Mr. Wilson's War

Chapter 16 TO MOBILIZE THE MIND

ON the afternoon of December 17 Colonel House’s quiet tread was heard again in the White House corridors. He had smuggled his mission out of France so secretly that the correspondents were astonished. “Of all the molelike activities of Colonel House,” cabled the New York Times man, Grasty, “the climax was his departure … Perhaps the Colonel had made a quiet bet with himself on his ability to take the party of fifteen or twenty persons out of the most conspicuous setting in Paris without anybody being the wiser.”

House found the President waiting for him in his study. They talked privately for two hours. Though the colonel liked to cast an optimistic glow over reports of his operations as diplomat extraordinary, this time he made no effort to disguise the fact that little had been accomplished.

Due to the recalcitrance of the Italians, who still dreamed of turning the Adriatic into their mare nostrum, and to Clemenceau’s lack of interest in anything but fighting the boche, the confidential colonel had failed to induce the Allied authorities to agree on the public statement of sane and liberal war aims which he and the President wanted. His arguments in favor of a central military command had met with evasive replies from Lloyd George, who ever since he had bet on the wrong horse with Nivelle was leery of the military. The hideous butcher’s bill the British Prime Minister was confronted with from Haig’s Flanders offensives made him suspicious of anything which would give that general or his associate General Robertson, the Imperial Chief of Staff, any added power of decision. He stalled and procrastinated. About all that House could report was that the meetings of the Supreme War Council had laid the foundation upon which unified command might, on some more auspicious occasion, be set up.

The President called in Secretary Baker and General Bliss for another conference with House next day. Then he sent him back to New York post haste to assemble the facts and figures the college professors were digging out of the libraries. He needed the peace inquiry bureau’s research as the basis for a fresh statement of war aims.

The Bolshevik seizure of power in Petrograd drastically changed the course of the war of ideas which interested Woodrow Wilson far more than military strategy. One of Leon Trotsky’s first acts in taking over the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as commissar for the All Russian Congress of Soviets, was to publish the secret agreements among the Allies to carve up Turkey and Austro-Hungary and the various Balkan states for the satisfaction of “territorial ambitions.”

The Manchester Guardian printed the first summary in English of these deals on December 13. They set the British nonconformist conscience to stirring.

Printed in America by Villard’s New York Evening Post, they provided encouragement to the socialists and pacifists whose views Woodrow Wilson was coming to hold in low esteem. “What I am opposed to,” he told an A.F. of L. convention in Buffalo, “is not the feeling of the pacifists, but their stupidity. My heart is with them, but my mind has contempt for them. I want peace but I know how to get it and they do not. You will notice that I sent a friend of mine, Colonel House, to Europe, who is as great a lover of peace as any man in the world, but I didn’t send him on a peace mission yet. I sent him to take part in a conference on how the war was to be won, and he knows, as I know, that that is the way to get peace.”

Wilson was not the only man in the world who thought he knew how to get peace. Lenin, spinning his webs behind the rifles and machine-guns of his partisans, in the humming dynamo of Smolny Institute, had announced that for the working class the war was at an end. Over the radio and through the propaganda organizations the Bolsheviks were feverishly constructing, they were telling the conscript armies that the way to get peace was to shoot their officers and go home.

To prove that they were as good as their word the Bolshevik leaders were already engaged in negotiations for an armistice with the Germans in the ruined Belorussian town of Brest-Litovsk. Comrades Kamenev and Joffe led the Bolshevik delegation.

Adolf Joffe, particularly, proved an adroit negotiator and propagandist. Like his friend Trotsky he came from a rural family of welltodo Jewish business people. After a somewhat dilettante education in various universities he became attracted by the idealism of the revolutionary movement and made over a considerable fortune to the Social Democratic Party. Lenin picked him for the delegation on account of his air of cosmopolitan culture. A workers’ representative was included, as a matter of course, but it wasn’t until the delegates were already on their way from Smolny to the railroad station that somebody remembered they had forgotten to bring along a peasant. “There’s a peasant,” said Joffe pointing to a broad bearded figure under a streetlamp. They stopped the car, and by threats and blandishments induced a confused and humble old countryman to come along. They never could break him of bowing and scraping and calling everybody “Barin,” which meant “master”; so his collaboration was hardly considered a success.

The German representatives were Foreign Minister von Kuhlmann and Major General Max Hoffmann, Pershing’s old acquaintance from Japanese War days who had won fame through his overall direction of the Riga offensive. Count Czernin represented the Austrian Emperor. There were contingents from Turkey and the Balkan states, four hundred delegates in all.

The proceedings started in an old theatre, one of the few buildings left standing in the town, in an atmosphere of unearthly reasonableness. Czernin, frightened by the strikes and foodriots spreading throughout his crumbling Austro-Hungarian empire, genuinely hoped to promote a general armistice. The Germans were biding their time. Possibly they did not want to upset the Bolshevist government which they were bolstering with millions of marks shipped into Petrograd for defeatist propaganda. They allowed Joffe to carry off an initial victory: the proceedings should be public, the participants could broadcast them to all the world. Then Joffe laid down two basic principles. There should be no annexations. Peoples should determine their own governments.

On Christmas Day the Germans produced their reply. They, too, were in favor of the principle of no annexations, particularly in relation to the German colonies the British had taken over, and were for selfdetermination, with some reservations in the case of these same German colonies.

Behind the scenes both sides were busy. The German generals were using the respite to consolidate their military positions and to sort out the units which could be spared for service at the western front. Nor were the Bolsheviks idle. Russian troops were fraternizing with the Germans along the whole length of the lines. Propaganda leaflets calling on the German workingclass to end the imperialist war were being hurried to the front from the printing shops of Petrograd and distributed by the hundreds of thousands.

The first talks ended with a ten day truce during which both sets of negotiators were to consult their governments. The German generals left dismayed. Somehow these despised Bolsheviks had managed to turn Brest-Litovsk into a sounding board for the preaching of their revolutionary apocalypse.

Von Hindenburg described the situation in his memoirs: “On December 15 an armistice had been concluded on the Russian front … Of course it would entirely have corresponded with our desires if the peace bells could have rung. The place of those bells was taken by the inflammatory wild speeches of revolutionary doctrinaires with which the conference room at Brest-Litovsk resounded … Peace on earth was to be assured by the wholesale massacre of the bourgeoisie … It seemed to me that Lenin and Trotzky behaved more like the victors than the vanquished, trying to sow the seeds of political dissolution in the rear as well as in the ranks of the army … I need hardly give any assurance,” ruefully added the Prussian commander in chief, “that to negotiate with a Russian terrorist government was extremely disagreeable to a man of my political views.”

With the coming of the holidays domestic problems piled up on the President’s desk. The country was locked in one of the harshest cold spells on record. Blizzards in the west and zero weather on the eastern seaboard were disrupting railroad traffic, already disorganized by conflicting priorities issued by the commissions, purchasing bureaus and quartermaster’s agencies which proliferated in Washington and around the thirtytwo camps where the draftees were in training. Every army paymaster was putting blue priority tags on the shipments he wanted with the result that priorities lost all meaning.

The railroads had come into the war in bad shape. Management was plagued by the results of past piratical financing, and held in a vice between the demands of skilled labor for wage increases, generally admitted to be long overdue, and the Interstate Commerce Commission’s refusal to allow rates to be raised. The railroads were undermanned. High wages in munitions plants and shipyards were draining off their best employees. The draft boards depleted the rest. The growth of war exports, without compensating imports, tended to fill the railroad yards in the east with empty freightcars waiting for a westerly load. On top of that the prolonged cold spell froze up locomotives, trapped barges on rivers and canals and increased the nationwide demand for coal and petroleum products. The railroad war board appointed by the Council of National Defense tried to unsnarl the tangle through voluntary cooperation but to no avail.

As Christmas approached, news came to Washington daily of plants shutting down for lack of fuel, of finished goods essential to the war effort jammed into warehouses or deteriorating on open docks, of ships tied up in frozen harbors. New York City was facing a coal famine. A hundred and fifty ships were anchored in the bay waiting for coal. In two weeks no mails had left for Europe. Newspapers were claiming that within seven days there would be no coal at all on Manhattan. Criticism of the conduct of war production was mounting in Congress. Somebody had to be put in charge to keep transportation moving.

For the past month whenever the President and his Secretary of the Treasury had a moment together they had talked railroads. Where was the man who could organize the whole network and run it as a continental unit? Wilson’s soninlaw already had the Treasury and four other fulltime jobs. “Mac I wonder if you would do it?” the President asked him one day. No man to underestimate his own powers, McAdoo answered that since he was already deep in railroad finance maybe he had better take the job himself rather than give it to someone he would have trouble cooperating with. Under the authority of a provision of the Army Appropriations Act, the President issued a proclamation taking possession of every railroad in the country and appointing William Gibbs McAdoo, with supreme powers over wages, rates, routing and financing, as director.

In his address to the railroad executives gathered in at the White House the summer before when the President was trying to induce them to meet the railroad workers halfway and stave off a railroad strike, he spoke with emotion of the “baneful seething” he found beneath the surface of America. This baneful seething, if proper action were not taken, might express itself in radical action “the consequences of which no man can foresee.”

Now he saw the possibilities of the sort of radical action he dreaded much enhanced by the flood of propaganda the Russian Bolsheviks were letting loose on the world. He saw Socialists, I.W.W.s, pacifists, anarchists of the Emma Goldman stripe all contributing in their separate ways to help enemy aliens and German agents impede the war effort. While he was a stickler for the forms of the constitutional process, he intended to use his powers under the espionage law and draft laws to the full.

His Attorney General was House’s old Texas friend T. W. Gregory, a devout adherent since the days of the Texas delegation at the Baltimore convention. Gregory made his name as a lawyer by conducting the government case against the New York New Haven & Hartford in an antitrust prosecution. House described him as loyal as Caesar’s legion. Now Gregory was zealously backing up the President by sending his assistants far and wide over the country to root out sedition.

Gregory’s fellow Texan, Postmaster General Burleson, was already making life difficult for the hyphenated press. He banned the chief Irish newspapers The Freeman’s Journal, The Irish World and The Gaelic American from the mails for statements disrespectful of the English ally. German and slavic language papers were continuously scrutinized for sedition. The Socialist Leader, published in Milwaukee, a city under suspicion as both a German-American and a Socialist center, was denied mailing privileges. Even the liberal Metropolitan Magazine, among whose contributors and editors were staunch adherents of the New Freedom, had an issue declared unmailable on account of an article by William Hard questioning the Administration’s policy in the Caribbean. Organs of the angry young radicals, such as Max Eastman’s Masses, were put out of business.

The Department of Justice even took action against a motion picture entitled The Spirit of 1776 which was forbidden the screen on account of a scene showing redcoats committing atrocities against revolutionary civilians. The Attorney General was so pleased with the judge’s decision in this case, tried in a federal court in California, that he had it published as a pamphlet.

Gregory’s agents meanwhile were seeking indictments against the seditious and the disloyal. The notorious anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were already in the toils of the law for their opposition to conscription. Enemy aliens were being weeded out of training camps and interned as fast as they could be apprehended. The disaffected were marked for deportation. Indictments were in the works against a college professor named Scott Nearing, who had been dismissed by the University of Pennsylvania for pacifist utterances; and against Rose Pastor Stokes, a Socialist from East Side New York, an old Wilson admirer, who was unable to stomach the Allied war aims as revealed by the secret treaties, and was saying so in public. Warrants were out for leaders of the Non-Partisan League who were too outspoken in their admiration for Senator La Follette. In Akely, Minnesota, a young Socialist let his fear of the Department of Justice so prey on his mind that he blew his head off by biting into a dynamite cap. In Chicago the federal District Attorneys were carefully laying the groundwork for the fulldress state trial of one-eyed William D. Haywood and a hundred and one members of the Industrial Workers of the World.

These “Wobblies” were easier game than the Socialists. The Socialists were respectable people. Their convictions about the sanctity of the democratic process were very near Woodrow Wilson’s own. The Wobblies came from the bottom of the heap.

Their fundamental tenet, like that of the Russian Bolsheviks, was that the exploiting class, as they called the employers of the world, and the working class had nothing in common. Unlike the Russian Bolsheviks who were all for seizing government power, they would have nothing to do with the state, either theoretically or practically. They boasted of their belief in sabotage and direct action. They dreamed of the general strike which, by some mystical process they never got very far towards describing, would peacefully transform society so that the men who did the work would own the tools of production and retain the profits now being siphoned off into the money bags of parasite capitalists. It was a doctrine which appealed to the wild frontier fringe of American labor. It was a doctrine for tramps and freelivers. It smacked of talk around the campfire in hobo jungles and of the independence of the homesteader invading the wilderness with his axe and his gun. As Americans, they claimed, they were born with the right of free speech.

The Wobblies may well at that time have had a million and a half adherents. They encouraged draftdodging and denounced the war as a capitalist device to squeeze profits out of the blood of conscript workers. Their doctrines were prevalent among the lumbermen of the Northwest who were producing timbers for the shipyards and spruce for the airplanes which were so slow in coming into production. They were stirring up strikes and freespeech fights which, it was claimed, impeded the war effort. The trial and eventual conviction of the entire leadership and the brutally long terms imposed by Judge Landis virtually removed the Wobblies’ frontier syndicalism from the lexicon of American Labor.

While Gregory’s federal agents, using what they called presidential warrants when they could not get warrants duly issued by grand juries, and even more zealous state officials, labored mightily to place critics of the presidential policies behind bars, the general public joined in the hue and cry.

Forty authors of standing petitioned the Senate for the expulsion of that wilful man, La Follette. German courses were dropped from schools and colleges. German dishes disappeared from bills of fare. Sauerkraut became known as liberty cabbage, German measles was renamed. German clover appeared in the seed catalogues as crimson or liberty clover. All manifestations of foreign culture became suspect. German operas were dropped from the repertory. The drive against German music culminated in the arrest of Dr. Carl Muck, the elderly and muchadmired conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

“It is not an army that we must shape and train for war. It is a nation,” Wilson wrote in his draft proclamation. “The whole nation must be a team.” To turn the whole nation into a team it was not enough to punish the expression of the wrong opinions. It was necessary to disseminate the right opinions.

During the first weeks after the declaration of war, at a time when Wilson was distracted by Congress’s refusal to give him, along with his other wartime powers, the censorship of the press, there appeared on the White House desk the sort of document he most liked to peruse when he was trying to make up his mind on some issue. The epistle summed up the arguments for and against official wartime censorship and suggested that what was needed was not suppression, but expression; in other words a publicity campaign to sell the war to the nation.

This brief was the work of a Colorado journalist who had supported the President with such vim, through a set of slashing editorials and a book on the issues, during the 1916 campaign, that Tumulty had him down for a post in one of the departments. The journalist’s name was George Creel.

Creel was a little shrimp of a man with burning dark eyes set in an ugly face under a shock of curly black hair. He came from an impoverished family of Virginians who had moved to Missouri after the Civil War. He had made his way up through Kansas City newspapers and muckraking New York magazines by energy and brass to the position of Police Commissioner in Denver. He was a leader of the reform element among Colorado Democrats. He had graduated from the tubthumping Denver Post to his own Rocky Mountain News. He was married to Blanche Bates, one of the reigning stars of the American stage.

A hardworking man with an inexhaustible selfconfidence, his failing was snap judgements. He was famous for his wise cracks. His remark that Senator Lodge, like the soil of New England, was carefully cultivated but naturally sterile, undoubtedly endeared him to the President.

“To Creel,” wrote Mark Sullivan, the journalistic chronicler of the period, “there are only two classes of men. There are skunks and the greatest man that ever lived. The greatest man that ever lived is plural and includes everyone who is on Creel’s side in whatever public issue he happens at the moment to be concerned with.” “It must be admitted,” Creel wrote of himself, “that an open mind is no part of my inheritance. I took in prejudices with mother’s milk and was weaned on partisanship.”

For years Creel, working his noisy way through single tax, socialism, muckraking, progressivism and reform to the New Freedom, had been proclaiming that Woodrow Wilson was the greatest man that ever lived. He certainly did not keep that opinion to himself when he appeared at the White House for consultation about the Committee on Public Information the President had decided to set up with Daniels, Baker and Secretary of State Lansing on the letterhead. The result of a single interview was that Creel was appointed chairman with full executive powers. It was understood that his instructions would come direct from the President.

As the wartime tensions increased around the President’s desk, Creel, along with Baruch, Newton D. Baker and Colonel House were about the only men Tumulty was instructed to pass into the upstairs study. Creel was Wilson’s link with the Censorship Board, with the Post Office and the Department of Justice. He cooperated with Military and Naval Intelligence. Through these he exercised the President’s power to suppress. As head of the Committee for Public Information his function, so he liked to put it, was expression. He became the President’s mouthpiece in the war of slogans.

Creel set up his office across the street from the White House in an old brick residence on Jackson Place. There he collected about him a staff of Wilson-minded journalists who, through subsidiary offices in the large cities, spread the doctrine from coast to coast.

The C.P.I. became the fountainhead of war news for the Washington press corps. The existence of an official press censorship was consistently denied but editors were safer if their material had passed through Creel’s hands.

He developed a news bureau and a set of syndicated services giving the administration slant to events and explaining away false and damaging rumors. Special matter was prepared for the foreignlanguage press. A picture division was set up and a film division. A foreign division channelled propaganda into Germany and Russia. There was a speakers’ bureau through which speakers for the various Liberty Loan drives were furnished with material. The seventyfive thousand volunteer orators groomed for four minute talks at street corners, in movie theatres and churches and at civic events, on topics prepared for them by Creel’s bureaus, became known as “the stentorian guard.”

C.P.I. posters were in every postoffice. C.P.I. information bulletins were on every bulletin board. Country weeklies and trade journals were nourished on Creel’s boilerplate. In an astonishingly short time George Creel had the entire nation — except of course for the disreputable minority who insisted on forming their own opinions — repeating every slogan which emanated from the President’s desk in the wordy war to “make the world safe for democracy.”

Woodrow Wilson’s birthday was on December 28. The group of White House intimates, that the President and Mrs. Wilson kept carefully insulated from any mention of the strains and anxieties of high office, conducted their jollifications in the small dining room because the larger White House rooms were closed off to conserve fuel. Mrs. Josephus Daniels baked the cake.

“The cake was perfectly beautiful and as palatable as it was good to look at,” the President wrote her in his note of thanks. “The sixty one candles on the cake did not make so forbidding a multitude as I should have feared they would and our little family circle had a very jolly time blowing them out and celebrating.” He allowed himself a professorial pun: “It was a regular blow-out.”

Colonel House returned to the White House before Christmas bringing the documents his Inquiry had prepared on European populations and boundaries and on the pretensions of the various national leaderships. After New Years he came back with another mass of material including maps prepared by Dr. Bowman’s assistants at the American Geographical Society. Wilson decided to give his statement the form of a message to be delivered soon after the opening of Congress. He had to answer the Bolshevik challenge that the Allies state their war aims. He hoped to stir the German socialists to the sort of pacifist demands he decried among the unruly at home, and to reassert his position as leader of liberal and idealist trends of thought in France and Great Britain.

House’s train was late. McAdoo was giving coal shipments right of way even over crack passenger expresses. It was nine o’clock on January 4 before the colonel reached the White House. “They had saved dinner for me,” he wrote in his diary, “but I touched it lightly and went into immediate conference with the President.” Wilson who loved the number thirteen was trying to organize the points he wanted to make under thirteen headings.

Next morning they met again in the President’s study. “Saturday was a remarkable day,” wrote House. “I went over to the State Department just after breakfast to see Polk and the others, and returned to the White House at a quarter past ten in order to get to work with the President … We actually got down to work at half past ten and finished remaking the map of the world as we would have it, at half past twelve o’clock.

“We took it up systematically, first outlining general terms, such as open diplomacy, freedom of the seas, removing of economic barriers, establishment of equality of trade conditions, guarantees for the reduction of national armaments, adjustment of colonial claims, general association of nations for the conservation of peace.”

They were still at work on a preliminary draft when the afternoon papers were brought in carrying a report of Lloyd George’s speech the day before to the British Trade Union Congress. The unpredictable Welshman, pressed by the opposition in Parliament to answer the Bolshevik demands and by the laborleaders whose assistance he needed in his conduct of the war, had jumped the gun on the American President by declaring: “We are not fighting a war of aggression against Germany … We are not fighting to destroy Austro-Hungary or to deprive Turkey of its capital … The settlement of the new Europe must be based on such grounds of reason and justice as will give some promise of stability. Therefore it is that we feel that government with the consent of the governed must be the basis of any territorial settlement in this war.”

