissons, and the 3rd was at Saint-Mihiel. These six formed the group which General Pershing had in France at the time of the emergency of the German offensive in March, which hastened our program of troop transport.

Now we were bringing to the American army five of the divisions which had been trained with the British, the 4th, 28th, 33rd, 35th, and 77th. From the British front the 77th had gone to Lorraine, whence it was recalled to the Château-Thierry theater. The 4th and the 28th were ordered from the British front, after the third German offensive in June, to stand between Paris and the foe, and then participated, along with the 77th, in the counter-offensive which reduced the Marne salient,—or as the French call it, the second Battle of the Marne, a simple, suggestive, and glorious name. Château-Thierry had thus been a stage in passage from the British to the American sector, and the call for the defense of Paris had been serviceable to the American command as a reason for detaching American divisions, which the British had trained, from Sir Douglas Haig, who, as he is Scotch, was none the less thriftily desirous of retaining them.

The 33rd Division, remaining at the British front after the other divisions had departed, gained experience in offensive operations, as we know, which approximated that of the others at Château-Thierry, when, fighting in the inspiring company of the Australians in the Somme attacks beginning August 8th, the Illinois men took vital positions and numerous prisoners and guns. Though these four divisions, the 4th, 28th, 33rd, and 77th, had not had the long experience of the four pioneer divisions, they had had their "baptism of fire" under severe conditions, they knew German machine-gun methods from close contact, and they had the conviction of their power from having seen the enemy yield before their determined attacks. To Marshal Foch they had brought further evidence that the character of the pioneer divisions with their long training in France was common to all American troops. The National Guard divisions which had arrived late in France, though they had been filled with recruits, had, as the background of their training camp experience at home, not only the established inheritance of their organization but the thankless and instructive service on the Mexican border, where for many months they had been on a war footing.

According to European standards none of the divisions in the first shock of the Meuse-Argonne battle was veteran, of course; and the mission given them would have been considered beyond their powers. Indeed, the disaster of broken units, dispersing from lack of tactical skill, once they were against the fortifications, would have been considered inevitable. A veteran or "shock" division in the European sense—such divisions as the European armies used for major attacks and difficult operations—would have had a superior record in four years of war. Its survivors, through absorption no less than training, would have developed a craft which was now instinctive. They were Europeans fighting in Europe; they knew their enemy and how he would act in given emergencies; they knew the signs which showed that he was weakening or that he was going to resist sturdily; they knew how to find dead spaces, and how to avoid fire; and they had developed that sense of team-play which adjusts itself automatically to situations. All that our divisions knew of these things they had learned from schooling or in one or two battles. We had the advantage that experience had not hardened our initiative until we might be overcautious on some occasions.

The battle order of our divisions for the Meuse-Argonne battle was not based on the tactical adaptation of each unit to the task on its front. We must be satisfied with placing a division in line at a point somewhere between the Meuse and the Forest's edge where transportation most favored its arrival on time. One division was as good as another in a battle arranged in such haste. The French Fourth Army was to attack on the west of the Argonne Forest; on its right a regiment of the 92nd (colored) Division, National Army, with colored officers, was to form the connecting link between the French and the American forces. For men with no experience under heavy fire, who were not long ago working in the cotton fields and on the levees of the South, this was a trying assignment, which would have tested veterans. Never before had colored men under colored officers gone against a powerful trench system. All the British and French colored troops had white officers, and our other colored division, the 93rd, which was attached to the French Army through the summer and fall of 1918, had white officers.

We come now to our divisions in place on the night of September 25th, with whom will ever rest the honor of having stormed the fortifications. When I consider each one's part I should like to write it in full. I shall mention them individually when that best suits the purpose of my chronicle, and at other times I shall describe the common characteristics of their fighting: in either case mindful of the honor they did us all as Americans.

IV
THE ORDER OF BATTLE

The Metropolitan Division in the Argonne proper—Six weeks without rest—Direct attack impossible in the Forest—Similar history of the Keystone Division—Pennsylvania pride—Its mission the "scalloping" of the Forest edge—The stalwart men of the 35th Division—Storming the Aire heights—Fine spirit of the Pacific Slope Division—A five-mile advance projected for the Ohio Division—North and South in the 79th Division—Never in line before, it was to strike deepest.

Three National Army divisions were to be in the initial attack. It was a far cry for the men who a year before had tumbled into the training camps at home, without knowledge of the manual of arms or of the first elements of army etiquette and discipline, to the march of trained divisions forward into line of battle in France. On the extreme left of the line was the Liberty Division, from New York City. The metropolitans were given the task of taking not a town, but a forest, with which their name will be as long connected as with our largest city. Its left flank on the western edge of the Argonne Forest and its right on the eastern, the 77th had a long divisional front of over four miles; but it would have been unsatisfied if it had had to share the Forest. The Forest was its very own. The public at home seemed to have the idea that the whole battle was fought there. If it had been, the 77th would have had to share credit with twenty other divisions, which had equally stiff fighting in patches of woods which were equally dense even if they were not called forests.

MAP NO. 4
DIVISIONS IN THE FIRST STAGE OF THE MEUSE-ARGONNE BATTLE, SEPTEMBER 26TH-OCTOBER 1ST.

If the Forest were stripped bare of its trees, it would present a great ridge-like bastion cut by ravines, with irregular hills and slopes of a character which, even though bald, would have been formidable in defense. Its timber had nothing in common with the park-like conception of a European forest, in which the ground opens between tree trunks in lines as regular as in an orchard. If the Argonne had been without roads, the Red Indians might have been as much at home in its depths as in the primeval Adirondacks. Underbrush grew as freely as in second-growth woods in our New England or Middle States; the leaves had not yet begun to fall from the trees.

It had not been until September 15th that the 77th had been relieved from the operations in the Château-Thierry region. A new division, fresh from training at the British front and in Lorraine, it had gone into line in August to hold the bank of the Vesle against continuous sniping, gassing, and artillery fire; and later, after holding the bottom of a valley with every avenue of approach shelled in nerve-racking strain, it had shown the mettle of the Americans of the tenements by fighting its way forward for ten days toward the Aisne Canal. It had been in action altogether too long according to accepted standards, though this seems only to have tempered its steel for service in the Argonne.

Ordinarily a new division would not only have been given time to recover from battle exhaustion, which is so severe because in the excitement men are carried forward by sheer will beyond all normal reactions to fatigue, but it would have been given time for drill and for applying the lessons of its first important battle experience. The value of this is the same to a division as a holiday at the mountains or the seashore to a man on the edge of a nervous breakdown. He recovers his physical vitality, and has leisure to see himself and his work in perspective.

Instead of knowing the relaxation and the joy of settling down in billets and receiving the attention of the "Y" and other ministrants, of having plenty of time to write letters home, and of receiving from home letters that were not more than six weeks old, the men of the 77th had long marches to make through ruined country, and were then switched about, in indescribably uncomfortable travel, on the way to the Argonne. The division commander made no complaint on this score; but it was a fact to be taken into consideration. The 77th was short of transport; its horses were worn down. Yet, faithful to orders, its artillery as well as its infantry was up on the night of the 24th. Owing to the length of its front, all four infantry regiments were put into line, which meant that there could be no relief for any units after they reached their destination.

We admire hardy frontiersmen, of whom we expect such endurance; but what of these city-dwellers, these men from the factories and offices, short of stature and slight of body? Who that had seen them before they entered a training camp would have thought that they could be equal to carrying their heavy packs on long marches and undergoing the physical strain of battle? Their fortitude was not due altogether to good food and the healthy régime of disciplined camps; it was the spirit of their desire to prove that they were the "best" division because they were the "Liberty Division." Their hearty, resolute commander, Major-General Robert Alexander, was justly proud of them and believed in them; and they had excellent officers, who held them up by example and discipline to high standards.

Faith in the impregnability of the Forest, from ancient times a bulwark for which armies competed, had not led the Germans to neglect any detail in improving its natural defenses. In that area where for four years the French and the Germans had stared across No Man's Land at each other, the reasons for the enforced stalemate were almost as obvious as those for the truce between the whale and the elephant. Either army had at its back the cover of woodland, while the slopes about the trenches formed a belt of shell-craters littered with trunks of trees. Any attempt to take the forest by frontal attack must have been madness. Action in front must be only an incident of pressure, and confined to "mopping up," as action on either side forced the enemy's withdrawal from a cross-fire. This was bound to be our plan, as the enemy foresaw; we shall see that he governed himself accordingly.

The 28th Division, which had been on the left of the 77th in the advance to the Aisne, was again on its left. These had really been the first two American divisions to fight side by side under an American corps command, that of Major-General Robert L. Bullard. In the enterprise that they were now undertaking they had need of every detail of team-play that they had learned.

Some elements of the 28th, which was then just arriving in the Château-Thierry region, had been in action against the fifth German offensive; then it had been pushed across the Marne, where it had been put in by brigades and moved about under harassing circumstances in the ensuing counter-offensive. Later, having proved its worthiness for the honor, as an intact division it had taken over from the exhausted 32nd on the Vesle. Practically, from July 15th until it went to the Argonne it had had no rest. It had held not only the town of Fismes on the bank of the Vesle, but the exposed position of the little town of Fismettes on the other side of the river, during that period when the Germans were inclined to make a permanent stand there if their digging, their sniping, and their battering artillery fire, showered from the heights upon the 28th and the 77th in the valley, were any criterion. In the subsequent advance to the Aisne, and later in the transfer to the Argonne, the division had to submit to the same kind of irregularities and discomfort as the 77th, and to suffer in the same way for want of adequate transport and of leisure for studying its latest battle lessons for use in the next battle.

There is a general idea that such populous states as New York and Pennsylvania lack state pride, particularly in the sense of the southern states; but any state, whose National Guardsmen were numerous enough to form a complete division on the new war footing, had the advantage of the unity of sentiment of the old family, which does not have to include strangers at its board. The 28th's deeds were Pennsylvania's. It stood proudly and exclusively for Pennsylvania with her wealth and prosperity and all her numerous colleges, large and small, from Allegheny in the northwest to the University of Pennsylvania. The men were evidently capable of eating three and four square meals a day, and they looked as if they were used to having them when they were at home.

