General Pershing, who had a weakness for dancing, admitted in his diary that the marches were so stirring they made him want to stir his dogs in a jig or a clog. After lunch the Americans motored back towards Paris. They were glutted with impressions. “And we have a firm respect for the British Army,” Harbord jotted in his notes.
On September 1 Pershing moved his G.H.Q. to a French army barracks in Chaumont. Chaumont was a provincial town situated at the headwaters of the Marne, on the boundary between the ancient dukedoms of Champagne and Lorraine. It was conveniently placed on the rail line from Troyes to Nancy behind the St. Mihiel salient where the general’s hopes were fixed for a breakthrough in the summer to come. Since their positions there had stabilized during the early months of the war neither the French nor the Germans had shown much interest in the Lorraine front that stretched from St. Mihiel to the Swiss border. The French generals picked it as the sector where the zany Americans could do the least harm.
Pershing at once instituted such elaborate precautions to keep the whereabouts of the American headquarters a secret that, while the doings at Chaumont were common knowledge in France and Germany, the only identification vouchsafed to the American public was “somewhere in France.”
Establishing his own headquarters was an important step in Pershing’s struggle to keep his American Army free from interference by the French. He had often envied friends who made themselves successful careers in business; here was his opportunity to set up an army headquarters according to the principles of modern business efficiency. Chaumont, for all the uniforms and the saluting and the “military courtesy,” observed with the more punctilio because officers and men were mostly new to the business, became a little fragment of the Chicago Loop or of downtown New York in the green fields of France. British and French liaison groups reported with delighted surprise on the New World atmosphere as they would report on one of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Shows. Before the first week had gone by the general was expressing his satisfaction by an entry in his diary; “Surroundings give relief after depression of Paris.”
While the noncoms and junior officers of the headquarters detachment sweated and strained, during the weeks before the move to Chaumont, to Americanize the bleak buildings, Pershing was Pétain’s guest for what became known as the Third Battle of Verdun. Along with regular leaves, better service from the field kitchens and increased rations of wine and grog, Pétain had promised, in his campaign to soothe the mutinous feelings of his troops, successful offensives on a limited scale which would not be too costly in lives. To show what he could do, he was planning to recapture two hills on the west bank of the Meuse that had been dealing out death and destruction to the French positions to the left of Verdun ever since the Germans captured them in their spring offensive the year before.
General Pershing duly reported to the headquarters of the French commander in chief at Compiègne and was taken aboard Pétain’s own private train. Next morning they found themselves on a siding at Gondrecourt, where the doughboys were being trained for combat in the open with bayonet and rifle. Jointly they reviewed the French infantry division, detailed to help train the green Americans, as a reward for severe losses and good conduct in the lines. Pershing was impressed by the solemn ceremony of decorating various officers and men for gallantry and the smart style the ranks showed when the men marched past the generals to the heartening strains of “Sambre et Meuse.”
Next they visited the American billets, in barns and farmyards and haymows and open fields, where groups were practicing with hand grenades and shooting the French automatic rifle. Pétain questioned the men about their quarters, and showed interest in the American cuisine. It was traditional for a French general to taste the soup when he visited a mess.
As they travelled from gray village to gray village with cobbled courts and manure piles under the windows, Pershing noted with some envy the reception which the sparse civilian population that remained gave Pétain. Strings of flags and green boughs arched the streets. Occasionally Monsieur le Maire appeared in his tricolor scarf. Little girls in pigtails advanced with bouquets. In this Germanic region most of them were blonde. Paternally the general would press his broad grizzly mustache against each rosy cheek. He was the hero of Verdun.
They lunched at Souilly on the Verdun road at the headquarters of the French Second Army. There, over the brandy and cigars, General Guillaumat, who was in charge, had his chief of staff describe to Pershing in detail the plan of the offensive to be conducted against the heights of Mort Homme and Hill 304 by twelve divisions on a fifteenmile front that straddled the Meuse. Already like distant surf, the pounding of the guns could be heard from beyond the hills to the northward.
For four days guns of all calibers had been pouring steel and lyddite into the German trenches. Proportionately to the area, Pershing was told, more shells were fired than in any engagement in the war. The American general figured the cost of the preliminary barrage at seventyfive million dollars.
While waiting for the attack to develop, Pershing, whose mind ran on the problem of supplying the two thousand guns and the hundred and eighty thousand men involved in the operation, had himself driven back to the sorting station at St. Dizier, where rations, clothing, construction supplies, fuel and arms and ammunition were stored in bulk in great warehouses, to be shipped out in daily trainloads consigned to the various divisions. Convoys of trucks took the supplies from the railheads as near to the front as they dared venture. From there supplies were pushed on small carts, or on mule or donkeyback to the deep dugouts near the command posts from which they were distributed into the trenches.
Less interesting to Pershing were the civilities he had to exchange with Monsieur Paul Painlevé, the Minister of War, and with Monsieur Albert Thomas, a socialist orator whom Pétain told him was just back from fraternizing with the revolutionists in Petrograd. Thomas was Minister of Munitions. The politicians had come out from Paris to see the show. The two generals agreed that the less civilians poked their noses into the warzone the better. Pétain could clothe himself with an icy chill when he talked to politicians.
After lunch the generals drove out the Voie Sacrée, the single road which, along with a single line of narrow gauge railway known as le Meusien, supplied the Verdun salient during the ferocious fighting of the preceding spring, to the command post of the XVI Corps, on high ground overlooking the valley of the Meuse. Pershing spent one of the most interesting afternoons of his life watching through the glasses the wavering lines of French advancing over the shellpocked hills. The slopes were gouged with entrenchments and churned by shellfragments until they had a puttycolored powdery look as one might imagine the surface of the moon. Groups of tiny moving specks advancing with erratic jerky motion from shellhole to shellhole were pointed out as elements of the Foreign Legion, which Pershing remembered having read of in his youth in Ouida’s Under Two Flags. As the sun was at their back visibility was perfect from the command post. It was a rare privilege, especially in such a war as this, to have a panoramic view of a battlefield.
Things were going well. The French officers were in high spirits.
A chance encounter added to the pleasure of the afternoon. Major General Corvisart, who was running that particular part of the show, turned out to be another old acquaintance of Pershing’s from the group of young European officers who tagged along after General Kurold during the Russo-Japanese War. They went over the names of the lighthearted crowd they had travelled with in Manchuria. Pershing had seen General Fowke a few days before. Sir Ian Hamilton was another mutual friend: what a mess he’d made at Gallipoli. Jolly Captain Hoffmann was earning a name for himself now that he was Ludendorff’s successor as German chief of staff on the Russian front. What had happened to Major von Etzel? General Corvisart burst out laughing and pointed into the valley before them. “I have just beaten him today. He is commanding a division opposite me.”