The President was quite put out. He felt that Lloyd George had taken the wind out of his sails. It did not suit his idea of keeping the center of gravity of the war in Washington merely to parrot the views of the British Prime Minister. His first impulse was to pitch his whole speech in the wastebasket. It took all House’s tactful persuasion to convince him that Lloyd George by “clearing the air” had prepared the way for Woodrow Wilson’s more authoritative statement of war aims.

Sunday afternoon House was back in the President’s study. The President read him the first draft of his speech. The colonel was delighted: “I felt it was the most important document he had ever penned.”

House wanted immediate notice to be given in the press that an important declaration was coming, but Wilson insisted that to give advance notice would start a rash of editorials. “The President’s argument was that … the newspapers invariably commented and speculated as to what he would say and that these forecasts were often taken for what was really said.”

The President and the colonel lunched together Monday. Both men were anxious for fear the speech would be illreceived in the American press. House feared this sudden entrance into European affairs would stir up isolationist sentiment. “… The other points we were fearful of were Alsace Lorraine, the freedom of the seas, and the levelling of commercial barriers. However … there was not the slightest hesitation on his part in saying them … The President shows extraordinary courage in such things. The more I see of him, the more firmly I am convinced there is not a statesman in the world who is his equal.”

That afternoon the meticulous Lansing was called in to dot the i’s and cross the t’s. For fear the Secretary of State might be offended by the scanty part he’d been allowed to play in drafting the document an occasional expression was changed to meet his approval.

After House and Lansing retired Creel came charging into the President’s office with what he claimed was “cheering news from Petrograd.” Edgar Sisson, his representative there, had managed to arrange the showing, at a large theatre on the Nevski Prospect, of a propaganda film extolling the American way of life entitled All for Peace.

At the very moment when President Wilson and his human megaphone were discussing their hopes for talking the Russians around to fighting a war for democracy, the Bolsheviks, wherever their armed men were in control, were seizing the banks and forcing the wealthy at the point of a gun to open up their safedeposit boxes. The result, if not the Wilsonian type of New Freedom, was a very substantial fund in gold rubles. To further their kind of peace the Council of People’s commissars put two millions at Trotsky’s disposal to spread the international revolutionary movement.

On the point of leaving Petrograd to take charge of the negotiations at Brest-Litovsk, Trotsky, while Wilson and his advisers were putting the final touches on the Fourteen Points speech, delivered himself of a blast at the Allied governments for not responding to his invitation to join in the peace conference. The sessions, so he put it, had been adjourned to give the Allied governments a chance to participate. Brest-Litovsk was their last chance: “Russia does not bind herself in these negotiations to the consent of the Allied governments. If they continue to sabotage the cause of general peace, the Russian delegation in any case will continue the negotiations … We at the same time promise our complete support to the laboring classes of any country which will rise against their national imperialists.”

Among other “cheering news,” Creel laid on the President’s desk a report from Colonel W. B. Thompson of the American Red Cross, one of the many unofficial observers at large in Russia that winter, counselling friendly contact with the Bolsheviks who were not “the wildeyed rabble most of us consider them.” Another item was the cabled rumor of a mutiny at the German Naval Base at Kiel. Perhaps the policy of the wedge was already beginning to take effect.

Creel gave place to a committee of the American Red Cross come to ask Wilson’s assistance in their drive for contributions. When Tumulty got them out of the office the text of the President’s message was hurried over to the Government Printing Office to be printed. The President dropped affairs of state for his usual family dinner. He retired early to be in form for his address to Congress on the morrow.

January 8 turned out to be a fine cold winter’s day. After breakfast the Wilsons went out to the country club to play a few holes of golf. It wasn’t till his return to the White House at eleven thirty that morning that the President had Tumulty notify Vice President Marshall and Speaker Champ Clark that he would be arriving on Capitol Hill in half an hour to address a joint session of Congress. Since he had addressed Congress only the Friday before, asking for broader powers to deal with the breakdown in railroad transportation, this notification of a fresh message caught the leaders of both houses unprepared. There was a hubbub in the lobbies and a scramble to round up sufficient senators and representatives to fill the House.

Several cabinet members were not notified. The only ambassador seen in the diplomatic gallery was Sir Cecil Spring Rice who the week before had taken his leave of the President with the announcement that he was being replaced by Lloyd George’s closest collaborator Lord Reading. A Serbian delegation waiting to be received by Congress had to be shunted off at the last moment.

Attendance was small in the visitors’ galleries. Mrs. Wilson arrived at noon accompanied by her mother and sister and by two of the President’s daughters. The ladies were discreetly joined by Colonel House. When the President was ushered into the speaker’s stand the applause that greeted him was thinner than usual.

Woodrow Wilson spoke in low measured tones. He began by reminding his hearers of the breaking off of the negotiations at Brest-Litovsk and of the perfidy of the German proposals there. He spoke of the Bolsheviks with sympathy; the Russian representatives were sincere and in earnest: “They cannot entertain such proposals of conquest and domination … The Russian representatives have insisted, very justly, very wisely and in the true spirit of modern democracy that the conferences they have been holding with the Teutonic and Turkish statesmen should be held with open, not closed doors, and all the world has been audience …

“Mr. Lloyd George has spoken with admirable candor and in admirable spirit for the people and government of Great Britain.”

Wilson went on to discuss in friendly tones the state of mind of the Russian people: “They call to us to say what it is that we desire, in what, if anything, our purpose and our spirit differ from theirs: and I believe that the people of the United States would wish me to respond with utter simplicity and frankness. Whether their present leaders believe it or not, it is our heartfelt desire and hope that some way may be opened whereby we may be privileged to assist the people of Russia to obtain their utmost hope of liberty and ordered peace.”

At this point came the first applause. People were still filing into the galleries. Senators and representatives were sneaking into their seats.

“What we demand in this war, therefore is nothing peculiar to ourselves. It is that the world be made fit and safe to live in … All the peoples of the world are in effect partners in this interest, and for our own part we see very clearly that unless justice be done to others it will not be done to us.”

The chamber was very silent when he began to enumerate the points of a program for a permanent peace: first open covenants openly arrived at; then freedom of the seas, the removal of economic barriers, the reduction of armaments; in the adjustment of colonial claims the interests of the subject populations must be considered equally with those of the colonizers; all conquered territory in Belgium and France and Russia must be evacuated and restored.

When he reached point VIII: the need to right the wrong done France by the seizure of Alsace and Lorraine in 1870, there was a burst of loud cheering. The galleries applauded. Senators and representatives jumped on chairs and waved their arms as if they were at a football game.

The President, smiling patiently, waited for the pandemonium to subside …

Point IX: The frontiers of Italy were to be adjusted along “clearly recognizable rights of nationality.” (House and Wilson and Lansing, haunted by fears that the Italians might follow the Russian example in a separate peace, had struggled long over that phrase.)

Point X: This was another poser. The President hoped at that point to encourage the national minorities without breaking up the Austro-Hungarian empire; he announced that they should be “accorded the freest opportunity of autonomous development.”

Point XI: Rumania, Serbia and Montenegro must be evacuated and restored.

Point XII called for free passage of the Dardanelles and autonomy and security for the various peoples making up the Turkish empire.

Point XIII demanded an independent Poland.

Point XIV called for a “general association of nations … formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.”

The President’s peroration proclaimed this to be “the moral climax … of the culminating and final war for human liberty.”

The response in America to the Fourteen Points speech was almost universal acclaim. Champ Clark wrote Wilson that it was clear as crystal: “Anybody that can’t understand it, whether he agrees with it or not, is an incorrigible fool.” Men of such diverse attitudes as Theodore Roosevelt and Senator Borah expressed their approval. Socialists applauded it. To the college professors whose thinking was shepherded by Herbert Croly’s New Republic the Fourteen Points became holy writ. The Republican New York Tribune called the message a second Emancipation Proclamation.

In Great Britain the reception was cooler. Editorial writers were pleased to have President Wilson so loyally backing up Lloyd George, but the phrase “freedom of the seas” gave them chills. Even the liberals of the Quakerowned “cocoa” press were restrained in their enthusiasm. The London Times expressed some doubts that “the reign of righteousness was within our reach.”

So slow was the transmission that a week went by before Creel’s representatives in Petrograd had the complete message in their hands. When the translation into German and Russian was complete Sisson, who was a frantic journalist in the old tradition, hurried in a cab through snowy streets with a copy for Smolny. He was allowed to place it personally in Lenin’s hands, and Lenin saw to it that it was immediately telegraphed to Trotsky at Brest-Litovsk.

Sisson described Lenin, whom he was seeing for the first time, as looking “like the bourgeois mayor of a French town, short, sparsely bearded, a bronze man in hair and whiskers, small shrewd eyes, round of face, smiling and genial when he desires to be.” According to Sisson, Lenin was “joyous as a boy” when he read the President’s words recognizing the honesty of purpose of the Bolsheviks.

Lenin recognized the value of Wilson’s Fourteen Points in driving a wedge between the Germans and their government. He allowed the speech to be distributed to German prisoners and copied into the literature the Bolsheviks were spreading through the armies.

Sisson hired outofwork Russian soldiers to paste posters of the speech up all over Petrograd. He distributed three hundred thousand handbills and some million pamphlets. American consuls and representatives of the Y.M.C.A. and of the International Harvester Company handed it out wherever they could. The Fourteen Points made President Wilson a hero to eastern Europe.

To the members of the German High Command this talk about liberty and selfdetermination and the rights of peoples was dangerous nonsense. Their fear of its effect on softheaded civilians back home seems to have hardened their decision that they must, before it was too late, take the peace conference out of the hands of their diplomats and dictate iron terms to the Russians.

Chapter 17 THE FIRST BLOOD

IN France the winter of 1917 settled in unusually early. Although the United States had been in the war seven months not an American soldier had come to grips with the enemy. By late October most of the elements to make up four large size divisions were training in Lorraine. The 1st Division, originally manned by regular army troops shipped straight to France from the Mexican border; the 2nd, which was half marines; the 26th based on the New England National Guard; and the 42nd, composed of militia outfits from twentysix states and the District of Columbia, were in the last stages of training.

These divisions amounted to something more than a hundred thousand men, a sizeable force, but not yet enough to count for much in the councils of the Allied commanders who were faced with the necessity of meeting the vast offensive which was expected on the western front as soon as the German High Command transferred its armies from the east.

The American doughboy was a changed man, in appearance at least, from the days of the Mexican border patrol. The broadbrimmed felt campaign hat had given way to the overseas cap and to steel helmets bought from the British. Rolled woolen puttees had replaced the canvas leggins left over from Philippine campaigns. Gasmasks were part of the regulation equipment.

Warm clothing was still scarce. Lucky were the men who had sweaters to wear under their tunics. Gloves were at a premium as were rubber boots to wade through the sleety muck of French barnyards. There were never enough blankets. Even woolen socks and proper footgear were in short supply. Flimsy shoes the doughboys called “chickenskins” disintegrated on the long hikes. Pershing’s battalions sometimes left bloody prints behind them as they tramped through the snow.

Summer had been raw and rainy in the Lorraine sector and the foothills of the Vosges, but with the progress of fall the rain turned to sleet and snow. Americans, accustomed to warm houses at home, suffered agonies of cold in their chilly billets. Enlistedmen huddled in barns and haylofts often under shattered roofs of tiles or dilapidated thatch that let in the wind and the drizzle, or in hastily constructed Adrian barracks. So chary were the French of the wood from their national forests that fires were only allowed for cooking. Baths were unheard of. Even the officers, billeted in spare bedrooms and front parlors, felt lucky if they could scrape together a few damp twigs that produced more smoke than heat in the tiny fireplaces. It was a time of chilblains and frozen feet. The historically inclined reminded each other of Washington’s winter at Valley Forge.

Drills and training continued in all weathers. Pershing was a stickler for drill. Dawes, one of the few men in the world who had real affection for John Pershing, told the story of how the Commander in Chief sent General Harbord across the street at some military function to button up Dawes’ overcoat. Dawes had forgotten to button all the buttons. “A hell of a job for the Chief of Staff,” muttered Harbord while he did it. An Englishspeaking French veteran of four years of war was heard to remark that the spit and polish at Pershing’s headquarters at Chaumont made him feel like a Boy Scout.

Though many officers and noncoms were sent to learn trench warfare among the British most of the instruction was by French divisions drawn back for rest and recuperation. The French conducted their training with enthusiasm. It was a better life than fighting the boche.

Near Gondrecourt French engineers constructed a model sector with dugout shelters, line entrenchments and observation posts. There the Americans were put through gas attacks with real gas and taught the use of handgrenades and Very pistols for signalling and the vagaries of the heavy Chauchat automatic rifle and of the 37-millimeter gun and the trench mortar. Even their machineguns were the French Hotchkiss since Army Ordnance had lost so much time trying to decide on the best possible machinegun that it hadn’t produced any.

Siege warfare had gone on so long that the French and British infantry instructors could hardly think of war except in terms of trenches and barbed wire entanglements and machinegun fire and riflegrenades for defense. For attack they relied on handgrenades. Shooting was the business of the artillery. The infantry’s job was to occupy and hold a position after the barrage had made it uninhabitable for the enemy.

General Pershing had other ideas. He planned for open warfare and insisted on marksmanship on the rifle range. He planned for combat man to man.

Orders came down to indoctrinate the troops in hatred of the boche. Units were harangued on the atrocities the Huns had committed in Belgium and France. American troops must be taught to hate the sonsofbitches. The straw dummies at bayonet practice were named Hans or Fritz. The troops got instruction in how to tear their guts out with proper zest.

In spite of swollen feet and frostbite, and exhaustion from the long quicktime hikes that were part of the weekly routine, the health and spirits of the men remained surprisingly good. Many were entranced by the picturebook prettiness of the countryside. Doughboys managed to squeeze a few pleasures out of the stony French villages. They got along famously with the children. Farmers’ wives did a flourishing business selling the Americans omelettes and vin chaud. The Americans were free spenders. They were always ready to trade cans of bullybeef for wines and liquors or occasionally for complaisances on the part of the farmer’s daughter. They helped the farmer with his chores. To the French they appeared not only as a protection from the boche but as a source of revenue. A whole language of Franco-American camaraderie grew up with French and English words interspersed. “Our popote’s no damn good. Cook feeds us beaucoup slum.”

On October 20 four battalions of infantry from the 1st Division were sent into the lines amid the undamaged scenery of a quiet sector along the Marne-Rhine canal between Lunéville and Nancy. The artillery, which had been learning the use of seventyfives and howitzers under French instructors at Le Valdahon, took up positions from which they could duplicate the fire of the guns of the French division which was holding that part of the front.

On October 23 the first American shell, out of a French seventyfive to be sure, was sent shrilling over the German lines. The boche replied in kind. The same day a few wounded were sent back to the new field hospital. Four days later a patrol out in nomansland managed to take a German prisoner.

By this time the Germans were alerted as to the positions of their new enemy. Since by mutual consent nothing ever happened on the Lorraine front the French had little aviation there. The A.E.F. did not yet have a plane fit to fly, so the men of the 1st Division had no air cover at all. The Germans bided their time until their observation planes reported that a relief of the American troops in advanced positions was in progress.

At 3 A.M. the morning of November 3 they let loose everything they had in a violent bombardment of an outpost which had just been occupied by a platoon of the 16th Infantry. It was the men’s first moment at the front. They had been fumbling about in the dark trying to find their way in the maze of trenches. Before they knew what had happened they were boxed in by a barrage. A German raiding party blew a path through the barbed wire with bangalore torpedoes. Right away their handgrenades came lobbing over the parapet. Three men were killed. The sergeant and nine more were overpowered by bayonets and trenchknives and surrendered. The German radio had itself a time crowing over this easy victory over the green Americans.

The only other Americans to undergo their baptism of shrapnel that fall were some railroadmen from the 11th Engineers attached to the British under General Byng. Two companies of them helped unload the tanks brought up at night in camouflaged flatcars and hidden in the woods in preparation for the November attack in front of Cambrai. After the unexpectedly successful breakthrough they went up with the Canadians to repair the railroad line through Gouzeaucourt. When the Germans launched their sudden counteroffensive they dropped crowbars and shovels and gave a good account of themselves with their rifles. They reported two dead, thirteen wounded and fifteen missing, after falling back shoulder to shoulder with the British combat troops.

Another engineer outfit on similar duty, from the 12th, managed to hide out in a village during the high tide of the German advance. When the enemy was dislodged from the furthest point of his advance they reported back without the loss of a man at their post of command.

The 1st Division, meanwhile, was pulled out of the lines for further training. Major General Sibert, who had made a name for himself superintending engineering work on the Panama Canal, but in whom G.H.Q. discovered a lack of combat initiative, was replaced by Robert Lee Bullard, a wiry Georgiaborn general with a twinkle in his eye, who had at least heard bullets sing as a young man in the pursuit of Geronimo and in the Philippines.

For many of the Americans that dank Christmas was the first they had ever spent away from home. The doughboys rigged up Christmas trees in every village where they were billeted and had a high time distributing candy and whatever toys they could get hold of to the sadeyed little French children. The Mayor of Gondrecourt was so touched that he wrote a letter of appreciation. It was like a fête of two large families he said. Never perhaps had such bonds of sympathy obtained between two nations.

A few days later the 1st Division floundered through a snowstorm to finish their training with five days of manoeuvres. “Worst weather in which I ever saw troops work,” wrote General Bullard in his diary. He described it as the fiercest strain to which he had ever seen troops subjected outside of battle. The snow was four or five inches deep on the open ground. The men in the practice trenches were over their shoetops in slush. There were frozen fingers and ears and noses. Horses died from cold and exhaustion. What saved the day, according to Bullard, were the rolling kitchens which they had imitated from the French popotes. Hot food kept up the men’s spirits and strength. Only the horses died; the doughboys held up, and the old army mules.

January 15 half of the 1st Division moved out of its billets in the training area to relieve the French on the eastern flank of the St. Mihiel sector. This was the position which Pershing picked the summer before for the eventual jumping off of an American drive into the vitals of industrial Germany. Up to now the Americans had been nursed by French units whenever they appeared. In the Toul sector they were on their own.

The weather was even more trying than during the five days manoeuvres. A cold night froze the snowy roads and a sleety rain smoothed them to sheer ice where neither the horses’ hoofs nor the wheels of trucks could take hold. Men and animals fell in all directions in a tangle of harness and ditched wagons. Upset wagons were continually having to be reloaded in the rain by men up to their knees in freezing slush. By night the wagon train of the first detachment had only progressed a mile and a half.

“I felt perfectly sure,” wrote Bullard, “that these soldiers were never afterward to encounter anything except death that would be harder to face than the labors and exposure of this day.”

Three days later the American battalions were filing into a five kilometer stretch of trenches on low and muddy ground in the vicinity of the village of Seicheprey. The officers of the French Moroccan division they relieved showed the Americans the lay of the land. The entire region was overlooked by German positions on a high bare hill. In spite of miles of camouflage every artillery position and every ammunition dump and every daylight move of troops was clearly visible to the boche observers looking through their glasses from safe observation posts on Montsec.

As harrowing as being under the enemy’s eye, was the itching from the cooties that swarmed in the dugouts and shelters. For most of the Americans it was their first experience with lice.

For two weeks their officers fretted under the command of the French corps headquarters. The French used the Toul area as a rest sector and they wanted to keep it quiet. The Americans were rearing to go. At last on February 10 Bullard could enter in his diary: “Received tactical command of my division on the fifth and began harrying the enemy at once … Well we stirred him up and he came back at us … Of course I lost men, but as we were the most active it seems probable that we made him lose more.”

The sector came to life in a series of raids and counterraids across the barbed wire and the muddy shellholes between the hostile positions. There was constant rifle and machinegun fire. Occasionally a highspirited doughboy who still felt war was a kind of a lark would poke his hat up on a stick above the trench just to see what Heinie would do. Heinie answered with minenwerfers. American detachments took losses but they struck back. The dead and wounded had to be carried two or three kilometers uphill through slippery access trenches where the mud never dried. Graves were always open in the little cemetery near headquarters at Mesnil la Tour. As signs of spring appeared on the ruined land the white crosses multiplied.

The plight of the 1st Division wallowing in the muck of the Toul sector under observation from the Germans on Montsec was typical of the whole strategic scheme of the war that winter. The Germans had the inside lines. They had the advantage of position. The initiative was theirs.

The element they lacked was time. Although the German people were kept in ignorance, the inner circle of command was already aware of the failure of their submarine blockade of Great Britain. On the other hand the German people were all too conscious of the success of the British blockade of the Fatherland. They were hungry. Stories were going around of babies dying for lack of milk. Fats were hardly obtainable. Soap had ceased to exist. Breadstuffs were ersatz and strictly rationed. Industries were running down for lack of raw materials.