"What about politics?" the critic always asks about any National Guard division. If there were politics in the 28th it was so mixed up with marching and fighting—and the men of the 28th were always doing one or the other when I saw them—that it was unrecognizable to one so unused to politics as the writer. Certainly, it was a good kind of politics, I should say, in that Pennsylvania had taken a downright interest in her National Guard, which was now bearing fruit. The 28th's commander, Major-General Charles H. Muir, was a man of equanimity and force, who had the strength of character, on occasion, to stand up to an Army staff when he knew that its orders were impracticable. The staff respected him for his confidence in the judgment of the man on the spot.

The 28th's losses both in officers and in men in that excoriating progress from the Vesle to the Aisne had been the price of a gallantry which was a further reproof to the scepticism in certain quarters about the National Guard. Officers who had been killed or wounded had been replaced by young men who were often from the training camps though not Pennsylvanians; and in the fierce illumination of battle much had been learned about the qualities of the survivors. Some of these who had hitherto been called politicians had entirely overcome the aspersion. Others who had worn themselves out physically might be given a period of recuperation even if the division had none. The 28th had been indeed battle-tried in all that the word means. If it could have had two weeks before the Meuse-Argonne in which to digest its lessons, this would have been only fair to it as a division: though probably its determination would have been no stronger.

The 28th's front was from the edge of the Forest on its left to the village of Boureuilles on its right. Astride the Aire River it linked the Forest with the main battle-line. While maintaining its uniformity of advance on its right, its left had the same difficult maneuver in "scalloping" the eastern edge of the Forest as the French in "scalloping" the western edge. This meant that the 28th must storm the wooded escarpments which the Forest throws out on the western side of the Aire. On the eastern side of the valley were heights which interlocked with the escarpments. As one Guardsman said, the division had a worse job than a Democrat running for governor of Pennsylvania in an off year for Democrats.

Now the 28th could not succeed unless the division on its right took the heights on the eastern side of the Aire. If the 28th failed, then the whole turning movement of the Army offensive toward the main series of heights which formed the crest of the whale-back was endangered. On the right of the 28th was the 35th Division, National Guard from Kansas and Missouri, which must offer the courage and vigor which is bred in their home country in place of the battle experience which had been the fortune of the Pennsylvanians. Major-General William M. Wright had been the first commander of the 35th. He was a man of the world, most human in his feeling and sound in his principles of war, with a personality which was particularly effective with troops of sturdy individualistic character, who were unaccustomed by their tradition of self-reliant independence of thought to the arbitrary system which a regular army develops in the handling of recruits in time of peace. Leonard Wood had the same class of men from the same region in the 89th, which Wright later led in the Meuse-Argonne battle with brilliant results.

Soon after the 35th arrived behind the British lines, Wright's accepted knowledge of regular army personnel and his capacity for inspiring harmonious effort in any group of subordinates led General Pershing to set him the task of organizing corps staffs, among them the Fifth, which was to develop exemplary traditions. Major-General Peter E. Traub, a scholarly soldier, fully equipped in the theories of war, succeeded him in command of the 35th. Traub's brigade of the 26th Division had received at Seicheprey the shock of the first attack in force that the Germans had made against our troops, where the quality which the young officers and men had shown in face of a surprise by overwhelming numbers, and their prompt recovery of the town without waiting on superior orders, had reflected credit on their brigade.

The physique and the good humor of the men of the 35th had been the admiration of everybody who had seen them after their arrival in the British area. The Guardsmen of Kansas had a fine tradition linked up with the career of Frederick Funston, who was in the fullest sense what is known as a born soldier. He was a combination of fire and steel; of human impulse and inherent common sense. His initiative was in tune with that of his Kansans. Through the authority of their faith in him he applied stern discipline.

With its left on Boureuilles and its right on Vauquois, the 35th must storm the heights of the eastern wall of the Aire under flanking artillery and machine-gun fire from the escarpments of the Forest, unless these were promptly conquered by the 28th. No finer-looking soldiers ever went into action. Their eagerness was in keeping with their vitality. Compared to the little men of the 77th, who were overburdened with heavy packs, they were giants of the type which carried packs of double the army weight over the Chilcoot Pass in the Klondike rush. Their inheritance gave them not only the strength but the incentive of pioneers. Whoever had the leading and shaping of such a body of American citizens had a responsibility which went with a glorious opportunity. The stronger the men of a division, the abler the officers they require to be worthy of their potentiality. Given the battle experience of the 77th, under a Pershing, a Wood, a Bullard, a Summerall, or a Hines, and a group of officers as such a leader would have developed, the work of the 35th would never have become a subject for discussion: but we shall come to this later on.

On the right of the 35th we had the 91st, National Army from the Pacific Coast, as the left division of the Fifth or center Corps, with its front from Vauquois to Avocourt. Its commander was Major-General William H. Johnston, a redoubtable fighter and vigorous for his years, as anyone could see at a glance. There was no question as to the character of his men, who were six thousand miles from home. Their physique was as good as that of the 35th, as you know if you know the region where they were called to service by the draft. Never before under fire, they were to fight their way through woods by a frontal attack, and then under the enemy's observation into an open ravine, and on through that up forbidding slopes. An appealing sentiment attached to this division from the other side of the continent, no less than to the 77th, from which it differed in its personnel as the Pacific Slope differs from the streets of New York. There were city men in its ranks, but not in the sense of city men from New York; and there were ranchmen, and lumbermen, and those among them who spoke broken English were not from tailors' benches.

On the right of the 91st was the 37th, Ohio National Guard under Major-General Charles S. Farnsworth, a regular officer of high repute, who was to take the division through its terrific experience in the Meuse-Argonne and afterward to Belgium. Why so excellent a division as the 37th should not have been earlier in France may be referred to geography, which gave an advantage to National Guard divisions from the seaboard states. The 37th had waited and drilled long for its chance, which now came in generous measure. After breaking through the trench system it must storm by frontal attack, for a depth of three miles, woods as thick as the Argonne; and this was only a little more than half the distance set for a single day's objective. Therefore, without previous trial in grand offensives, it was assigned a mission which would ordinarily have been supposed to be disastrous against even a moderate defense. The 37th was without its own artillery, but it had been assigned on short notice the artillery of the 30th Division, which, however zealous and well-trained, had not worked with the division or ever operated in a serious action, let alone protected infantry advancing for such a distance over such monstrously difficult ground.

On the right of the 37th was the 79th, National Army drawn from Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia. Major-General Joseph E. Kuhn, who was in command, was well-known as an able engineer officer. He had served as an attaché with the Japanese in the Russo-Japanese War, seeing more of the operations than any other single foreign officer; and he had been an attaché in Germany early in the Great War, afterward becoming president of the War College in Washington. Aside from this equipment his untiring energy, his high spirits, and his personality fitted him for inculcating in a division confidence in itself and its leadership.

The 79th, with men from both sides of Mason and Dixon's line, united North and South in its ranks. Since its arrival from the States it had hardly had time to become acclimatized. In place of its own artillery, which was not yet equipped, it had not even a homogeneous artillery brigade. Of American artillery (aside from seventeen of the French batteries upon which we were relying so largely for our preliminary bombardment) it had three regiments, less six batteries, from the experienced 32nd Division, and one regiment from the 41st Division. Though the 79th had never been under fire before, though it had only training-camp experience, it was expected, after taking the first-line fortifications, to cover the most ground of any division on the first day, and though it did not have to fight its way through any important woods it was to proceed along the valley of the Montfaucon road, passing over formidable ridges which were under the observation of woods on either flank capable of concealing any amount of enemy artillery.

V
ON THE MEUSE SIDE

The ground of the Verdun battle—The Crown Prince's observatory—The Third Corps to move the right flank down the Meuse—Businesslike quality of the 4th Division—A marshy front and no roads—Swinging movement of the Blue Ridge Division—The Illinois Division to secure the right flank—Dominating heights east of the Meuse.

At this point let us consider the missions of the three corps. Liggett's First, with the 77th, 28th, and 35th Divisions, had the problem of the left flank, the conquest of the Argonne Forest, the valley of the Aire, and the heights of the eastern valley wall, which was so essential to supporting the movement of Cameron's Fifth Corps in the center. The Fifth, with the 91st, 37th, and 79th Divisions, was to make the bulge of the sweep toward the main crests of the whale-back. Its objective on the first day was the town of Montfaucon, whose whitish ruins on the distant hilltop pretty well commanded all the terrain on the corps front. Here the Crown Prince through his telescope, at the safe distance which was in keeping with the strong sense of self-preservation of the Hohenzollerns, had watched some of the attacks on Verdun.

This sector was near enough to the battleground of Verdun to have participated in some of the volume of shell-fire which had left no square yard of earth in No Man's Land, or for half a mile on either side of the trenches, untouched by explosions. The thicker the shell-craters, the more difficult it is to keep uniformity of movement. They are useful for cover for a halted charge, but for a charge that is intended to go through, as ours was, they meant that troops must pick their way over unstable footing. In view of the possibilities of French counter-attacks the Germans had hardly been negligent in perfecting all their defenses during the Verdun battle.

The groups of woods south of Montfaucon and north and west of Avocourt was the heart of the German defense against the Fifth Corps. Against Cheppy Wood which covered Vauquois the French, in 1915 when small offensives were still the rule, had made many attacks in order to gain the dominating position of Vauquois; and later, in the Verdun battle and subsequent offensive operations by the French, the Germans had used the woods as shelter for reserves, which drew persistent shell-fire of large caliber from the French. A thick second growth had sprouted up around the shell-craters and broken timbers, which afforded concealment to the enemy and confused any platoon or company commander in keeping his men together and in touch with the platoon or company on either flank.

