The attack, the French told Pershing, was a complete success. They described the losses as minimal. Their troops had already overrun most of Mort Homme. Hill 304 was proving a tough nut, but the German grip on it was loosening.
Driving away from the front to board Monsieur Painlevé’s train back to Paris, Pershing was shown gray columns of captured Germans moving to the rear. The wornout men shuffling through the mud gave off a sour smell. The enemy’s smell. Four thousand he was told. By the time he read the communiqués the number had mounted to ten.
General Pétain was in a rarely expansive mood. He was pleased by Pershing’s frank marvelling at the enormous convoys of trucks, and at the numbers of men engaged in all kinds of supply behind the lines. Pétain was pointing out with pride the work he had done on the road, and boasting of the courage of his troops, and of the enormous losses they suffered during the fighting at Verdun the year before. He rubbed his hands over the lightness of the casualty lists so far reported in today’s operation. He fell to his favorite sport of flaying the politicians and congratulated Pershing on being far enough away from home to be out of their reach.
As they got on more familiar ground Pétain asked Pershing how many times he’d sat for his portrait. The American modestly admitted that a man named Jonah had just done one for L’Illustration. “Don’t let them publish it!” cried Pétain. “Every officer whose portrait by Jonah has appeared has been relieved of his command.”
General Pershing in his My Experiences in the World War disclaimed any superstitious feelings: “Quite the contrary, but I immediately forbade the publication of the portrait.”
The men parted on very good terms. Pershing came away full of admiration for Pétain’s careful planning and for his good work in stimulating the morale of his troops. What he’d seen of the complicated coordination needed to supply divisions in the front line steadied his conviction that communications and shipping were the first thing to work for before starting to lay the plans for an American offensive. He must impress that on the minds of the staff officers he was to confer with in Paris in the morning.
While General Pershing and the liaison officers and the ministers and their attachés trundled towards Paris getting what sleep they could in the jiggly blue light of their compartments, on the slopes of Hill 304 and at the crest of Mort Homme, from Avocourt Wood to Bezonvaux on the east bank of the Meuse, the fighting continued.
As usual it was the German counterattack that caused the casualty list to mount.
The heavy artillery went on shattering men’s eardrums. There was the sharp slamming of seventyfives. Machineguns kept up their ratatatat. Minenwerfers annihilated the night with their crunching roar; or, in some moment of comparative silence, when the storm beat far away, men crouching in the muck in the lee of some pile of stones, with their fingers on the triggers of their rifles, would hear from the trenches behind them the sound of the klaxon that warned of a gas attack.
The lucky ones who had managed to crawl into a dugout or deep shell-hole would huddle in the corners trying to catch a little sleep while their faces seemed to turn to slime under the sleazy gasmasks.
Dawn would bring a certain calm. Stretcherbearers would start gingerly dragging the wounded into dressing stations. In deep shelters doctors would do their best with gauze and splints and blessed morphine as long as it held out. Men, moaning through their gasmasks on the stretchers, would be inched up the uneven stairways and shoved into some motor ambulance backed up to the entrance; and the long jouncing journey over washboard roads, here and there gouged into pits by high explosives, would start — past wrecked guns and broken equipment drowned in mud, and dead men lying in quaint attitudes where they had fallen. When higher ground was reached the gasmasks would be pulled off to make it easier to vomit, and men who had lived through the night would breathe the morning air and look back down at the gasinfested mist, greenish like spewed up bile, in the hollow ruins below.
Going would be smoother on the main roads to the rear, past the bloated bodies of mules killed days before, and carcasses of wrecked trucks dragged out of the way. Smartly dressed military police would be handling the traffic. Ambulances with their cargo of groans and bloody bandages would line up to let by fresh halfdrunk detachments with doom on their faces, shambling in as replacements, or strings of the invaluable seventyfives.
Unloaded from the ambulance outside the field hospital the wounded would look around, with the big eyes of suddenly awakened children, at green leaves and undestroyed houses, and perhaps at cabbages growing in a prettily tilled field. The first duty of the admitting officer was to sort out the cases that could be helped from the hopeless bellywounds and the too drastic amputations and the too abundant hemorrhages. The stretchers of the men too far gone to take up the surgeons’ time would be laid out in the shade. Some orderly would try to make them comfortable with such narcotics as were available, or at least, if a man still had breath in his lungs and a mouth to smoke with, light a cigarette and place it between his lips.
The same September 1 that Pershing set up shop in the old army barracks at Chaumont, the Kaiser’s generals tried out a novel method of attack on the Russian lines in front of Riga on the Baltic. In spite of their conquest of the broad middle band of Europe through the Danube Valley to the Black Sea, Germany was feeling the pinch of the British blockade. Food was short. Manpower was short. Steel and chemicals for munitions were short. The enormous losses on the western front were beginning to tell. Some style of attack more economical in men and munitions than the mass offensives of the past year had to be invented.
Credit for working up a new plan went to General von Hutier who commanded the troops facing the Russians on the east Prussian border. Von Hutier seems to have studied with some care Nivelle’s success at Fort Douaumont and his failure on the Aisne. Though the textbooks extolled it as the most important element in warfare the principle of surprise had been neglected by both sides on the Western Front. Von Hutier began to prepare for surprise attack on the Russian lines in front of Riga. He moved his troops only at night and took the greatest care that his concentrations should be kept secret from the enemy. He was planning to attack a limited section of the lines with overwhelming force, after a short but extremely violent artillery bombardment, and then to exploit the breakthrough by pouring trained divisions into the enemy’s rear.
While he drilled his troops in the new tactics, the High Command kept him waiting for the opportune moment when disorganization in Russia should reach its maximum. They did not want to shock the Russians into unity by premature action.
Wilson’s administration in Washington had as great hopes of the Russian revolution as did the German general staff, but where the Germans saw disintegration and ruin by which they expected mightily to profit, the Americans saw the rise of a sister democracy in the image of their own. The United States was the first country to recognize the Provisional Government. Every American leader from T.R. and Taft to Gompers and Debs cheered the abdication of the Czar Nicholas. Ink and oratory were lavished on the new democracy. To Woodrow Wilson, and his propaganda mouthpiece, George Creel, it was a relief to be able to conduct the war “to make the world safe for democracy” without having to explain away their alliance with the blackest autocracy in Europe.