It was hoped that with the next harvest the Baltic provinces and Poland and the Ukraine, about to be denied to the Petrograd Bolsheviks by the peace terms at Brest-Litovsk, would be furnishing wheat and meat. For the moment the only way to provide sufficient food for the army was to starve the civilians.

Germany’s allies were in a bad way. The Hapsburg empire was on the verge of emulating the collapse of the Romanoffs. In the Balkans victor and vanquished suffered equally from pestilence and famine. The Bulgarian Army was weakened by the strife of factions. The Turks lacked money and munitions and the will to fight. In the southern dominions the British had wiped out the shame of Kut el Amara by capturing Baghdad and Jerusalem. Arabian sheikhs were declaring their independence. Romantic British agents like Philby and Lawrence were lashing up the Bedouins to revolt. In the Aegean the Turkish rule was threatened by the Greeks whom the British were cautiously arming under Venizelos.

Erich von Ludendorff’s successes in the East had won the Kaiser’s devotion. Von Hindenburg relied on him completely. As Imperial Chief of Staff, he was master of Germany. It was largely his decision that, before the untrained Americans should learn how to fight, and before the corrosion of Bolshevism and hunger and revolt should advance any further, the German armies must strike the Allies a knockout blow in the West.

As fast as the German divisions were pulled out of the eastern battlefields they were put through courses of training in von Hutier’s methods of open warfare which had proved so successful at Riga and Caporetto. The rank and file were thoroughly indoctrinated with the notion that one final blow would bring a victorious peace to the Fatherland. The staffs meanwhile were busy blueprinting every detail of a series of offensives which they believed would shatter the Allied armies. With immense pains alternative projects were drafted. If they made proper use of their new dominance in manpower they could not fail.

“St. George I” was the code name of an operation against Ypres, “St. George II” against Lys. These were to be under the group of armies commanded by Prince Rupert of Bavaria. Further south the German Crown Prince’s headquarters would join the Bavarians in the conduct of operation “Michael” against the hinge between the British and the French in front of St. Quentin. The Kaiser’s son would further assume command of operation “Roland” through the Chemin des Dames. If these went awry other plans dubbed “Castor and Pollux,” “Hector and Achilles” were in readiness. There was preparation for diversions in Alsace and the Trou de Belfort. Dummy concentrations were to be used to confuse Allied intelligence as to where the real blows would fall. “It will be an immense struggle that will begin at one point, continue at another, and take a long time,” Ludendorff told the Kaiser. “It is difficult but it will be victorious.”

The information that came in from the camp of the enemy to the political observers attached to the German General Staff was not too discouraging. In America one of the first results of the war effort was the collapse of railroad transportation. American newspapers were full of the failure of the airplanebuilding program. Men were dying of influenza in the training camps. Ex-President Theodore Roosevelt — for whom the Germans had high respect — was stalking about the country denouncing the inefficiencies of the Administration. The War Department was said to have “ceased to function.” So general was the disillusionment with the production of fighting equipment that a prominent Democrat, Senator Chamberlain of Oregon, was assailing Secretary Baker’s management in a fulldress debate in the Senate.

More than a million draftees were in training, but no appreciable amount of ordnance was being produced. The shipbuilding program was still on the draftingboard and the British were proving unwilling to furnish enough of their own shipping to transport American troops to France in really large quantities.

On the western front, although the Allied Supreme War Council was functioning it was far from attaining unity of command. The French and British had to maintain twelve divisions in Italy to keep that country in the war. Pétain had managed to restore the morale of the French but only by his guarantee that no offensives would be attempted. His plan for a mobile reserve had been accepted by the Supreme War Council but Haig was proving reluctant to put British troops at his disposal. Lloyd George had not screwed up his courage to get rid of Haig whom he obviously distrusted, but he was retaining as a home guard in England the trained men Haig needed to replace the divisions he sent to Italy. Pétain and Haig were engaged in a dispute as to how much of the French lines the British should take over.

When Haig finally consented to relieve the French on a thirty mile stretch in front of St. Quentin he entrusted the new sector to Gough’s Fifth Army which was far from recovered from the bloodletting at Ypres the autumn before. Gough’s men manned the French positions so thinly and listlessly that this hinge between the French and British immediately became of paramount interest to Ludendorff’s planners.

The High Command decided as early as January that operation “Michael” should come first. The concentration of troops and guns and ammunition was made at night and with extraordinary precautions for secrecy. At the same time trooptrains were allowed to be seen in Alsace to give the French the impression that something might be attempted from the direction of the Swiss border. Haig, though some of his staff-officers kept warning him that the attack would come through St. Quentin, was obsessed with the protection of the Channel ports.

He kept his strongest forces on his left. The various British army headquarters were full of talk about defense in depth: “let them come through and smash them from the flanks.”

The Supreme War Council meanwhile was issuing neatly drawn maps showing the German armies poised for attack to the north of Cambrai and in the Champagne region between Rheims and Verdun. According to their prognostications the attack would come in June.

On March 10 the Kaiser signed the orders at Imperial General Staff Headquarters, the Hotel Brittanique, in the ancient wateringplace of Spa in Belgium, and, as the trees were beginning to bud on the wooded hills, moved forward in his court train to treeshaded Avesnes in the French department of Nord to animate his armies by his imperial presence.

March 20 all northern France was beaten by a storm of rain and mist. The weather was so bad Hindenburg almost postponed the attack set for the morrow. By night the rain had given place to dense fog.

At 3:30 A.M. the heaviest bombardment of the war with highly volatile gas mixed with shells from guns of all calibers overwhelmed the British positions on a forty mile front. After four hours the bombardment turned into a rolling barrage and the German infantry, in groups accompanied by field guns, trenchmortars, and heavy machineguns started to advance behind it through the fog.

Their instructions were to move ahead as fast as they could, leaving all mopping up of stubborn positions to the units that followed. By noon, when the sun burned through, the Germans found that they had broken the British Fifth Army defenses all along the front. Northward in the direction of Arras the British were holding firm.

For ten days the Germans kept advancing at the speed of about five miles a day through the region between the Somme and the Oise which they had devastated in their withdrawal the year before. The utter ruin of the land they crossed was more hindrance to them than the retreating British. By the time they had reached the flourishing farmlands and undamaged roads beyond Montdidier they had so far outrun their supply that they could advance no further. They had taken thousands of square kilometers of French soil. They had destroyed the British Fifth Army, capturing eighty thousand prisoners and nine hundred and seventyfive guns, but without the railroad junction of Amiens it would be hard to consolidate their victory.

Although the railroad line through Montdidier was lost to the enemy, General Byng’s Third Army, the victors at Cambrai, dug in and held in front of Amiens with that British stubbornness that so often dismayed the German staff. A General Carey did a famous job of collecting stragglers from the broken divisions and throwing them into new trenches across the St. Quentin-Amiens road. These detachments became known as “Carey’s chickens.” Among the odds and ends of units he imbued with the will to fight was a group of American engineers.

Back in February some companies of the 6th Engineers had been detailed to join a British outfit near Peronne for instruction in military bridge building. They found the British engineers working an Italian labor battalion from the illfated army that broke and ran at Caporetto. The bridge work was absorbing.

The game was to construct a light bridge parallel to the river bank that could be swung around by a truck to span the river when needed. These Americans got along famously with the British who began to call them the Royal 6th.

The Americans were seeing the war at last. There were airraids every night. They watched with great interest the searchlights picking out attacking planes. Soon they could recognize the double whine and buzz of German bombers. The sound of the guns over the faraway front, so one of the officers entered in his diary, sounded to him like the engines of a large riversteamer in the distance. At night the gunflashes made a continual border of red along the northern horizon.

Their British friends frowned on all this activity. “ ‘Uns are cookin’ up something narsty.” An offensive might come any day.

Gasmask drills were instituted.

Spring was early. There were flowers in the gardens of wrecked houses. Songbirds were singing in the trees along the sluggish green Doignt that flowed into the Somme at this point. The men were enjoying the mild presages of the first French spring any of them had ever seen.

On March 22 a Captain Davis, who had been ordered to return to their old billeting center to settle some claims of damage presented by the villagers, rejoined his unit. He had come through Paris without learning that anything particular was going on at the front, but when he stepped out from the train at Amiens he found the railroad station under heavy attack from the air. Getting out of Amiens as quick as he could he made it back to Peronne by road without too much difficulty, but there he found that the British had orders to burn all the fine bridges they had gone to so much trouble to build. The Americans’ orders were to fall back on their dump of engineer equipment at Chaulnes, some fifteen kilometers to the south.

The roads were getting crowded. The sky was full of noise. Airraids were continuous.

They had hardly settled into their cantonments at Chaulnes when orders came to destroy all equipment, even field desks. With only the service records and the men’s packs they were to retreat another twentyfive kilometers to Moreuil on the Amiens-Montdidier railroad. There they pitched shelter tents. The weather was pleasant.

On the morning of March 27 the 6th Engineers were informed that their colonel had volunteered them to join the British defense of Amiens. British lorries carried them out to a point on the road between Warfusse and Abancourt. Although they already had their Springfields and their bayonets, there they were issued British rifles too. The British rifle, they reported, was less accurate but handier for rough field work. The trenches to the right of the road had been wellbuilt, but to the left where the engineers were, they were barely started. The Americans were hard at work digging themselves funkholes, when they heard a lot of noise to the right of the road, shrapnel, machineguns, mortar fire; the rough field work had begun.

They were working engineers with little combat training. They were lying in an open field. Behind them was a small wood. In front of them was the advancing German Army. It gave them a lonesome feeling. Hearts were thumping. Hands were cold on the riflestocks. Eyes were glued to the sights.

The Britishers in the trenches to the right of the road started, so Captain Davis put it, “retiring in some disorder and quite a hurry.” An order came from the American colonel to hold and to close up with the troops to the right. At the same moment an excited British major appeared who ordered the Americans out of their trench. He told them to form a line, retire three paces and fire; and then to retire another three paces and fire again, just like at Waterloo. The order seemed rather humorous to the Americans because there weren’t any Germans in sight to fire at.

A British general, maybe it was Carey himself, appeared on the scene and made a great outcry that the damned Yankees were running away. The damned Yankees went back into their trench and promptly helped repulse a German attack.

They spent all that day in the trenches without grub and with very little water.

Next day was fine. The Germans shelled. The blue sky filled with cotton blobs of shrapnel. The 6th Engineers stayed put. There were a few casualties. By this time they were getting regular British rations. Next day the Germans started shelling up and down the line. “It was like a feu de joie with guns,” noted the captain in his journal. The shells sounded like a swarm of bees moving up and down the trenches. Jerry must be having trouble with supply because he was economizing on his ammunition. Eight casualties. Everybody was tense. German infantry was advancing in the shelter of a fold in the land.

All at once the Americans were amazed to see what looked like a haywagon coming towards them down the St. Quentin road. Couldn’t be a farmer’s haywagon, something funny about the wheels. A lieutenant pumped a few bullets from a Springfield into the haywagon and out popped a couple of jerries. They sure ran. When the hay fell away the thing turned out to be an eight inch howitzer.

Later the same day they captured a man who claimed to be an English sergeant. He’d been asking too many questions about whether the Americans had any machineguns. Of course they hadn’t. He talked English all right. Next day the jerries came over in what looked like English planes, captured planes maybe, and machinegunned the trenches. This was the engineers’ fourth day in the lines.

After dark that night the headquarters company was transferred to another line of trenches. These were better built and had barbed wire entanglements in front of them but they were full of water. The following night they were shifted again to a point north of the road. There a few Hun snipers bothered them but there was no other activity. Next night they were taken out of the line for good. The men were relieved in small groups. The Huns sent up starshells to see what was happening. The 6th Engineers had lost two officers and twenty men killed and more than a hundred wounded or missing.

They were billeted at a place called Glissy for a rest. They slept all the first day. An Englishspeaking girl who came nosing around was arrested for a spy. The men were sent in batches into Abbeville for showers. After their showers they were served out British uniforms, the only fresh clothes available. Now they were Royal Engineers for fair.

A couple of days later they were back near Amiens working on the bridges again, this time on the Somme. From where they worked on a tubular bridge to be swung across the Somme they could see the shells taking bites out of the tall pinnacles of the Amiens cathedral in the distance. They worked quietly. No extra bloodpressure. The shelling was far away. They’d had their baptism of fire.

The German thrust towards Amiens shocked the British and French leadership into taking one more reluctant step towards a unified command. Each meeting of the Supreme War Council was revealing more cross purposes among the Allies. Pétain’s plan for assigning a few French and British divisions to a general reserve, which could be thrown into the line under a single commander wherever the need was greatest, was several times approved in principle but never put into effect. Only that naïve American, tonguetied old General Bliss, seemed wholeheartedly for it. His protests that it was the only logical plan were met by smiles and supercilious shrugs.

Clemenceau backed the general reserve for a while as an entering wedge for obtaining the supreme command for a Frenchman; but, so he told the story later, when he broached such a possibility to Sir Douglas Haig, the British Field Marshal jumped up with his hands over his head like a jackinthebox and cried, “Monsieur Clemenceau, I have only one chief, my king.”

The latest meeting of the Supreme War Council in London on March 14 had proved particularly futile. The British produced so many arguments against the general reserve that even Clemenceau gave the impression of having been talked around to their way of thinking. Only Clemenceau’s chief of staff, General Foch, stood his ground and insisted on putting himself on record with a long acidulous protest in writing. His stubbornness embroiled him with the grumpy old Tiger. The two Frenchmen left London on very bad terms indeed.

Ferdinand Foch, like Joffre, was a product of the Pyrenees. But unlike the anticlerical Joffre, he came of a devoutly Catholic family. His education was Jesuit. The Franco-Prussian war found him preparing for a military career at the Jesuit school of St. Clément in Metz. The taking over of the ancient French fortress city by the Prussians made an indelible impression on the ardent and studious youth of nineteen. As much as Clemenceau he dedicated his life to la revanche, but his career was among the old regime elements in the army and the clergy that never really accepted a French republic, neither the First, nor the Second, nor the Third. His father was an official of the Second Empire. His brother was a Jesuit priest. His silent hatred of democratic politics stood him in ill stead in the army. Though admittedly the artillery officer most learned in the classics of warfare, promotions came hard. In spite of their political differences Clemenceau, who appreciated brains, during his premiership in 1907 appointed Foch to be director of the Ecole de Guerre. As director of the French war college Foch made friends with his opposite number in England, the whimsical and slightly crackbrained Sir Henry Wilson, during the first interchanges of the entente cordiale. They became so congenial that he invited Sir Henry to his daughter’s wedding.

When war broke out Foch was charged with the defense of Nancy. His son and his soninlaw were both killed during the first year. Foch made himself a brilliant reputation in command of the Ninth Army under Joffre in the first battle of the Marne, but after the disasters on the Somme in 1916 he shared Joffre’s eclipse and was relegated to the post of inspector general on the Swiss border. Pétain brought him back as Chief of Staff, with offices in the Invalides, and ever since that day Foch had been stringing his wires towards eventual attainment of the supreme command. Since Robertson’s retirement, Sir Henry Wilson, again Foch’s opposite number as British Chief of Staff, had taken, in a chaffing sort of way, to promoting his French friend’s qualifications for generalissimo.

The extent of the disaster before Amiens began to dawn on the British Government during the Palm Sunday weekend. Lloyd George, who was out of town, received a desperate wire from Haig begging him to do something to induce the French to get troops into the widening gap between the French and British armies. He called up Lord Milner, his Secretary of State for War, one of the few cabinet officers still in London, and told him to leave for France immediately. The Prime Minister had to have an on the spot report. Milner, he added hurriedly, had full authority to do anything necessary.

Milner picked up General Wilson at Versailles and all day Monday the twentyfifth the two of them went careening over the French roads in a staffcar from one inconclusive conference to another. Confusion everywhere. Recriminations. Haig complaining that the divisions Pétain had promised had failed to appear; Pétain accusing Haig of letting go strong points he had given his word to hold.

Haig was shaken. He had lost selfconfidence to the point that he admitted tremulously to Milner that if that was the only way of getting his flank covered he was willing to take orders from a Frenchman. To spare Haig’s feelings Milner and Wilson were talking up Clemenceau as generalissimo with Foch as his technical adviser.

They found the Tiger at Compiègne, his eyes sunk behind his cheekbones, his mustache shaggier than usual. He told them gruffly that the only possible remedy was the immediate unification of command. Meanwhile Haig had sent word that he was too busy to come to Compiègne. A meeting was arranged for the following day with all the chief French and British commanders, at the little rural center of Doullens, about midway between Amiens and the sea, to come to a final decision.

Clemenceau spent Monday night in Paris. His sleep as usual was disturbed by airraids. A mysterious longrange gun, soon to be nicknamed Big Bertha, had started dropping shells at twenty minute intervals into the French capital. It was evidently the longest range gun ever fired.

The city, while not exactly panicky, was tense. Though outwardly the Premier gave an impression of confidence he was making secret arrangements for the evacuation of the most important government offices in case of need. The nervous and the rich were leaving already. Trains for Lyons and the Midi were full of standees. At the same time the gare du Nord was choking up pitifully with refugees arriving with their bundles and boxes from the invaded north.

The people who had decided to stick it out were in good spirits. Sunday afternoon the boulevards were unusually lively. The President of the Republic visited the sites of the explosions and brought the nation’s condolences to the bereaved and the wounded. Holidaymakers were more curious than frightened about the projectiles from Big Bertha. The Parisians were pointing out to each other that they weren’t doing much damage after all.

The appointment at Doullens was for eleven in the morning. Clemenceau and his military aide, General Mordacq, arrived on the dot. A second later President Poincaré and his military aide drove up. Along with them came Monsieur Loucheur, the minister for armaments and aviation. There was no love lost between the President of the Republic and the President of the Council of Ministers, particularly since the scheme for making Clemenceau generalissimo had been bruited about, but in this extremity they greeted each other cordially. Clemenceau, noted Mordacq, was in good spirits. He seemed almost gay.

Lord Milner and General Wilson were late. Since Haig and his staff had filled up the little town hall, the French leaders remained in the prettily gardened little square outside. The day was chilly with a raw wind off the Channel, so they had to walk briskly up and down to keep warm.

Townspeople crowded around them. They were asking if they were going to allow the Germans to come as far as Doullens. Should people pack up and leave? Bitter reproaches lurked under a polite demeanor. The Tiger growled one of his usual phrases about “they shall not pass” through his mustache.

From where he stood it was all too clear that the retreat was continuing. Refugees kept coming along the main road through the square. There were countrypeople in wagons piled high with household goods, lowing cows and flocks of sheep with their tinkling bells, now and then a protesting pig being dragged along, boys pushing handcarts, babycarriages full of prized possessions with the baby in among them, old women in bonnets, old men hobbling on sticks: a sickening repetition of roadside scenes in the tragic summer of 1914.

Among them, marching sedately in step, came pinkfaced detachments of retreating British troops. The Frenchmen were amazed at their expressionless faces. Whenever there was a moment of silence they could hear the German guns like heavy surf in the distance.

The President of the Council and the President of the Republic had only time to exchange a few anxious words before they were joined by General Foch. Foch at sixtyseven was a strutting gamecock of a man with gray blue eyes and an abundant grizzled mustache. He arrived, followed by his staff, with a great air of bustle and confidence. At last he was going to attain the command he’d so long desired. He greeted the heads of the French republic and made his famous gesture of brushing away cobwebs.

“My plan is not complicated,” he exclaimed in harsh trenchant tones. “I want to fight. I’ll fight in the North. I’ll fight on the Somme. I’ll fight on the Aisne, in Lorraine, in Alsace, I’ll fight everywhere and blow after blow I’ll end by knocking out the Boche; he’s no smarter and no stronger than we are.”

Mordacq noted in his journal that Foch seemed to bring a gust of victory with him.

Pétain’s arrival was lugubrious. He came full of complaints. The British were not keeping him properly informed. How could they expect him to send in reinforcements if they wouldn’t stop retreating? “That man,” whispered Pétain to the group about him, when he caught sight of Haig’s tall figure on the steps of the town hall, “will have to capitulate in two weeks.”

The French were nervously comparing their watches with the town clock. Eleven fortyfive. Where the devil were the representatives of the British Government? The sound of the guns seemed to grow louder. Their pacing became nervous, almost feverish. Twelve o’clock struck. No sign of Milner and Wilson.

At twelve five, two British staffcars appeared at full tilt, scattering the refugees as they came. As soon as Lord Milner stepped out of his car, Clemenceau, who had the knack of putting people in the wrong, strode up to him savagely and asked if it were true that the British were planning to evacuate Amiens. Milner protested loudly that Marshal Haig intended no such thing.

