Chapter 7 AMERICA IN FRANCE No.7

(Continued)

It was late when we left Verdun, on the afternoon of the day which saw us at its beginning on the southern edge of the St. Mihiel battle-field, and the winter daylight had passed into darkness before we began to run through a corner of the Argonne, on our way to St. Menehould and Chalons, passing by the wholly ruined village of Clermont in Argonne. The forest ran past us, a wintry fairyland, dimly lit by our quickly moving lamps, and apparently impenetrable beyond their range, an optical effect, however, that may be produced in darkness by a mere fringe of trees along the roadside. But I knew while I watched the exquisite effects of brown and silver, produced by the succession of tall, pale trunks rising above the lace-work of the underwood, as scene after scene pressed upon us out of the dark, that we were indeed in a forest country, only some twenty miles away from the scene of General Pershing's drive at the end of last September, when he achieved on the first day an advance of seven miles through difficult country, while General Gouraud was pushing forward in Champagne; and I found myself speculating in the dark on the many discussions I had heard both among English and Americans of that advance, and of the checks and difficulties which, as I suppose is now generally admitted, followed on the first brilliant operations.

During the last few weeks further information has been forthcoming about the Meuse-Argonne battle, as the American operations between the Argonne and the Meuse from September 26th to November 11th are apparently to be known. But a good deal of obscurity still hangs over the details of the fighting. In the British Army I came across the very general belief that the staff and transport work of the advance had been-in the words of a well-known historian of the war-"as was natural with a new army, scarcely adequate to the fighting qualities of the troops engaged." And I often heard regret expressed that the American Command had not been more willing to avail itself of the staff experience of either or both of the older armies, which might-so the British or French spectator thinks-have lessened the casualty lists among extraordinarily gallant but inexperienced troops. "Replacements fresh from home were put into exhausted divisions with little time for training," says General Pershing's report. And "some of the divisions were fighting their first battle." They were faced also at the beginning of the advance by some of the best remaining German troops. When one thinks of all the long and bitter training in the field that went to the perfecting of French or British staff work, and then of the difficult nature of the ground over which the First American Army had to make its way, one can only feel the deepest sympathy for the losses sustained by the fresh and eager troops. The Argonne forest itself had long been recognised as impenetrable to frontal attack, and on the Argonne side of the American twenty-mile front, along the western edge of the valley of the Aire, the ground is still heavily wooded and often very hilly. As one of the ablest military critics, himself a soldier of great distinction, expressed it to me: "Foch had set the Americans an uncommonly hard task!"

But if there was some failure in those matters where neither bravery nor natural intelligence can take the place of long training, and experience in the field, there was no failure in ardour or in spirit. In spite of heavy losses, General Pershing never failed to push on. Starting from a line on the northern edge of the great Verdun battle-field, Montfaucon, the German headquarters during the Verdun fighting of 1916, was captured in three days. Then came severe fighting against fierce counter-attacks, and great difficulties with transport over shell-torn ground and broken roads, difficulties increased by bad weather. But on October 4th the gallant attack was renewed, and by October 10th, owing to the combined effects of the British drive in the north and the pressure on both sides of the Argonne, from General Gouraud on the west and the Americans on the east, the enemy fell back and the famous forest was cleared.

The third and last phase of the fighting began on the 23rd of October. The enemy was now weakening rapidly along the whole of his line. For while the American Army had been stubbornly fighting its way north from Varennes to Grandpré, where it stood on November 1st, the British Armies, in the great Battles of Cambrai-St. Quentin, Ypres, and Courtrai, had not only captured the Hindenburg line and some fifty thousand prisoners, but had brought about-without fighting-the evacuation of Laon and the retreat of the Germans to the line of the Aisne; the German withdrawal, also, to the Scheldt, involving the freeing of Lille and the great industrial district of France; and finally, in concert with Belgian, French, and some American units, the clearing of the Belgian coast, and the recovery of Ostend, Zeebrugge and Bruges. The end, indeed, was rushing on. Co-operation was everywhere maintained, and blow followed blow. "During this period" (6th to 31st October), says the British Commander-in-Chief, "our Allies had been pushing forward steadily on both sides of the Argonne. The enemy was held by their attacks on his southern flank, while to the north the British offensive was driving forward rapidly behind his right."