The assignment of such an ambitious objective to these three divisions required an abounding faith in their manhood, initiative, and training upon the part of an audacious command. I may add that before the attack the Germans had taken one prisoner from the 79th Division, which they thus identified; they did not know of the presence of the other two divisions. As the 79th had never been in line before, they were warranted in thinking that a green division could be there for no other purpose than the usual trench training which we had systematically given all our divisions before they went into serious action. When the 79th came rushing on toward Montfaucon on the morning of the 26th, the enemy's surprise was warranted by all their canons of military experience.

The Third Corps on the right flank, with its right on the Meuse River, had in a broad sense the same mission as the First in supporting the main drive toward the whale-back by the Fifth. On its left in liaison with the 79th was the 4th, the only regular division in the attack, under Major-General John L. Hines, whose ability was later rewarded by a corps command. Regular divisions had a certain advantage in the assignment of experienced professional officers and in the confidence of the staff in the value of regular traditions which must be maintained. Though in detached units, the 4th had had a thorough trial in the Marne counter-offensive of July 18th to 24th. Then it had been swung round, and as an intact division had taken over from the 42nd, after the heights of the Ourcq were gained, for the final pursuit to the Vesle, where it had a taste of shells, gas, and machine-gun fire in the "pocket" before it was relieved by the 77th and started for Saint-Mihiel. The 4th was a thoroughly regular and singularly efficient division, disinclined to advertisement, doing its duty systematically and unflinchingly.

At the outset of its advance it would have to cross marshy ground and the Forges Brook, from which the footbridges had naturally been removed by the enemy. On the left it was to keep up with the swift progress of the 79th, with its course dominated on the left by the Montfaucon heights, and on the right by the heights east of the Meuse—of which we shall hear much before the story of the Meuse-Argonne battle is told. There were wicked slopes and woods to be conquered. Indeed, its position on the right flank of the 79th confronted as stern and complex difficulties as that of the 37th on the left flank of the 79th.

On its right was the 80th Division under Major-General Adelbert Cronkhite, sturdy, thick-set, cut out of sandstone, who faced the world all four-square with his Blue Ridge men. The 80th had done well at the British front, and had been in reserve at Saint-Mihiel. Though it had its own divisional artillery and its units complete, this was its first experience in a drive through first-line fortifications for an extensive objective. If it had not so far to go as the 4th, its trying maneuver in swinging toward the Meuse included passing between the Juré and Forges Woods, which, unless cleared of the enemy, would enfilade its advance with machine-gun fire.

The 33rd Division, Illinois National Guard, had the extreme right. I have mentioned already the preparation which the 33rd had had in the August offensive with the British. Major-General George Bell was calm and suave, but a stalwart disciplinarian. Before leaving the States he had eliminated many officers who for temperament, physical disability, or other reasons appeared less serviceable abroad than at home. This enabled him to travel to France without excess baggage, and to arrive there with his organization knit together by a harmonious and spirited personnel. As for his men, they were from Illinois and of the Illinois National Guard, as you may learn in Cairo, Springfield, or Chicago, for Illinois had been one of the forward states in supporting its Guardsmen.

The 33rd was to swing up along the Meuse by noon of the first day, and to rest there as a pivot for the Third Corps,—a delicate operation. Its position was as picturesque as its record was various, in its service first with the British under the Australian Corps, then with a French, and later with an American Corps. If the war had lasted long enough the Illinois men might have been sent to serve on the Italian front, to complete their itinerary of military cosmopolitanism. At its back now was the Mort Homme, or Dead Man's Hill, whose mention in the communiqués during the Verdun fighting was frequent in the days when the world hung on the news of a few hundred yards gained or lost on the right or left bank of the Meuse. There under countering barrages from the quick-firers and the plowing by high explosive shells, Frenchman and German had groveled in the torn earth, mixed with blood and flesh, between the throes of hectic charges for advantage. The Germans won the hill, but eventually the French regained it. Then silence fell on the shambles where the unrecognizable dead rested, and above them rose not the red poppies of the poet's pictures, but weed and ragged grass from the edges of the shell-craters.

Such was the texture of the rising undulating carpet unrolled to the northeast over the battlefield of Verdun. In the foreground it was variegated by the ruins of villages and those exclamation points of desolation, the limbless trees, which melted into its greenish-ashen sweep over the fort-crowned hills in the distance. Beyond them was the plain of the Woëvre; and beyond that was Germany. An occasional shell-burst showed that the volcano of war still simmered; its report was an echo of the crashing thunders of the past, which we were to awaken again in the valley of the Meuse.

The Meuse seemed only a larger Aire, asking its way sinuously in this broken country. As vision followed its course past the German trench system in front of the Mort Homme and past the area of destruction, it was arrested by the bald ridge of the Borne de Cornouiller, or Hill 378. Mark the name! It will have a sinister part in our battle. Ten of our divisions were to know its wrath without knowing its name. Higher than any of the Verdun forts, except Douaumont, and higher than the heights of the whale-back, it had been in the possession of the Germans since August, 1914. From its summit observers could give the targets to the countless guns hidden in the woods and ravines of its reverse slopes.

An offensive against frontal positions resembles the swinging open of double doors, with their hinges at the points where the first-line fortifications are broken. The farther the doors are swung, the greater the danger of enemy pressure on the hinges, whose protection is the tactician's nightmare. In broadening his front of offensive operations by alternating attacks Marshal Foch may be said to have been opening several doors which were to become the alternately advancing panels of a screen.

The Fourth French Army was the left flank of our army in the Meuse-Argonne. As its left, and therefore the left of the whole Franco-American attack, was making only a slight advance at the start, it was little exposed. Our Third Corps had the right flank of the whole movement, the Meuse River being the hinge, with the swing toward the west bank of the Meuse, which bends westward toward the heights of the whale-back on the Corps front. This gave it a frontal command of the west bank, while it put the German trench system on the east bank in the right rear of our line of general movement. Though the Meuse was an unfordable stream, and we held the bridgeheads to prevent any infantry counter-attack, this could not prevent cross-fire upon us from artillery and even from machine-guns. As from the Mort Homme one had a visual comprehension of the mission of the Third Corps, which was more informing, not to say more thrilling, than the study of maps at Headquarters, the inevitable question came to mind as to what was being done for our protection on the east bank. The answer was that French artillery and infantry were to undertake "exploitation." This was a familiar word, which could not intimidate the artillery on the Borne de Cornouiller. Forces in exploitation on the flanks, however encouraging in battle plans, form an elastic term in application, dependent upon what sacrifices they will make in the thankless task of diverting the enemy's fire to themselves. With the heights of the Meuse commanding one flank and the heights of the whale-back commanding the other, the Third Corps was to operate in the Meuse trough as in the pit of an amphitheater, striving to fight its way up the seats under a plunging fire from the gallery.

Still, there was nothing else to be done. Someone had to take punishment on the flanks for the support of the drive on the center. The grueling which the Third Corps was to endure in advancing on one side of the trough of a river valley beyond the enemy line on the other was as certain to entail severe losses as was the mission of the First Corps against the Argonne Forest and down the valley of the Aire. The duty of all concerned, in an offensive which was organized in haste in the hope of winning a great prize by springing into the breach of opportunity, was not to hesitate in consideration of handicaps, but to minimize them as much as possible in the initial plan, and then to strike in fullness of confidence and of all the power at our command. The strategy of the battle was daring in conception, and resolute in execution.

VI

WE BREAK THROUGH

French gunners at home in the landscape—Sleep by regulations in spite of suspense—"Over the top" not a rush—Difficulty of keeping to a time-table—Even with a guiding barrage—What barbed wire means—And the trench mazes beyond—Moving up behind the infantry.

The Pacific Slope, Kansas, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and New York thus had the honor of the initial attack in our greatest battle, in which men from every state in the Union were to have a part before it was won. In that area of rolling country from Verdun to the Bar-le-Duc-Clermont road, which had been stealthily peopled by our soldiers, the swarming of their khaki was relieved by scattered touches of the blue of the Frenchmen who had come to assist us. Though ours was the flesh and blood which was to do the fighting—every infantryman was an American—the French were filling the gaps in our equipment which we could have filled ourselves, as I have said, only by delaying the Meuse-Argonne offensive until the spring of 1919 as we had originally planned.

Under their camouflage curtains in an open field, or in the edge of a woods, or under the screen of bushes which fringed a gully, the groups of French gunners seemed at home in a landscape that was native to them while it was alien to the Americans. When at rest their supple lounging attitudes had a certain defiance of formal military standards, as if French democracy were flouting Prussian militarism. When the order for firing came, the transition was to the alertness of the batter stepping up to the plate, and their swift movements had the grace and confidence of professional mastery which had long put behind it the rudimentary formalities of the drill-ground. They seemed a living part of the infantry, their pulse-beats answering the infantry's steps. Never were guests more welcome than they to our army. We could not have too many French guns—or cannon, as our communiqués called them in recognition of the unfamiliarity of our public with military terms—playing on the enemy's trenches and barbed wire in the preliminary bombardment which blazed a way for the charge.

I have known the suspense preceding many attacks while the darkness before dawn was slashed by the flashes from nearby gun mouths and splashed by the broad sheets of flame from distant gun mouths. There is nothing more contrary to nature than that the quiet hours of the night should be turned into an inferno of crashes and, at the moment of dawn, when the world refreshed looks forward to a new day, men should be sent to their death. The suspense before the Meuse-Argonne attack was greater than before the Somme attack, when the British new army, after its months of preparation and nearly two years of training, was sent against the German line; it was greater than before Saint-Mihiel, our own first offensive.

At Saint-Mihiel we had hints that the enemy would oppose us with only a rearguard action. Our mission would be finished with the first onslaught; we had only to cut the salient; the result was measurably certain, while in the Meuse-Argonne it was on the knees of the gods. The Germans could afford to yield at Saint-Mihiel; they could not in the Meuse-Argonne, where, if informed of the character of our plan, they might make a firm resistance in the first-line fortifications or at such points in them as suited their purpose in seeking to draw us into salients, to be slaughtered by enfilade fire as the French were in their spring offensive of 1917.

