Foch had to be satisfied with a qualified command, but Pershing had won his point; an American army was included on a par with the French and British.
It was the boche who conferred the supreme command on Foch. Hardly a week had elapsed after the conference at Beauvais, when, just as the various Allied headquarters were getting their breath and settling back into the old routine with the assurance that things were quieting down, on April 9 Ludendorff made his next move. Prince Rupert of Bavaria’s group of armies attacked the British lines again, this time in the valley of the Lys south of Ypres.
This was operation “St. George,” reduced in scope by Ludendorff’s fear of risking too much of his reserve to the point where staff officers referred to it scornfully as operation “Georgette.” The tactics were the same as in the first drive. The German command picked the moment when a Portuguese division that had been suffering miseries from insufficient clothing and poor supplies in the trenches was slated for relief. Seven carefully trained assault divisions converged in a surprise attack while the relief was being carried out. The Portuguese broke and ran. The relieving brigades became entangled in the rout. The thinly held British lines on either side melted away.
The success was greater than Ludendorff had dared hope. The movement he intended as a diversion to draw Allied reserves from his spearhead at Montdidier became a major offensive. On April 11 the British pulled out of Armentières, long famous in drunken singing and latrine talk as a rest center for British Tommies. The situation became so desperate that Haig issued the order: “Every position must be held to the last man. There must be no retirement. With our backs to the Wall, and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight to the end.”
Even so the retreat continued. All the ground so many British and Canadian lives were squandered to regain in front of Ypres was lost. As the spring had been unusually dry the German divisions were able to work their way across the swampy valley of the Lys to the high ground to the westward. For a while it looked as if the British armies would be driven back on Boulogne and Calais.
In spite of daily appeals to Pétain and Foch, French reinforcements were slow in arriving. When they did appear their chief feat of arms was to help the British lose their most important position on Mount Kemmel to the southwest of Ypres. Still the British managed to hold Ypres itself and the essential railroad center of Hazebrouck.
By the end of April the British could count around three hundred thousand casualties, dead, wounded and prisoners, since March 21. The German losses were almost as heavy. Ludendorff had extended his lines in two huge salients, but in each case he had fallen short of his strategic objective, which had been Amiens in the first offensive and Hazebrouck in the second. Mordacq had been assuring Clemenceau that this would happen. “Les boches n’ont pas le cran,” he said. The Germans haven’t the gall.
Foch was now firmly in the saddle. Brought up from boyhood in the theory of toujours l’offensif he was collecting the mass of manoeuvre he’d preached at the Ecole de Guerre and biding his time for a counterstroke. He retained his confident swagger. When British officers begged him to send more troops to their assistance he consistently refused. “C’est la bataille du nord,” he would say with a shrug of his shoulders.
As the German pressure slackened, the French and British began to become insistent again that American units should be incorporated in their own armies as fast as they landed. At the conference of the Supreme War Council at Abbeville they gave Pershing a bad quarter of an hour.
The plausible Lord Reading had been working on President Wilson in Washington and had, so it seemed, brought him around to the belief that the outcome of the war depended on merging the identity of the American troops in the British and French forces. Lloyd George had in his hands a message from the White House acquiescing in the British plan to bring over only American infantry and American machinegunners instead of complete divisions. Lloyd George and Lord Milner, seconded by Clemenceau and Foch, started on Pershing and Bliss with arguments in favor of this plan as soon as they showed their faces in the conference room. Bliss had little stomach for debate, but Pershing held his ground.
He was fond of reminding the French that when they’d sent Rochambeau overseas to serve with the Americans in the Revolutionary War, it had been with the understanding that he would have a separate command, but this time he answered in his halting way, wearing his grimmest poker face, that since it looked as if the American Army was going to have to bear the brunt of the war from now on it was essential for all concerned that the Americans should fight the way they’d fight best, and that was as a separate unit. The debate became so acrimonious that Clemenceau adjourned the conference, saying that Foch and Milner and Pershing had better argue the matter out in private.
As soon as they were alone in a small room Foch turned on Pershing and asked in his rasping voice, “You are willing to risk our being driven back to the Loire?” Pershing answered yes it was a risk that had to be taken. They argued so long that the three prime ministers became impatient and rapped on the door. Milner went to open the door and Pershing heard him whisper to Lloyd George, “You can’t budge him an inch.”
Pershing rose to his feet. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I have thought this program over very carefully and I will not be coerced.”
In the end he agreed to follow the British plan for two months but no longer. He overcame Italian opposition by promising Orlando to send a complete American regiment to Italy. On the eventual autonomy of the A.E.F. he would not yield an inch. “We parted with smiles,” wrote Clemenceau, “that on both sides concealed gnashings of teeth.”
After all this demand for infantry General Pershing was somewhat amazed, upon arriving back at his headquarters at Chaumont, to receive a letter from Marshal Haig asking for ten thousand artillerymen. Pershing answered politely that the British had not yet furnished the howitzers they had promised. If Haig would furnish the guns and the instructors he would man six batteries for him. Haig withdrew his request.
It was agreed that three more American divisions should immediately be added to the three already holding quiet sectors and that the 1st Division should be placed under orders of the VI Corps of the First French Army in front of Montdidier. To carry out this arrangement the 1st was relieved on the St. Mihiel salient by the 26th or Yankee Division under General Edwards. In the confusion that was spreading over the rear of the French armies as a result of the German drives, the conduct of the relief became thoroughly snarled up. As if to prove that it wasn’t only between allies that disagreements flourished, the staffs of the two American divisions fell out among themselves. Valuable time was taken up at Chaumont sorting out charges and countercharges until Pershing called up both divisional commanders and told them sharply to drop it.
The boche added to the confusion by constant shelling and a crippling gas attack. The Germans seemed bound to make the front as hot as they could for their new enemy. The New Englanders of the 26th Division had hardly learned to find their way through the labyrinth of old trenches that led to an advanced post in the ruins of the village of Seicheprey when the German artillery closed down on them with a box barrage which was followed by a raid in overwhelming force.