Then, with November, the British Army, in the Battle of the Sambre, "struck at and broke the enemy's last important lateral communications, divided his forces into two parts on either side of the Ardennes, and initiated a pursuit which only stopped with the Armistice." About one hundred thousand prisoners had been taken by the British Armies since September 26th. "Victory, indeed," in General Gouraud's phrase, "had changed her camp!" Led by her, the British, French, and American Armies streamed east and north through the few days that remained, pursuing a beaten and demoralised enemy. The final American advance was begun on November 1st, and on November 7th patrols of the 42nd Division reached the Meuse at Wadelincourt, opposite Sedan; while the Fifth Division was in the Forest of Woevre, and the 90th Division had captured Stenay.

Some very interesting figures have lately been given as to the forces under General Pershing's command. Altogether some 770,000 men seem to have been employed-both east and west of the Meuse-of whom 138,000 were French. Forty-six German divisions, amounting, according to the American estimate, to about 350,000 men, opposed the American advance. The casualties are given as 115,000-among them 26,000 killed[8]-for the American troops, and 7,000 for the French. The enemy casualties are estimated at 75,000, and 16,000 prisoners were taken.

One incident, relatively unimportant, but wonderfully picturesque, is sure to find a place in the American song and story of the future. It was during the rapid advance of the last days, when the far vision of the Rhine was already beckoning forward the victorious Allies, and giving wings to the feet of youth. On the night of November 3rd, after a successful day, the 9th and 23rd Infantry of the Second Division found themselves in column formation on the road leading north to Beaumont, a small town south of Sedan. The way lay open, and they took it. They marched on and on through the night, throwing out the usual advance guard and flank patrols, but otherwise unprotected. By all the rules of war the brigade should have been cut off. But in this twilight-time-this G?tterd?mmerung of the end, conditions were abnormal, and the two regiments marched on through forest country, right through the enemy lines towards the Meuse, for about eight kilometres, capturing machine-gunners asleep at their guns, and rounding up parties of the enemy on the roads, till in the early dawn they reached a farm where German officers were sitting round tables with lights burning-only to spring to their feet in dismay, as the Americans surrounded them. The cold autumn morning-the young bronzed faces emerging from the darkness-the humbled and astonished foe: surely Old and New, Europe and America, were never brought together in a moment more attractive to the story-teller. A touch of romance amid the tragedy and the glory! But how welcome it is!

The full history, however, of the Argonne fighting will probably not be accurately known for some little time to come. No such obscurity hangs over the glorious fighting on the Marne, through the scenes of which I passed both on the railway journey from Paris to Metz, and in motoring from Chalons to Paris on our return. Colonel Frederick Palmer's book[9] gives an account of these operations, which, it seems to me, ought to be universally read in the Allied countries. The crusading courage of whole-hearted youth, the contempt of death and suffering, the splendid and tireless energy which his pages describe, if they touch other English hearts as deeply as they have touched mine, will go a long way towards that spiritual bond between our nations which alone can make real and lasting things out of Leagues and Treaties.

It was on our way from Rheims to Paris after our drive through the Champagne battle-field that we passed rapidly through the places and scenes which Colonel Palmer describes.

As we approached Rheims about midday, a thick white fog rolled suddenly and silently over the chalk uplands that saw General Gouraud's campaign of last September and October. We ran through it, past a turning to Moronvilliers on the left-famous name!-and within a short distance of Nogent l'Abbesse, the fort which did most to wreck Rheims Cathedral, and so down in a dreary semi-darkness into Rheims itself.