After the preliminary bombardment began at midnight, our American Army world, as detached in its preoccupation with its own existence, as much apart from the earth, as if it were on another planet, waited on the dawn of morning, which was the dawn of battle. The stars which were out in their distant serenity had a matter-of-fact appeal to generals to whom a clear day meant no quagmires to impede the advance. It was the business of all except the gunners and the truck-drivers, or of those speeding on errands to tie up any loose ends of organization, to try to force a little sleep. Even the infantry, with the shells screaming over their heads, were supposed to make the most of their inertia in rest which would give them reserve strength for the work ahead.

This was in keeping with the formula which had been studied and worked out through experience. No one not firing shells could be of any service in smashing in strong points or cutting barbed wire. Particularly it behooved high staff officers and commanders to lie down, with minds closed to all thoughts of mistakes already made or apprehensions of future mistakes, in order to be fortified with steady nerves, clear vision and stored vitality for the decisions which they would have to make when they had news of the progress of the action. The plans for the attack were set; they might not be changed now; the attack must be precipitated. Aides protected their generals from interruption, and arranged that they should have food to their liking, and as comfortable a bed as possible. No genius composing a sonnet or a sonata could have been more securely protected in his seclusion than a corps commander. The rigorous drill which had formed the men in the front line to be the pawns of superior will was applied to keep the superior will in training for its task.

General Pershing kept faith with the formula, and many others followed his example, though junior staff officers worked through the night. They were plentiful, and "expendable," as the army saying goes, as expendable in nervous prostration as were in wounds and death the young lieutenants who were to lead their platoons into the hell of machine-gun fire. Waiting—waiting—waiting while the guns thundered were the ambulances beside the road, the divisional transport, the ammunition and engineer trains, the aviators with their planes tuned up and ready, the doctors and nurses at the dressing-stations and evacuation hospitals, and the reserve troops in billets. Officially through his orders everyone concerned knew only his own part, but all knew without asking that an unprecedented ordeal was coming.

It was easier for French and British veterans, familiarized by other offensives with the roar and the flashes of artillery, to relax than for Americans who were having the experience for the first time. With sufficient practice one may learn to sleep with a six-inch howitzer battery in an adjoining field shaking the earth. Many times during the Meuse-Argonne battle I have seen our own veterans giving proof of such hardihood; but on this night of September 25th it was not in human nature for all the thousands who were to have no sleep the next day or the next night to summon oblivion to their surroundings. Those who fell asleep slept with nerves taut with anticipation and in the consciousness of a nightmare, in which the rending thunders were mixed with reflection upon their own arduous efforts and their part in the future. Everyone was a runner crouched for the pistol-shot, as he awaited the dawn. The great test for which all had prepared individually and collectively for two years was coming tomorrow.

With the first flush of thin light the observation balloons had risen in stately dignity from the earth mist, and the planes had taken to the sky and swept out over the enemy lines: the combat planes seeking foes and the observers to watch the progress of the charge or enemy movements or the location of batteries or of machine-gun nests which were harassing our infantry. Mobilization by the aviators for the offensive had not been hampered by the problems of one-way and two-way roads. They flew over from Saint-Mihiel the afternoon before or on the morning the battle began.

At 5.30, just as a moving man would be visible a few yards away, from the Meuse to the western edge of the Argonne, where we had our liaison with the French who advanced at the same moment, our men left the old French trenches and started for the German trenches. Everyone is familiar with the phrase "going over the top," yet despite the countless descriptions everyone who saw an attack for the first time remarked, "I didn't know it was like that!" The system of the advance on the morning of September 26th accorded with the accepted practice of the time. In their familiarity with the system soldiers and correspondents have taken it for granted that what was common knowledge to them was common knowledge to all the world. Only when they returned home did they realize their error, and learn that ignorance of fundamentals ingrained in army experience had made their narratives Greek to all who had not been in action.

The average man is slow to yield his idea that a charge is an impetuous sweep. It sounds more real to say that "the boys rushed" than to say that they advanced with the sedateness of a G. A. R. parade on Decoration Day, which is more like what really happened. Indeed, they simply walked, unheroic as that may seem; and from high ground, or better still from a plane flying low, an observer saw to the limit of vision right and left men proceeding at a set and regular pace. The more uniform and the more automatic this was, the better. On closer view every man, except in height and physique, was a duplicate of the others, in helmet, in pack, in gas mask, in every detail of uniform, even in the way he carried his rifle with its glistening bayonet, which was the only relief to khaki on the background of somber-tinted earth.

Every man, every platoon, and on through the different units to divisions and corps, was moving on a time schedule. A competition between companies to "get there" first would have resulted from the start in a hopeless tangle. If not literally, it may be said broadly that each company was to be at a given point on the map at a given hour; and if one company, or battalion or regiment, for that matter, outdistanced another, it was because it had kept its schedule and the other had not. In case it became "heady" and was on its objective in advance of schedule, it ran the risk of "exposing its flanks." At least that is the theory of the staff in its essence. An ideal army, according to the staff, would be at a given line on the map at 10.30, at another at 11.30, and so on. This might be possible if there were no enemy to consider, although it would require an adept army, as everyone who has ever drilled recruits well appreciates. He knows how long it takes to train them, and to learn how to direct a small force in carrying out satisfactorily a practice skirmish evolution over slightly uneven ground. The gregarious instinct of itself seems to break uniformity by drawing men into groups in face of infantry fire in battle for the first time, as well as eagerness to close with the enemy and gravitation away from the points of its concentration. Shell-bursts scatter them, casualties make gaps which lead to further disorganization.

Could our army have had reproduced for its edification the confusion of the battle of Bull Run or of Shiloh, it would have realized the purpose of all the painstaking drill, the monotonous and wearing discipline, which made the well-ordered movement possible. Its very deliberateness in maintaining the coördination of all its units gave it a majesty in its broad and mighty sweep, which was more like the sweep of a great river than the cataract rush of the small forces of the old days, which the public still continued to visualize as a charge. I thought of it too as in keeping with the organization of modern life, in the trains entering and leaving a great city station or the methodical processes of a vast manufacturing concern.

How did our men know whether or not they were keeping their schedule? Did they look at their watches as they counted their steps? They had a monitor at first in the rolling barrage, that curtain of fire which preceded them. This was their moving shield which the guns far in rear provided for their guidance as well as protection. If they came too close to the barrage, they were exposed no less than their enemies to death from its hail.

We may have a comparison in marching behind a road sprinkler, with orders to keep just out of reach of its spray, which will be obeyed if the spray consist of nitric acid instead of water. The more guns the stronger the shield. We could never have an excess of guns as Grant had at the outset of the Wilderness campaign, when he sent many batteries of the short-range pieces of those days to the rear for want of room on a narrow front in which to maneuver them. Cæsar applied the first barrage in France in his tactical use of the shields of his legions, who owed their success to systematic training no less than we in the Meuse-Argonne. His men had to carry their own shields; the modern soldier has enough to carry without carrying his.

Suspense was most taut, it was agonizing, as every soldier knows, in the waiting hours ticking away into waiting minutes before the charge. As the final minute approached, the veteran, as a connoisseur in death's symbols, might find assurance in the strength, and apprehension in the weakness, of the supporting barrage laid down on the enemy trenches. Those of our men who had not been in battle before could have no such prescience. They did know that when they left their trenches the full length of their bodies would be exposed. They would march, rifle in hand, without firing, while only the shield of the shells from friendly guns screaming over their heads—the greater the volume, the sweeter the music—could silence the fire of rifles and machine-guns which had them at merciless point-blank range. Instantly they climbed "over the top," anticipation became realization. One ceased to listen to his heart-beats. The emotion became that of action. Suspense became objective, merged in responsibility for every man in watching where he stepped as he moved toward his goal, and for every captain and lieutenant in directing his company or platoon.

The most careful maneuvering on fields at home was poor preparation for No Man's Land, which is like nothing else in the world except No Man's Land. Millions of soldiers know it through long watches over its dreary lifeless space, and more vividly through crossing it in a charge. For four years it had been the zone of death where no soldier from either side ventured except at night on patrol or in a raid or general attack. All this time shells had been pummeling it. The rims of craters, of sizes varying with the calibers of the shells, joined each other; old craters had been partly filled by later bursts. This continued pestling of the soil with nothing to press it down but the rain made it the more spongy in wet weather and the looser in dry weather. The heads of the men bobbed as they advanced, stepping in and out of craters, and wove in and out as they passed around craters. The rims often gave way with their weight, or they slipped on the dew-moist weeds that fringed them or upon some "dud" shell hidden in the weeds, as their attention was diverted from the ground under foot by the burst of an enemy shell or of one from their own guns which fell dangerously short.

As our artillery, in order to preserve the element of surprise, had not "registered" with practice shots, it was firing strictly by the map; and, though its accuracy was wonderful, inexperienced gunners manning guns which had not had the allowances for error recently tabulated, were bound, in some cases, to send their shells wide of the mark. The big calibers might fail to destroy "strong points" that held machine-gun nests, or a battery of seventy-fives fail to cut the section of wire which was its assignment. For these mistakes the infantry must suffer. It is the infantry which always pays the price in blood for all mistakes; and the transfer of an officer to Blois or the demotion of a general officer would not bring back their dead.

Their immediate concern, as that of every infantryman had been in every charge throughout the war, as they crossed No Man's Land, was the wire entanglements. All the original wire, four years' exposure to the weather making its rusty barbs the more threatening, was still there in some form or other, though it had been ruptured or further twisted by previous bombardments whose craters only added to the difficulties of passage. Breaks had been filled by new wire, which rather supplemented the old than took its place. Additional stretches had been put out at intervals to reinforce the defense of vital points. A half-dozen strands will halt a charge in its tracks; here was a close-woven skein, from three and four to twenty yards in depth. Where the depth was greatest, it was most likely to have a continuous uncut stretch which the enemy had marked as a target for fire upon the arrested attackers.