He then asked if the French would excuse him for a few minutes so that he could talk to his generals in the mayor’s office. They had had no chance to confer. Marshal Haig and Generals Plumer and Byng led the way into the building. After fifteen minutes they called in the French.

The conference of Doullens began with neatly bearded little Poincaré presiding.

The Tiger snarled at Haig: was he planning to give up Amiens? Haig said that was the last thing he was planning to do but that he must have French reinforcements to cover his flank. He had no reserves ready to fight.

It was Pétain’s turn to say what he could do. Haig had already turned over to his command the elements of the Fifth Army nearest the French flank. “The Fifth Army,” began Pétain, “has ceased to exist.” He went into a long gloomy account of how for days he’d been trying to find divisions. He had found twentyfour, but most of them were tired and some frazzled from recent combat. The problems of transportation and redeployment would take a long time to solve. It would take time.

Pétain’s words threw a chill over the group. For a while nobody spoke.

Clemenceau grabbed Milner’s arm and backed him into a comer. “We must make an end of this,” he whispered. “What do you propose?”

Milner had come all primed. He immediately proposed putting the French and British armies under the command of General Foch. To sweeten the pill for Pétain and Haig, Milner brought in the word “coordinate.” Pétain announced loftily that indeed he would serve under General Foch. They all looked at Haig.

Mordacq noticed how lined and haggard Haig’s face was. He’d lost the erect look of the wooden soldier perfectly painted and polished. He muttered something about doing everything necessary to serve the general interest.

Clemenceau insisted that the decision be put in writing. Foch’s command must take effect from that moment. General Foch was charged with coordinating the British and French armies on the western front. All present signed the little document. Milner’s signature committed the British cabinet.

Pétain went back gloomily to his train. Haig and his generals returned to their distracted headquarters. The staff officers felt something had been put over on their chief. Being forced under French command was the price he had to pay for reinforcements.

The French were rubbing their hands. The air was sharp. It was two and they were accustomed to their déjeuner at twelve. All present confessed to a good appetite. The President of the Republic, and General Foch and Monsieur Clemenceau and Monsieur Loucheur and their aides and secretaries walked around the corner to a highly recommended little country restaurant, L’Hôtel des Quatre Frères Aymon, where a hangup luncheon had been ordered for them.

As they sat down to table Clemenceau and Foch, who never agreed for more than a few minutes at a time, couldn’t help a slight falling out. “Well,” growled the Tiger glaring at Foch as he tucked his napkin under his chin, “you’ve got the position you wanted so much.”

Foch snapped back, “You give me a lost battle and ask me to win it … I consent and you think you are making me a present. I am disregarding my own interest when I accept.”

The others intervened. Like good Frenchmen they turned their attention to the food and the wine. According to Mordacq they were in as much of a glow as if they had won a victory over the Germans. He remembered the luncheon as being distinctly gay.

Newton D. Baker, mouselike as usual under a derby hat that looked too large for him, was in Europe during these days of tension. He had come, he explained modestly to Pershing and Bliss, to get the feel of the war. He was getting it. Long faces in London. Long faces in Paris. Refugees in the railroad stations. Airraid sirens wailing every moonlight night. The crunch of bombs in the distance. In Paris, during the Good Friday service, a shell from Big Bertha exploded in the church of St. Gervais. The Gothic vault fell. A hundred and fifty people, mostly women and children, were killed or badly hurt.

Wherever the Secretary of War went he was besieged with requests for American troops. The Italians wanted them. The French wanted them. The British wanted them so badly they were at last willing to forego a certain amount of lucrative commercial trade and to allot more shipping to overseas transport; but only for infantry and machinegunners, they insisted. None of the Allies wanted an independent American army; what they wanted was American cannonfodder.

Baker’s report to Pershing was that the President was wavering on the question. Wilson had become convinced that everything must be sacrificed for unity of command. His cables strongly backed the appointment of Foch. Well and good, said Pershing, he was willing to serve under Foch, but they must never give up the plan for a separate American army.

Out of a total strength of just under three hundred and twenty thousand men under his command in the A.E.F. Pershing had already offered his 1st Division to Pétain. Now the 2nd, 26th and 42nd divisions were ready for service. Another soon would be.

After a long discussion at his Paris office with General Bliss and Secretary Baker on the bearing of the decision at Doullens, which they all applauded, on American plans, Pershing decided that the moment had come formally to put his troops at Foch’s disposition. After lunch he set out with General Bliss to find Foch, who was reputed to be setting headquarters up in a little hillside town between Compiègne and Beauvais, called Clermont de l’Oise.

It was encouraging to the Americans to find the roads west of Paris encumbered by motor trucks loaded with supplies and troops heading towards the front. This confirmed the report that Foch was already filling the gap east of Amiens with French divisions. When they reached Clermont they drove around the town for a while before they could find anybody who would admit any knowledge of General Foch’s whereabouts. At last Pershing’s interpreter, Captain de Marenches, uncovered a friend at French Third Army Headquarters who detailed a poilu to guide them. He directed Pershing’s chauffeur out through the truckgardens on the edges of town and down an avenue of tall poplars to a small picturesque farmhouse.

While they waited in the walled garden to be admitted, they admired the flowering shrubs. The place had a delicious air of quiet and seclusion. There was some pale spring sunshine. Leaving Bliss to admire a cherry-tree in bloom in the middle of the lawn Pershing was ushered into the house. He had announced he wanted a private interview.

Pershing found Clemenceau, Loucheur and Generals Pétain and Foch deep in the study of a map laid out on the diningroom table. The French were counterattacking near Montdidier. Since the house was small, when Pershing repeated that he wanted to speak with Foch alone, the others went outside to admire the cherrytree.

“I have come to offer our American troops for the present battle,” Pershing said. “… Artillery, infantry, aviation. Everything we have is yours. Dispose of it as you will … I have come especially to tell you that the American people will be proud to take part in the greatest battle in history.”

Feeling that the occasion merited the effort, General Pershing addressed General Foch in French.

No man to underplay a dramatic moment, Foch seized Pershing’s arm and rushed him out of the house to where the others were standing by the cherrytree. “Repeat what you said.” Foch was radiant.

General Pershing repeated his carefully rehearsed speech with even greater emphasis. His aide, General Boyd, told him afterwards that his French gushed out with unaccustomed fluency under the pressure of the great moment.

“We are here to be killed,” blurted out General Bliss in English. “How do you want to use us?”

Pétain remarked dryly that he had already decided that with General Pershing. A spot had been picked where the American troops should go into the lines. Later Foch took credit for this decision. “I could only reply to their perfect comradeship,” he wrote, “by at once placing the First American Division facing Montdidier in the very center of the German attack.”

Pershing’s chivalrous gesture was made much of in the French press. He was invited to accompany Bliss to the next meeting of the Supreme War Council, hurriedly called for April 3 at the town hall at Beauvais. The British were late again, so the American generals and their aides had leisure to admire the huge old cathedral left unfinished so many centuries ago. When they entered the town hall they found a certain assurance among the delegates. The German drive was petering out. Amiens was no longer in danger. The boche had outrun his supply. Foch’s selfconfidence was catching. In the conference room Lloyd George, with his mane of white hair and his queasy smile, was very much in evidence.

As soon as Clemenceau called the meeting to order Foch rose to explain that now that the front was stabilized his instructions to coordinate the movements of the armies had been complied with. He wanted more specific powers. Lloyd George pointed out that after three years of war nothing had been accomplished … What had just happened, he added nervously, had stirred the British people very much and it mustn’t be allowed to happen again or the people would start asking questions and somebody would be called to account. He threw the ball to the Americans.

General Bliss read out the Doullens resolution and said that Foch should be given broader powers. Pershing came out flatfootedly for a supreme commander and declared that commander should be Foch.

Lloyd George strode across the room to where Pershing was sitting and grabbed him by the hand. “I agree fully with General Pershing.”

When Haig’s turn came to speak he said that there had been unity of command right along. He saw no need for anything more.

It was decided to draft a resolution. Pershing pointed out when the draft was submitted to him that there was no mention of an American army.

Pétain said there wasn’t such a thing. The American units were either in training or amalgamated with the British or the French.

Pershing stood his ground. He was not an eloquent man. He tended to start with “er er er” when he spoke. He managed to get across his message that if there wasn’t an American army yet there damn soon would be. The resolution he subsequently approved granted Foch complete strategic direction of the Allied armies, but left tactical direction of the British, French and American forces in the hands of their national commanders. To mollify Haig a clause was added allowing these commanders to appeal to their home governments if in their opinion Foch’s instructions placed their armies in danger.

Foch had to be satisfied with a qualified command, but Pershing had won his point; an American army was included on a par with the French and British.

It was the boche who conferred the supreme command on Foch. Hardly a week had elapsed after the conference at Beauvais, when, just as the various Allied headquarters were getting their breath and settling back into the old routine with the assurance that things were quieting down, on April 9 Ludendorff made his next move. Prince Rupert of Bavaria’s group of armies attacked the British lines again, this time in the valley of the Lys south of Ypres.

This was operation “St. George,” reduced in scope by Ludendorff’s fear of risking too much of his reserve to the point where staff officers referred to it scornfully as operation “Georgette.” The tactics were the same as in the first drive. The German command picked the moment when a Portuguese division that had been suffering miseries from insufficient clothing and poor supplies in the trenches was slated for relief. Seven carefully trained assault divisions converged in a surprise attack while the relief was being carried out. The Portuguese broke and ran. The relieving brigades became entangled in the rout. The thinly held British lines on either side melted away.

The success was greater than Ludendorff had dared hope. The movement he intended as a diversion to draw Allied reserves from his spearhead at Montdidier became a major offensive. On April 11 the British pulled out of Armentières, long famous in drunken singing and latrine talk as a rest center for British Tommies. The situation became so desperate that Haig issued the order: “Every position must be held to the last man. There must be no retirement. With our backs to the Wall, and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight to the end.”

Even so the retreat continued. All the ground so many British and Canadian lives were squandered to regain in front of Ypres was lost. As the spring had been unusually dry the German divisions were able to work their way across the swampy valley of the Lys to the high ground to the westward. For a while it looked as if the British armies would be driven back on Boulogne and Calais.

In spite of daily appeals to Pétain and Foch, French reinforcements were slow in arriving. When they did appear their chief feat of arms was to help the British lose their most important position on Mount Kemmel to the southwest of Ypres. Still the British managed to hold Ypres itself and the essential railroad center of Hazebrouck.

By the end of April the British could count around three hundred thousand casualties, dead, wounded and prisoners, since March 21. The German losses were almost as heavy. Ludendorff had extended his lines in two huge salients, but in each case he had fallen short of his strategic objective, which had been Amiens in the first offensive and Hazebrouck in the second. Mordacq had been assuring Clemenceau that this would happen. “Les boches n’ont pas le cran,” he said. The Germans haven’t the gall.

Foch was now firmly in the saddle. Brought up from boyhood in the theory of toujours l’offensif he was collecting the mass of manoeuvre he’d preached at the Ecole de Guerre and biding his time for a counterstroke. He retained his confident swagger. When British officers begged him to send more troops to their assistance he consistently refused. “C’est la bataille du nord,” he would say with a shrug of his shoulders.

As the German pressure slackened, the French and British began to become insistent again that American units should be incorporated in their own armies as fast as they landed. At the conference of the Supreme War Council at Abbeville they gave Pershing a bad quarter of an hour.

The plausible Lord Reading had been working on President Wilson in Washington and had, so it seemed, brought him around to the belief that the outcome of the war depended on merging the identity of the American troops in the British and French forces. Lloyd George had in his hands a message from the White House acquiescing in the British plan to bring over only American infantry and American machinegunners instead of complete divisions. Lloyd George and Lord Milner, seconded by Clemenceau and Foch, started on Pershing and Bliss with arguments in favor of this plan as soon as they showed their faces in the conference room. Bliss had little stomach for debate, but Pershing held his ground.

He was fond of reminding the French that when they’d sent Rochambeau overseas to serve with the Americans in the Revolutionary War, it had been with the understanding that he would have a separate command, but this time he answered in his halting way, wearing his grimmest poker face, that since it looked as if the American Army was going to have to bear the brunt of the war from now on it was essential for all concerned that the Americans should fight the way they’d fight best, and that was as a separate unit. The debate became so acrimonious that Clemenceau adjourned the conference, saying that Foch and Milner and Pershing had better argue the matter out in private.

As soon as they were alone in a small room Foch turned on Pershing and asked in his rasping voice, “You are willing to risk our being driven back to the Loire?” Pershing answered yes it was a risk that had to be taken. They argued so long that the three prime ministers became impatient and rapped on the door. Milner went to open the door and Pershing heard him whisper to Lloyd George, “You can’t budge him an inch.”

Pershing rose to his feet. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I have thought this program over very carefully and I will not be coerced.”

In the end he agreed to follow the British plan for two months but no longer. He overcame Italian opposition by promising Orlando to send a complete American regiment to Italy. On the eventual autonomy of the A.E.F. he would not yield an inch. “We parted with smiles,” wrote Clemenceau, “that on both sides concealed gnashings of teeth.”

After all this demand for infantry General Pershing was somewhat amazed, upon arriving back at his headquarters at Chaumont, to receive a letter from Marshal Haig asking for ten thousand artillerymen. Pershing answered politely that the British had not yet furnished the howitzers they had promised. If Haig would furnish the guns and the instructors he would man six batteries for him. Haig withdrew his request.

It was agreed that three more American divisions should immediately be added to the three already holding quiet sectors and that the 1st Division should be placed under orders of the VI Corps of the First French Army in front of Montdidier. To carry out this arrangement the 1st was relieved on the St. Mihiel salient by the 26th or Yankee Division under General Edwards. In the confusion that was spreading over the rear of the French armies as a result of the German drives, the conduct of the relief became thoroughly snarled up. As if to prove that it wasn’t only between allies that disagreements flourished, the staffs of the two American divisions fell out among themselves. Valuable time was taken up at Chaumont sorting out charges and countercharges until Pershing called up both divisional commanders and told them sharply to drop it.

The boche added to the confusion by constant shelling and a crippling gas attack. The Germans seemed bound to make the front as hot as they could for their new enemy. The New Englanders of the 26th Division had hardly learned to find their way through the labyrinth of old trenches that led to an advanced post in the ruins of the village of Seicheprey when the German artillery closed down on them with a box barrage which was followed by a raid in overwhelming force.

The garrison of Seicheprey was wiped out. When finally dislodged by a counterattack, in which the adjoining French division had to be called on for help, the boche carried off a hundred and eightyseven prisoners, including five officers. The casualties were heavy all around. The German radio exulted in the defeat of the Yankees and a corresponding gloom filled Allied headquarters.

A year, a month, a week and a day after the declaration of war the Americans scored their first victory.

Between April 7 and April 16 the 1st Division went through an intensive course in training in open warfare in a hilly region sprinkled with old Norman keeps around Gisors to the northwest of Paris. Pershing wanted to shake loose any trench warfare habits the men might have picked up from associating with the French in the eastern sectors. Then in three days the division was marched seventyfive kilometers up into the rear of the Sixth French Army. The night of the twentysecond the advanced brigade relieved the French division which was holding on by its eyelashes in front of the village of Cantigny.

It was a springtime landscape of long gently sloping green hills. The tileroofed houses of Cantigny clustered prettily around its chateau on the slope of a hill that hid the strategically important valley beyond, where a main line of railroad ran through Montdidier in the direction of Paris. Since the French had only fallen back into that region three weeks before they had not had time to construct their usual elaborate system of entrenchments and dugouts. The front was a line of occupied shellholes running through a wheat field. It wasn’t a sector, the defensiveminded French officers told the Americans, but something that might be made into a sector.

Cantigny and the ridge behind it dominated the countryside. Its possession was essential for the counterattack Pétain’s headquarters was planning in the direction of Montdidier. The French had recaptured Cantigny twice and had twice been driven out. The shallow valleys and the plain in front of the village was under continual shelling by the wellplaced German artillery. Ravines and patches of woodland were continually saturated with poison gas. The first weeks were spent by the Americans in counterbattery fire and in digging down into the soft chalk subsoil. The flimsy houses of the region were no protection at all. Lathe and mud-plaster walls went up in dust with every shell’s concussion. Headquarters and posts of command had to be established in the wine cellars and storage caves which luckily abounded under every farmhouse.

The boche had command of the air. His sausage balloons placidly directed the fire of his gunners. Since there was as yet no effective American airforce the division had to depend on French planes for protection and observation. At night the Germans bombed at will. The Americans’ only experience with their British allies was a lone plane which appeared over their lines one day and resolutely strafed the trenches with machineguns. The Americans thought he must be a Heinie using a British plane for deception, but when a French aviator shot the stranger down he turned out to be a Britisher sure enough. He’d lost his way and thought he was machinegunning a boche position singlehanded. A few days later a British liaison officer appeared redfaced and profuse with apologies.

Life was sheer hell in the Cantigny sector. The Germans had plenty of gas and the American artillery had none. All movement had to be at night. Kitchencarts and watercarts drawn by a single mule could only be moved up after dark through the slimy chalk of the access trenches so the food was cold and the water muggy before it reached the men in the advanced positions. Watering horses and mules was a risky business as the boche knew the locations and no matter how often the hour was changed seemed to be always ready with a few wellplaced shells. Stretchercases had to be taken to the rear through long slippery cuts in the chalky hills. Field hospitals and ammunition dumps were often under fire. While their attack on Cantigny was being planned the Americans were suffering sixty casualties a day merely holding their defensive positions.

From buck private to General Bullard there was no difference in opinion: the Germans had to be driven out of Cantigny. While the staff, working in a deep stinking cellar under an old manor house back near the demolished railroad station, planned the attack, the men in the front lines executed small nightly patrols, and what they called silent raids, without artillery buildup, in the nomansland between the two armies. There the Americans rapidly gained the ascendant. Prisoners were brought in. Bits of information were picked up from which the staff could plot out the terrain to be covered in the coming attack.

The 28th Infantry was selected to make the assault. For several days they practiced in a position twenty kilometers to the rear where the topography of Cantigny was duplicated as nearly as possible. Meanwhile the French moved up a hundred and thirtytwo seventyfives, thirtysix one hundred and fiftyfive millimeter howitzers and thirtyfour trench mortars in addition to the regular divisional artillery. A dozen tanks and a contingent of flamethrowers were ready to support the infantry. The division was furnished with an unlimited supply of gas and high explosives. The French were as anxious as the Americans that there should be no slipup in the Cantigny operation.

May 27 in cooperation with the Crown Prince’s offensive away to the east on the Chemin des Dames, the Germans in Cantigny put on a heavy bombardment with gas and explosives. This was followed by a number of raids on the Americans and on the French to the right and to the left of them. In repulsing one of these raids the French made a small advance. They had already captured a wooded hill to the northwest. Though casualties were considerable the arrangements for the American attack were in no way disrupted.

The night that followed was calm and clear. At 4:45 on the morning of the twentyeighth, when the mist was rising out of the valleys, the artillerymen of the supporting batteries verified their adjustments by firing a few rounds at their assigned targets. An hour later every gun behind the 1st Division broke loose. French airplanes took control of the air. Areas where German troops were expected to be massed were heavily gassed. At 6:45 the seventyfives changed their angle of fire to a rolling barrage which moved at the rate of a hundred meters in two minutes. Behind it the infantry advanced supported by machinegun units and mortars. The French Renault tanks operated without a hitch. Flamethrowers followed to clean out deep shelters and trenches. By 7:20, exactly on schedule, the entire objective was gained.

Strong points were established in the cemetery and in a wood on the ridge north of the town and in the shelter of the stone walls of the château. Every German in Cantigny was dead, wounded or captured.

Two hundred and twentyfive prisoners were marched to the rear to be shown to General Pershing and members of the French Army Command who had come up for the show. In the actual attack casualties were light indeed. The success seemed almost too good to be true.

General Bullard remarked in his notes that his Commander in Chief seemed unimpressed by the 1st Division’s fine performance. Pershing was worried for fear they might not hold their gains.

He had hardly left Bullard’s command post when a written message came from him emphasizing his orders that Cantigny must be held at any cost. Some French general must have raised a doubt in his mind. Bullard remembered Pershing’s having asked him whether the French ever patronized him. “Do they assume superior airs with you?”

Bullard answered no sir they did not; he’d been with them too long and knew them too well.

“By God they’ve been trying it with me,” said Pershing vehemently, “and I don’t intend to stand a bit of it.”

“He inspires no enthusiasm, ever,” Bullard noted of his Commander in Chief; “respect, yes.”

The 1st Division gave no Allied officer the opportunity to assume superior airs. Although the counterattacks were heavy; and, after the extra French artillery was withdrawn, the German guns administered bitter punishment, the Americans held on. When they were finally taken out of the sector in early July they had suffered nearly five thousand casualties, killed, wounded, and gassed. Of prisoners they lost very few.

