Part 8 (1/2)
This worried neither the higher command nor me. The higher command did not know that the map was wrong; they had sent me their beautiful little plans. I sent them equally beautiful ones without debating the matter, and all were satisfied.
I remember one general who commanded the brigade of which I was a member. His hobby was switch lines. A switch line is simply a trench running approximately perpendicular to the front, where a defensive position can be taken up in case the enemy breaks through on the right or left and whereby you form a defensive flank. The old boy would come up, solemn as a judge, and ask me where my switch lines were to be put.
With equal solemnity I would explain to him. After talking for a half an hour he would ask confidentially, ”Major, what is a switch line?” With equal solemnity I would explain to him and conversation would cease.
Three days thereafter we would go through the same thing again. The old fellow had heard someone talking about a switch line once and somehow felt that it counted a hundred in game to have one.
Another indoor sport of the high command was a report for plans of defense. A plan of defense consisted of maps and long screeds indicating just where counter-attacks were to be launched when parts of the front line were taken by the enemy. They were beautiful things, pages and pages long. They were as gay in color as Joseph's proverbial coat, and when things broke, circ.u.mstances were always such that you did something entirely different from any of the plans.
Still another sport was patrol reports and patrolling. The patrols were, according to instructions, arranged for by the higher command because the higher command knew nothing and could know nothing of the particular details that govern in any individual section of the front. They would send down to the battalion commander and demand statements, for their revision, as to what his patrols were to be for the night, when they were to go out, what they were to do, etc. The battalion commander would send them his patrol sheet and then by the above-mentioned code they would endeavor to confer with him and debate the advisability of certain of his actions. Again experience taught the way out. You agreed with everything they said, and did what you originally intended. Next day they would want a map indicating exactly the points traversed by the patrol. Knee-deep in water in a filthy dugout, your adjutant or intelligence officer would make them this map. The map, like most maps, was for decorative purposes. No patrol wandering in a pitch-black night in the rain, stumbling on dead men, snarling itself in wire, lying flat on its bellies when the Hun flares shot up, could possibly tell exactly where it had gone. This was, happily, not known to the higher command, so they rested in blissful ignorance.
I cannot leave the question of maps without discussing the all-absorbing topic of coordinates. A coordinate is a group of numbers which indicate an exact point on the map. If you have firmly got the system in your head, you can find the point accurately on the map. Any man, however, who thinks he can go and sit on a coordinate on the actual ground is either a lunatic or belongs to the higher command. Incidentally, in demanding reports of patrols, alternate gas positions, etc., the order usually, reads, ”Battalion commander will furnish reports with coordinates.”
When I was recovering from a wound in my leg, I attended for two weeks our staff college. This college was well conceived and did excellent work, but nowhere were more evident the grievous faults of our unpreparedness. A good staff officer should have had practical experience with troops. If he has not had this experience he takes the thumb rules too literally and does not realize that they are simply rules to govern in general. We had practically no officers with this experience. The result was that the students, good fellows, most of them men who had never been in action, attached too much importance to the figures and did not realize it was the theory that was important.
Infantry, according to staff problems, always marches four kilometers an hour. March graphics are drawn with columns which clear points, with three hundred meters to spare between them and the head of the next column after both columns have marched ten kilometers to the point of junction. No account is taken of the fact that rarely, if ever, does infantry exceed in rate of march three and one half kilometers under the ordinary conditions prevailing in France, and that bad weather, bad roads, etc., bring it to three kilometers. What a commanding officer of troops must bear in mind is not simply getting his troops to a given point, but getting them to that given point in such shape that they are able to perform the task set them when they arrive. Furthermore, roads given on the map are accepted with the sublime faith of a child. I remember once having my regiment on the march for twelve hours because the trail on which we had all been ordered to proceed necessitated the men going single file, and the infantry of a division single file stretches out indefinitely.
Our troops had now begun to arrive in France in large numbers. It was more than a year after the commencement of the war before this was effected. The inability of our national administration to bring itself to the point where it considered patriotism as above politics was largely responsible for this. Every move forward toward the active pus.h.i.+ng of the war was the result of the pressure of the people on Was.h.i.+ngton. When I say that our troops were coming across in large numbers, let it be borne in mind that, though the men did come, munitions and weapons of war did not. The Browning automatic rifle, for example, to my mind one of the greatest weapons developed by the war, was invented in the United States in the summer of 1917. When the war finished it had just been placed for the first time in the hands of a limited number of our divisions; my division, the First, never had them until a month after the armistice. We used the old French chauchat, a very inferior weapon. None of our airplanes had come, and the death of many of our young men was directly traceable to this, as they, of necessity, used inferior machines. Our cannon was and remained French and its ammunition was French. Our troops were at times issued British uniforms and many of the men objected strenuously to wearing them on account of the b.u.t.tons with the crown stamped on them. Our supply of boots, up to and including the march into Germany, was composed in part of British boots. These boots had a low instep and caused much foot trouble. These are facts that no amount of words can cover, no speeches explain away.
CHAPTER VIII
SOISSONS
”And drunk delight of battle with my peers, Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.”
TENNYSON.