According to photographs of selected areas, which show a few bits of wire sticking out of a choppy sea of fresh earth, every square yard of which has been lashed by shell-fire, it would seem that artillery was accustomed to do as thorough mowing as a reaper in a field of grain. Even with treble our volume of artillery fire, taking treble the length of time of our bombardment, and with every shell perfectly accurate on its target, we could hardly have accomplished any such blessed result. The best that could be expected was that lanes would be opened at frequent intervals.

A break in the uniformity of advance appeared at once when one platoon or company had a clear space on its front while its neighbors had not. Suppose that for five hundred yards of distance the guns had completely failed and for five hundred yards on either side they had succeeded: then you had two exposed flanks sweeping forward into the trenches beyond, possibly against the enfilade fire of machine-gun points especially established for this opportunity.

Where the guns had not done the work for them the men must do it themselves. If they had the torpedoes at the end of long sticks, resembling exaggerated skyrockets, they might thrust these into the meshes and explode them to gain the destructive effect of shell-bursts. If the artillery had made some breaks, they might, in their impetuosity to keep up with the rest of the line, try to pick their way. What young soldiers can accomplish in this respect is past all comprehension by elders who try to follow in their steps. The first wonder is how they were able to go through at all, and the second is how they had any flesh on their leg-bones after they had gone through. Their main reliance was on the hand wire-cutters, which had not been improved since Cuba and South Africa.

All the while that the soldier was snipping the strands and bending them back as he crawled forward, he was usually too near the trench to have any protection from the barrage, while from the trench he was a full-size target at short range. War offers no more diabolical suspense than to this prostrate soldier in his patient groveling effort, when machine-gun fire is turned in his direction. He is in the position of a man lashed to a bulls-eye. Bullets sing as they cut strands of wire around him. He feels a moist warm spot on his leg or arm and knows that he is hit. Perhaps he tries to apply the dressing to the wound; but more likely he refuses to expose himself by any movement which will attract the gunner's attention. He may be hit again and again before the inevitable final bullet brings the last of his ghastly counted seconds of existence. The bones of men who were killed in this way—"hung up" in the wire—are all along the wire of the old trench line from Switzerland to Flanders. Or perhaps, when that patient wire-cutter has taken death for granted, the machine-gun suddenly diverts its spray to other targets, and he is safe.

Such was the nature of the barrier of entanglements which had to be conquered by these young divisions of ours before they ever began fighting. Beyond its fiendish and elaborate skeins was a trench system equally elaborate in all its appointments for the real resistance. German officers and soldiers in occupation had taken all the interest in improvements, and the more as it concerned the safety of their own skins, of the most fastidiously scientific and progressive superintendent of a manufacturing plant. The latest wrinkles in the development of defensive warfare were promptly applied. After each trench raid or enemy attack, weak points that had appeared were corrected. Generals who came on inspection ordered changes suggested by their study of the ground. Regiments new to a sector brought fresh ideas and industry. Work was good for German soldiers, who were kept digging and building for four years in perfecting the security of these intricate human warrens.

Any trench system, after allowing for an enemy's success in clearing the hurdle of the wire and in penetrating the trench system, and even for his successful occupation of considerable stretches of the front line, relied upon "strong points" and second lines in the maze of fortifications to make the gains futile, or only the prelude to a more costly repulse than if the attack had failed in its first stage. Let it be repeated that not one out of four of our soldiers had ever before stormed a first-class fortified line. They and their officers knew the character of its mazes only through lectures, pictures, maps, and imagination; but they were perfectly certain of one thing, and that was that their business was to clean the Germans out, and for this they were equipped with proper tools. In other words, when you saw a German emerging from a deep dugout where he had taken refuge from the bombardment, or appearing round a traverse, either kill him or gather him in.

The ardor and ferocity of our youth in a furious offensive mood was never more compelling in its results. Caution was not in our lexicon. If strong points held out, the thing was to go through them. There was no time to lose. The first wave must go on according to schedule, leaving those who followed to do the mopping up of details. Our faith was in our valor and destiny. In our progress the first-line fortifications were to be only another hurdle after the wire.

In the course of this famous day, in seeking a personal glimpse of every aspect of the action, I was at Army, Corps, and Division Headquarters as the news came in, and I was three miles beyond the trenches with our advance against the machine-gun nests. Such a morning sun as is rare in this region eventually dissipated the thick mist which had been in our favor in concealing our attack from enemy observation, and against us in preventing our observation of the movement of our own units. It kept on shining, which was still more rare, in all the genial pervading warmth which we associate with its generous habit in this season at home, until midday found the air singularly luminous—luminous for this region—and the sky a soft blue. The generals could not have asked more; and to the medical corps it meant a blessing for the wounded. Judging by the weather that ensued during the remainder of the battle, the point that the sun of the Argonne exhausted all its beneficence on the first day and had to retire behind clouds to recuperate, in order to keep up the reputation of "sunny France" for future tourist seasons, seems well taken.

Not only was the infantry advancing, but all the rest of the army, no longer obliged to court concealment under the cover of the night, had come aggressively into the open, the stealthy processes of preparation having given place to the thrill of battle joined. Where all efforts on preceding days had been directed toward a stationary theater, now all were directed to a traveling theater. A mighty organism of human and metal machinery, which had been assembling and tuning up its engines, had thrown in the clutch and was in motion.

Considering the volume of shells being fired at the Germans, the columns of motor-trucks loaded with ammunition now had an intimate appeal. The front had become a magnet drawing every thought toward it, with every waiting ambulance and vehicle expectant of an order to start forward. At the rear there was less traffic on the roads than during the period of preparation; but forward, close to the trench lines, roads that had been empty two days before were crowded. Machine-gun battalions in reserve and batteries of artillery which had carried out their assignment in the preliminary bombardment, and were moving forward to new positions where they could support the advance, were demanding right of way over divisional transport, which was clear as to its duty to keep as close to the infantry as orders would permit. The signal corps, unrolling their wires, also wanted precedence in order that division headquarters might have information; and the engineers had taken precedence over everybody with the compelling argument that unless roads were built no traffic could move forward.

It was a familiar enough picture. To the jaded observer of war every glimpse only reproduced some scene which was part of a routine of which he was so weary that it made him desire, if for no other reason, the realization of the supreme hope that this should be the final offensive of the war. The great thing, though all the equipment and all the system seemed age-old because of their associations, was that the personnel was new. A new knight had slipped into old armor, and taken up the sword from a tired if experienced hand. D'Artagnan had arrived from Gascony to add his young blade to the blades of the three Musketeers. On the part of everybody there was still the boyish enthusiasm of the beginner in a game.

Hundreds of officers who had been to staff schools, or enduring the S. O. S. in fractious impatience, now for the first time were at the front—the front of the Great War; and with them were all the men of the supply units, motor drivers, ambulance drivers, engineer battalions, military police, whose one thought was a sight of that "big show."

The French gunners looked on smiling, as a middle-aged woman smiles over the enthusiasm of the débutante. Given the hour of attack, they knew by experience how long it would be before the first wounded and the first prisoners would come down the road. Soldiers who had never seen a German at close quarters perhaps had taken the prisoners; a young intelligence officer might be having his first experience in questioning them. To the French the prisoners looked like all the "sales Boches"; but we were discovering their characteristics afresh. Later came the severely wounded on stretchers which were slipped into the ambulances which bore them away. By nine o'clock in the morning we knew that except for a few strong points which could not hold out we were through the wire and through that elaborate trench system and out in the open, and still going on.

VII
IN THE WAKE OF THE INFANTRY

A successful surprise—The importance of traffic control in maintaining the advance—The "show" in the air—How the engineers built roads—And traffic blocked them—And colonels showed the traffic police how.

The veteran accepts his long service as a guarantee of efficiency; the novice is patient under instruction and open to suggestion. Our desire to do everything in the book, our painstaking individual industry under a meticulous discipline, and our willingness as beginners to learn had served us well before the battle in the concealment of our strength and plans from the enemy. There were so many of us and we were so swift in our onset that we gave the enemy the benumbing shock which on many occasions the newcomer, springing aggressively into the arena, has inflicted by a rain of blows upon a hardened adversary who has appraised him too lightly.

If the Germans had made the most of their fortifications with their customary skill, the dam might have held against the flood; for it is the touch and go of impulse that decides in the space of a second between docile hands up begging for succor and a fury of resistance to the death. Suddenly brought to face overwhelming formations, the answering sense of self-preservation prevailed in the German trenches before the German officers and non-commissioned officers, had they been in the mood, could overcome the mass instinct of their men.

The French on our left had presumably met more resistance than we in the first-line fortifications. Their attack was doubtless more professionally skillful than ours. Had they failed, for no other reason than that they had fewer men to the mile, the cost of a repulse would have been less for them than it would have been for us. The Germans knew that the French were massing west of the Argonne, and apparently accepted their attack as serious, while they thought that we would make only a demonstration. We had been right in our anticipation that they would not consider, for one thing, another major offensive by our army feasible so soon after Saint-Mihiel; or, for another, that Marshal Foch, while he was carrying on extensive operations in northern France, would have the temerity or the forces to undertake in addition such an extensive effort as that of September 26th.

Despite the honor in which open warfare was now held, a first line was still a first line, with its wire, deep dugouts and strong points, and all the approaches accurately plotted by the artillery through long practice in fire. A part of it might be readily taken at any time by thorough artillery preparation, but the victors in the early offensives had suffered enormous toll of casualties from shell-fire in organizing their new positions. Though the short artillery preparation, without registering, had proved efficacious against the Germans on July 18th and August 8th, when they were holding shallow trenches in ground which they had won in their spring offensives, it had not as yet been tried by the Allies—I may mention again—over any such length of front against the old trench system as in the Meuse-Argonne. It is only fair to say that we were not opposed in strong force, but, make any qualification you choose, by conquering twenty miles of first-line fortifications we had won a signal triumph which must have been a distressing augury to the German command.

