The men were numb with the exhaustion of five days of fighting. It wasn’t until dusk on July 22 that they heard the welcome bagpipes of a Scottish division marching in to relieve them.
When the soldiers of the 1st reassembled by companies around their rolling kitchens back in the forest out of range of the German guns, officers and men were aghast at what they saw.
Hardly a handful remained of each of the four regiments of infantry. Scarcely a company had an officer left to command it. A sergeant, a corporal, in one case a private was in command. Every battalion commander was a casualty. The 26th Infantry had lost all its field officers and came out commanded by a captain in his second year in the service. When the acting sergeants called the roll of their companies barely half of the enlisted men were there to answer Present.
Mangin was lavish in his congratulations to the two American divisions. “You rushed into the fight as though to a fête,” he declaimed in his general orders … “91 guns, 7200 prisoners, immense booty, ten kilometers of country reconquered: this is your portion of the spoil of victory … I am proud to have commanded you during such days and to have fought with you for the deliverance of the world.”
Once they recovered from the shock of defeat, the Germans carried out their retreat with coldblooded skill. It was not until August 2 that Soissons was actually reoccupied, though heavy artillery brought up to the heights round Berzy-le-Sec soon ruined its effectiveness as a transportation center for the boche.
The commanders in chief of the Allied armies, their spirits for once matching the glitter of gold braid on their caps, met on July 24 at Foch’s headquarters at Bombon. Foch read a summary of the strategic situation. The Germans were in retreat. The Allied generals at last had more manpower at their disposal than did the German High Command. Two hundred and fifty thousand American troops arriving each month were tipping the scales. To meet this increased riflepower the Germans had a muchweakened defensive army holding their lines, and behind that front, a shock army of stormtroops still capable of delivering dangerous blows.
The Allies had seized the initiative, said Foch. His eyes flashed. He puffed out his bantam chest with an arrogant smile under his bristling gray mustache. They must never let it go.
He outlined three operations that must be completed in preparation for the great final offensive. He was taking it for granted that this final offensive would take place in the spring or summer of 1919. He had been steeped in war so long it was hard for him to imagine that it would ever end.
The first operation was already on: to drive the enemy off the Paris-Metz main line of railroad in the valley of the Marne.
Second operation: The northern trunk line through Amiens and Hasebrouck to the Channel coast must be cleared of enemy interference. This was up to Haig and the British forces north of Amiens. General Debeney’s army in the southern part of the sector would cooperate.
Third operation: The eastern section of the Paris-Metz railroad must be restored to Allied use by the reduction of the Saint Mihiel salient east of Verdun. This would be the business of the Americans.
When Foch asked for comments from the Allied commanders — so the story was told at Chaumont — each spoke in his customary roles. Haig complained that his armies were not yet re-established after the shocking blows they had suffered in March and April. Pétain grumbled that the French were bled white. Pershing blurted out that his men asked nothing better than to get into the fight, but added, in a sour tone, that the only thing holding them up was that no American army had been formed for them to fight with.
Foch could be diplomatic when he wanted to be. He quieted their complaints with his confident smile. It was decided that the next move must be to disengage Amiens. That was the affair of the valiant British. It was hinted that the safety of the British Expeditionary Force might well lie in anticipating the offensive that was brewing against them in Prince Rupert’s group of armies. Surprise, tirelessly repeated Foch; the watchword was surprise.
Haig entrusted the Amiens operation to General Sir Henry Rawlinson’s Fourth Army.
Sir Henry, known as Rawly to his intimates in the upper echelons, was a British aristocrat brought up in the grand Victorian tradition. His father, as well as being an eminent servant of the empire, was a learned orientalist and one of the first students of Assyrian inscriptions. His mother was a Seymour of the great house of the Dukes of Somerset and a tolerable watercolorist besides. Rawly himself was no mean hand with a pencil and a man of some reading as well as of experience in the East. He served as aide to Lord Roberts in India. He was with Kitchener at Khartoum.
Though, as an old poloplayer, he couldn’t bring himself quite to give up cavalry, he was one of the few British topdrawer generals who appreciated tanks. Furthermore he appreciated Anzacs. His army was made up of a corps of Australians, who were tough nuts to handle for officers who rubbed them the wrong way, a corps of Canadians and a corps of British. In reserve he had the American 33rd Division. He was broad-minded enough even to like Americans.
The young men of Rawly’s Intelligence had for some time been bringing in reports of warweariness among the German troops opposing him. They were suffering from an epidemic of influenza. Their lines were thinly held. Long before the council of war at Bombon he had been prodding Haig to recapture the outer defenses of Amiens which the boche had held since March. He had attempted several tentative probes.
Rawly’s Fourth of July operation was not only the first tryout of the Americans on the British front. It was the first tryout of the Mark V tank. Both experiments were successful. The Americans showed fight. The new tank proved faster and more easily manoeuverable than the old. The attack being planned would be led by Mark V tanks.
The battle of Amiens was purely a British show. French cooperation was secondary. Only a single regiment of Americans was involved. The staffwork could hardly have been better. The concentration of men and armament was carried out at night or in cloudy weather under air cover that kept German observation planes out of the area. Batteries were reinforced with new guns without showing any increased fire power. While the three hundred and sixty heavy tanks and ninetysix whippet tanks were being moved into position, masses of airplanes were used to create a sound barrage so that the enemy should not hear the rattling and clanking of the unwieldy vehicles.
Secrecy was so well maintained that not only Ludendorff’s staff but the war cabinet and the Australian Labor Prime Minister, William Morris Hughes, who was in London raising a storm about the excessive casualties his Aussies were suffering at the front, were kept in ignorance of what was being planned. Canadian casualty stations were ostentatiously set up in Mount Kemmel area, with the result that the governor general of Canada protested publicly that his troops weren’t being used as a unit as had been promised.
Everything led the Germans to expect an attack in the north. They were further lulled to security when the Australians extended their lines in front of Amiens to relieve part of a French division to the south of them. By zero hour the British had managed to move in unobserved not only the tanks, but a thousand extra guns and six fresh divisions. The final detailed orders were delayed to the last moment.
On the morning of August 8, Sir Douglas Haig made one of his customary placid entries in his diary: “Glass steady. Fine night and morning — a slight mist in the valley. An autumn feel in the morning air.” He added that the Fourth Army reported a quiet night.