“A year, a month, a week and a day after we came into the war we took enemy ground and held it,” the word spread like a flash through the A.E.F., to Chaumont, and down the line of communication to the ports where files of khakiclad men were shambling off the transports; to Washington, where sallow officeworkers struggled redeyed into the night with the problems of procurement and supply; to the mines and steel-plants and the shipyards. The phrase went from mouth to mouth. “A year, a month, a week and a day.”

Among the hardpressed French reeling back from the fresh German offensive the victory at Cantigny was exaggerated to almost miraculous proportions. The Americans Pétain had promised them the year before were in the war at last. The Americans had counterattacked and won.

Chapter 18 THE KAISER’S LAST VICTORY

THE 1st Division’s feat of arms at Cantigny never got the play it deserved in the American press because it was overshadowed by frightening headlines reporting a new German breakthrough. Operation “Roland.”

Ludendorff’s generals managed to assemble fortytwo divisions and nearly four thousand guns in the neighborhood of Laon without the French command being any the wiser. These were poised against the Chemin des Dames front which was considered so impregnable it was lightly held by four French divisions and three English divisions sent there for a rest after the pounding they had taken in Flanders. Only Pershing’s intelligence, studying such reports as were available of German troop movements, came to the conclusion that the boche was preparing an attack along the Aisne. When word was passed along to the French they paid no attention.

Foch, at his new headquarters in a small brick cháteau named Bombon a good fifty kilometers to the rear of Paris, was busy with his plans for a counteroffensive between Montdidier and Noyon. He announced in his most oracular vein that no such attack was pending.

Von Hindenburg told in his memoirs of having visited Laon at the time of Nivelle’s failure the spring before. It was a sunny morning. He found the views from the highset hill town delightful. Walking out on the terrace of the prefecture he carefully surveyed the landscape to the south. He described the ridge of the Chemin des Dames cutting across the green wellwatered plain like a wall that joined the hill masking Soissons to the southwest to the high land along the valley of the Aisne that sheltered Reims to the eastward. He remembered Napoleon’s battle against the Prussians in that difficult terrain. Only with complete surprise would success be possible.

Ludendorff reassured him: even if the attack were only partly successful it would draw off French support from the British against whom the final knockout was being prepared. The German generals gloated a little over the prospect of mounting Krupp’s new longrange guns, improved versions of the three Berthas that terrorized the Parisians, and bombarding England from the Channel ports.

The German Commander in Chief went on to repeat a humorous tale brought back to him from the front: the croaking of the frogs was so loud on the marshy little stream that for a ways separated the opposing armies that the German engineers were able to set up their portable bridges right under the noses of the French outposts. He remembered with pride how a captured Prussian noncom hoodwinked the French by telling them not to worry about the coming barrage because German morale had been so lowered by their losses in the Flanders offensive that they would refuse to advance.

Whether it was the croaking of the frogs or the fabrications of the Prussian noncom that lulled them, the French commanders took no precautions. It turned out later that the general in charge was in Paris that night visiting his light o’ love. Surprise was complete.

At 1 A.M. the morning of May 27 the Germans began the heaviest bombardment they’d hitherto used in the war on the entire front from Soissons to Reims. Three and a half hours later seventeen divisions, preceded by the first German tanks to appear in force, attacked on a forty kilometer front.

The thinly strung French gave way. The British to the eastward managed to fall back in fair order in the direction of Reims. At noon the Germans were crossing the Aisne on bridges the Allies had neglected to blow up. By nightfall they had ploughed through a second range of defensible hills and were crossing the Vesle west of Fismes. Two days later they took the important supply centers of Soissons and Fère-en-Tardenois. By the end of the month they occupied most of the country between the Ourcq and the Marne.

As on the Somme and the Lys the very magnitude of the German victory threw Ludendorff’s plans out of kilter. The Crown Prince’s armies took sixtyfive thousand prisoners, scores of airplanes nested in their hangars and immense quantities of guns and ammunition. Discipline broke down when the German divisions found themselves unopposed in the rich unspoiled countryside.

The German soldiers were hungry. They were greedy for fats. Four years of wartime stringency had left them starved for every kind of goods. This was the champagne region. There were cellars stocked with wine in every village. While the more levelheaded officers were rounding up needed military equipment, the troops were slaughtering chickens and pigs in the barnyards and scattering to eat and drink and loot in the dwellinghouses. Re-establishing order became a major problem.

At the same time the advanced assault troops were moving so fast they outran their supply. The British, as ever stubborn in defeat, held with their backs to Reims. To the west of the Ourcq fresh French divisions, hastily entrenched in the wooded region of Villers-Cotterets, blocked advance down the Soissons-Paris railroad. The Germans found themselves squeezed into the wedgeshaped pocket between the Ourcq and the Marne. It was a rough farming region of low irregular hills, illprovided with highways and served only by a branch line of railroad. As they advanced towards Château-Thierry on the main road to Paris along the Marne the Crown Prince’s armies found themselves stalled and squeezed between the two rivers.

In the rear of the defeated armies there was panic. More than a million people left Paris that spring. Big Bertha’s bombardment redoubled. On the Bourse and in the Chamber of Deputies the word was Bordeaux. At Versailles the Supreme War Council went from one session of confused wrangling to another. It was as much as the grayfaced old Tiger could do, moving ceaselessly between the front and the rear, his mustache bristling and an old slouch hat pulled down on his head, to bully and cajole the politicians into staying put. While privately he speeded arrangements for removing the government departments, in public he repeated endless variations of Foch’s declaration: they would fight in front of Paris and in Paris and behind Paris. They would fight on the Seine and they would fight on the Loire. For the present the battle was on the Marne.

On May 30, the day the American 2nd and 3rd Divisions received their orders to move up to the Marne, Pershing had eleven combat divisions under his command in the A.E.F. Three divisions, recently landed, were receiving hasty instruction between the British lines and the Channel coast. Another three were on inactive fronts in Lorraine and the Vosges mountains and the rest were billeted around in training areas. Elements of seven more were beginning to disembark in French and British ports.

The 2nd Division, going through final manoeuvres near Gisors, was being readied to relieve the 1st at Cantigny. The 3rd, made up mostly of regular army men, was waiting near Chaumont to move up to Lorraine when the orders came. Since this division had never been under fire, it was decided to parcel its units out among the French forces being marshalled to dispute a German crossing of the Marne. The 7th Machinegun Battalion, which was motorized, set out ahead and reached Château-Thierry late in the afternoon of May 31.

Château-Thierry, where la Fontaine was born, was a tranquil little town of seventeenthcentury French houses nestling among walled gardens between the slick green river and the mossy walls of Charles Martel’s castle now landscaped as a park on the hill.

Caked with dust after twentyfour hours of travel in open trucks, the American machinegunners arrived on the stone bridge across the Marne in time to be met with a wave of his kepi by the general commanding a French colonial division which was advancing in the wrong direction. The French were being dislodged by German gunfire. The arriving Americans were hailed with enthusiastic shouts, but there was little time for cheering. Already the roofs and chimneypots of the town were being knocked down about their heads. In the confused fighting while the Germans were held off long enough for the bridge to be blown up the machinegunners gave a good account of themselves.

All along the placid Marne American doughboys, as fast as they piled out of their trucks, were jogtrotting into position to oppose German crossings. The sector in front of Château-Thierry became known as the “Pas Fini” sector, because the poilus there kept trying to tell the Americans as they arrived: “Guerre finie.” The Americans, most of whom had never seen combat outside of the motion picture screen, roared them down. “Pas finie. We’ve just begun our guerre.”

While contingents of the 3rd were taking up positions on the south bank of the Marne to the east of the German point of deepest penetration, the 2nd Division, under the command of General Omar Bundy, leaving the tired 1st to hold on as best it could at Cantigny, was hurried by truck and train towards Meaux.

Meaux, famous as a market for Brie cheeses, was a farming center frequented by Sunday excursionists from Paris, who liked to row on the quiet Marne and to picnic and eat fried gudgeons on its wooded banks. At Meaux the Americans had their first experience with the backwash of defeat. The place was in confusion. Shopkeepers were putting up their shutters. The narrow streets were locked tight in a tangle of military vehicles headed to the rear and contesting the way with farmers’ carts and wagons loaded with household goods. Many houses had been wrecked by an airraid the night before.

Decoration Day was sweltering hot. James S. Harbord, who had managed to get himself replaced as Chief of Staff and was now acting Brigadier General in command of the marine brigade of the 2nd Division, after fighting his way from Paris through encumbered roads in his staffcar, reached Meaux about noon. While he waited for the arrival of the officer detailed to let him know his brigade’s destination, he went into a hotel for lunch.

The tables were crowded with hungry French officers rapping on their plates for attention. The food was giving out. The waiters were rattled. Nobody was getting served. Harbord fell to talking to a grayhaired American lady wearing the armband of the Y.M.C.A., who turned out to be from Ohio and William Howard Taft’s sisterinlaw. As soon as she’d eaten she started pinch-hitting as a waitress. Before the general’s meal was over she had coolly taken over management of the kitchen and diningroom. Everybody got fed. When the last plate was served the proprietors closed the hotel up and the whole staff departed.

By this time Harbord had his orders (of which details kept being changed in the course of the afternoon) to proceed some thirty or forty kilometers to the north into a region to the west of Château-Thierry where French detachments, that had been fighting a losing battle for six days without relief, were hard pressed by the Germans. Eventually during the night the divisional command was set up at Montreuil-aux-Lions on the main highway from Paris to Metz. The orders were to deploy one brigade to the north and another to the south of this arterial road. At French corps headquarters there was considerable doubt as to whether the raw American troops could hold. The French general was assured that these were American regulars and that in a hundred and fifty years they had never been beaten.

As they scoured the countryside for locations for bivouacs and billets the marines felt the full impact of the retreat. Every southbound road was crowded with a tangled mass of carts, trucks, barrows, artillery caissons, people on bicycles, flocks and herds, old and young fleeing as they could. The soldiers mingled with the civilians. Under roadside trees lay the untended wounded and the sick and helpless who could drag themselves no further. Every little gully was full of abandoned equipment, wrecked trucks, machineguns, rifles, coats, blankets, boots.

As the soldiers fled they plundered the villages, drank up the wines and liquors in the taverns, ate everything that could be eaten. They threw away ammunition belts and entrenching tools to load their knapsacks and musettebags with loot. Farmhouses were gutted, milk and wine spilled on the floor, drawers and cupboards ransacked for valuables, pictures torn off the walls, mirrors and windows smashed with riflebutts. What had been an army was a whimpering, sweating, drunken rabble spreading more terror than the advancing Germans, whose presence was made known by increasing shellfire at every crossroad, and by reconnaissance planes marked with the black German cross that skimmed unopposed overhead.

The weather continued fine. All night and during the morning of June 1 marine and infantry units of the 2nd Division kept arriving in the vicinity of Montreuil-aux-Lions. As fast as they arrived they were moved into positions facing the rolling wheatfields and the wooded knolls that formed the watershed of a small tributary of the Ourcq known as Clignon brook.

The first battalions were spread thin. One marine unit occupied so much of the line that their foxholes on the open hillside back of Les Mares farm had to be seven feet apart. The machinegun companies hadn’t arrived. They had only their rifles, and a couple of batteries of French seventyfives ensconced behind them. “Are you holding the line in depth?” asked a liaison officer from G.H.Q. “No, in width,” the marine C.O. snapped back.

There the marines saw their first krauts, carefully spaced files of gray figures in coalscuttle helmets wading towards them through the wheat. A couple of heavy machineguns arrived in the nick of time. The marines were under shellfire. The village behind them was burning. They didn’t start shooting till the krauts had approached to a hundred yards. Their shooting was good. The files hesitated. The dead and wounded dropped out of sight into the wheat. The first German line melted. Now the second line was taking punishment. Suddenly they broke and ran. The wheatfield was empty. Fingers scorched and blackened from the heat of their rifles, the marines stayed in their foxholes.

During the night of June 3 the rolling kitchens caught up. The men who had been living on bacon and hardtack and on what fowls and potatoes they could pilfer from abandoned farms, were served the first proper rations many of them had eaten since Chaumont.

There followed a few days breathing spell. It was a period of suspense. From dawn to dark and dark to dawn they lay in their positions waiting for the onrushing German army. Stragglers and refugees had drained away down the roads. A weird quiet gripped the countryside.

The French were still being pushed out of a string of small villages beyond the ridges that faced the 2nd Division. Occasional detachments of chasseurs in their black berets came through in fair order. Falling back was all they could think of. One French officer went so far as to order a marine battalion he came across to join in the retreat. Their captain made the retort that soon became legendary: “Retreat hell, we just got here.”

By June 5 General Degoutte, who commanded the French corps to which the 2nd Division was attached, felt he had the situation well enough in hand to order some small advances to improve his defensive positions. He had enough artillery available to give support for a limited attack.

Part of the American lines was uncomfortably overlooked by a dense growth of hardwoods on the crest of the long smooth rise the boche occupied as soon as they ran the French out of the villages along Clignon brook in the valley beyond. This was Belleau Wood. General Bundy was ordered to take possession of it.

American staffwork was still rudimentary. Requests for topographical maps of the region met with shrugs at French headquarters. Maps could only be procured through certain army departments which were not in evidence on the battlefield. Billy Mitchell’s airforce was promising observation planes but none had appeared. The Americans were utterly ignorant of the lay of the land. Maybe the way to find out what was in the wood was to go up there and look. The job fell to Harbord’s marine brigade.

The morning of June 6 the Americans and the French on their flanks began a general advance to seize the higher ground. Most of the operation was successful. To the east of the Metz-Paris road elements of the 3rd Division helped capture at least part of the bare hill, marked 204 on the military maps, which dominated Château-Thierry and the road along the valley of the Marne.

At the same time the marines attacked the innocentlooking wood in front of them. Behind a brisk artillery barrage they deployed as they had been taught in manoeuvres, in four skirmish lines. When they reached the edges of the wood, fire from machineguns invisible amid the dense foliage cut them down like a scythe. The survivors kept on going and vanished among the trees.

The attack on either side of Belleau Wood moved with such dash that at the western end of the line some companies loped past the road where they were supposed to dig in and charged into the outskirts of Torcy in the valley beyond. There the krauts picked them off at their leisure. To the east the marines poured over the hill without too much loss and occupied the village of Bouresches. For hours there was no news from the battalion in the center which had disappeared into the wood.

The first reports to brigade headquarters were encouraging indeed. Harbord was in high spirits. “He is happy as a clam,” a liaison officer wrote back to Chaumont, “even though he has about ten batteries so close to his p.c. that it sounds as if the guns were all in his bedroom.”

During the afternoon Harbord’s command posts began to piece together a picture of what was happening in Belleau Wood. The great trees that looked so harmless through the glasses extended much further than anybody had imagined. Under their shade was a nightmare of sudden ravines and boulders and mossy outcroppings masked in dense undergrowth. The enemy had the broken ground organized into a network of machinegun nests placed so that as soon as one machinegunner was overpowered others to the flank and rear could make the position untenable. Their mortars and minenwerfers were craftily hidden in hollows and behind jutting rocks. The artillery barrage had done them no harm.

The marines were suffering punishment. Their commander Colonel Albertus Catlin was severely wounded early in the day. Many companies lost officers and noncoms. One had only ten men left. The chain of command broke down. Isolated companies and isolated individuals roamed on as best they could without guide or chart among the trees and boulders, firing at an enemy they never could see. Men lost their sense of direction. Occasionally they strayed into their own machinegun fire. The nearer German machineguns were ringed with circles of dead marines. The lucky ones found spots of soft loam where they could dig themselves in among the rocks and the brambles. Wounded and bleeding men struggled ahead. If they were licked they did not know it.

Come nightfall the walking wounded started to trickle back, grimy ash-faced men with bandaged heads, men with arms in slings improvised out of web belts, men hobbling on rifles for crutches. Colonel Catlin was brought out on a stretcher. Lieutenant Colonel Lee took his place. Morale remained high. The machinegunning was tremendous, reported the marines, but if you got within bayonet range of a kraut the kraut would surrender. A little more time and they’d clean out that wood.

Reinforcements were sent into Bouresches under cover of darkness. A party of volunteers ran in a truckload of ammunition and rations through heavy German fire.

Next day the marines were encouraged by the sight of a real American airplane. From then on American pursuit and observation planes that had been training in French and British machines back of Toul became more common overhead. They continued to be outnumbered and outclassed by the Germans who had faster planes and more experienced pilots.

On June 8 the marines made another attempt to storm Belleau Wood. German machineguns too well placed. Casualties; but no results except for two minenwerfers and some machineguns captured. Harbord had to pull his marines back into a ravine on the edge of the wood so that the artillery could give the place a thorough shellacking.

June 10 after a stepped up barrage, the marines attacked again and reported optimistically as they had so often before that they held the entire wood. Still they had stopped short of the main German defense line in the northeast corner.

The marines were game. Next day another attack drove clean through to the north side but after the smoke cleared it was discovered the Germans hadn’t budged. Still no accurate maps.

The men were wearing out. General Bundy telegraphed Pershing’s headquarters asking for relief: “The Second Division has been marching, entrenching and fighting since May 30. During that time few of the men have had a night’s rest … For the past five days it has been engaged in close combat, offensive and defensive. The division holds a front of ten kilometers. There are no troops to relieve them.”

After a number of such messages, and one from Harbord pointing out that many of his men had not even taken their shoes off in two weeks, an infantry regiment from the 3rd Division was sent in to relieve the contingents that had suffered most casualties.

The usual confusion ensued. The officers were so green that they didn’t know they had to keep their men out of sight of the sausage balloons that were directing the German artillery fire. The boche took the occasion to mount a brisk raid on Bouresches. A box barrage cut off the garrison for a while, and an officer fresh from the rear sent back word that Bouresches was overwhelmed. A little later a runner appeared with the message “Nothing but marines in Bouresches” and asking for hot coffee and drinking water.

By this time a little more than half of Belleau Wood was in American hands. Prisoners were accumulating, but still no one had an accurate idea of its topography. The marines sent in skirmish line after skirmish line of infantrymen to grope their way through ravines and underbrush into savage machinegun fire. By June 13 they were sure the wood was theirs.

That very day the boche, who had used little gas thus far, made a sudden and saturating bombardment with mustard gas. Eight hundred American casualties. Lines of blinded men came stumbling back to the dressing stations with their hands on eachother’s shoulders, led by a wounded man who still had his sight. Though gasmasks gave good protection against the effect on the lungs, wherever there was moisture on the skin either from sweaty clothing or dew on the grass, the gas left painful burns. The mustard gas made Belleau Wood untenable. Next day Harbord had to pull his marines out to positions on the fringes of the thickets they had lost so many lives to conquer.

It wasn’t until an Alsatian deserter was brought into headquarters during the night of June 21 and pointed out the German defenses on the map that Harbord’s staff got a clear idea of their location. The garrison, they learned, was under the command of a Major Bischoff who had a reputation for the skill in bushfighting he had gained in colonial wars. He had suffered heavy losses from the fury of the marines’ assault but his positions were impregnable to infantry.

Clearly this had been all along a job for the artillery. On June 25 the northern fringe of Belleau Wood was shelled for fourteen hours. In the late afternoon the marines advanced again behind a rolling barrage. “Come on you sonsofbitches do you expect to live forever?” the sergeants yelled. This time the losses weren’t too heavy.

They found the great trees blasted to splinters, the German defenders stunned and helpless. By 9:30 that night Belleau Wood really was in American hands. Two hundred and fifty German prisoners and many machineguns. The Germans fell back on a defensive line along Clignon brook, and gave little more trouble in that sector.

The commanding officers of the 2nd Division had learned a great deal about warfare, at a cost as high, in proportion to the number engaged, as at Gettysburg or Chickamauga. During the month of June they lost roughly a third of their effectives in dead, wounded, and gassed.

The French lavished citations on the survivors. Since the American censorship deleted the identifying numbers of the infantry regiments, the American press gave the impression that a brigade of marines had stopped the German drive on Paris singlehanded. Actually two divisions had distinguished themselves. The French added to the misapprehension by courteously renaming le bois de Belleau, le bois de la Brigade de Marine.

Even the Germans were impressed. Ludendorff remarked that the Americans attacked bravely, “but they were unskillfully led, attacked in dense masses and failed.” Hindenburg wrote with grudging admiration of the quality of the American troops which he described as being “clumsily but firmly led.” A staff report described the 2nd Division as a very good one which might possibly be rated as a storm troop. “The moral effect of our gunfire cannot seriously impede the advance of the American infantry.”