After our "break through" there was little answering artillery fire. We had drawn the teeth of immediate artillery resistance by going through to the guns. We had captured many guns; others were forced to fall back to escape capture, and they, or any that were hurried forward, would have had to fire, not at a settled trench line, but at infantry deployed and on the move. Meanwhile our infantry must be driven to the utmost of its capacity to make the most of the headway that we had gained.

We had also to consider the dispersion and the fatigue which bring loss of momentum in an attack, just as a tidal wave spends itself in flowing inland. The farther our infantrymen went, the farther our transport must go to provide them with rations and ammunition. Thus the ability of our organization to continue the advance after the "break through" included the indispensable factor of efficient arrangements at the rear. As a division has twenty-seven thousand men, its daily food requirements are equal to those of a good-sized town, without including small arms and artillery ammunition and other material. People at home who were surprised at the length of time it took a division to march by on parade, without its artillery or transport, will have some idea of the road space required for a single division fully equipped for action and in motion.

Behind the old trench system traffic movement had settled into a routine, under the direction of policemen at the crossings, resembling that of a city. In our mobilization for the attack we had brought, aside from corps and army troops, nine divisions into the Meuse-Argonne sector. This led to the pressure which would appear in suddenly trebling the traffic of a city. Though the roads were insufficient, they were kept systematically in repair; quantities were known; we were forming up on a definite line of front. After the attack was begun, the defensive force was falling back upon its established and dependable arrangements. The offensive force—and this cannot be too clearly or vividly stated—had to build a city, as it were, by establishing new depots and camps, repairing old roads and building new roads, while traffic control in the area of advance was subject not only to the calculable requirements of a great street parade in a city, but to the incalculable requirements of a great fire and other emergencies which switch concentrations from one street to another.

From a ridge in the midst of the old trench system in the center of our line, the nature of our task appeared as a picture, which my observation in threading my way through the streams of traffic in the rear filled in with detail. Ahead, except for occasional groups and lines appearing and disappearing in the wooded, undulating landscape, our advancing infantry seemed to have been dissipated into the earth. Their part after they were through the fortifications I shall describe in another chapter. The bridge between them and the rear was for the moment in the air, where Allied and German planes in prodigal numbers came and went on their errands of combat and observation. In the jam on the roads back of the trenches, thousands of men, of waiting machine-gun battalions and of stalled artillery, and drivers and helpers attached to traffic of all kinds, were looking aloft at a "show" which was worth the price of being packed in darkened transports, and almost worth the price of enduring army discipline.

If they might see nothing of the battle going on behind the ridge, they had grandstand seats for the theatrics of war in the air, staged on the background of the blue ceiling of heaven. I was not to see the like of this scene again in such bright sunlight. The most jaded veteran never failed to look up at the sound of machine-gun firing, which signaled that the aces might be jousting overhead. Would one be brought down? There might be only an exchange of bullets between planes in passing; then one might turn to give chase to the other; or both begin maneuvering for advantage. In shimmering flashes the sunlight caught the turning wings of planes that tumbled in a "falling leaf" when at a disadvantage, caught the wings of planes that were crippled and falling to their death.

Duels were forgotten when a German plane with no Allied plane across its path swept down toward the huge inflated prey of an observation balloon. His telephone told the observer in the basket that it was time to take to his parachute. The sight of the figure of a man, harnessed to a huge umbrella, leisurely descending from a height of a thousand feet, divided attention with watching to see whether or not the gas within the thin envelope overhead broke into a great ball of flame. If not, it was brought down to take on its passenger again; and it could be lowered with incredible rapidity for such an immense object, as the wire which anchored it was reeled in on the spinning reel on the motor-truck. There was something very modern and truly American about a motor-truck in a column of traffic towing a balloon.

Most fortunate of all the spectators were the men with machine-guns for aërial defense mounted on trucks. They both observed and participated in the game. Many of them were in action for the first time with a new toy. They did not propose to miss any opportunity to make up for having come late into the war.

"Haven't you learned the difference between an Allied and a German plane? You're shooting at an Allied plane," an officer called to a machine-gunner.

"Yes, sir," was the reply, and he stopped firing.

"Why didn't you tell him you couldn't hit it anyway?" remarked a passing wounded man, after the officer had passed on. "But don't worry. If they miss the plane, the bullets can still hit somebody when they fall."

Entranced as they were by the spectacle, all the men who had to do with the moving of the wheels of all the varieties of transport which overflowed the roads were only the more eager to press forward. The air was not their business. Their duty was over the ridge toward the front. The artillerists had particularly appealing reasons for impatience, as we shall see. They were using rugged language, which relieved their steam-pressure without changing the fact, which was being burned into the consciousness of the whole army, that as surely as a chain is no stronger than its weakest link, a road is no stronger than any slough which holds up traffic.

The engineers had no time to spare for observing blazing balloons. Their labors in the old trench system, in contrast to the florid drama of the air, were a reminder of how completely earth-tied the army was, and how small a part of its effort was above the earth, even in the days when communiqués paid much attention to aces. For a mile or more every road in the immediate rear of the old French trenches had been in disuse for four years while it was being torn by shell-bursts. For the distance across No Man's Land, it had become part of the sea of shell-craters. On the German side of No Man's Land were more trench chasms, and another stretch which had been blasted in the same fashion as the French side.

Shoveling would fill many of the holes; but shoveling required labor when we were short of labor, and time when every minute was precious. It was increasingly evident every minute, too, that trucks that carry three tons, and six-inch mortars, and heavy caissons were not meant to pass over any piece of mended road that had its bottom two or three feet below the surface. They insisted upon finding the bottom and remaining there until pulled out by other traction than their own.

The division engineers were supposed to keep on the heels of the infantry, which they did with a gallantry which made amends for the inadequacy of their numbers and material. Their efficacy was dependent upon these two features and upon the prevision of the division command in mastering the problem beforehand. There were critics who said that some division staffs evidently expected their artillery and rolling kitchens to take wing; but the division staffs produced by way of answer the unfailing list of written orders on the subject, which could not be carried out. If the infantry were repulsed or checked, the engineers might share some of the fighting, as they had on more than one occasion. There seemed to be a universal apprehension, the engineers said, that an engineer might have a chance to sleep or rest, which would obviously ruin his morale. If, after the infantry had passed on, the enemy concentrated the fire of a battery on the road-builders, they were not supposed to be diverted from their labor, but to be prompt in filling new shell-craters.

The lack of material ready on wagons for immediate movement to the front left them to gather what material they could on the spot. They could not use barbed wire, and in places that seemed the only thing in sight. They tore out trench timbers, which often proved rotten from four years in moist earth, they gathered stones where stones could be found and used these to make something more solid than loose earth turned by the shovel; and they sent hurry calls to the rear for trucks of material, which themselves might be stalled on the way forward in the jam of waiting traffic. The more sticks and stones filled in a bad spot, the more were needed as the earth underneath continued to yield. When a truck-driver saw that the truck in front, which belonged to his convoy, had passed through a rut, he determined that where his leader could go he could follow, and he drove ahead, cylinders roaring with all their horse-power. When he was stuck, he spurred them to another effort. Meanwhile his wheels were probably sinking, and he had delayed the mending of the break in any satisfactory way while the truck in front backed up to put out a towline, and all hands in the neighborhood added their muscular man-power to cylinder horse-power. The Germans had raised in the shell-torn earth of the trench system another barrier than that of their fortifications to a swift drive for their lines of communication.

Their own limited opportunities in "passing the buck" did not exclude the engineers from easing their own mental, if not physical, burden by remarking with acid intensity that a little better traffic control on the part of some of the people who were complaining would help matters. No one who had been along the roads could deny that this point was well taken. If not the experience of other offensives, our traffic demoralization at Saint-Mihiel should have been a warning to us, though most of the men who had learned their lessons in that sector were still occupied there. We had the admirable example of the British transport, which, after confusion in the Somme battle resembling ours at Saint-Mihiel, had developed in practice under fire a system which seemed automatic.

The number of guns and ammunition-caissons and the length of a column of divisional transport were calculable quantities. Their order of precedence behind the infantry was largely a settled formula. The number of roads and their state of repair must be known not only on the map but by practical observation. Some were narrow country roads, which would accommodate only "one-way" traffic, and others would accommodate traffic going both ways. Having all these factors in mind, the program must include the disposition of labor battalions where they would be needed in making prompt repairs, when heavy trucks cut up roads, especially one-way dirt country roads.

We had written out extensive instructions for traffic regulation, which were to be enforced by military police who were new to the task and insufficient in numbers. The same thing happened to the military police on September 26th as happened to the New York City police during the parade of the 27th Division, when the crowd broke through the police lines into the line of march. In this instance, when aggressive commanders of artillery and convoys saw an opening, they made for it without regard to traffic regulations, though their ardor may have meant only delay in the end.

Thus the military police had paper authority which they could not enforce. Their minds were kept in confusion by the confusion of personal directions they received from volunteer experts. They were overwhelmed in rank; and respect for rank had been drilled and drilled into them. A colonel is a colonel and a mighty man; a lieutenant-colonel is a mightier man than a major, who in turn outranks any captain in charge of a section of road. What was the use of proclaiming a road "one-way," when a staff officer appeared and declared it "two-way"? What was there to do when another staff officer appeared with an outburst against the disobedience of regulations that had interlocked traffic going both ways on this same one-way road?

This is not saying that the personal initiative of a passing senior officer was not serviceable, when he confined his effort to breaking a jam, without reorganizing the system in one locality, and thereby throwing it out of gear in other localities. With the best of intentions, colonels fresh from home who had not seen a large operation before were particularly energetic. Some of their remarks stirred memories of Philippine days when the transport of an expeditionary battalion was in difficulties. The burden of the world was on their shoulders. When they gave an order, they wanted no suggestive "But, sir——" from any captain or major, though they complained that reserve officers lacked both initiative and discipline. As each colonel departed in the blissful consciousness that it had taken a trained soldier to "straighten things out," the traffic officers, in the interval before another appeared with contradictory orders, might indulge their sense of humor with the reflection that numerous "fool colonels" must be wandering about France with a free hand in impressing their rank upon juniors.