Thirty-five years ago I was in Rheims for the first and only time, before this visit. It was in September, not long before the vintage. The town and the country-side were steeped in sunlight, and in the golden riches of Mother Earth. The air indeed, as it shimmered in the heat above the old town, and the hill slopes where the famous vineyards lie, seemed to "drop fatness." Wealth, wine, the body and its pleasures, the cunning handicraft and inherited lore of hundreds of years and many generations seemed to take visible shape in the fine old town, in its vast wine-cellars, and in the old inn where we stayed with its Gargantuan bill of fare, and its abonnés from the town, ruddy, full-fleshed citizens, whose achievements in the way of eating and drinking we watched with amazement. Even the cathedral seemed to me to breathe the richness and gaiety of this central France; the sculptures of the fa?ade with its famous "laughing angel" expressed rather the joy of living, of fair womanhood, of smiling maternity, and childhood, of the prime of youth and the satisfied dignity of age, than those austerer lessons of Christianity which speak from Beauvais, or Chartres or Rouen. But how beautiful it all was, how full, wherever one looked, of that old spell of la douce France! And now! Under the pall of the fog we drove through the silent ruin of the streets, still on their feet, so to speak, as at Verdun, but eyeless, roofless, and dead, scarcely a house habitable, though here and there one saw a few signs of patching up and returning habitation. And in the great square before the Cathedral instead of the old comeliness, the old stir of provincial and commercial life-ruin!-only intensified by a group of motors, come to bring distinguished Sunday visitors from Paris and the Conference, to see as much of it as an hour's wait would enable them to see. There in front of the great portal stood the Prime Minister of England and the Cardinal-Archbishop-heroic Cardinal Lu?on, who, under the daily hail of fire, had never left his church or his flock so long as there was a flock in Rheims to shepherd. And above the figure of the Cardinal soared the great West Front, blackened and scarred by fire, the summits of the towers lost in mist, and behind them, the wrecked and roofless church.

The destruction of irreplaceable values, other than human life, caused by the war, is summed up, as far as France is concerned, in this West Front of Rheims; so marred in all its beautiful detail, whether of glass or sculpture, yet still so grand, so instinct still with the pleading powers of the spirit. The "pity of it!" and at the same time, the tenacious undying life of France-all the long past behind her, the unconquerable future before her-these are the ideas one carries away from Rheims, hot in the heart. Above all, for the moment, the pity of it-the horror of this huge outrage spreading from the North Sea to Switzerland, of what the French call so poignantly nos mines-symbolised, once for all, by the brutal fate of this poem in stone, built up by the French generations, which is Rheims Cathedral. And as we passed away from Rheims, through the country roads and the bombarded villages of the Tardenois, another district of old France, which up to May last year was still intact, with all its farms and village and country houses, and is now but little different from Artois and Picardy, I found myself thinking with a passionate anxiety, almost, of the Conference sitting in Paris and of its procedure. "France is right-is right," I caught myself saying for the hundredth time. "Before anything else-justice to her!-protection and healing for her! Justice on the criminal nation, that has ravaged and trampled on her, 'like a wild beast out of the wood,' and healing for wounds and sufferings that no one can realise who has not witnessed for himself the state of her richest provinces. It was she who offered her breast to the first onslaught of the enemy, she who fought for us all when others had still their armies to make, she who has endured most and bled most, heavily as others-Britain, Italy, Belgium, Serbia-have endured. Her claim must come first-and let those in England and America who wish to realise why come and see."

We drove down diagonally through the Marne salient as it was last summer after the German break-through on the Marne, to Dormans and so across the river. In the darkening afternoon we passed over the Montagne de Rheims, and crossed the valley of the Ardre, near the spot where the 19th British Division, in the German attack of last June, put up so splendid a fight in defence of an important position commanding the valley-the Montagne de Bligny-that the General of the Fifth French Army, General de Mitry, under whose orders they were, wrote to General Haig: "They have enabled us to establish a barrier against which the hostile waves have beaten and shattered themselves. This none of the French who witnessed it will ever forget."