Pershing smiled his thinlipped smile. “Our first three divisions to participate in active operations had all distinguished themselves,” he wrote. “The First at Cantigny, the Second at Belleau Wood, the Third at Château-Thierry.” He started pressing Foch and Pétain for the formation of an American corps under which the divisions that had proved their mettle might be grouped in the neighborhood of Château-Thierry in preparation for the counterattack south of Soissons, which he was already talking up with Pétain’s staff.

The warmhearted Harbord, closer than Pershing to the blood and guts of the fighting front, let himself go in notes he jotted down in the ramshackle fieldstone and mortar farmbuilding bedded between batteries of one hundred and fiftyfive millimeter-howitzers, where he made his brigade headquarters: “What shall I say of the gallantry with which these marines have fought? I cannot write of their splendid gallantry without tears coming to my eyes. There has never been anything better in the world … Literally scores of these men have refused to leave the field when wounded. Officers have individually captured German machine guns and killed their crews. Privates have led platoons when their officers have fallen … We are some 3400 fine officers and men less than we were a month ago … It is a dear price to pay for a bit of French territory but somewhat compensated for by the fact that the little bit of lovely France was at the very apex of the German push for Paris and that we exacted a toll from four German divisions that outbalanced our own losses … There are hundreds of cases of individual heroism and not one of misbehavior.”

The American counterattacks were not the only factors that threw Ludendorff’s plans into disarray but they surely helped. His new strategy, hastily improvised at a conference with von Hindenburg and the Kaiser in the first heady days of victory in the Chemin des Dames, was to encircle Paris with a pincers movement. He was meeting with increasing resistance from the French along the necks of his salients. The British were showing their usual obstinacy. The Americans cost him time and irreplaceable manpower. The dash and youthful recklessness of the American assaults, combined with news of the hardly believable speedup in the transportation of American troops to Europe, which the U-boats were proving helpless to hinder, had an impact on the German will to fight more far reaching than the results of a few tactical successes. Cantigny and Belleau Wood and the Marne bridges were seen by the German strategists as the first gusts of a coming storm. If the war were to be won it had to be won quickly.

Chapter 19 LUDENDORFF’S BLACK DAY

AMERICANS celebrated July 4, 1918, in various ways.

In Washington President Wilson, accompanied by Mrs. Wilson and the customary covey of relatives, by members of the cabinet and of the diplomatic corps and by a group of leaders of foreignlanguage societies, carefully picked by Creel and Tumulty in view of their usefulness in the forthcoming congressional elections, proceeded to Mount Vernon on the Mayflower.

The afternoon was a furnace. There was no air even on the river. The President showed his popular touch by moving among his sweating guests and urging them to doff their frockcoats and silk hats. Ferried ashore in launches they found a crowd of two thousand people trampling the shrubberies of George Washington’s old plantation. Wilson addressed the throng from a stand set up beside Washington’s tomb.

He spoke poetically of the quiet of the spot “serene and untouched by the hurry of the world.” When he excoriated the central powers his eyes flashed with cold anger behind his noseglasses. There must be no peace of compromise. He proclaimed four more principles to reinforce his Fourteen Points:

“The destruction of every arbitrary power everywhere that can, separately, secretly and of its single choice, disturb the peace of the world.”

The settlement of questions of territory and sovereignty “upon the basis of the free acceptance of that settlement by the people immediately concerned.”

Government of nations “by the common law of civilized society.”

The establishment of an international organization to preserve the peace.

“… The blinded rulers of Prussia have aroused forces they know little of,” —his voice rang through the little Virginia burying ground in the hollow among the trees by the riverbank—“forces which, once roused, can never be crushed to earth again.”

“Four more nails in the coffin of German militarism,” proclaimed Creel’s propagandists.

The representatives of the European minorities, who had climbed back into their frockcoats to listen to the President’s speech, expressed themselves as delighted: each man heard in those tolling words the call of his national aspirations.

Meanwhile the new shipyards, having applied massproduction methods to the construction of oceangoing freighters, were managing on that glorious Fourth to launch ninetyfive ships. “The great splash.” Their target had been a hundred.

In the Amiens salient four companies of the recently disembarked 33rd Division, made up of Illinois militiamen, some of them wearing Australian uniforms in complete disregard of General Pershing’s orders, joined the Aussies of General Richardson’s Fourth Army in a successful coup de main against Hamel and were saluted by their allies as “fighting fools.”

In Paris marines from the 2nd Division paraded down the Champs Elysées and were almost kissed to death by applauding crowds.

Back of Cantigny the 1st’s artillery saluted the German positions with fortyeight salvos in patriotic bombardment. Later in the day, sheltered from German planes by the spreading oaks of the park that surrounded an ancient château, they put on, for the benefit of a superannuated French general who lived there and of a number of admiring ladies, a remarkably fine horse show.

In Germany and Austria the early days of July were a time of scarcity, of explosions of pacifist sentiment in the Reichstag, and of open defiance of edicts of the Imperial Government. The Brest-Litovsk peace and resulting measures taken to include the old dominions of the Czar in the Mittel-Europa trading complex only resulted in spreading the Bolshevik contagion through the kingdoms, dukedoms and city states of the central empires. The imperial confederation that Bismarck cemented was shaking apart. Even Prussia, the cornerstone, was cracking.

The Kaiser had assured his subjects that Ludendorff’s spring offensives would bring peace with victory, but all the German workingpeople could see was an immense new butcher’s bill, and hunger and stringency. It was the turn of the Germans to get tired of being killed. They were beginning to listen to Bolshevik agitators whispering that peace lay in defeat.

Ludendorff’s first three drives were smashing successes, but they only resulted in consolidating the Allies and in speeding the shipment of American troops. The fourth offensive, launched during the period of the bitter struggle for Belleau Wood, proved a failure.

The aim of this offensive, now known as “Project Gneisenau,” was to capture Compiègne, and to take over the main trunk line of railroad between Paris and Cologne. It was to be the westward prong of the pincers around Paris. The operation was entrusted to General von Hutier himself. The attack was made at dawn on June 9 after the usual gas and artillery saturation on a twenty mile front between Noyon and Montdidier.

This time Foch correctly gauged Ludendorff’s intentions. Seventyfives and howitzers were lined hub to hub behind his defenses. His troops escaped the initial bombardment by falling back from lightly held advance posts to entrenchments in the rear. The most the boche gained, after suffering crushing casualties, was six miles. The American operations on both banks of the Marne were part of a general French counterattack which stalled the enemy in his tracks.

Ludendorff was baffled. Indecision seized the High Command. Their strategists were torn between their original plan to drive the British into the Channel, and the tempting bait of Paris, Europe’s capital city, lying at a mere fifty miles from their firing lines. While they prepared, with ever more meticulous care, for their final drive towards Paris, the Germans allowed the Allies a month’s respite in which to regroup their armies according to Foch’s ideas. Perhaps Ludendorff missed the keen mind of his adviser Max Hoffmann who was bogged down in the contradictions of his victory over the revolutionary Russians in the east. Ludendorff was picking his way cautiously. A new spirit of caution was spreading through his armies. This fifth offensive, which the General Staff named “the drive for peace,” must not be allowed to fail.

Pershing now had twenty combat divisions under his command, Some of them were hampered in their effectiveness because, due to the British obsession that only infantry should be shipped, their artillery and other supporting services had not yet arrived. In spite of obstruction from both the British and French, who were still showing reluctance to give up their scheme to use American recruits as replacements for their own armies, a purely American service of supplies was functioning and beginning to function well. Twenty thousand tons of supplies were being unloaded daily in the American-managed ports. American railroadmen were re-equipping the lines that led into Lorraine. American locomotives were pulling longer freights than had ever been seen on the continent. French railroad yards resounded with the root-to-toot-toot of their whistles. Tours, the hub of the S.O.S. was as much an American city as Chaumont.

On July 10 Pershing had a long conference with Foch at his château at Bombon. He wanted Foch to consent to pulling his American divisions out of the French and British sectors. He wanted them reorganized right away in an American army, at first on the Marne where they were needed in view of the coming German offensive, and later in Lorraine which was to be the point of departure for his drive planned for 1919 into the industrial heart of Germany. Already he was setting up American corps headquarters under which to group them. He urged on Foch his project for an American attack on the St. Mihiel salient.

Foch was keeping his own council. He was determined that this time there should be no leaks. He had no intention of letting either Pershing or Haig in on his real plans. He had grouped his mass of manoeuvre back of Compiègne and Soissons between the two German salients. He gave no inkling of where they would strike. He agreed vaguely with everything the American general said but he kept pushing back the date for independent American operations. He talked about a French drive to free the Marne in September. After that maybe.

The little Frenchman made up for his lack of candor by gusts of cordiality. Pétain would see to it that the American divisions would not lack for artillery, he said in his lordly way. “Today when there are a million Americans in France I am going to be still more American than any of you.” He overwhelmed the tightlipped Pershing with staccato sentences. “America must have her place in the war … The American army must become an accomplished fact.” By the end of July perhaps, or by September or certainly by the following year.

That afternoon General Pershing was up on the Marne at La Ferté-sous-Jouarre where the 2nd Division was recuperating behind the lines from Belleau Wood. The troops were paraded, citations read, decorations awarded. One marine gunner swam across the Marne to receive his.

A couple of days later the Commander in Chief lunched with Harbord at the headquarters of his marine brigade. Harbord boasted that one of his men had captured four German officers and seventyeight privates. Pershing retorted drily that no wonder Harbord was popular with the marines if he told such tall stories about them. At the same time he announced Harbord’s promotion to Major General in command of the 2nd Division.

Behind the lines men kept listening for the roar of artillery that would announce an attack. “If the Germans do not bring off a very heavy offensive in the region between Château-Thierry and Reims within the next few hours our French allies are going to explode, blow up, disintegrate,” wrote Harbord. “It has been announced daily for days, but the Boche must know how we are worrying about it for he has so far failed to produce either the heavy offensive or any visible usual preparations for it.”

The streets of Paris had a feverish gaiety that July. Everybody who planned to leave had already left. The Bertha dropped in a shell every twenty minutes regular as clockwork. Except for a slight quickening of the pulse men and women laughed off the danger. When a shell exploded in the Seine, within minutes people were out in skiffs scooping up the fish killed by the concussion.

Appetites were good. When a shell burst in front of Foyot’s sacred old restaurant across from the Senate Chamber, two American officials for whom an elderly waiter was pouring wine from a bottle of vintage burgundy noticed that his hand never quivered. “This wine is too good to shake up,” he explained.

Nightlife was vivid. Venery reigned. All the women looked pretty in the dark streets. The boulevards were enchanting in the blackout. In shuttered halls entertainers sang to packed benches “Suis dans l’axe du gros canon.”

The celebration of Bastille Day on July 14 was the climax. The morning shone bright and clear. French airplanes filled the sky over the city. The streets were full of flowers. There was a smell of strawberries in the air.

A brilliant military parade was deployed down the Champs Elysées. All Paris dressed in its best to crowd the wide sidewalks.

Preceded by the Garde Republicain in their gleaming helmets, riding their fine horses, detachments from all the Allies, carrying their national colors and led by bands playing their national airs, marched in dress uniforms from the Arc de Triomphe to the Place de la Concorde. There were French Chasseurs Alpins in bérets and black tunics, British Lifeguards, Italian Bersaglieri in roostertail hats, Portuguese, an anti-Bolshevik unit of cossacks in astrakhan, representatives of the Bohemian and Slovak regiments that had thrown off the Austrian yoke, Poles, Romanians, Serbs, Montenegrins, Greeks in their stiff white kilts. The United States was represented by units of the 1st Division.

Towards midnight American M.P.’s with a tense look on their faces darted out from their headquarters on the rue St. Anne. They went through hotels and nightspots rounding up officers and men on leave. All leaves were cancelled. The offensive had begun.

Colonel Billy Mitchell was in Paris that afternoon trying to speed up the shipment of planes promised his brigade which was now attached to Hunter Liggett’s I Corps. He was eating a late snack before hurrying back to his headquarters at Coulommiers about thirty miles to the eastward. In the restaurant he met a Red Cross man who was a friend of his and as they sat eating they speculated on the location of the coming offensive. It had to be against Reims because the Germans would not dare advance further south without having the use of the trunk line of the railroad to Paris.

As they talked they heard a rumbling sound. Guns to the north. Mitchell glanced at his wristwatch. It was 12:10 precisely.

Out on the street they could see a great flicker and glare in the northern sky. Mitchell told the Red Cross man to come along with him if he wanted to see the greatest battle in history.

They jumped into the air service colonel’s fastest staffcar. A little before 3 A.M. they were at Mitchell’s headquarters.

At the airdrome they could look about them. The flash of guns lit up the clouds. The colored signals from bursting rockets and the white glow of starshells hovered over the whole length of the lines. Searchlights dissected the sky. There was a continual buzz and whine of airplanes overhead. The thud of airplane bombs sounded out now and then against the pounding surflike roar of artillery.

Since few Americans as yet had training in night flying, Mitchell telephoned his pursuit and observation groups to be ready to operate with the first light. The news from his French liaison officers was disturbing. The French air division’s orders had gone astray and their planes were not ready for combat. The Germans were attacking along the Marne. The only immediately available aviation on this part of the front consisted of American pursuit and observation groups, and a British brigade.

After a few winks of sleep Mitchell took up one of his pursuit planes and flew to the American lines beyond La Ferté-sous-Jouarre. The morning was overcast, the ceiling low. No German planes bothered him. Except for the artillery fire all along the lines he could see nothing particular going on.

Then he turned east and flew through low scudding clouds with occasional patches of clear sky up the valley of the Marne. Approaching the Jauglonne bend he met a few Fokkers but they paid no attention to him. To see anything he had to fly under the clouds. The river here was hemmed in by high hills. East of Dormans he found himself skimming above violent artillery fire. The Germans were crossing the river on five bridges. They were crossing in perfect order.

He was flying at about five hundred feet. There was no antiaircraft. “Looking down on the men marching so splendidly I thought to myself what a shame to spoil such fine troops.”

He cruised a little further up the river, then swung north towards Reims. A terrific battle was going on in that vicinity. The air hummed with German planes. He spun around and headed back to the bridges. There seemed to be hand to hand fighting on the hill just south of a pontoon bridge swarming with boche.

“The opposing troops were almost together. This was the nearest to a hand-to-hand combat than anything I had seen so far. I thought they were Americans and later found it was our Third Division.”

Mitchell had to duck into the clouds to escape a swarm of boche planes on the way back to his airdrome. He sent out his whole pursuit group to attack the bridges, and relayed the information to the nearest available French on the Champagne front east of Reims. They turned out in force, and, in spite of the distance they had to come, disturbed the perfect order of the Germans. By the end of the day American, French and British planes had dropped a recordbreaking fortyfour tons of explosives on the Marne bridges.

The Americans that Colonel Mitchell saw so heavily engaged were companies of Colonel Ulysses Grant McAlexander’s 38th Infantry, from General Dickman’s 3rd Division. Since the division’s first precipitate appearance at Château-Thierry the combat units had had six weeks, under pretty continuous German shellfire from commanding positions on the northern bank, to dig into entrenchments along the river between Château-Thierry and the Jauglonne bend. They formed part of the French Sixth Army.

This time there was no surprise. In a raid across the river a couple of weeks before, the French had captured a German engineer officer with meticulous plans on him for two of the crossings, and the Americans had made prisoners of a boatload of patrolling krauts during the preceding night. The only unknown factors were the day and the hour of the attack.

McAlexander’s men had been digging riflepits down to the water’s edge, stringing barbed wire and making all the defensive preparations they had been taught by their French instructors. Due to a startling failure in liaison they had not understood the new tactics promulgated by Foch and Pétain by which the Germans were to be made to expend their artillery preparation on lightly held front positions while the real defense line was to be established several thousand yards to the rear. When the German attack came the Americans stayed put.

The boche managed to move up a stunning preponderance of artillery. Starting at midnight they shelled with high explosives. Then they drenched the whole countryside with gas and smoke bombs that smothered most of the French and American batteries. The gas and smoke mingled with the morning mist to form a dense fog so that the Germans could launch their pontoons, which had been hidden by the reeds and bushes, without being detected. They were halfway across the river before the Americans caught sight of them.

“Day was just breaking,” wrote a lieutenant who was in one of the outposts, “and through the mist, fog and smoke one could see the boats and rafts loaded to the gunwales with enemy infantrymen and machinegunners set out for the southern bank … Men of the 38th, who had escaped the hours of shelling, met every attempt with rifle and automatic weapon fire. Scores of these boats were shattered or sunk or else disabled and sent drifting harmlessly down the river. Hundreds of Huns jumped into the water and were drowned. Those who reached our side by swimming were either killed or captured.”

Soldiers wounded in the early morning remained in their riflepits firing as best they could until they were killed. One man was found dead with his rifle and pistol empty, and in front of him a heap of twelve dead Germans.

The advance posts along the riverbank were overwhelmed. The Germans swarmed up the hill and met the main line of American defense behind the embankment of the Paris-Metz railroad, which was the German objective for the first rush.

The Americans held their position while the French on their flanks fell back according to plan on a further line of hills. McAlexander’s outfit found itself enfiladed by the boche on each flank.

The 38th did not budge. Their accurate riflefire caused heavy losses to enemy troops marching forward in formation on either side of them. Their most painful casualties came from a French barrage dropped between the railroad line and the river on the theory that all Allied troops had already fallen back. A lieutenant of the field artillery had several horses killed under him and was himself wounded in the numerous dashes he made back through the zone of fire to try to correct the range of the guns.

Costly as it was in lives, the 3rd Division’s obstinate resistance managed to throw two crack German divisions into confusion. The Americans ended the day with a third of their number killed or wounded but holding their positions along the railroad and with three hundred kraut prisoners on their hands.

At the same time some companies of the 28th Division of the Pennsylvania National Guard were receiving their baptism of fire on the crest of a hill two miles south of the Marne to the eastward. Again there was a misunderstanding of the new French tactics. The four companies stayed in their positions instead of retiring with the French before the German assault and were killed or captured to a man, except for one small group, led by officers who had never seen combat in their lives, who managed to fight their way back to the new French entrenchments.

The German penetration south of the Marne amounted to five miles in some places, but their pontoon bridges took such punishment from Allied aviation that by July 16 their advance had lost momentum and by the seventeenth they were stalled.

This German crossing of the Marne was intended as the western prong of a new pincers operation directed at the railroad center of Reims and the high ground to the south of it. While the western prong was making great sacrifices for an initial success, the eastern prong was faring badly indeed.

The American 42nd, the Rainbow Division made up of a conglomeration of National Guard outfits under General Menoher, was turned over to onearmed Gouraud’s French Fourth Army which was ordered to hold Reims at any cost. Here the liaison was good. Gouraud carefully instructed all the elements under his command as to the tactics about which he was particularly wellinformed.

In the Reims sector there was clear moonlight the night of July 14. Gouraud’s artillery laid down a terrific barrage at ten minutes before the time they knew the German bombardment was scheduled to start. The boche troops were taking punishment long before their zero hour.

The French and Americans knew exactly what to expect. Every detail had been correctly predicted. When the German rolling barrage moved forward and the storm troops jumped off they retired, leaving sacrifice groups to signal the whereabouts of the attackers, to a rear defensive position. When the boche reached the Allied front lines, a curtain of fire descended on them from the Allied artillery. The attacking waves never reached Gouraud’s fortified entrenchments. At ten in the morning the Germans were still trying to consolidate the gains that Gouraud had intentionally yielded to them. Next day a series of counterattacks pushed them back to their starting place. The 42nd Division’s part in this most successful defensive operation in the entire war cost them fortythree officers and sixteen hundred and ten men in total casualties.

Three days after the jumpoff both Foch’s headquarters and the German High Command knew that Ludendorff’s fifth offensive had failed.

The hour had come that Ferdinand Foch had been waiting for. For a month he had worked to concentrate a striking force in the wooded region around Villers-Cotterets. From there he would be in a position, if the boche should continue to attack Reims in preparation for a drive against Paris, to hit them on the exposed flank of their salient between the Marne and the Ourcq. The very success of Ludendorff’s drive south of the Marne, combined with his failure to budge Gouraud’s force defending Reims, to throw him off balance and to make the western flank of his armies south of Soissons more vulnerable. This was the moment for Foch to risk an offensive.

Fending off interference from his British allies and from his own generals kept him even busier than planning the logistics of his troop movements. Versailles was in an uproar.

The success of three German drives threw Lloyd George into a case of jitters. He was desperate to stop the drain on British manpower. He kept advocating drastic changes in military policy. He dreamed of restoring the old stalemate in France and Flanders. He advocated moves against Germany through Austria or the Balkans. He wanted expeditions to Russia to keep the Germans from mobilizing Russian manpower. At the same time he was appalled by the prospect of a new German attack on Haig’s shattered armies.