The biggest "fool colonel" or general was he who, to avoid walking, took his car in the early part of the day across the freshly made road over the trench system, thereby delaying the carts of machine-gun battalions. When his car was stalled, he received about as much sympathy as the driver of a truck stalled on a road which did not belong to his division. Not being a colonel, the driver might be made the public object of language which did not consider rank or human sensibilities.

In no result was the fact more evident than in our traffic direction that in making a large army we must crack the mold of a small army. In time our capacity for organization would make a new mold. Meanwhile, though it might be applied at cross-purposes, our American energy, adaptable, tireless, furious, and determined, must bring results. The many broken-down trucks in ditches beside the road were only the inevitable casualties of a prodigious effort. Let the infantrymen keep on advancing; we would force their supplies up to them in one way or another.

VIII
THE FIRST DAY

Out in the open—The enemy limited to passive defense—And relying on machine-gunners—Their elusiveness—Problems of the offense—Slowing down—Up with the infantry—Why dispersion—Liaison up, down, and across—How keep the staff informed?—The spent wave before Montfaucon.

What of the infantry lost to view in the folds of the landscape? They were confronting the originals of the hills, woods, and ravines, whose contours on paper had been the definite factor in making plans, while the character and resistance of the enemy had been the indefinite and ungovernable quantity. As the day advanced, irregular pencilings, reflecting the reports of the progress of the fighters, moved forward on the maps of the different headquarters toward the heavy regular lines of the objectives which were the goals of our high ambition.

The loss of the first-line fortifications to the Germans could not be considered as serious as in an offensive in the first years of the war. Even as early as the Verdun battle, proponents of the mobile school of warfare, who had never been altogether silenced by the engineering school, had advocated a yielding elastic defense, which, after drawing the Crown Prince's Armies away from their depots, would counter by a sudden attack of the gathered French forces; but such a maneuver was too daring and contrary to the thought of the time, with its dependence upon rigid defense. Infantry had fallen into the habit of feeling "undressed" and helpless unless in trenches. When the soldier was forced into the open, he had hastened to hide his "nakedness" in a shell-crater, or instantly, in the very rodent instinct that he had developed, set to digging himself a pit. Since the German offensive of March, 1918, all the practice had been to wean the infantry away from settled defenses to the supple use of light artillery, trench mortars, and machine-gun units. Happily, as we know, the basic training of our infantry had been in keeping with this idea.

In the palmy days of German numbers and vigor, the German High Command might have met our Meuse-Argonne offensive by the prompt marshaling of reserves for a decisive counter-attack against our extended forces with inadequate roads at their backs; but if Ludendorff realized the errors which our fresh troops might commit from inexperience, we realized, on our part, that he was too occupied elsewhere by Allied attacks to consider any considerable aggressive action on our new front, where his tactics must have in mind, obviously, the protection with a minimum cost of men and material of his lines of communication, in order to assure a successful withdrawal from northern France and Belgium. With our attack developed, his subordinate in the Meuse-Argonne sector, in carrying out this policy, would choose the points where he could gain the best results by concentrating the fire of the artillery at his command, and then depend upon the expert German machine-gunners for defensive warfare in the open, supported by such fragmentary defense lines as might be hastily constructed.

According to the German intelligence report of our operation at Saint-Mihiel, our staff work had been immature, while our line officers did not know how to make the most of our gains. Without considering that at Saint-Mihiel we were under orders to stop on our limited objectives, and granting the Germans their view, no one will deny them the credit of knowing how to make the most of their tactical opportunities. The bellows of our accordeon was being drawn out as theirs was drawn in. With every hundred yards of advance our men were farther from their communications. Reports were accordingly the longer in reaching headquarters, and orders for future moves the longer in reaching the line, while those of the Germans, as they fell back on their communications, were prompt.

It was not the first time that they had lost first-line fortifications. They knew by experience as well as observation what had happened to their first line under the powerful initial assault; and they knew what they had to do, in full dependence upon a staff system trained in practice to meet this as well as the other vicissitudes of war. The failure of their men in the front line to stand to the death was an irritating exhibition of deteriorating morale, which must be taken into consideration not only by the subordinate but the higher commands. Scattered and demoralized individuals and groups, filtering back in retreat, might be re-formed, or passed through advancing reserves to the rear for reorganization. Fresh machine-gun units, which had almost the mobility of infantry, could be readily placed at points already foreseen as most suitable. One machine-gun might hold up the advance of a company of infantry. The enemy was fully familiar with the details of a landscape studded with ideal machine-gun positions, the choicest being the edge of a woods on a hillside overlooking an open space.

Some of our officers and men had met German machine-gun practice in open warfare in the Château-Thierry campaign and at the British front. As others knew it only under the limitations of trench warfare, the resistance which they now must face was familiar to them only through instruction. The German machine-gunner, having learned as the survivor of many battles the art of self-preservation at his adversary's expense, would wait all day and all night and even longer without a shot, until his target appeared in the field of fire assigned to him; wait as a Kentucky feudsman waits behind a rock for his enemy to appear on a road. Each gun was only one in a well-plotted array covering all the avenues of approach which any attacking force must follow. The guns disposed in front might precede or wait on the guns in flank in opening fire.

There was nothing new or wonderful in this arrangement. Any soldier with a sense of ground and of natural combative strategy could work out a plan of interlocking fire; but the discipline and the training requisite to its proper execution, and the stubborn phlegmatic bravery which sticks to a machine-gun to the death, are not to be found at random on any page of a city directory or social register. The fact that a gun had begun firing did not mean that it could be immediately located. Sometimes when light conditions were right the flash was visible, unless the gunner had hung a piece of bagging, through which he could aim, to conceal the flash. The direction of the fire might be judged somewhat by sound, and also by observing the spits of dust in the earth or on the wall of a building. Judgment on this score was affected by the proximity of the passing bullets to the observer's person.

The more machine-guns were firing from different angles, the more difficult it was to locate any one of them by either method; and the more influential the human element. In the midst of their fire imagination easily multiplied the number of guns, which is one of the moral effects of their use. When a gun was located, the gunner might slip back behind the crest of a ridge, or he might have moved as a precaution, before he was located, to another position which had been chosen as his next berth, with pit and camouflage in readiness.

An experienced aviator—always there is that word "experience" which has no substitute—might detect a machine-gun nest if he flew low; but not as a rule in woods or in bushes, or even in the open when covered with green branches. There were many machine-gunners and relatively few aviators. If a gunner thought that an aviator who flew low had seen him, he might have taken up a new position before the aviator's information had brought down artillery fire. The machine-gunner was a will-of-the-wisp with a hornet's sting, which could be thrown a mile and a half. Usually the price of locating him was casualties to the infantry, and still more casualties before he was taken, if he stood his ground. If the Germans had not enough machine-guns back of their first line for a complete interlocking defense on the first day of the battle—and they certainly had later—they aimed to place them where they could do the most good.

Naturally the American Army, studying its chessboard, had taken into consideration the counter-moves of the enemy which would result from its attack. Of course the passage through the entanglements would lead to the first dislocations of liaison; the storming of the trenches to more; and the passage over the shell-craters to still more. After every offensive against the trench system, officers had studied how to avoid the slowing down of the attack after the first line was taken. This had led to passing the first wave promptly through the trenches and leaving a second wave to "mop up" by "breaching" dugouts and cleaning up points of resistance; and then to the system of "leap-frogging," in which, when the men in front had been weakened in numbers by casualties and lost their aggressive cohesion, fresh troops went through them to carry forward the attack. Reserves in passing through the lanes of the barbed wire and over the trenches and on to catch up with an advancing line also suffered from disorganization, which might be increased by strong concentrations of enemy shell and machine-gun fire.

A division commander had discretion as to how he would gain his objectives, which brings us into the field of tactical direction, as technical as it is vital to success. His dispositions were a test of his knowledge of his profession, and his handling of the division after it was engaged of his qualities of generalship. In some instances villages and strong points were passed by the main line of advance, and left to be conquered by special attacking forces. Instructions had not only to be elaborate but practical.

Those captains and lieutenants, the company and platoon commanders, who were carrying out the instructions, must each be a general in his own limited field. The less experience his seniors had in preparing practical instructions, the more he might suffer for his want of experience in leading men in battle. With the conquered trenches behind him, he had to make sure that his men were in hand, and if he had been allowed no time for reorganization behind his shield, that was an error; for barrages might move too fast, in expressing the desire of commanders for speed. At the same time, the line officer had to identify by the map the ground on his front which he was to traverse and the positions he was to take as his part in that twenty miles of pulsing, weaving, and thrusting line.

When you are seated before a table in calm surroundings, trying to follow the course of one company in an advance, you realize the limitations of your 1 to 20,000 map. It ought to be 1 to 10. More elements than any layman could imagine entered into the problem of the location of the command post from which a battalion commander was to direct the movements of one thousand men, or a regimental commander of three thousand, in action. All this, of course, represents sheer fundamentals in thoroughgoing military science; but we must have the fundamentals if we are to appreciate the accomplishment of our young army in the Meuse-Argonne battle.

A prominent hill was easily recognized. If a village were in the line of your attack, that was a simple guide; but in a region where, unlike our country of scattered farmhouses, the farmers all live in villages, there was a paucity of buildings which might serve as landmarks. One of our men expressed the character of the terrain by saying that with every advance it all looked alike—hills, ridges, woods, and ravines; yet when you came close to the part which you were to attack it seemed "different from any other and a lot worse." We had to cross brooks and swamps as an incident to conquering the other features of the landscape. If we missed any kind of fighting on the first day of the battle, it was in store for us in the later stages.

