A British general, maybe it was Carey himself, appeared on the scene and made a great outcry that the damned Yankees were running away. The damned Yankees went back into their trench and promptly helped repulse a German attack.
They spent all that day in the trenches without grub and with very little water.
Next day was fine. The Germans shelled. The blue sky filled with cotton blobs of shrapnel. The 6th Engineers stayed put. There were a few casualties. By this time they were getting regular British rations. Next day the Germans started shelling up and down the line. “It was like a feu de joie with guns,” noted the captain in his journal. The shells sounded like a swarm of bees moving up and down the trenches. Jerry must be having trouble with supply because he was economizing on his ammunition. Eight casualties. Everybody was tense. German infantry was advancing in the shelter of a fold in the land.
All at once the Americans were amazed to see what looked like a haywagon coming towards them down the St. Quentin road. Couldn’t be a farmer’s haywagon, something funny about the wheels. A lieutenant pumped a few bullets from a Springfield into the haywagon and out popped a couple of jerries. They sure ran. When the hay fell away the thing turned out to be an eight inch howitzer.
Later the same day they captured a man who claimed to be an English sergeant. He’d been asking too many questions about whether the Americans had any machineguns. Of course they hadn’t. He talked English all right. Next day the jerries came over in what looked like English planes, captured planes maybe, and machinegunned the trenches. This was the engineers’ fourth day in the lines.
After dark that night the headquarters company was transferred to another line of trenches. These were better built and had barbed wire entanglements in front of them but they were full of water. The following night they were shifted again to a point north of the road. There a few Hun snipers bothered them but there was no other activity. Next night they were taken out of the line for good. The men were relieved in small groups. The Huns sent up starshells to see what was happening. The 6th Engineers had lost two officers and twenty men killed and more than a hundred wounded or missing.
They were billeted at a place called Glissy for a rest. They slept all the first day. An Englishspeaking girl who came nosing around was arrested for a spy. The men were sent in batches into Abbeville for showers. After their showers they were served out British uniforms, the only fresh clothes available. Now they were Royal Engineers for fair.
A couple of days later they were back near Amiens working on the bridges again, this time on the Somme. From where they worked on a tubular bridge to be swung across the Somme they could see the shells taking bites out of the tall pinnacles of the Amiens cathedral in the distance. They worked quietly. No extra bloodpressure. The shelling was far away. They’d had their baptism of fire.
The German thrust towards Amiens shocked the British and French leadership into taking one more reluctant step towards a unified command. Each meeting of the Supreme War Council was revealing more cross purposes among the Allies. Pétain’s plan for assigning a few French and British divisions to a general reserve, which could be thrown into the line under a single commander wherever the need was greatest, was several times approved in principle but never put into effect. Only that naïve American, tonguetied old General Bliss, seemed wholeheartedly for it. His protests that it was the only logical plan were met by smiles and supercilious shrugs.
Clemenceau backed the general reserve for a while as an entering wedge for obtaining the supreme command for a Frenchman; but, so he told the story later, when he broached such a possibility to Sir Douglas Haig, the British Field Marshal jumped up with his hands over his head like a jackinthebox and cried, “Monsieur Clemenceau, I have only one chief, my king.”
The latest meeting of the Supreme War Council in London on March 14 had proved particularly futile. The British produced so many arguments against the general reserve that even Clemenceau gave the impression of having been talked around to their way of thinking. Only Clemenceau’s chief of staff, General Foch, stood his ground and insisted on putting himself on record with a long acidulous protest in writing. His stubbornness embroiled him with the grumpy old Tiger. The two Frenchmen left London on very bad terms indeed.
Ferdinand Foch, like Joffre, was a product of the Pyrenees. But unlike the anticlerical Joffre, he came of a devoutly Catholic family. His education was Jesuit. The Franco-Prussian war found him preparing for a military career at the Jesuit school of St. Clément in Metz. The taking over of the ancient French fortress city by the Prussians made an indelible impression on the ardent and studious youth of nineteen. As much as Clemenceau he dedicated his life to la revanche, but his career was among the old regime elements in the army and the clergy that never really accepted a French republic, neither the First, nor the Second, nor the Third. His father was an official of the Second Empire. His brother was a Jesuit priest. His silent hatred of democratic politics stood him in ill stead in the army. Though admittedly the artillery officer most learned in the classics of warfare, promotions came hard. In spite of their political differences Clemenceau, who appreciated brains, during his premiership in 1907 appointed Foch to be director of the Ecole de Guerre. As director of the French war college Foch made friends with his opposite number in England, the whimsical and slightly crackbrained Sir Henry Wilson, during the first interchanges of the entente cordiale. They became so congenial that he invited Sir Henry to his daughter’s wedding.
When war broke out Foch was charged with the defense of Nancy. His son and his soninlaw were both killed during the first year. Foch made himself a brilliant reputation in command of the Ninth Army under Joffre in the first battle of the Marne, but after the disasters on the Somme in 1916 he shared Joffre’s eclipse and was relegated to the post of inspector general on the Swiss border. Pétain brought him back as Chief of Staff, with offices in the Invalides, and ever since that day Foch had been stringing his wires towards eventual attainment of the supreme command. Since Robertson’s retirement, Sir Henry Wilson, again Foch’s opposite number as British Chief of Staff, had taken, in a chaffing sort of way, to promoting his French friend’s qualifications for generalissimo.
The extent of the disaster before Amiens began to dawn on the British Government during the Palm Sunday weekend. Lloyd George, who was out of town, received a desperate wire from Haig begging him to do something to induce the French to get troops into the widening gap between the French and British armies. He called up Lord Milner, his Secretary of State for War, one of the few cabinet officers still in London, and told him to leave for France immediately. The Prime Minister had to have an on the spot report. Milner, he added hurriedly, had full authority to do anything necessary.
Milner picked up General Wilson at Versailles and all day Monday the twentyfifth the two of them went careening over the French roads in a staffcar from one inconclusive conference to another. Confusion everywhere. Recriminations. Haig complaining that the divisions Pétain had promised had failed to appear; Pétain accusing Haig of letting go strong points he had given his word to hold.
Haig was shaken. He had lost selfconfidence to the point that he admitted tremulously to Milner that if that was the only way of getting his flank covered he was willing to take orders from a Frenchman. To spare Haig’s feelings Milner and Wilson were talking up Clemenceau as generalissimo with Foch as his technical adviser.