In Paris marines from the 2nd Division paraded down the Champs Elysées and were almost kissed to death by applauding crowds.
Back of Cantigny the 1st’s artillery saluted the German positions with fortyeight salvos in patriotic bombardment. Later in the day, sheltered from German planes by the spreading oaks of the park that surrounded an ancient château, they put on, for the benefit of a superannuated French general who lived there and of a number of admiring ladies, a remarkably fine horse show.
In Germany and Austria the early days of July were a time of scarcity, of explosions of pacifist sentiment in the Reichstag, and of open defiance of edicts of the Imperial Government. The Brest-Litovsk peace and resulting measures taken to include the old dominions of the Czar in the Mittel-Europa trading complex only resulted in spreading the Bolshevik contagion through the kingdoms, dukedoms and city states of the central empires. The imperial confederation that Bismarck cemented was shaking apart. Even Prussia, the cornerstone, was cracking.
The Kaiser had assured his subjects that Ludendorff’s spring offensives would bring peace with victory, but all the German workingpeople could see was an immense new butcher’s bill, and hunger and stringency. It was the turn of the Germans to get tired of being killed. They were beginning to listen to Bolshevik agitators whispering that peace lay in defeat.
Ludendorff’s first three drives were smashing successes, but they only resulted in consolidating the Allies and in speeding the shipment of American troops. The fourth offensive, launched during the period of the bitter struggle for Belleau Wood, proved a failure.
The aim of this offensive, now known as “Project Gneisenau,” was to capture Compiègne, and to take over the main trunk line of railroad between Paris and Cologne. It was to be the westward prong of the pincers around Paris. The operation was entrusted to General von Hutier himself. The attack was made at dawn on June 9 after the usual gas and artillery saturation on a twenty mile front between Noyon and Montdidier.
This time Foch correctly gauged Ludendorff’s intentions. Seventyfives and howitzers were lined hub to hub behind his defenses. His troops escaped the initial bombardment by falling back from lightly held advance posts to entrenchments in the rear. The most the boche gained, after suffering crushing casualties, was six miles. The American operations on both banks of the Marne were part of a general French counterattack which stalled the enemy in his tracks.
Ludendorff was baffled. Indecision seized the High Command. Their strategists were torn between their original plan to drive the British into the Channel, and the tempting bait of Paris, Europe’s capital city, lying at a mere fifty miles from their firing lines. While they prepared, with ever more meticulous care, for their final drive towards Paris, the Germans allowed the Allies a month’s respite in which to regroup their armies according to Foch’s ideas. Perhaps Ludendorff missed the keen mind of his adviser Max Hoffmann who was bogged down in the contradictions of his victory over the revolutionary Russians in the east. Ludendorff was picking his way cautiously. A new spirit of caution was spreading through his armies. This fifth offensive, which the General Staff named “the drive for peace,” must not be allowed to fail.
Pershing now had twenty combat divisions under his command, Some of them were hampered in their effectiveness because, due to the British obsession that only infantry should be shipped, their artillery and other supporting services had not yet arrived. In spite of obstruction from both the British and French, who were still showing reluctance to give up their scheme to use American recruits as replacements for their own armies, a purely American service of supplies was functioning and beginning to function well. Twenty thousand tons of supplies were being unloaded daily in the American-managed ports. American railroadmen were re-equipping the lines that led into Lorraine. American locomotives were pulling longer freights than had ever been seen on the continent. French railroad yards resounded with the root-to-toot-toot of their whistles. Tours, the hub of the S.O.S. was as much an American city as Chaumont.
On July 10 Pershing had a long conference with Foch at his château at Bombon. He wanted Foch to consent to pulling his American divisions out of the French and British sectors. He wanted them reorganized right away in an American army, at first on the Marne where they were needed in view of the coming German offensive, and later in Lorraine which was to be the point of departure for his drive planned for 1919 into the industrial heart of Germany. Already he was setting up American corps headquarters under which to group them. He urged on Foch his project for an American attack on the St. Mihiel salient.
Foch was keeping his own council. He was determined that this time there should be no leaks. He had no intention of letting either Pershing or Haig in on his real plans. He had grouped his mass of manoeuvre back of Compiègne and Soissons between the two German salients. He gave no inkling of where they would strike. He agreed vaguely with everything the American general said but he kept pushing back the date for independent American operations. He talked about a French drive to free the Marne in September. After that maybe.
The little Frenchman made up for his lack of candor by gusts of cordiality. Pétain would see to it that the American divisions would not lack for artillery, he said in his lordly way. “Today when there are a million Americans in France I am going to be still more American than any of you.” He overwhelmed the tightlipped Pershing with staccato sentences. “America must have her place in the war … The American army must become an accomplished fact.” By the end of July perhaps, or by September or certainly by the following year.
That afternoon General Pershing was up on the Marne at La Ferté-sous-Jouarre where the 2nd Division was recuperating behind the lines from Belleau Wood. The troops were paraded, citations read, decorations awarded. One marine gunner swam across the Marne to receive his.
A couple of days later the Commander in Chief lunched with Harbord at the headquarters of his marine brigade. Harbord boasted that one of his men had captured four German officers and seventyeight privates. Pershing retorted drily that no wonder Harbord was popular with the marines if he told such tall stories about them. At the same time he announced Harbord’s promotion to Major General in command of the 2nd Division.
Behind the lines men kept listening for the roar of artillery that would announce an attack. “If the Germans do not bring off a very heavy offensive in the region between Château-Thierry and Reims within the next few hours our French allies are going to explode, blow up, disintegrate,” wrote Harbord. “It has been announced daily for days, but the Boche must know how we are worrying about it for he has so far failed to produce either the heavy offensive or any visible usual preparations for it.”
The streets of Paris had a feverish gaiety that July. Everybody who planned to leave had already left. The Bertha dropped in a shell every twenty minutes regular as clockwork. Except for a slight quickening of the pulse men and women laughed off the danger. When a shell exploded in the Seine, within minutes people were out in skiffs scooping up the fish killed by the concussion.
Appetites were good. When a shell burst in front of Foyot’s sacred old restaurant across from the Senate Chamber, two American officials for whom an elderly waiter was pouring wine from a bottle of vintage burgundy noticed that his hand never quivered. “This wine is too good to shake up,” he explained.