Early in July rumors reached us that we were going to be relieved. At first we did not attach any importance to this, as we had heard many rumors of a like nature during the months we had been in the sector. At last, however, the French officers came up to reconnoiter, and we knew it was true. We were relieved and marched back to some little village near the old French town of Beauvais. Everyone was as happy as a king.
Here we heard that the plan was to form a corps of the Second Division and our division, train and recruit them for a month, and make an offensive with us some time late in August or September. General Bullard, our division commander who had been, in turn, colonel of the Twenty-eighth Infantry, brigadier general commanding the Second Brigade, and division commander, was to be corps commander. This pleased us very much, as we had great confidence in him.
We had been in these villages only for a few days when orders reached us to entruck and proceed to some towns only a short distance from Paris.
This appealed to us all, for if we were going to train and rest for a month, no more delightful place could be chosen for one and all than the vicinity of Paris.
The buses arrived and all night we jolted southwest through the forest of Chantilly. By morning we arrived and detrucked and the brown columns wound through the fresh green landscape to the charming little gray stone towns. The town where we were to stay was called Ver. It was built on rolling country and its gray cobble-paved streets twisted and wound up hill and down through a maze of picturesque gray houses in whose doors well-dressed, bright-cheeked women and children stood watching us. On the hill were the remains of an old wall and chateau, and at the foot, through a broad meadow shaded with trees, a fair-sized brook rippled. Jean Jacques Rousseau lived and wrote there. How he could have been such a hypocrite and have lived in such a charming place is more than I can see.
The men were delighted. ”Say, Buddie, this is some town; look at that stream!”--”Bonne billets.”--”Let's fight the rest of the war here”--were some of the remarks I heard as the column swung in.
Everything was ideal. The stream above mentioned furnished a bathtub for the command. We had had no opportunity for about two months to thoroughly bathe, as we had been on active work the entire time, and you can imagine in just what condition we were. To put it in the words of one of my company commanders, ”The command was as lousy as pet c.o.o.ns.”
The first day we spent in orienting ourselves, getting the kitchens arranged and the billets comfortable. Meanwhile the troops were down bathing in the stream, to the admiring interest of the French inhabitants, who lined the bridge. To our staid Americans the unconventional att.i.tude of interest in bathing troops displayed by the French inhabitants of all ages and both s.e.xes was a source of constant embarra.s.sment. I have known a platoon sergeant to guide his men to quite a distant point to take their baths. When I asked him why, he replied, ”Sir, it isn't decent with all them frogs looking on.”
That evening, at officers' meeting, everyone was on the crest of the wave, ”sitting on the world,” as the doughboy puts it. The officers established their mess in various houses, and I remember to this day Lieutenant Kern, as gallant an officer as ever it was my pleasure to know, who was mortally wounded some three days from this time, telling me that they had the prettiest French girl in all of France as a waitress at his company mess and that they were all going to give her lessons in English. We talked over training and made all arrangements for a long stay. The only dissenting voice was that of the medical officer, Captain E. D. Morgan. He, Ca.s.sandra-like, prophesied that the town was too nice and we would be moved soon.
Next morning, while I was out going over the village, selecting drill grounds and planning the schedule, a motorcycle orderly arrived and handed me a message which read, ”You will be prepared to entruck your battalion at two this afternoon.” This meant no rest for us. We realized that a move on our part now meant one thing and one thing only, that something serious had arisen, and that we were going in again. Rumor had been rife for two or three days past that the big Hun offensive was about to start again. In the army, among the front-line troops, practically all you get is rumor about what is happening daily. Where the rumor starts from it is impossible to say, but it travels like lightning. Officers' call was sounded, and when they had a.s.sembled, I read them the order and told them it was my opinion we were going into a big battle right away. The men were immediately a.s.sembled and told the same thing. We always felt that all information possible should be given to the men. Instead of the command being downcast at the idea of leaving their well-deserved rest, their spirits rose. Immediately bustle and preparation was evident everywhere in the town.
By one o'clock the truck train was creaking into place on the road.
Oddly enough the truck train was made up of White trucks, made in Cleveland, with Indo-Chinese drivers and was under the command of a French officer. The troops filed by in columns of twos toward the entrucking point. The men were laughing and joking. ”They can't do without us now, Bill.” ”Say, Nick, look over there” (pointing toward a grave yard), ”them's the rest billets of this battalion, and that”
(indicating a rather imposing tomb) ”is the battalion headquarters.”
Many of them were singing the national anthem of the doughboy, _Hail!
Hail! the Gang's All Here._
I got into the automobile of the French commander of the train, taking with me Lieutenant Kern, as he was pretty well played out and I wanted to spare him as much as possible. The French train commander had no idea what our ultimate destination was. All he knew was a route for about sixty kilometers, at the end of which he was to report for further orders at a little town. As we ran up and down the column of trucks checking the train to make sure that all units were present and all properly loaded, the men were singing and cheering.
As all afternoon we jolted northward through clouds of dust, rumors came in picked up from French officers on the roadside. The Hun had attacked in force east and west of Rheims in a desperate attempt to break the French army in two. East of Rheims they had met with a stone-wall resistance by Gouraud's army and been hurled back with heavy loss. West of Rheims their attack had been more successful, and they were reported to have broken through, crossed the Marne, and to be now moving on Chalons.