Though many officers and noncoms were sent to learn trench warfare among the British most of the instruction was by French divisions drawn back for rest and recuperation. The French conducted their training with enthusiasm. It was a better life than fighting the boche.
Near Gondrecourt French engineers constructed a model sector with dugout shelters, line entrenchments and observation posts. There the Americans were put through gas attacks with real gas and taught the use of handgrenades and Very pistols for signalling and the vagaries of the heavy Chauchat automatic rifle and of the 37-millimeter gun and the trench mortar. Even their machineguns were the French Hotchkiss since Army Ordnance had lost so much time trying to decide on the best possible machinegun that it hadn’t produced any.
Siege warfare had gone on so long that the French and British infantry instructors could hardly think of war except in terms of trenches and barbed wire entanglements and machinegun fire and riflegrenades for defense. For attack they relied on handgrenades. Shooting was the business of the artillery. The infantry’s job was to occupy and hold a position after the barrage had made it uninhabitable for the enemy.
General Pershing had other ideas. He planned for open warfare and insisted on marksmanship on the rifle range. He planned for combat man to man.
Orders came down to indoctrinate the troops in hatred of the boche. Units were harangued on the atrocities the Huns had committed in Belgium and France. American troops must be taught to hate the sonsofbitches. The straw dummies at bayonet practice were named Hans or Fritz. The troops got instruction in how to tear their guts out with proper zest.
In spite of swollen feet and frostbite, and exhaustion from the long quicktime hikes that were part of the weekly routine, the health and spirits of the men remained surprisingly good. Many were entranced by the picturebook prettiness of the countryside. Doughboys managed to squeeze a few pleasures out of the stony French villages. They got along famously with the children. Farmers’ wives did a flourishing business selling the Americans omelettes and vin chaud. The Americans were free spenders. They were always ready to trade cans of bullybeef for wines and liquors or occasionally for complaisances on the part of the farmer’s daughter. They helped the farmer with his chores. To the French they appeared not only as a protection from the boche but as a source of revenue. A whole language of Franco-American camaraderie grew up with French and English words interspersed. “Our popote’s no damn good. Cook feeds us beaucoup slum.”
On October 20 four battalions of infantry from the 1st Division were sent into the lines amid the undamaged scenery of a quiet sector along the Marne-Rhine canal between Lunéville and Nancy. The artillery, which had been learning the use of seventyfives and howitzers under French instructors at Le Valdahon, took up positions from which they could duplicate the fire of the guns of the French division which was holding that part of the front.
On October 23 the first American shell, out of a French seventyfive to be sure, was sent shrilling over the German lines. The boche replied in kind. The same day a few wounded were sent back to the new field hospital. Four days later a patrol out in nomansland managed to take a German prisoner.
By this time the Germans were alerted as to the positions of their new enemy. Since by mutual consent nothing ever happened on the Lorraine front the French had little aviation there. The A.E.F. did not yet have a plane fit to fly, so the men of the 1st Division had no air cover at all. The Germans bided their time until their observation planes reported that a relief of the American troops in advanced positions was in progress.
At 3 A.M. the morning of November 3 they let loose everything they had in a violent bombardment of an outpost which had just been occupied by a platoon of the 16th Infantry. It was the men’s first moment at the front. They had been fumbling about in the dark trying to find their way in the maze of trenches. Before they knew what had happened they were boxed in by a barrage. A German raiding party blew a path through the barbed wire with bangalore torpedoes. Right away their handgrenades came lobbing over the parapet. Three men were killed. The sergeant and nine more were overpowered by bayonets and trenchknives and surrendered. The German radio had itself a time crowing over this easy victory over the green Americans.
The only other Americans to undergo their baptism of shrapnel that fall were some railroadmen from the 11th Engineers attached to the British under General Byng. Two companies of them helped unload the tanks brought up at night in camouflaged flatcars and hidden in the woods in preparation for the November attack in front of Cambrai. After the unexpectedly successful breakthrough they went up with the Canadians to repair the railroad line through Gouzeaucourt. When the Germans launched their sudden counteroffensive they dropped crowbars and shovels and gave a good account of themselves with their rifles. They reported two dead, thirteen wounded and fifteen missing, after falling back shoulder to shoulder with the British combat troops.
Another engineer outfit on similar duty, from the 12th, managed to hide out in a village during the high tide of the German advance. When the enemy was dislodged from the furthest point of his advance they reported back without the loss of a man at their post of command.
The 1st Division, meanwhile, was pulled out of the lines for further training. Major General Sibert, who had made a name for himself superintending engineering work on the Panama Canal, but in whom G.H.Q. discovered a lack of combat initiative, was replaced by Robert Lee Bullard, a wiry Georgiaborn general with a twinkle in his eye, who had at least heard bullets sing as a young man in the pursuit of Geronimo and in the Philippines.
For many of the Americans that dank Christmas was the first they had ever spent away from home. The doughboys rigged up Christmas trees in every village where they were billeted and had a high time distributing candy and whatever toys they could get hold of to the sadeyed little French children. The Mayor of Gondrecourt was so touched that he wrote a letter of appreciation. It was like a fête of two large families he said. Never perhaps had such bonds of sympathy obtained between two nations.
A few days later the 1st Division floundered through a snowstorm to finish their training with five days of manoeuvres. “Worst weather in which I ever saw troops work,” wrote General Bullard in his diary. He described it as the fiercest strain to which he had ever seen troops subjected outside of battle. The snow was four or five inches deep on the open ground. The men in the practice trenches were over their shoetops in slush. There were frozen fingers and ears and noses. Horses died from cold and exhaustion. What saved the day, according to Bullard, were the rolling kitchens which they had imitated from the French popotes. Hot food kept up the men’s spirits and strength. Only the horses died; the doughboys held up, and the old army mules.
January 15 half of the 1st Division moved out of its billets in the training area to relieve the French on the eastern flank of the St. Mihiel sector. This was the position which Pershing picked the summer before for the eventual jumping off of an American drive into the vitals of industrial Germany. Up to now the Americans had been nursed by French units whenever they appeared. In the Toul sector they were on their own.
The weather was even more trying than during the five days manoeuvres. A cold night froze the snowy roads and a sleety rain smoothed them to sheer ice where neither the horses’ hoofs nor the wheels of trucks could take hold. Men and animals fell in all directions in a tangle of harness and ditched wagons. Upset wagons were continually having to be reloaded in the rain by men up to their knees in freezing slush. By night the wagon train of the first detachment had only progressed a mile and a half.