Every meeting of the Supreme War Council was angrier than the last. Backbiting and recrimination were the order of the day. Pershing was having to use all sorts of subterfuges to get the artillery and service troops he needed to complete his divisions shipped across the Atlantic. At Lloyd George’s insistence cables were sent Woodrow Wilson making the completely impractical demand that a hundred divisions of American infantry be dispatched immediately. At the same time he was importuning Haig to take back his XXII Corps which, according to the Beauvais and Abbeville agreements, the British field marshal was placing at Foch’s disposition.

Haig, who distrusted his own politicians even more than he distrusted the French, loyally stood by his commitments to Foch. When Lloyd George sent an emissary to try to make him change his mind, he wrote out his reply: “I take the risk, and I fully realize that if the dispositions prove to be wrong, the blame will rest on me. On the other hand, if they prove to be right the credit will lie with Foch. With this,” he added bitterly, “the Government should be well satisfied.”

In spite of continual private bickering between the two men, Foch had support from Clemenceau. Even so he was not yet master in his own camp. As late as the morning of July 15, when he was driving north to confer with Haig, he discovered, dropping in unannounced on the headquarters of his Tenth Army at Noailles, that Pétain, as commander of the French armies in the field, had issued orders to discontinue the concentrations of troops around Villers-Cotterets. Pétain, as always defensive-minded to the point of timidity, wanted to reinforce Gouraud at Reims.

“Let Gouraud take care of himself,” said Foch with his arrogant gesture of brushing away the cobwebs of human stupidity. He countermanded Pétain’s orders in the nick of time.

Possibly some rumor of Pétain’s intended dispositions reached German Intelligence and encouraged Ludendorff to weaken his flank south of Soissons and throw everything he had against Reims. The High Command’s strategic thinking seems to have been confused by the fact that the Germans had a double objective: to seize the Reims-Paris trunk line of railroad and at the same time to build up the reserves for Prince Rupert’s knockout blow against the British in the north which was set for two weeks after a German victory on the Marne.

Foch, always punctual, hurried from the Tenth Army to his meeting with Haig at nearby Monchy. That day he let the British commander in on just enough of his plan to keep him welldisposed. It wasn’t until the morning of the seventeenth, when Foch knew that the German drive was stalled before Reims and at least slowed across the Marne, that he sent Haig a message fully disclosing his intentions: early next day General Mangin of the French Tenth Army would attack south of Soissons with twenty divisions.

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.

As the long twilight faded into night the confusion was compounded.

“Now it is night in the great Forest of Retz,” wrote Private McCord in his diary, “and dark as a dungeon, and with the darkness comes rain. As we grope in single file we cling each man to a packstrap of the man in front, as blindly, doggedly on we go, in spite of the mud, the heavy packs and the rain that comes down in torrents … Blindly feeling our way, with the help of God and our own intuition, we the lousy infantry, s.o.l. as always, until they get us to where they need us, managed to miraculously accomplish the impossible by getting from the right to the left side of this dark, seething, confusing stream of traffic to follow other lousy troopers, men like ourselves, the other battalions and companies of our regiment, in single file off through the woods to our left …”

Wherever Harbord went, his men told the same story of a weary night ride or endless hike; no information, no maps, no guides, no orders.

The machineguns of the marine brigade were for some reason dumped off at an old château. “When finally located and told the mission of the division, these men,” wrote Harbord, “carried their guns by hand on the long march across fields and muddy roads, getting into position at the last moment. No one can understand exactly what this means unless he has tried to carry a machinegun twelve miles through a ploughed field …

“Seven hours of darkness before the zero hour,” wrote Harbord. “None of my units except the gunners were in place. It rained hard; the forest was plutonian in its darkness: the road, beyond words to describe: trucks, artillery, infantry columns, cavalry, wagons, caissons, mud, MUD, utter confusion … All realized that the task was almost superhuman, but that the honor not only of the division but of the American name was at stake. At 3 A.M. the 5th Marines and the 9th Infantry were forcing their way through the forest … they would be up with about five minutes to spare … The regiments got to the point designated for the assault at double-time.”

The orders were for the Moroccan division to attack in the center with the American 1st on its left and the 2nd on its right. Many men of the 2nd had marched without sleep for two nights.

“The attack began at the appointed hour of 4:55 A.M.,” Harbord jotted in his notes. “It was out of my hands when they went over the top and there was nothing to do but pray for victory and wait for news.”

July 18: “Nearing dawn and stopped raining,” noted Sergeant Carl McCune of the 5th Marines. His battalion halted on a hill about a half a mile from the front line where the men left their blankets and made up combat packs with reserve rations. Then the hike was resumed, the men very quiet and the artillery silent. A French machinegun outfit, bearded men muddy from the trenches, passed by towards the rear. The sergeant noted that they seemed tired and glad to see the marines. There were shellholes everywhere. Woods thinning out. At a farmhouse the men were issued two bandoliers of ammunition and two grenades each.

“A 75 barked suddenly and then began the most terrible barrage ever experienced up to this time. Every caliber of gun, large and small, firing as rapidly as possible, joined in throwing over a wall of steel and iron that was to drive the invader out of the land. The sky was becoming clearer. As we were late we began to double time into position, panting, stumbling, well-nigh exhausted; the men ran quickly through a counter-barrage thrown over by the Germans. Men fell now and then hit by shrapnel … A French sentinel posted at a wire strung across the road, opened it to let the Marines through; shells dropped closer, several men were hit. Big trees cut by artillery fire lay everywhere about the woods. Exhausted, the men dropped into holes constituting the line and paused for breath. Exhausted as they were, the men arose and went over the top to meet the enemy.”

The Germans were taken by surprise. Some units were out in the fields taking in the wheatharvest the French farmers had abandoned in their flight. Their counterbarrage proved spotty. Outposts made little resistance.

The day turned out bright and clear. The sun was hot and men who had drunk up the water in their canteens during the night suffered agonies of thirst. When a man fell dead his comrades snatched for his canteen. Soon they were picking canteens off the fallen Germans.

“We went through barbed wire entanglements,” continued Sergeant McCone. “In front of the advanced posts a machinegun opened up and the men who received the fire halted and lay on the ground, behind trees if possible; our units to the right and left advanced and forced the gun crew to withdraw. We advanced keenly on the alert from tree to tree. Maxims lay scattered about with long belts of ammunition discarded by the Germans in their flight. The barrage roared steadily … The German artillery now dropped shells between the first and second wave which the men avoided by making an encircling movement around the shelled area and reforming when out of range. To the right of the company were captured a four inch gun, a telephone station and several prisoners. We found hot coffee and German warbread and butter which the men devoured after making the prisoners first sample it.”

Marines of another detachment, after storming a ravine, found themselves the possessors of a barrel of sauerkraut. Parched with thirst and starving for food they broached it with a riflebutt. As they continued up through a wheatfield after the retreating Germans each man had his rifle in one hand and a dripping clutch of sauerkraut in the other.

At the same time infantry outfits were storming the village of Vierzy which commanded a heavily defended tunnel on the Soissons-Villers-Cotterets railroad.

“We emerged from the woods,” wrote Lieutenant Marvin H. Taylor of the 23rd Infantry, “upon a broad stretch of wheatfields as flat as a table, which was bounded by a wide deep valley, in the bottom of which was the main position of the town of Vierzy. The houses were built in a series of terraces along the opposite side and each one offered excellent protection for Boche machine guns which opened up a murderous fire upon us, exposed as we were crossing the open fields. Our advance was a quick rush down the slope into the town, then a short delay caused by lurking snipers who were disposed of, after a bit of house to house fighting, and then the arduous climb up to the opposite slope again. There were fences and walls enclosing the grounds of each house and they were still intact. The destruction of war had apparently skipped that little town for some unaccountable reason, and all of these structures made progress extremely difficult. A formation of any sort was quite impossible, and we struggled forward in groups made up of men of all outfits, infantrymen, marines and Moroccans, in a strange hodgepodge …

“At the summit we came upon a strange scene. There on the very edge of the hill, somewhat concealed by shrubbery, a German machinegunner had been engaged in taking advantage of an unobstructed field of fire as we crossed through the wheat. But now retribution had been meted out and the German gunner was dead at his gun. Seated as in the act of firing, his finger on the trigger, his head bent forward on the breech, a bullet hole in the forehead and gaping bayonet wound in the throat. I never thought I would reach a point where I would glory in death but the sight of that fellow positively caused a thrill of exaltation to sweep over me and tired as I was I laughed aloud … When I laughed every man in the platoon caught the spirit of it and laughed a grim short laugh.”

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.

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.

An hour before dawn, muffled by a thick ground mist made thicker by smoke bombs, the British tanks swarmed across the German lines. When they were well started a barrage dropped in front of them. The Aussies and Canadians followed in their trail. The big guns of the British artillery concentrated on knocking out enemy batteries. Whippets and armored cars broke through and romped about behind the German lines. The surprise was so great that one corps headquarters was caught at breakfast.

“Everywhere else the situation had developed more favorably for us than I, optimist though I am, dared to hope,” Haig noted. “The enemy was completely surprised, two reliefs of Divisions were in progress, very little resistance was offered and our troops got their objectives quickly with little loss.”

“On August 8, 1918 I commanded Whippet tank ‘Musical Box,’ ” reported Lieutenant C. B. Arnold. He told of crossing the railway at Villers-Bretonneux, a town hotly contested ever since the German March attack. His formation proceeded due east. “I found myself to be the leading machine, owing to the others having become ditched. To my immediate front I could see more Mark V tanks being followed very closely by Australian infantry … We came under direct shell fire from a four gun field battery of which I could see the flashes.”

Shells exploded near. Two Mark V tanks a hundred and fifty yards on the right of him were knocked out. He saw clouds of smoke coming from the machines and the crews tumbling out of them. Men were dropping, among the infantry that tagged after. Lieutenant Arnold’s whippet passed behind a screen of trees along the side of a road.

“I ran along this belt until level with the battery when I turned full right and engaged the battery in the rear … The gunners some thirty in number abandoned their guns and tried to get away. Gunner Ribbans and I accounted for the whole lot. I cruised forward making a detour to the left and shot a number of the enemy who appeared to be demoralized and were moving about the country in all directions.”

He advanced through a railroad siding and found Australian infantrymen occupying a sunken road beyond the battery he’d knocked out. After asking their lieutenant if they needed any help he proceeded in an easterly direction along the railway embankment passing two British cavalry patrols which were taking punishment from a group of Germans in a wheatfield. He advanced on the Huns, scattered them and then proceeded along the railroad tracks, noting that a burning train was being towed away by its engine. He was searching for a spot marked on his map as a German cantonment.

“Many enemy were visible packing kits and others retiring. On our opening fire on the nearest many others appeared from huts making for the end of the valley, their object being to get over the embankment and so out of our sight. We accounted for many of these.”

Then he cruised across country firing at retreating files of enemy infantry. As he was well ahead of his supporting troops the Musical Box was taking a lot of machinegun and rifle fire. Nine tins of gasoline for refueling carried on the roof of the tank were riddled. Gasoline dripped down over the cab.

“The fumes and the heat of the engine”—Lieut. Arnold noted that he had been in action for nine hours by this time—“made it necessary to breathe through the mouthpiece of the box respirator.”

He shot up an airfield. He knocked out a truck crossing a bridge. He crossed the railway line and fired into a convoy of horsedrawn wagons with canvas tops. By this time he was under intense machinegun fire.

“The left hand port cover was shot away. Fumes and heat were very bad.” Lieutenant Arnold was shouting to his driver to turn and discontinue the action when there were two heavy concussions and the cab burst into flames.

“Carney and Ribbans got to the door and collapsed. I was almost overcome but managed to get the door open and fell out onto the ground and was able to drag out the other two men. Burning petrol was running on to the ground where we were lying. The fresh air revived us and we all got up and made a short rush to get away from the burning petrol. We were all on fire. In this rush Carney was shot in the stomach and killed. We rolled over and over to try to extinguish the flames. I saw numbers of the enemy approaching from all around. The first arrival came for me with rifle and bayonet. I got hold of this and the point of the bayonet entered my right forearm. The second man struck at my head with the butt end of his rifle, hit my shoulder and neck and knocked me down. When I came to there were dozens all around me, and anyone who could reach me did so and I was well kicked: they were furious.”

After a number of interrogations and a certain amount of face slapping Lieutenant Arnold was taken to a fieldhospital where he was given an antitetanus injection and his burns treated. When he refused to answer questions he was locked in a room with no window and kept there for five days with only a bowl of soup and a small piece of bread a day to eat. He still refused to answer questions and finally found himself at a camp for British officer prisoners at Freiburg. It wasn’t until he was freed after the armistice that he was able to turn in his report.

“August 8 was the black day of the German army in the history of this war,” wrote Ludendorff. German fear of tanks became obsessive. Crack units broke and ran. The Australians and Canadians carried their objectives in jig time. The British corps had trouble but advanced.

The French army to the south, which had few tanks, attacked after the usual artillery bombardment from Montdidier north to the Amiens sector. At first they had heavy going, but, as the confusion caused by the British penetration spread, they began to make headway.

Haig couldn’t help recording the difficulties of the French: “I returned to my train for lunch,” he noted, “and about 4 pm I called on H.Q. First French army at Conty. Debeney was much distressed and almost in tears because three batallions of his Colonial Infantry had bolted before a German machine gun. I told him that the British advance would automatically clear his front.”

By night Rawlinson’s army had advanced seven miles, had captured four hundred guns, among them a longrange weapon of the Bertha type that had been pounding the British rear back of Amiens, and taken thirteen thousand prisoners. The French caught up with them on the second day.

After the first twentyfour hours the tempo slacked. The waterlogged entrenchments of the old Somme battlefields proved a greater obstacle than the enemy. Tanks broke down and ran out of fuel. Tank crews were exhausted.

The British generals still relied on cavalry to exploit a breakthrough. The Germans proved again that with a very few machineguns they could make mincemeat of horses and riders. The whippets which had run far ahead of their units were handicapped by orders to stand by to help the cavalry. The advance petered out. By the third day the Germans were digging in tenaciously on a shortened line, but their hope of taking Amiens was gone.

Although in some ways a minor operation the German High Command heard the voice of doom in their defeat at Amiens. For the first time their armies had broken under assault. Officers had allowed themselves to be swept by panic. Divisional headquarters had allowed their records to be captured.

“We had to resign ourselves now,” wrote Ludendorff, “to the prospect of the continuance of the enemy’s offensive. Their success had been too easily gained. Their wireless was jubilant, and announced — and with truth — that the morale of the German army was no longer what it had been. The enemy had also captured many documents of inestimable value to them.”

Ludendorff immediately called in divisional commanders and field officers to meet with him at his headquarters at Avesnes. “I was told of deeds of glorious valor, but also of behavior which, I openly confess, I should not have thought possible in the German army.”

He laid the blame on pacifist propaganda. Prince Lichnowsky, who had been German ambassador in London in 1914, had allowed his account of British efforts to preserve the peace to be published in a pamphlet. The inference was that the German Imperial Government bore most of the guilt for provoking the war. The authorities were not interfering with its distribution, even to the troops. Wilson’s Fourteen Points were in every hand. Soldiers who had been prisoners of war in Russia were re-enrolled under protest and spread the Bolshevik infection through their new regiments. Joffe, Bolshevik ambassador to Berlin, was making his embassy the center for the spreading of treason and defeatism. “The army,” wrote Ludendorff, “was literally swamped with enemy propaganda.”

“The failure of August 8,” Hindenburg admitted in his memoirs, “was revealed to all eyes as the consequence of open weakness … The enemy had learned a good deal from us since the spring … he had employed against us those tactics with which we had soundly beaten him time after time.”

So seriously did Ludendorff take the defeat before Amiens that he went to Hindenburg and offered to resign as Chief of Staff. Neither Hindenburg nor the Kaiser would accept his resignation.

At an imperial conference at the Hotel Britannique at Spa on August 13 Ludendorff announced brusquely that the war must be ended. The Kaiser instructed his Foreign Secretary to start immediately working for negotiations, if possible through the Queen of the Netherlands. Next day the Emperor Charles of Austria arrived with the news that the Austro-Hungarian Army could not be expected to resist through another winter. Although Hindenburg remained optimistic, Ludendorff repeated the facts as he saw them. The impression he gave to the conference at Spa was, in his own words, that “I no longer believed in a victorious issue of the war.”

Chapter 20 TO SAVE THE RUSSIANS FROM THEMSELVES

IN Washington the summer of 1918 was unusually hot. Woodrow Wilson continued his relentless routine. At eight he presided, with Edith Wilson at the other end of the table, at his customary family breakfast. Visiting relatives from the large Wilson and Bolling connections were expected to appear with fresh morning faces. Through the windows Edith would point out the fourteen sheep and four lambs “doing their bit” cropping the White House lawns. After breakfast the President walked over to his office in the wing, and there dictated to his stenographer until a little before ten, when congressmen, cabinet members, or delegations that for some reason or another could not be shunted off on Tumulty, began to be admitted.

The President would listen to what his visitors had to say with cool affability. His replies were invariably noncommittal. He would ask for the problems to be put in writing so that he could decide on them later in the quiet of his study.

Lunch was at one but the President was often late. After lunch, if there were no cabinet meeting scheduled, would come formal calls from ambassadors and the like. If there were any of the afternoon left and the weather weren’t too hot he would hurry with Grayson or sometimes with Edith to the country club for a little golf, coming back to the White House in time for a bath before dressing for dinner.

When he was dressed the great mass of letters and documents that had to be signed that day were brought to him. Sometimes he had time for a glass of scotch and soda before the formal evening meal. At table guests were discouraged from talking about politics or international affairs.

After dinner came consultations with close advisers such as Baker or Creel or with Colonel House if he were in town. Then the President would retire to his study, often helped by Edith, who liked to arrange his manuscripts for him, and would pore over the papers he’d collected during the day and make his shorthand notes or type out on his own typewriter the private memoranda from which his state papers or public speeches would gradually evolve. It was often long after midnight before he got to bed.

Saturday mornings he would try to play a full eighteen holes of golf, usually with Grayson, or with Edith if she felt up to it. Sundays he attended the Central Presbyterian Church. He always listened to the sermon with attention: he was a connoisseur of sermons as some men are of wines. In the afternoon he would collect the ladies of the family and take them motoring around one of his unchangeable itineraries in the White House car.

Woodrow Wilson’s first wife’s brother Stockton Axson, then serving as Secretary of the American Red Cross, was a frequent visitor that summer. “Stock,” as he called him, was one of the men the President loved best. Their friendship was tinged perhaps by a certain nostalgia for academic days and for his lost life with Ellen whose death he still could not bear to think of.

Dr. Axson remembered a conversation they had one Sunday afternoon in late June of that year as so significant that, when Ray Stannard Baker asked him for anecdotes to include in his Life and Letters some years later, he told about it in detail. Axson came to lunch at the White House after church and found the President in “one of his most loveable talking moods.” When Axson and the Wilsons were alone after the meal, Wilson suddenly asked him whom he would name for the next President.

Present company was excepted, they agreed. Axson suggested McAdoo. The President answered that he loved Mac as much as Stock did, but that the next President must have great powers of reflection as well as being a man of action. “Now nobody can do things better than Mac, but if Mac ever reflects, I never caught him in the act.” He said Newton D. Baker was the best man but he could never be nominated. “The next President will have to be able to think in terms of the whole world,” he went on. “He must be internationally minded … the only really internationally minded people”—Wilson was thinking aloud—“are the labor people. They are in touch with world movements.”

After the war the world would change radically. Governments would have to do things now done by individuals and corporations. Waterpower, coalmines, oilfields would have to be government owned. “If I should say that outside,” he exclaimed, “people would call me a socialist, but I am not a socialist. And it is because I’m not a socialist that I believe these things.”

He added that he believed this was the only way communism could be prevented — Dr. Axson told Ray Baker he wasn’t sure Wilson used the word communism, which wasn’t yet in circulation, perhaps he said bolshevism—“the next President must be a man who is not only able to do things, but after having taken counsel and made a full survey, be able to retire alone, behind his own closed door, and think through the processes, step by step.”

Woodrow Wilson, during those summer months, though brilliantly persuasive in his public appearances, was tortured by perplexities whenever he retired behind his own closed door, to think through the processes, step by step.

At home, now freshly stimulated by Bolshevik propaganda against capitalism and war, there was that “baneful seething” among the workingclass and the foreign born that never ceased to worry him.

The very Sunday Dr. Axson remembered as the date of their cosy after-luncheon talk, Eugene V. Debs, who proclaimed himself a socialist but whose basic notions of the democratic process were not too different from the President’s, was arrested in Cleveland charged with making statements that violated the Espionage Act.