For if the Montagne de Bligny had gone, the French position on the Montagne de Rheims, south-west of Rheims, and the Cathedral city itself would have been endangered, no less than by the attack on the north-east of the town, which General Gouraud a month later pinned to earth. And when we reached Dormans, on the south bank, turning west-ward to Chateau Thierry, we were on ground no less vital, where in July the American troops in General Pershing's words wrote "one of the most brilliant pages in our military annals." The story is well known. The Germans were attempting to cross the river in force between Donnans and Chateau Thierry, and then to thrust their way down the valley of the Surmelin to Montmirail and the great main road to Paris, which passes through that town. A single regiment of the 3rd American Division held up the enemy, on the river bank to the east of Mézy, fighting at the same time east and west against German parties who had managed to get a footing at other points on the south side, and finally counter-attacking, throwing two German divisions into complete confusion, and capturing six hundred prisoners. No episode in the war is more likely to ring in the memory of after-times. "In the bend of the Marne at the mouth of the Surmelin," says Colonel Palmer, "not a German was able to land. In all twenty boats full of the enemy were sunk or sent drifting harmlessly down the stream." To the east of Mézy also, four American platoons did incredible things in defence of the Paris-Nancy railway. "They were not going to yield that track alive-that was the simple fact." And their losses were appalling. In the second platoon of the four engaged, all were killed except three who were wounded, and half of the third were down before they had driven the enemy from the embankment. The American graves lie all on the south side of the line-the German on the north. "We actually took over four hundred prisoners between the railroad and the river-the 6th German Grenadier Regiment was annihilated...." And the Germans never reached the Surmelin valley, or that Montmirail road on which they had set their hearts. "The deciding factor," says Colonel Palmer, "was the unflinching courage of our men, and their aggressive spirit." And the action, small as were the numbers engaged, could not have been bettered. "It is a military classic."

Over this hard-fought ground, consecrated by the graves of men who had thus bravely-thus gaily-laid down their lives for a cause of which they had no doubt, we ran on to Chateau Thierry, and that western flank of the Marne salient, where in June, while the Germans were still pressing south, and in July when Foch turned upon his trapped foe, the Americans, most of whom were for the first time in real battle, bore themselves to the astonishment and admiration of all the watching Allies. In June especially, when matters were at their worst. The capture of Bouresches, and Belleau Wood, the capture of Vaux on July 1st, the gallant help which an American machine-gun battalion gave the French in covering the French retreat across the bridge at Chateau Thierry, before it was blown up, and foiling the German attempts to cross, and the German move towards Paris, were perhaps, writes a British military authority, "the most splendid service, from a military standpoint, the Americans rendered to the Allied Cause. It was certainly the first occasion on which they really made themselves felt, and brought home to the Germans the quality of the opposition they were likely to encounter from the American Armies."

As we approached Chateau Thierry, the fog had cleared away and the night was not dark. On our railway journey to Metz a week earlier, we had seen the picturesque old place, with Hill 204 behind it, and the ruins of Vaux to the north-west, in daylight, from the south bank of the river. Now daylight had gone, but as we neared the Marne, the high ground on the curving north bank, with its scattered lights and their twinkling reflections in the water, made still a dimly beautiful setting for the much injured but still living and busy town. We crossed the temporary bridge into the crowded streets, and then as we had come a long way, we were glad to dip for tea and a twenty minutes' break into an inn crowded with Americans. Handsome, friendly fellows! I wished devoutly that it were not so late, and Paris not so far away, that I might have spent a long evening in their company. But we were all too soon on the road again for Meaux and Paris, passing slowly through the ruined streets of Vaux, with Bouresches and Belleau Wood to our right, and behind us the great main road from Soissons to Chateau Thierry, for the command of which in its northern sector, the American divisions under General Mangin, and in its southern portion those commanded by General Dégoutte, had fought so stoutly last July. Altogether seven American divisions, or close upon 200,000 men, were concerned in Foch's counter-attack, which began on July 18th; and as General Pershing notes with just pride: "The place of honour in the thrust towards Soissons on the 18th was given to our 1st and 2nd divisions, in company with chosen French divisions. These two divisions captured 7,000 prisoners and over 100 guns."

What one may call the "state entry" of America into the war had thus been made, and Germany had been given full warning of what this new element in the struggle must ultimately mean, were it given time to develop. And during all these weeks of June and July, British and American ships, carrying American soldiers, came in a never-ending succession across the Atlantic. An American Army of 5,000,000 men was in contemplation, and, "Why," said the President at Baltimore in April, "limit it to 5,000,000?" While every day the British Navy kept its grim hold on the internal life of Germany, and every day was bringing the refreshed and reorganised British Army, now at the height of its striking power, nearer to the opening on August 8th of that mighty and continuous advance which ended the war.