Charles Marie Emmanuel Mangin, a small jumpy sallow man with deep lines in his face and a jetblack mustache, was a veteran leader of colonial troops. Bullard described him as a little foxterrier with a bulldog jaw. He had made his reputation leading two successful counterattacks at Verdun in 1916. The plan of the move to cut off Soissons was his. The crux of the operation was intrusted to Berdoulat’s corps which was to consist of the American 1st and 2nd and a Moroccan division famous for recklessness and dash.
The 1st, now under Major General Summerall who had been promoted for his conduct of the artillery at Cantigny, received orders on July 11. They were to start moving out of the Beauvais rest area for an undisclosed destination. Travel was to be by night and the troops were to hide from airplane observation in copses and villages during the day. The 1st’s advance towards the front proved strenuous but was carried out with no more than the usual confusion.
The 2nd, notified three days later, had a rough time of it. The division was in the process of being relieved from the now fairly inactive Belleau Wood region to the west of Château-Thierry. General Edwards’ Yankees were moving in to replace them. To add to the complications Major General Harbord had barely been notified that he was to take over divisional command from General Bundy.
Harbord was in Paris on two days leave, outfitting himself with new uniforms, and being wined and dined as the hero of Belleau Wood by his crony Charley Dawes, when he received orders to replace Bundy at once. Arriving at the rest area near La Ferté-sous-Jouarre where his division was supposed to be, he found that most of his troops were already on the move but nobody could tell him exactly where they were going.
On July 14, which was a nice quiet sunny day along the Marne, the marines of the first regiments to come out of the firing line were placidly swimming and washing their clothes in the green river or writing letters or dozing on the grass in anticipation of a few days of very much needed rest, when the sergeants began snapping out orders to fall in for a long march. They broke up camp in a hurry and hiked till long after dark.
Next day they hiked on through back roads of the beautiful green countryside between the Oise and the Ourcq. In the late afternoon their rolling kitchens caught up with them. They hurriedly swallowed some slum and hiked again. They hiked all night. After fifty hours of marching they reached their destination and were told to get ready to attack within twentyfour hours.
It wasn’t till late in the night of July 16 that Harbord, after ramming his staffcar through an incredible tangle of military traffic moving up the main road into the woodlands around Villers-Cotterets, found General Berdoulat. The corps headquarters was in a village that proved to be a terrible bottleneck for traffic because the highway narrowed there to a single street hemmed between stone houses.
Berdoulat greeted Harbord cordially and served him some supper, but he could give him no idea of where the various units of the 2nd Division were at that moment. While they were eating he announced casually that Harbord’s division was to take up positions along the edge of the woods and attack on the morning of the eighteenth in the direction of the Soissons-Château-Thierry road.
Nobody on Berdoulat’s staff vouchsafed any further information as to where the regiments arriving by forced marches were expected to assemble or where such troops as were being transported by bus and truck would be unloaded. That was the business of the army, not of the corps the officers told him.
They did furnish him with maps and with copies of the general orders. A French general, who had fought over this countryside in 1914, hurriedly dictated a description of the terrain to Harbord’s chief of staff, Colonel Brown.
Harbord and Brown spent the night writing up their divisional orders. The tactical problem, over ground as unknown to them as the face of the moon, was hard enough to put down on paper; the prospect of putting it into practice appalled them. They did the best they could, spurred to the work by a brief but vigorous bombing by boche planes which made them fear that perhaps the boche knew more about the plans of the French Army than they did. With the first streaks of day they were on the move.
“Just twentyfour hours before the coming attack,” wrote Harbord, “we left Taillefontaine in my motor car to attempt to find the division, concentrate it, distribute the necessary orders, assure the supply of ammunition, rations, evacuation of the wounded, and to guarantee its assault at the prescribed hour.”
Foch picked the ancient Forest of Retz as a concentration point because the enormous trees afforded considerable protection from boche observation planes. The highway to Soissons cut through the middle of this forest and from that highway narrow logging roads made tunnels of greenery to the right and left. Every road and woodland trail was packed with the troops and the mounts and the rolling equipment of twenty divisions converging for the attack.
The morning of the seventeenth dawned rainy but the day turned out hot. The rain from intermittent thundershowers was a relief for men hot and sweating from long marches. When the sun shone drenched uniforms steamed. The men suffered tortures of thirst. The roads became slippery and the ditches filled with mud.
Dogtired and footsore as they were, the arriving doughboys and marines were impressed by the majesty of their surroundings. Green on the fringes and dark almost to blackness within, great oaks and beeches towered on either hand ninety feet above the mossy forest floor.
It was midafternoon before the American units reached the depths of the forest. One regiment was late because the French major in charge of the trucks held them up for two hours while he haggled to have receipts signed for the transportation of the men. The Americans knew that the minute he had his receipts he would dump them out where they were instead of taking them to their destination. “Oh those frugal French!” exclaimed Harbord.
Men looked around wideeyed at the great concentration of troops. Picketlines of artillery and cavalry stretched out of sight among the trees. French infantrymen in faded blue lolling beside their stacked rifles seemed to the arriving Americans to be giving them appraising looks. Some thought they smiled approval through their wiry beards and droopy mustaches.
Tanks elbowed them to one side as they marched — along the right side of the road since the center had to be left open for heavy traffic. Many of the Americans were seeing tanks for the first time. There were big tanks and little tanks, weirdly camouflaged with splotches of green and brown and blue. They rattled and crunched and groaned and snorted along. Sometimes a man had to throw himself into a thicket to get out of their way. Plodding wearily along they passed piles and piles of small arm ammunition. There were rows of shells of every conceivable caliber, ranks of winged aerial bombs, enormous dumps of handgrenades and pyrotechnic equipment for signalling.
The center of the road was a jumble of howitzers propelled by lowslung caterpillars, graceful French seventyfives hauled by brisk sixhorse teams, larger fieldguns dragged by eight straining drayhorses. There were rolling kitchens and waterwagons behind their spans of mules, and troops of led horses of every color and shape: roan, sorrel, black, bay. Through the tangled mass wound neverending convoys of ammunition trucks, dispatch riders on motorcycles, officers in sidecars, the impatient crowded touring cars of some general’s staff.
Through the trees on either side plugged weary files of mudcaked poilus, with their rifles that seemed much too long to the Americans, and all their paraphernalia of pots and pans for light housekeeping dangling and clattering from the knapsacks on their backs. Among them were dark Moroccans in khaki, black Senegalese, ruddy English in their welltailored uniforms. In the distance among the great treetrunks flitted shadows of mounted French grenadiers with plumes and lances.