Night found the men of the 2nd Division scattered in exhausted disorder over a great segment of the battlefront. They had crossed the Soissons-Villers-Cotterets railroad and blocked off the northern end of the Vierzy tunnel and were occupying objectives which had been set for the third day, many of them in territory assigned to their allies.
Meanwhile the 1st Division to the north of the Moroccans advanced doggedly, with more order and less speed, against energetic German resistance, in a valley which sloped towards Soissons and the little river Crise, a tributary of the fateful Aisne. The hamlet of Missy-aux-Bois was fiercely contested. By night they had Missy and were among the gardenwalls of Breuil a short distance to the east.
For a brief respite exhausted marines and doughboys dug into funk-holes. Lucky was the man who could catch an occasional catnap. “The night was cool and clear,” wrote Sergeant McCone, “the stars shining. Wounded marines lay groaning in the fields because there were not enough stretchers to care for all.”
“By night,” noted Harbord, “we had three thousand prisoners; eleven batteries of German artillery, hundreds of machineguns and dozens of minenwerfers: had pushed the enemy before us six miles and were a mile ahead of the best shock troops in France, the fanatical Moslems from Morocco. But some of the best men America ever produced had watered with their blood those sunny slopes and wooded crests.
“At 10 P.M.,” continued the general’s diary, “I moved Division Headquarters forward to Beaurepaire farm … It was an advanced dressing station and a very distressing scene. The congestion on the one country road prevented ambulances from getting to the front and men had lain there in the yard of farm buildings all day, and were to continue to lie there twelve or fourteen hours longer. Water was unobtainable, the buildings were in ruins from shell fire, and the boche still dropped an occasional bomb from his airplanes as they circled over. But from these wounded there was no word of complaint, nothing but patience in suffering. There were wounded Germans, Americans and darkskinned Moroccans side by side on the ground, blood over everything, clothes cut away, some men dead, and a ceaseless stream of traffic still pouring to the front with ammunition and supplies for fighting … No sleep, of course, and at 2 A.M. of the 19th an order to push on the attack that day.
“The division had outrun its communications. There was no wire connection at all to the rear. The corps order was brought by a French officer who was very much surprised to find the division where it was.”
That day German aviation turned out in force. Resistance stiffened, particularly in front of Berzy-le-Sec on a range of hills which dominated the Soissons-Château-Thierry road. All day, in liaison with the French on both flanks, units of the 1st Division advanced in short rushes against some of the best troops in the German Army.
By that night casualties of the 2nd Division had mounted so high and the men were so exhausted that Mangin decided to replace them by a rested French division. “The loss has been almost five thousand officers and men,” noted General Bullard, now in command of the American corps which had supervision over the operation. “But what they did was worth any price to the Allied cause.”
“The loss was heavy but the effect for the Allied cause was worth it all,” wrote Harbord. “For over an hour this morning,” he went on, “Brown and I stood by the roadside and watched the troops march back towards the Forêt de Retz. Battalions of only a couple of hundred men, companies of twenty-five or thirty, swinging by in the gray dawn, only a remnant, but a victorious remnant, thank God. No doubt in their minds as to their ability to whip the Germans. Their whole independent attitude, the very swagger of their march, the snatches of conversations we could hear as they swung past, proclaimed them a victorious division.”
Ever since the offensive began the French had been trying to take the upland village of Berzy-le-Sec and the little knolls to the south of it which dominated the outskirts of Soissons. Possession of this high ground would deny to the Germans the use of the Château-Thierry road in their retirement from the Marne. As well as being a railroad center, Soissons was the crossroads of six converging highways essential to the enemy’s transport system.
The boche had placed his batteries and machinegun nests with his usual ingenuity. The French units were making no headway. On the morning of July 20 General Summerall received word from Mangin’s headquarters that his 1st Division, which had been showing the same reckless dash as the 2nd during the past two days of fighting, should, as a reward for gallantry, have the honor of taking Berzy-le-Sec.
Take it they did.
The first attempt failed. A group of officers watching through field-glasses from a hill above the hamlet of Chaudun, which had been captured at heavy cost during the first day, saw the 2nd Brigade march out in column formation from the shade of the lines of lacerated poplars where the main road to Soissons emerged from the forest. At first the men’s faces, shadowed by their helmets in the hot July sun, looked black. A French officer thought they were Algerians, but as they advanced, in perfect order at about the pace at which a barrage rolls, the observers on the hill began to make out the American box respirator hanging on each man’s breast and the broad flash of American bayonets. As they advanced up over the bare hillside, dust and smoke rose from Allied shells pounding the village. There was as yet no sound from the German guns.
The formations went out of sight behind a fold in the land. Now the observers could see the leading ranks following their barrage across a ridge above the roofs and steeple of the village. Each individual soldier stood out against the grassy hillside. When the first rank, advancing in perfect order, reached the crest a few shells from large caliber howitzers exploded among them. The boche were testing the range.
“The accuracy of preparation of this fire was such that practically no adjustment was required, and almost immediately our infantry was shrouded in smoke and dust,” the observer noted in his report. “Great gaps were left in the ranks as the shells crashed among them. Nevertheless the advance continued in the most orderly way … Many of our infantry passed out of sight over the ridge accompanied by the devastating fire of the enemy’s artillery. Men struck by the enemy’s fire either disappeared or ran aimlessly about and toppled over.”
Now the observers were hearing the rattle of the enemy’s machineguns. The lines of tiny figures dropped into shellholes. Files of wounded were seen hobbling painfully back. “Individual men and groups of twos or threes began to wander about all over the field. They were the unit leaders, reorganizing their groups against counterattack. The attack had met the resistance of a strong position occupied in great force by the enemy … Thus the afternoon passed and night fell.”
Next morning at dawn the attack was renewed with Brigadier General B. B. Buck himself leading the first wave. Although depleted by three days of constant fighting the 1st Brigade, leapfrogging the survivors of the 3rd, crossed the deep gully of the Crise and planted itself on the heights clear across the Soissons-Château-Thierry road.
An hour later units of the 2nd Brigade swept through Berzy-le-Sec. They first had to capture a deadly battery of German 77s that had been firing on them at point blank range.
In the slanting light of late afternoon the Americans on the hills above the village could see the railroad yards of Soissons in the distance. That night as they lay in their positions awaiting a counterattack that never came they watched, in the misty valleys to the east and southeast, great fires rise from burning munitions dumps and villages put to the torch as the Crown Prince’s armies retreated from the Marne.