“I felt perfectly sure,” wrote Bullard, “that these soldiers were never afterward to encounter anything except death that would be harder to face than the labors and exposure of this day.”
Three days later the American battalions were filing into a five kilometer stretch of trenches on low and muddy ground in the vicinity of the village of Seicheprey. The officers of the French Moroccan division they relieved showed the Americans the lay of the land. The entire region was overlooked by German positions on a high bare hill. In spite of miles of camouflage every artillery position and every ammunition dump and every daylight move of troops was clearly visible to the boche observers looking through their glasses from safe observation posts on Montsec.
As harrowing as being under the enemy’s eye, was the itching from the cooties that swarmed in the dugouts and shelters. For most of the Americans it was their first experience with lice.
For two weeks their officers fretted under the command of the French corps headquarters. The French used the Toul area as a rest sector and they wanted to keep it quiet. The Americans were rearing to go. At last on February 10 Bullard could enter in his diary: “Received tactical command of my division on the fifth and began harrying the enemy at once … Well we stirred him up and he came back at us … Of course I lost men, but as we were the most active it seems probable that we made him lose more.”
The sector came to life in a series of raids and counterraids across the barbed wire and the muddy shellholes between the hostile positions. There was constant rifle and machinegun fire. Occasionally a highspirited doughboy who still felt war was a kind of a lark would poke his hat up on a stick above the trench just to see what Heinie would do. Heinie answered with minenwerfers. American detachments took losses but they struck back. The dead and wounded had to be carried two or three kilometers uphill through slippery access trenches where the mud never dried. Graves were always open in the little cemetery near headquarters at Mesnil la Tour. As signs of spring appeared on the ruined land the white crosses multiplied.
The plight of the 1st Division wallowing in the muck of the Toul sector under observation from the Germans on Montsec was typical of the whole strategic scheme of the war that winter. The Germans had the inside lines. They had the advantage of position. The initiative was theirs.
The element they lacked was time. Although the German people were kept in ignorance, the inner circle of command was already aware of the failure of their submarine blockade of Great Britain. On the other hand the German people were all too conscious of the success of the British blockade of the Fatherland. They were hungry. Stories were going around of babies dying for lack of milk. Fats were hardly obtainable. Soap had ceased to exist. Breadstuffs were ersatz and strictly rationed. Industries were running down for lack of raw materials.
It was hoped that with the next harvest the Baltic provinces and Poland and the Ukraine, about to be denied to the Petrograd Bolsheviks by the peace terms at Brest-Litovsk, would be furnishing wheat and meat. For the moment the only way to provide sufficient food for the army was to starve the civilians.
Germany’s allies were in a bad way. The Hapsburg empire was on the verge of emulating the collapse of the Romanoffs. In the Balkans victor and vanquished suffered equally from pestilence and famine. The Bulgarian Army was weakened by the strife of factions. The Turks lacked money and munitions and the will to fight. In the southern dominions the British had wiped out the shame of Kut el Amara by capturing Baghdad and Jerusalem. Arabian sheikhs were declaring their independence. Romantic British agents like Philby and Lawrence were lashing up the Bedouins to revolt. In the Aegean the Turkish rule was threatened by the Greeks whom the British were cautiously arming under Venizelos.
Erich von Ludendorff’s successes in the East had won the Kaiser’s devotion. Von Hindenburg relied on him completely. As Imperial Chief of Staff, he was master of Germany. It was largely his decision that, before the untrained Americans should learn how to fight, and before the corrosion of Bolshevism and hunger and revolt should advance any further, the German armies must strike the Allies a knockout blow in the West.
As fast as the German divisions were pulled out of the eastern battlefields they were put through courses of training in von Hutier’s methods of open warfare which had proved so successful at Riga and Caporetto. The rank and file were thoroughly indoctrinated with the notion that one final blow would bring a victorious peace to the Fatherland. The staffs meanwhile were busy blueprinting every detail of a series of offensives which they believed would shatter the Allied armies. With immense pains alternative projects were drafted. If they made proper use of their new dominance in manpower they could not fail.
“St. George I” was the code name of an operation against Ypres, “St. George II” against Lys. These were to be under the group of armies commanded by Prince Rupert of Bavaria. Further south the German Crown Prince’s headquarters would join the Bavarians in the conduct of operation “Michael” against the hinge between the British and the French in front of St. Quentin. The Kaiser’s son would further assume command of operation “Roland” through the Chemin des Dames. If these went awry other plans dubbed “Castor and Pollux,” “Hector and Achilles” were in readiness. There was preparation for diversions in Alsace and the Trou de Belfort. Dummy concentrations were to be used to confuse Allied intelligence as to where the real blows would fall. “It will be an immense struggle that will begin at one point, continue at another, and take a long time,” Ludendorff told the Kaiser. “It is difficult but it will be victorious.”
The information that came in from the camp of the enemy to the political observers attached to the German General Staff was not too discouraging. In America one of the first results of the war effort was the collapse of railroad transportation. American newspapers were full of the failure of the airplanebuilding program. Men were dying of influenza in the training camps. Ex-President Theodore Roosevelt — for whom the Germans had high respect — was stalking about the country denouncing the inefficiencies of the Administration. The War Department was said to have “ceased to function.” So general was the disillusionment with the production of fighting equipment that a prominent Democrat, Senator Chamberlain of Oregon, was assailing Secretary Baker’s management in a fulldress debate in the Senate.
More than a million draftees were in training, but no appreciable amount of ordnance was being produced. The shipbuilding program was still on the draftingboard and the British were proving unwilling to furnish enough of their own shipping to transport American troops to France in really large quantities.
On the western front, although the Allied Supreme War Council was functioning it was far from attaining unity of command. The French and British had to maintain twelve divisions in Italy to keep that country in the war. Pétain had managed to restore the morale of the French but only by his guarantee that no offensives would be attempted. His plan for a mobile reserve had been accepted by the Supreme War Council but Haig was proving reluctant to put British troops at his disposal. Lloyd George had not screwed up his courage to get rid of Haig whom he obviously distrusted, but he was retaining as a home guard in England the trained men Haig needed to replace the divisions he sent to Italy. Pétain and Haig were engaged in a dispute as to how much of the French lines the British should take over.