Oh, that word liaison! That linking up of the units of the attack in proper coördination! Is there any man of the combat divisions who does not know its meaning or who wants to hear it again? It never came into slang at home in the same way as camouflage; but it is a thousand times more suggestive of the actualities of war. Liaison between the French and the American armies, between corps, divisions, brigades, regiments, battalions, companies, platoons, squads, and individual soldiers. Liaison between infantry and artillery and trench mortars and planes and tanks! If you did not have it, why, the adjoining commander might be as much to blame as you, at least, and you could say that he was altogether to blame. It may be said that the history of the war will be written in terms of positions taken, and of positions which were not taken because coöperating units failed to keep their liaison. They were not up. When I mention that there were difficulties of liaison in writing of any division, I am not saying who was at fault, as no one person was, perhaps, more than another.

Other generals might be promoted and demoted, but General Liaison remained the supreme tactician. "Establishing liaison" was fraught with more heartaches and brain-aches than any other military detail. Men prowled through the night in gas-masks under sniping rifle and machine-gun fire and artillery fire, to ascertain if the unit supposed to be on their flank was there: perhaps to receive a greeting from an officer hugging a fox-hole, "Why aren't you fellows keeping up with us?"

Liaison was most difficult in woods, though the fighting was not necessarily always the severest there. Men naturally took to the paths instantly they advanced into woods, and these, if they were not stopped by machine-gun fire, advanced ahead of those in the deep underbrush. A stretch of unseen wire might arrest a part of the line, without the men in liaison on the right and left, as they plunged through the thickets, knowing that it had been stopped. The sheer business of keeping any kind of formation was distracting enough, without the sudden bursts of machine-gun fire, which might be so powerful that there was nothing to do except to take cover and consider a plan for silencing or capturing the gun. Unless the casualties were so serious that it was suicidal not to halt and mark out a plan for capturing the nest, and as advancing was a sure way of locating machine-guns and a prompt way of overwhelming them, we swept on in the spirit of our instructions and impatience. Captured machine-guns littered the paths of our battalions, in tribute to the effect of our impetuous rush upon gunners who continued to forget their orders to stand to the death when they saw the tidal wave of our soldiers about to swamp them.

As the day wore on and the enemy began to recover from the shock of the surprise of our initial onset, we encountered an increasing volume and fury of machine-gun fire from hill to hill across valleys, sweeping down ravines, plunging from crests and by indirect aim over crests, from village houses and from both directions where village streets crossed. At critical points it was supported by concentrations of shell-fire. Along that road, at the edge of this patch of woods, along that stretch of river bottom, the German's artillery laid down barrages over a space already swept by bullets, to hold positions by which he set as much store in his plans as we in ours.

"Why aren't you getting on?" division commanders asked, or tried to ask—as communication did not always permit the message to arrive promptly—when the pencilings on the map were not keeping up to the schedule of progress toward the objectives. It was an easy question; the answer might be in the lack of resolution of a regimental or battalion commander, in the character of the resistance to his troops, or in their disorganization under new and severe trials. After further ineffectual efforts the battalion and regimental commanders might say that progress was impossible without reserves.

Should the division commander send them? Expending his reserves on the first day of a long battle might place him in a dangerous position in face of a later and graver emergency; but he had the word of a subordinate that they were necessary. Had that subordinate in his first serious engagement become too readily discouraged? What was the extent of his losses? They were a criterion for judging his balance of assets for continuing the attacks, though they did not include the exhaustion of the men, their mood of the moment, or the disruption of liaison of their units.

The division commander might sit rigid with the front of Jove, which he thought was the chief item of the military formula, and say: "I want no excuses. Take the position!" Or he might keep on pressing in his reserves, in the determination that his division would be up on time; for Corps Headquarters were depending on him. The pencilings moving toward the corps objective were his record in the battle. If the pencilings were in a V-shape, that was bad. It meant that some of his elements were in a salient, in danger of being "squeezed."

Sometimes the pencilings were farther advanced than the troops. The wish being father to the thought, observers who saw a charge entering a woods took it for granted that it would go through the woods. Aviators sometimes mistook German soldiers in movement for our own; again they misread the maps, and placed our troops on a ridge ahead of their actual position. Company leaders might make the same mistake. The incentive to "get there" involved eagerness to send back word that you were arriving. A little group of gallant men who pushed through a wood or gained a crest might have been swept back by machine-gun fire by the time their proud report had reached division headquarters. Instead of having commanding ground as a "jumping-off place" for the next stage of advance, they might be hugging the reverse slope, exposed to fire from three sides immediately they showed themselves.

Regular as well as reserve officers who had never before been in action were to prove again that no amount of study of the theory of war, invaluable as it is, may teach a man how to keep his head in handling a thousand or three thousand men under fire. West Point cadet drill, Philippine jungle and "paddy" dikes, Leavenworth staff school, army post routine, and border service had no precedent of experience for the problems of maneuver which they now had to solve. It was all very well to say that the men were all right; but another thing was keeping your men together. I saw a regular colonel violating, in a singular reaction to amateurishness, the simplest principle of organization—the same that keeps subordinates informed of the location of a business superior—by having no post of command where he or an adjutant could be found with orders or reports. Some colonels remained steadily at their headquarters, without absenting themselves for personal inspection in any emergency; others moved restlessly about the field, trying to apply to three thousand men the personal direction of a platoon commander. Every subordinate who witnessed such an exhibition by a superior was bound to lose confidence in the command. I am not thinking of a lack of physical bravery when I say that there were instances of colonels and brigadiers voicing pessimism in the presence of subordinates. They might have become good judges or good philosophers, but they were not meant by nature, at least in their lack of battle experience, to drive home an ambitious offensive movement. Others had too much blind initiative; they were the kind that would drive head downward at a stone wall. Others were amazingly cool, determined, and efficient. These the men would follow against any odds.

Being human, our men who symbolized the pencilings on the map had muscles and nerves which were subject to fatigue. They had no visualization of their goals. If they could have been shown a flag on a mountainside, which they must reach before they "knocked off" for the day, the incentive for keeping on would have been more directly applied. All they saw was the slope or woods ahead of them. Their knowledge of the battle plan was limited to their orders to keep on going. After nights when suspense and suppressed excitement had allowed them little sleep, they had been going all day from 5.30 in the morning—going through barbed wire and trenches, over uneven ground, as they fought their way not only under fire but under the strain of that wearing mental concentration of trying to remember and apply all they had learned in their training and in previous actions.

Physically, the task set for our troops had seemed almost superhuman. Many had taken enough steps to cover in a straight line twice the distance they had traveled. To the eye of a hurrying observer, these myriad figures, whether dashing toward a machine-gun nest, or ducking to avoid an outburst of fire, or coming wounded across the fields, had the attraction of the ardor and fearlessness of youth in battle, while they brought many thoughts which were as far from the battlefield as the homes that had sent them forth.

We might say "check!" to the Germans if we had taken Montfaucon at the end of the first day. Montfaucon was the highest point on our way to the Lille-Metz railway except the Buzancy heights. It was visible from the old first-line trench system at Malancourt and from the Mort Homme on the banks of the Meuse, and it looked forward over the ground of the projected second day's advance.

It happened that I knew by travel that day how far it was from Headquarters to the front line. I might feel as well as appreciate the reasons of the officer and the soldier for disappointing Headquarters when I came to the end of my journey, where the tidal wave, expending itself, had left a platoon of infantry, without touch with the units on their right and left, washed up in a sunken road on the reverse slope of a hill in front of Montfaucon. On the bare crest of the hill lay the bodies of comrades who had fallen when the watchful German machine-gunners aimed at the human targets appearing in bold silhouette on the sky-line. It would have been madness for a handful of men without support to continue on against such blasts of cross-fire. They had fallen back, bringing their wounded, to await orders. Apart from the opposition they had met, the irregular landscape over which they had advanced was sufficient explanation of their inability to keep their liaison. It made islands of the hills as it diverted the tidal wave into the channels of the ravines. Scattered American soldiers were moving about the neighborhood like hunters, beating up Germans who had taken cover among bushes and in holes.

There was a recess in the battle in the vicinity, with stretches of several seconds when the countryside seemed quite peaceful. Then for another quarter of a minute, only a single machine-gun might be firing with deliberately precise intervals between shots. Suddenly the whole pack broke into full cry at the sight of quarry on the ridge which forms the southwestern approach to the town from the Montfaucon woods. We must have this ridge before we took the town. As I looked in this direction, I saw a line of our men appearing above the crest, each figure sharp against the light blue sky. Their intervals seemed at first as exact as the teeth of a comb; then the teeth began to drop out as figures fell. For a few seconds longer the survivors strove against the blasts before they drew back and faced right and moved along under cover of the slope, apparently seeking a less exposed portion of the crest for another attempt.

The machine-gun fire died down into spiteful irregularity until the line wheeled again toward the crest. Their heads were hardly above it when, with the unity of an orchestra answering the conductor's baton, the diabolical whirring rattle began again with all its previous volume. Evidently quite as many guns had this portion of the ridge under their fire as the other. This time the men did not persist. In proper tactical wisdom they disappeared from the sky-line as quickly as a woodchuck dodges into his hole.

We had now definitely developed the strength of the enemy at this point. Possibly we had located some of his machine-guns. At least, a battalion commander had learned enough to realize that he must undertake a deliberate method adapted to the situation for silencing them, which of course meant delay in pushing forward toward the day's objective the pencilings in one small section of the Headquarters map. Yet it was such details as this, revealed to me in a pantomime of vivid and stark simplicity and brevity, which taken together made the whole for that abstraction to the soldier which is called the High Command.

"Is Montfaucon taken?" was the question of Headquarters when I arrived there in the evening. Some reports indicated that it was. This part of the line was the most extended, and its communications accordingly the most uncertain. There were other pencilings on the map which also had to be erased. If we had not gained all our objectives, this was not saying that we had not been astonishingly successful. Having, as it were, set out ambitiously to take the whole solar system between dawn and darkness, one of the planets still held out, with the fixed star of Buzancy heights in the distance.

There might be many small salients, but none of threatening importance in our new line. Despite the uneven battle experience of our divisions, all had done their part magnificently. Our gains were more than a mile on our flank to four miles in the center, where we had made the bulge toward the summit of the whale-back. How far had we expended our momentum in our initial onset? What was the traffic situation? What of the morrow?