When Haig finally consented to relieve the French on a thirty mile stretch in front of St. Quentin he entrusted the new sector to Gough’s Fifth Army which was far from recovered from the bloodletting at Ypres the autumn before. Gough’s men manned the French positions so thinly and listlessly that this hinge between the French and British immediately became of paramount interest to Ludendorff’s planners.
The High Command decided as early as January that operation “Michael” should come first. The concentration of troops and guns and ammunition was made at night and with extraordinary precautions for secrecy. At the same time trooptrains were allowed to be seen in Alsace to give the French the impression that something might be attempted from the direction of the Swiss border. Haig, though some of his staff-officers kept warning him that the attack would come through St. Quentin, was obsessed with the protection of the Channel ports.
He kept his strongest forces on his left. The various British army headquarters were full of talk about defense in depth: “let them come through and smash them from the flanks.”
The Supreme War Council meanwhile was issuing neatly drawn maps showing the German armies poised for attack to the north of Cambrai and in the Champagne region between Rheims and Verdun. According to their prognostications the attack would come in June.
On March 10 the Kaiser signed the orders at Imperial General Staff Headquarters, the Hotel Brittanique, in the ancient wateringplace of Spa in Belgium, and, as the trees were beginning to bud on the wooded hills, moved forward in his court train to treeshaded Avesnes in the French department of Nord to animate his armies by his imperial presence.
March 20 all northern France was beaten by a storm of rain and mist. The weather was so bad Hindenburg almost postponed the attack set for the morrow. By night the rain had given place to dense fog.
At 3:30 A.M. the heaviest bombardment of the war with highly volatile gas mixed with shells from guns of all calibers overwhelmed the British positions on a forty mile front. After four hours the bombardment turned into a rolling barrage and the German infantry, in groups accompanied by field guns, trenchmortars, and heavy machineguns started to advance behind it through the fog.
Their instructions were to move ahead as fast as they could, leaving all mopping up of stubborn positions to the units that followed. By noon, when the sun burned through, the Germans found that they had broken the British Fifth Army defenses all along the front. Northward in the direction of Arras the British were holding firm.
For ten days the Germans kept advancing at the speed of about five miles a day through the region between the Somme and the Oise which they had devastated in their withdrawal the year before. The utter ruin of the land they crossed was more hindrance to them than the retreating British. By the time they had reached the flourishing farmlands and undamaged roads beyond Montdidier they had so far outrun their supply that they could advance no further. They had taken thousands of square kilometers of French soil. They had destroyed the British Fifth Army, capturing eighty thousand prisoners and nine hundred and seventyfive guns, but without the railroad junction of Amiens it would be hard to consolidate their victory.
Although the railroad line through Montdidier was lost to the enemy, General Byng’s Third Army, the victors at Cambrai, dug in and held in front of Amiens with that British stubbornness that so often dismayed the German staff. A General Carey did a famous job of collecting stragglers from the broken divisions and throwing them into new trenches across the St. Quentin-Amiens road. These detachments became known as “Carey’s chickens.” Among the odds and ends of units he imbued with the will to fight was a group of American engineers.
Back in February some companies of the 6th Engineers had been detailed to join a British outfit near Peronne for instruction in military bridge building. They found the British engineers working an Italian labor battalion from the illfated army that broke and ran at Caporetto. The bridge work was absorbing.
The game was to construct a light bridge parallel to the river bank that could be swung around by a truck to span the river when needed. These Americans got along famously with the British who began to call them the Royal 6th.
The Americans were seeing the war at last. There were airraids every night. They watched with great interest the searchlights picking out attacking planes. Soon they could recognize the double whine and buzz of German bombers. The sound of the guns over the faraway front, so one of the officers entered in his diary, sounded to him like the engines of a large riversteamer in the distance. At night the gunflashes made a continual border of red along the northern horizon.
Their British friends frowned on all this activity. “ ‘Uns are cookin’ up something narsty.” An offensive might come any day.
Gasmask drills were instituted.
Spring was early. There were flowers in the gardens of wrecked houses. Songbirds were singing in the trees along the sluggish green Doignt that flowed into the Somme at this point. The men were enjoying the mild presages of the first French spring any of them had ever seen.
On March 22 a Captain Davis, who had been ordered to return to their old billeting center to settle some claims of damage presented by the villagers, rejoined his unit. He had come through Paris without learning that anything particular was going on at the front, but when he stepped out from the train at Amiens he found the railroad station under heavy attack from the air. Getting out of Amiens as quick as he could he made it back to Peronne by road without too much difficulty, but there he found that the British had orders to burn all the fine bridges they had gone to so much trouble to build. The Americans’ orders were to fall back on their dump of engineer equipment at Chaulnes, some fifteen kilometers to the south.
The roads were getting crowded. The sky was full of noise. Airraids were continuous.
They had hardly settled into their cantonments at Chaulnes when orders came to destroy all equipment, even field desks. With only the service records and the men’s packs they were to retreat another twentyfive kilometers to Moreuil on the Amiens-Montdidier railroad. There they pitched shelter tents. The weather was pleasant.
On the morning of March 27 the 6th Engineers were informed that their colonel had volunteered them to join the British defense of Amiens. British lorries carried them out to a point on the road between Warfusse and Abancourt. Although they already had their Springfields and their bayonets, there they were issued British rifles too. The British rifle, they reported, was less accurate but handier for rough field work. The trenches to the right of the road had been wellbuilt, but to the left where the engineers were, they were barely started. The Americans were hard at work digging themselves funkholes, when they heard a lot of noise to the right of the road, shrapnel, machineguns, mortar fire; the rough field work had begun.
They were working engineers with little combat training. They were lying in an open field. Behind them was a small wood. In front of them was the advancing German Army. It gave them a lonesome feeling. Hearts were thumping. Hands were cold on the riflestocks. Eyes were glued to the sights.
The Britishers in the trenches to the right of the road started, so Captain Davis put it, “retiring in some disorder and quite a hurry.” An order came from the American colonel to hold and to close up with the troops to the right. At the same moment an excited British major appeared who ordered the Americans out of their trench. He told them to form a line, retire three paces and fire; and then to retire another three paces and fire again, just like at Waterloo. The order seemed rather humorous to the Americans because there weren’t any Germans in sight to fire at.