“By God they’ve been trying it with me,” said Pershing vehemently, “and I don’t intend to stand a bit of it.”
“He inspires no enthusiasm, ever,” Bullard noted of his Commander in Chief; “respect, yes.”
The 1st Division gave no Allied officer the opportunity to assume superior airs. Although the counterattacks were heavy; and, after the extra French artillery was withdrawn, the German guns administered bitter punishment, the Americans held on. When they were finally taken out of the sector in early July they had suffered nearly five thousand casualties, killed, wounded, and gassed. Of prisoners they lost very few.
“A year, a month, a week and a day after we came into the war we took enemy ground and held it,” the word spread like a flash through the A.E.F., to Chaumont, and down the line of communication to the ports where files of khakiclad men were shambling off the transports; to Washington, where sallow officeworkers struggled redeyed into the night with the problems of procurement and supply; to the mines and steel-plants and the shipyards. The phrase went from mouth to mouth. “A year, a month, a week and a day.”
Among the hardpressed French reeling back from the fresh German offensive the victory at Cantigny was exaggerated to almost miraculous proportions. The Americans Pétain had promised them the year before were in the war at last. The Americans had counterattacked and won.
Chapter 18
THE KAISER’S LAST VICTORY
THE 1st Division’s feat of arms at Cantigny never got the play it deserved in the American press because it was overshadowed by frightening headlines reporting a new German breakthrough. Operation “Roland.”
Ludendorff’s generals managed to assemble fortytwo divisions and nearly four thousand guns in the neighborhood of Laon without the French command being any the wiser. These were poised against the Chemin des Dames front which was considered so impregnable it was lightly held by four French divisions and three English divisions sent there for a rest after the pounding they had taken in Flanders. Only Pershing’s intelligence, studying such reports as were available of German troop movements, came to the conclusion that the boche was preparing an attack along the Aisne. When word was passed along to the French they paid no attention.
Foch, at his new headquarters in a small brick cháteau named Bombon a good fifty kilometers to the rear of Paris, was busy with his plans for a counteroffensive between Montdidier and Noyon. He announced in his most oracular vein that no such attack was pending.
Von Hindenburg told in his memoirs of having visited Laon at the time of Nivelle’s failure the spring before. It was a sunny morning. He found the views from the highset hill town delightful. Walking out on the terrace of the prefecture he carefully surveyed the landscape to the south. He described the ridge of the Chemin des Dames cutting across the green wellwatered plain like a wall that joined the hill masking Soissons to the southwest to the high land along the valley of the Aisne that sheltered Reims to the eastward. He remembered Napoleon’s battle against the Prussians in that difficult terrain. Only with complete surprise would success be possible.
Ludendorff reassured him: even if the attack were only partly successful it would draw off French support from the British against whom the final knockout was being prepared. The German generals gloated a little over the prospect of mounting Krupp’s new longrange guns, improved versions of the three Berthas that terrorized the Parisians, and bombarding England from the Channel ports.
The German Commander in Chief went on to repeat a humorous tale brought back to him from the front: the croaking of the frogs was so loud on the marshy little stream that for a ways separated the opposing armies that the German engineers were able to set up their portable bridges right under the noses of the French outposts. He remembered with pride how a captured Prussian noncom hoodwinked the French by telling them not to worry about the coming barrage because German morale had been so lowered by their losses in the Flanders offensive that they would refuse to advance.
Whether it was the croaking of the frogs or the fabrications of the Prussian noncom that lulled them, the French commanders took no precautions. It turned out later that the general in charge was in Paris that night visiting his light o’ love. Surprise was complete.
At 1 A.M. the morning of May 27 the Germans began the heaviest bombardment they’d hitherto used in the war on the entire front from Soissons to Reims. Three and a half hours later seventeen divisions, preceded by the first German tanks to appear in force, attacked on a forty kilometer front.
The thinly strung French gave way. The British to the eastward managed to fall back in fair order in the direction of Reims. At noon the Germans were crossing the Aisne on bridges the Allies had neglected to blow up. By nightfall they had ploughed through a second range of defensible hills and were crossing the Vesle west of Fismes. Two days later they took the important supply centers of Soissons and Fère-en-Tardenois. By the end of the month they occupied most of the country between the Ourcq and the Marne.
As on the Somme and the Lys the very magnitude of the German victory threw Ludendorff’s plans out of kilter. The Crown Prince’s armies took sixtyfive thousand prisoners, scores of airplanes nested in their hangars and immense quantities of guns and ammunition. Discipline broke down when the German divisions found themselves unopposed in the rich unspoiled countryside.
The German soldiers were hungry. They were greedy for fats. Four years of wartime stringency had left them starved for every kind of goods. This was the champagne region. There were cellars stocked with wine in every village. While the more levelheaded officers were rounding up needed military equipment, the troops were slaughtering chickens and pigs in the barnyards and scattering to eat and drink and loot in the dwellinghouses. Re-establishing order became a major problem.
At the same time the advanced assault troops were moving so fast they outran their supply. The British, as ever stubborn in defeat, held with their backs to Reims. To the west of the Ourcq fresh French divisions, hastily entrenched in the wooded region of Villers-Cotterets, blocked advance down the Soissons-Paris railroad. The Germans found themselves squeezed into the wedgeshaped pocket between the Ourcq and the Marne. It was a rough farming region of low irregular hills, illprovided with highways and served only by a branch line of railroad. As they advanced towards Château-Thierry on the main road to Paris along the Marne the Crown Prince’s armies found themselves stalled and squeezed between the two rivers.
In the rear of the defeated armies there was panic. More than a million people left Paris that spring. Big Bertha’s bombardment redoubled. On the Bourse and in the Chamber of Deputies the word was Bordeaux. At Versailles the Supreme War Council went from one session of confused wrangling to another. It was as much as the grayfaced old Tiger could do, moving ceaselessly between the front and the rear, his mustache bristling and an old slouch hat pulled down on his head, to bully and cajole the politicians into staying put. While privately he speeded arrangements for removing the government departments, in public he repeated endless variations of Foch’s declaration: they would fight in front of Paris and in Paris and behind Paris. They would fight on the Seine and they would fight on the Loire. For the present the battle was on the Marne.
On May 30, the day the American 2nd and 3rd Divisions received their orders to move up to the Marne, Pershing had eleven combat divisions under his command in the A.E.F. Three divisions, recently landed, were receiving hasty instruction between the British lines and the Channel coast. Another three were on inactive fronts in Lorraine and the Vosges mountains and the rest were billeted around in training areas. Elements of seven more were beginning to disembark in French and British ports.