The 2nd Division, going through final manoeuvres near Gisors, was being readied to relieve the 1st at Cantigny. The 3rd, made up mostly of regular army men, was waiting near Chaumont to move up to Lorraine when the orders came. Since this division had never been under fire, it was decided to parcel its units out among the French forces being marshalled to dispute a German crossing of the Marne. The 7th Machinegun Battalion, which was motorized, set out ahead and reached Château-Thierry late in the afternoon of May 31.
Château-Thierry, where la Fontaine was born, was a tranquil little town of seventeenthcentury French houses nestling among walled gardens between the slick green river and the mossy walls of Charles Martel’s castle now landscaped as a park on the hill.
Caked with dust after twentyfour hours of travel in open trucks, the American machinegunners arrived on the stone bridge across the Marne in time to be met with a wave of his kepi by the general commanding a French colonial division which was advancing in the wrong direction. The French were being dislodged by German gunfire. The arriving Americans were hailed with enthusiastic shouts, but there was little time for cheering. Already the roofs and chimneypots of the town were being knocked down about their heads. In the confused fighting while the Germans were held off long enough for the bridge to be blown up the machinegunners gave a good account of themselves.
All along the placid Marne American doughboys, as fast as they piled out of their trucks, were jogtrotting into position to oppose German crossings. The sector in front of Château-Thierry became known as the “Pas Fini” sector, because the poilus there kept trying to tell the Americans as they arrived: “Guerre finie.” The Americans, most of whom had never seen combat outside of the motion picture screen, roared them down. “Pas finie. We’ve just begun our guerre.”
While contingents of the 3rd were taking up positions on the south bank of the Marne to the east of the German point of deepest penetration, the 2nd Division, under the command of General Omar Bundy, leaving the tired 1st to hold on as best it could at Cantigny, was hurried by truck and train towards Meaux.
Meaux, famous as a market for Brie cheeses, was a farming center frequented by Sunday excursionists from Paris, who liked to row on the quiet Marne and to picnic and eat fried gudgeons on its wooded banks. At Meaux the Americans had their first experience with the backwash of defeat. The place was in confusion. Shopkeepers were putting up their shutters. The narrow streets were locked tight in a tangle of military vehicles headed to the rear and contesting the way with farmers’ carts and wagons loaded with household goods. Many houses had been wrecked by an airraid the night before.
Decoration Day was sweltering hot. James S. Harbord, who had managed to get himself replaced as Chief of Staff and was now acting Brigadier General in command of the marine brigade of the 2nd Division, after fighting his way from Paris through encumbered roads in his staffcar, reached Meaux about noon. While he waited for the arrival of the officer detailed to let him know his brigade’s destination, he went into a hotel for lunch.
The tables were crowded with hungry French officers rapping on their plates for attention. The food was giving out. The waiters were rattled. Nobody was getting served. Harbord fell to talking to a grayhaired American lady wearing the armband of the Y.M.C.A., who turned out to be from Ohio and William Howard Taft’s sisterinlaw. As soon as she’d eaten she started pinch-hitting as a waitress. Before the general’s meal was over she had coolly taken over management of the kitchen and diningroom. Everybody got fed. When the last plate was served the proprietors closed the hotel up and the whole staff departed.
By this time Harbord had his orders (of which details kept being changed in the course of the afternoon) to proceed some thirty or forty kilometers to the north into a region to the west of Château-Thierry where French detachments, that had been fighting a losing battle for six days without relief, were hard pressed by the Germans. Eventually during the night the divisional command was set up at Montreuil-aux-Lions on the main highway from Paris to Metz. The orders were to deploy one brigade to the north and another to the south of this arterial road. At French corps headquarters there was considerable doubt as to whether the raw American troops could hold. The French general was assured that these were American regulars and that in a hundred and fifty years they had never been beaten.
As they scoured the countryside for locations for bivouacs and billets the marines felt the full impact of the retreat. Every southbound road was crowded with a tangled mass of carts, trucks, barrows, artillery caissons, people on bicycles, flocks and herds, old and young fleeing as they could. The soldiers mingled with the civilians. Under roadside trees lay the untended wounded and the sick and helpless who could drag themselves no further. Every little gully was full of abandoned equipment, wrecked trucks, machineguns, rifles, coats, blankets, boots.
As the soldiers fled they plundered the villages, drank up the wines and liquors in the taverns, ate everything that could be eaten. They threw away ammunition belts and entrenching tools to load their knapsacks and musettebags with loot. Farmhouses were gutted, milk and wine spilled on the floor, drawers and cupboards ransacked for valuables, pictures torn off the walls, mirrors and windows smashed with riflebutts. What had been an army was a whimpering, sweating, drunken rabble spreading more terror than the advancing Germans, whose presence was made known by increasing shellfire at every crossroad, and by reconnaissance planes marked with the black German cross that skimmed unopposed overhead.
The weather continued fine. All night and during the morning of June 1 marine and infantry units of the 2nd Division kept arriving in the vicinity of Montreuil-aux-Lions. As fast as they arrived they were moved into positions facing the rolling wheatfields and the wooded knolls that formed the watershed of a small tributary of the Ourcq known as Clignon brook.
The first battalions were spread thin. One marine unit occupied so much of the line that their foxholes on the open hillside back of Les Mares farm had to be seven feet apart. The machinegun companies hadn’t arrived. They had only their rifles, and a couple of batteries of French seventyfives ensconced behind them. “Are you holding the line in depth?” asked a liaison officer from G.H.Q. “No, in width,” the marine C.O. snapped back.
There the marines saw their first krauts, carefully spaced files of gray figures in coalscuttle helmets wading towards them through the wheat. A couple of heavy machineguns arrived in the nick of time. The marines were under shellfire. The village behind them was burning. They didn’t start shooting till the krauts had approached to a hundred yards. Their shooting was good. The files hesitated. The dead and wounded dropped out of sight into the wheat. The first German line melted. Now the second line was taking punishment. Suddenly they broke and ran. The wheatfield was empty. Fingers scorched and blackened from the heat of their rifles, the marines stayed in their foxholes.
During the night of June 3 the rolling kitchens caught up. The men who had been living on bacon and hardtack and on what fowls and potatoes they could pilfer from abandoned farms, were served the first proper rations many of them had eaten since Chaumont.
There followed a few days breathing spell. It was a period of suspense. From dawn to dark and dark to dawn they lay in their positions waiting for the onrushing German army. Stragglers and refugees had drained away down the roads. A weird quiet gripped the countryside.