There was the troublesome agitation for the pardon of the syndicalist Tom Mooney convicted of bombing a preparedness parade in San Francisco, that would not down. There was the sedition of the now leaderless I.W.W., that was interfering with the cutting of timber in the forests of Oregon and Washington.

Strikes kept interrupting war production. The immediate problem on the President’s desk was a strike being fomented against the Western Union Telegraph Company that threatened a tieup of communications inconceivable in wartime. The President’s remedy for that was a bill being speeded through Congress to take over the telephone and telegraph services as the railroads had been taken over six months before.

Abroad, it was not the military problems that gave Wilson sleepless nights. Though he enjoyed thinking about the navy, he had little taste for the strategy and tactics of land warfare. He left that to the professionals. He recoiled from the thought of mass bloodshed. What few details of combat reached him came strained through the congenial mind of his Secretary of War. The problem that tortured him was political: whether or not to intervene in the ruined Romanoff empire that lay across the eastern third of the hemisphere, writhing in agony like a snake run over on the road.

Lloyd George’s plausible friend, Lord Reading, the British ambassador, was at Wilson almost daily urging the British point of view, which was that Allied expeditions should be landed at Murmansk on the Arctic coast and at Vladivostok in the Far East to keep the stocks of war materials piled up in these two ports from falling into German hands. The bogy he kept presenting to the President was that the Brest-Litovsk peace, which was resulting in a seemingly friendly exchange of embassies between the Bolsheviks and the Imperial German Government, would produce an alliance from which the Germans could draw men and materials for the war in the West.

Various emissaries from Clemenceau, including the eminent philosopher Henri Bergson, sang to the same tune.

To add to these perplexities was a long dicker with the Japanese, whom the State Department felt were being encouraged by their British friends to invade Siberia on their own. The President’s advisers agreed that the Japanese must be kept from taking advantage of the disintegration of Russia to build up their own empire, but there was difference of opinion as to how that should be done. Newton D. Baker was dead set against intervention of any kind. House pointed out that an invasion by the Japanese alone would throw the Russians into the arms of the Germans. In his opinion, if the Japanese insisted on going in it would be better to have an American force go along with them. In any case intervention should be preceded by largescale economic aid, administered by Herbert Hoover along the lines of Belgian Relief.

From Americans in Russia came conflicting reports. Some saw in the Bolshevik government merely a final phase of the revolutionary upheaval destined to pass away in a few months like the Jacobin terror that ended the French Revolution. Others saw in it the foundation of a new social order.

Woodrow Wilson was a tired man. His desk was stacked with more materials than he could cope with. House was already noting with alarm that he wasn’t getting through as much work as he used to. Dr. Grayson remarked that his memory for names was failing. Ever since the Bolshevik seizure of power had shattered his dream of a democratic Russia he had been allowing the news from that revolutiontorn empire to pile up against some closed door in his mind.

He was becoming more and more reluctant to hear arguments about what action the United States should take in Russia. He balked at listening to the impressions of returned travellers. It was as if he felt that the data he had already absorbed were too difficult to resolve into the only terms his mind knew how to deal with. In early July he described to House, who had taken refuge from the extreme heat at Magnolia on the North Shore, in an intimate and affectionate letter, the desperation of his struggle to find the right words: “I have been sweating blood over the question of what is right and feasible”—“possible” he explained in parenthesis—“to do in Russia. It goes to pieces like quicksilver under my touch …”

When people arrived fresh from the scene he refused to see them. He had listened distractedly to a few reports from Elihu Root’s mission at the end of the preceding summer, but to the chagrin of that eminent and elderly Republican statesman, had paid no attention to his recommendations.

Returning members of the Red Cross Commission that followed fared no better.

Hard on the heels of the Root mission, transported by the same old worn imperial train rolling up the weary versts from Vladivostok, a fresh aggregation of Americans appeared in Petrograd. The engineers of the Railroad Mission, still loafing in uncomfortable hotels without being given any work to do, immediately dubbed the Red Cross people the Haitian army. Red Cross workers sent abroad were given assimilated military rank. There were colonels, majors, lieutenants, but not a single private.

This particular Red Cross mission differed from all others in that it was financed by a single individual. W. B. Thompson, who went along as business manager with the rank of colonel, paid all the bills.

W.B. was a legendary figure among Baruch’s crowd on Wall Street. Born in Virginia City and raised in Butte, Montana, he struck it rich in copper. Coming east a millionaire, he applied an aptitude for poker and faro acquired in the mining camps of his boyhood, to such good account on the stock exchange that he became one of the country’s wealthiest men.

With a war on, W.B., a big stout boisterous fellow in his late forties, was rearing to perform some patriotic service. His old friend Henry P. Davison of the Morgan bank, who headed the Red Cross, suggested that he go relieve the Russians. An expedition of about forty was collected. Though medical supplies and some doctors were taken along, the real purpose, as Edward N. Hurley of the Shipping Board hastened to explain to W.B. in behalf of the Administration, was to convince the Russians they should keep on fighting for the Allied cause. Copies of Woodrow Wilson’s speeches took up more baggage space than gauze bandages.

W.B. arrived in Russia convinced he was the President’s personal representative. In Petrograd he hired the largest suite in the famous Evropskaya Hotel, bought a wolfhound, had himself driven about in a glittering limousine by a French chauffeur, and with his lavish dinners and his skull cap and his big cigars appeared to the astonished inhabitants as almost a cartoon version of the American capitalist.

He developed a passion for icons and other Russian antiques. Taken to see Catharine Breshkovskaya, an old lady revered for her sufferings in the Czar’s prisons as the “little grandmother of the Revolution,” he became convinced that her friends, the Right Social Revolutionaries, were the people to back. When he found he could get no funds from the State Department he promptly drew a check of his own on the Morgan bank for a million dollars to spend in their behalf. This sudden financing of the Social Revolutionaries by the most flamboyant of Wall Street magnates gave the Bolsheviks an added talking point in their attacks on them. If anything more were needed to put the skids under Kerensky, W.B.’s million turned the trick.

After Kerensky’s flight and the collapse of Kornilov’s rebellion, W.B. made a sudden switch and decided that the Bolsheviks were the faction that had the organization and the ruthlessness to come out on top. In this decision he was much influenced by his second in command, Raymond Robins, who, travelling back and forth across the country buying wheat for relief purposes, had discovered in empirical American fashion that the Bolsheviks were the only people he could trust to get anything done. Leaving Robins in charge of Red Cross activities, which by now included a considerable and highly unreliable secret service, W.B. set out to carry the word to Washington.

On the way home he stopped in London to chum with his old school friend Tom Lamont, who as one of their leading sources of funds, was much listened to by British officials. He convinced Lamont that the Bolsheviks would fight the Germans if properly handled. Lamont took him to see various cabinet members. “Don’t let Germany make ’em their Bolsheviks, made ’em our Bolsheviks,” W.B. told them.

Lloyd George was so impressed he immediately instructed a Russian-speaking Scottish diplomat named Bruce Lockhart, who was acting British Consul General in Moscow, to establish contact with Lenin and Trotsky. The bait held out by Lloyd George was that if the Bolsheviks recognized Lockhart as unofficial representative, the British would similarly recognize their agent Litvinov, who was already in London.

Much encouraged, Thompson took the first boat and arrived in Washington in January 1918. Though Lamont went with him, eager to describe Lloyd George’s reactions to W.B.’s tale, neither one of them got in to see the President. Wilson had just delivered himself of the Fourteen Points speech and felt that had settled the Bolsheviks for a while.

With Thompson gone the mantle of unofficial American representative in Russia fell on the shoulders of another mining prospector. Raymond Robins was an intensely emotional man, very much the thespian. He had large smouldering black eyes and straight black hair. People noticed that he looked like an Indian. Born in the Florida back country, he worked in Appalachian coal mines as a boy, went west prospecting, and came back rich from the Alaska gold rush. He was selfeducated, a devout Christian and a practicing evangelist. After studying for the ministry, he picked up some law and dedicated himself to settlementhouse work in Chicago. In 1912 he joined the Bull Moose movement and ran for the Senate on the Progressive-Republican ticket. A Progressive of the “Onward Christian Soldiers” variety he was picked for the Red Cross Mission on Theodore Roosevelt’s recommendation.

Arriving in Petrograd with a vast desire to do good and no knowledge of the language he picked up a young New York Jew for an interpreter. Alexander Gumberg was born in Russia and remained a Russian citizen but he grew up in the speculative intellectual life of the Jewish East Side. As business manager of the Russian language paper Novi Mir he struck up an acquaintance with Trotsky. Like so many others he returned to Russia after the revolution hoping for the promised land. A brother was a member of the Bolshevik party. Though a moderate socialist and of a somewhat sceptical turn of mind Gumberg was trusted by the Bolshevik leaders.

Through his intelligent interpreting Robins was able to make closer contact with Lenin and Trotsky than any other American. Though Robins never pretended to share their dogmatic beliefs or to approve their methods, he respected them for their dedication and their transparent ability. There was a fervor about Robins that impressed even Lenin.

Robins became convinced that he could singlehandedly change the course of history. Through Creel’s representative, Edgar Sisson, and through the Red Cross he sent home reports which he was confident would be understood and appreciated by Woodrow Wilson, whom he greatly admired.

The Bolsheviks were going to win in Russia, and they ought to win because they were the only people capable of getting anything done. During the Brest-Litovsk negotiations he reported that they were stringing the Germans along. When Trotsky refused to sign the German peace terms and came back to Petrograd to broadcast his “Neither war nor peace” statement, Robins’ faith was confirmed. If he could get a promise of immediate assistance from the Allies he believed he could induce the Bolshevik leadership to turn on the Germans.

Their partners in the “dictatorship of the proletariat” the Left Social Revolutionaries, whose support came from the peasantry and especially from the prosperous peasants of the Ukraine, were all for waging guerrilla war. Lenin was saying that peace was a necessity but Trotsky, through Gumberg, was giving Robins intimations that if American recognition arrived soon enough and were followed by Allied aid, he would be for continuing the war. Robins had fallen under Trotsky’s spell. He felt kinship with Trotsky’s dramatic oratory. He claimed that in his experience Trotsky had never failed to keep his word.

Trotsky, Robins told the sympathetic Lockhart, who was working against odds with his own government as Robins was with his, for Bolshevik recognition, “was a four kind son of a bitch, but the greatest Jew since Christ.” The Bolsheviks were using the Germans more than the Germans were using them. By spending their money to back old regime elements against the Bolsheviks the Allies were doing the Germans’ work for them. “If the German General Staff bought Trotsky they bought a lemon.”

During the earlier part of the negotiations at Brest-Litovsk Sisson and Robins worked together in friendly fashion. They lived together and ate their meals together. It was through Gumberg’s influence at Smolny that Robins helped Sisson get distribution of Wilson’s Fourteen Points speech among the German troops.

Furthermore Robins, through connections which Thompson had set up, had contacts with the underworld of penniless and disinherited people who lived by catering to the various intelligence services. One group claimed to have tapped the telegraph wires into Smolny and was making hay selling the private communications of the Bolshevik command to the highest bidder.

Robins was using his connection with some of these connivers to get news of shipments of scarce war materials such as copper and nickel destined for the Germans. Then, through Gumberg, he would tip off the Bolsheviks at Smolny, who were only too glad to have them intercepted for their own purposes.

All through the Brest-Litovsk negotiations Petrograd teemed with undercover activities. Though the dictatorship of the proletariat was theoretically established the Bolsheviks had not had time to crush opposition. Free newspapers still appeared. The city was poorly policed. Selfstyled anarchists made free with the possessions of the rich. Secret agents swarmed. The German foreign office and general staff were spending buckets of money to foment pacifist and defeatist movements. French and British agents played hide and seek with them. Each secret agent was the center of a set of adventurers aiming to live high off inflated rubles while there was still time.

This gentry’s chief stock in trade with the Allied missions was documents purporting to prove that the Bolsheviks were agents of the German secret service. The first batch seems to have been distributed quite widely and gratis as a comeon. This was a set of circulars supposed to have been issued by a branch of the High Command giving instructions to their Russian agents. The dragoman of the American Embassy had a copy. Others were in the hands of the British and one set was published by a Cossack newspaper in anti-Bolshevik territory in the south.

One of the informers Robins was in touch with turned copies of these papers over to him early in February 1918. Though Robins himself took no stock in them, he felt the State Department should be informed of their existence and showed them to Sisson.

Right away Robins and Sisson disagreed as to what should be done. Both men were excited to the breaking point by the conspiratorial atmosphere of those wintry days of tension and suspense. Robins said the papers were worthless, but Sisson, a professional newspaperman and as fervent a Germanhater as could be found on Creel’s staff, decided he’d hit on the most important scoop of the war. Their argument became so personal that at their last breakfast together neither man would speak.

Left on his own Sisson had to turn to the Embassy. As happens so often in American diplomatic history, none of the Wilson administration’s agents were instructed to coordinate their activities with the others, and the last thing any of them thought of was to take the ambassador into their confidence. While Sisson was pondering how best to track down the clues he had in his hand he received a message from the Embassy that Mr. Francis would like to see him.

David R. Francis was a cigarsmoking whiskeydrinking old Kentuckian who had been Secretary of the Interior under Grover Cleveland, had served as Governor of Missouri and promoted the St. Louis World’s Fair. When, as a deserving Democrat with a reputation for business acumen, he was offered the embassy in Petrograd he seems to have felt that with war threatening he could not refuse any service the President asked of him. Not wanting to subject his wife and family to the hazards of wartime Russia he set out accompanied only by a secretary and a faithful colored valet He intrigued the Petrograd diplomatic corps during the last days of the Romanoffs by the simplicity of his establishment, his rough diamond frankness and his penchant for poker.

A further cause for comment was his relationship with a Madame de Cramm, a voluble lady suspected of being a German spy largely on account of her name. She was in and out of the Embassy at all hours, giving the ambassador lessons in French, so it was said; she accompanied him on walks through the broad Petrograd streets on the white nights of summer. The gossip about Madame de Cramm may account for some of the standoffish attitude of Robins and Sisson towards the Embassy staff.

Mr. Francis was no sooner established in the Romanoff capital than the imperial façade crumbled away disclosing a turmoil of ideologies and cutthroat factions which he was no better equipped to understand than any of the other Americans stumbling through the political nightmare. Being a man of some worldly knowledge he might have acquitted himself better if he hadn’t been, intentionally he felt, kept in the dark as to the intentions of the Administration.

About the time of Sisson’s quarrel with Robins the ambassador was approached by a Russian journalist, with a great black beard and a rather unsavory history, who showed him the photostat of a letter of Joffe’s which he claimed proved under the table dealings with the enemy during the Brest-Litovsk talks. Much more interesting material, the journalist implied, could be had for a price. Mr. Francis called up Sisson and asked him to look at the photostat. Sisson brought along the material Robins had turned over to him. The two men put their heads together and decided that genuine or not the stuff should be cabled to Washington. Meanwhile Mr. Francis asked the State Department for twentyfive thousand dollars to spend for undisclosed purposes.

When Lansing showed Wilson the cable the President, who evidently blamed Ambassador Francis for Thompson’s imprudence in so openly backing the wrong horse, noted: “our views and Francis’ have not in the least agreed on the use which should be made of money in Russia.” However he left the decision to Lansing.

The draft was honored and Francis, who probably felt that Creel’s representative knew more about administration policy than he did, gave Sisson his head. Sisson got help from the British secret service and documents poured in. A few samples were cabled to the State Department in the diplomatic code. Secretary Lansing expressed interest, so with redoubled zeal Sisson bought every scrap of paper that was offered him.

Sisson’s eager sleuthing was interrupted on February 18 when the German General Hoffmann announced that his patience was at an end and ordered his troops to advance into Russia. In two weeks his armies occupied the Baltic provinces. A German division marched into Narva, less than a hundred miles from Petrograd.

Panic struck the city. In Smolny, behind the rifles of their praetorian guard of Latvian troops, the Bolshevik leaders began packing their records for the move to Moscow.

Allied agents scattered in all directions. The embassy staffs crowded into special trains. The British managed to get through to Sweden before the civil war between Reds and Whites cut off communication across Finland. Monsieur Noulens the French ambassador was forced to turn back, an accident of war which greatly added to his distaste for the revolutionary Russians. Mr. Francis, insisting that since he was accredited to the Russian people and not to any particular government, his business was to remain on Russian soil as long as he could, retired in good order to Vologda.

Vologda was an ancient lumbering town, reported to have more churches than dwellinghouses, about three hundred miles east of Petrograd at the junction of the Trans-Siberian railroad with the line that led north to Archangel. From Vologda Mr. Francis was in a position to retreat either to Archangel or to Vladivostok, if retreat became necessary. The other embassies joined him there and for a few months Vologda became an Allied oasis from which the western diplomats looked out on the chaos about them. Nothing the Bolsheviks could do, not even the threats and blandishments of Karl Radek, their most disarming jokester and their most persuasive journalist, could lure the embassies to Moscow.

Sisson, a wiry dyspeptic waspish little man, by this time a bundle of nerves and selfrighteousness, entrusted his pack of incriminating documents to a friendly Norwegian diplomatic courier and set off in a crowd of refugees for Finland. Sticking to the Norwegian like a leech, after all sorts of hairbreadth escapes, he managed to make his way through the deadly skirmishing of the Finnish civil war and across the ice to Sweden. By early May, Sisson, who described himself as a nervous wreck, managed to reach Washington and to have his portentous package placed in the President’s hands.

On March 3, 1918, at Lenin’s insistence, the Bolshevik representatives had capitulated at Brest-Litovsk and signed a treaty with Germany by which Russia gave up any claim to Poland, Lithuania, Finland, the Baltic Provinces, the Ukraine and to the regions south of the Caucasus. Prisoners were to be turned loose. Diplomatic missions were to be exchanged and trade re-established. Trotsky’s response was to resign his post as Foreign Minister. Immediately appointed Commissar for War, he started building a Red Army.

Robins, still hopeful of attaining Washington’s recognition for Lenin’s government, travelled back and forth between Moscow and Vologda. He too tried to induce Ambassador Francis to move his embassy to Moscow. Francis wouldn’t budge.

Towards the end of April Count Mirbach-Harff, a German career diplomat, arrived in Moscow with a large delegation, and Adolf Joffe installed an equivalent crew of revolutionary propagandists in the old Imperial Russian Embassy in Berlin. Lansing and his counsellors at the State Department took this exchange to mean the complete penetration by German influence of such parts of Russia as were left under Bolshevik control. Robins was requested to come home immediately.

After final friendly interviews with the leading Bolsheviks, Raymond Robins’ Red Cross car was attached to the Trans-Siberian express and started its long rumbling way to Vladivostok. His party was furnished with rifles and ammunition for their protection and also with a pass signed by Lenin himself. In his pocket Robins carried an appreciative personal letter from Trotsky and a document, drawn up under Lenin’s direction, offering a rich bait of mineral concessions in Siberia to American capitalists consequent to American recognition.

The train stopped for fifty minutes at Vologda. Ambassador Francis went down to the station to pass the time of day. The two men walked up and down the platform chatting. Neither man told the other what was uppermost in his mind.

Ambassador Francis had just sent a cable to Washington announcing that he had at last come to the opinion that Allied intervention was necessary with or without the consent of the Moscow government.

Robins’ thoughts were fervid with the hope that the document entrusted to him by Lenin would be the opening wedge for fresh relations between Washington and Moscow. He was planning a campaign of press releases and speeches. Perhaps Ambassador Robins would soon be succeeding Ambassador Francis.

“A private conversation of about twenty minutes,” so Francis recalled the scene, “and I turned away from him or he turned away from me: I have forgotten which, not in any unfriendly spirit …”

Gumberg, who eventually found a business career in New York more congenial than life under the dictatorship of the proletariat, went along with Robins. He bore a commission from the Moscow government to set up a Russian press bureau in America.

In Vladivostok Robins received a curt message from Washington enjoining him not to talk for publication. In Seattle, at the request so it seems of Lansing himself, Robins and Gumberg were put to the indignity of being searched by the immigration officials. Already anyone who had even talked to a Bolshevik was suspect in America.

W. B. Thompson joined Robins in Chicago and rode with him to Washington to use what influence he could muster, but all he could achieve was a testy interview for Robins with the Secretary of State. The chief preoccupation of the Administration was that Robins should keep his mouth shut. This Robins loyally did. President Wilson’s door remained closed to him.

It wasn’t until the war was over and after Robins had had his say before a congressional committee that he was able to tell a businessman’s luncheon what he’d intended to tell the President in the summer of 1918.

“You believe that private property has a great and useful mission in the world. So do I … That is why I am talking to you today. There is a bomb under this room and under every other room in the world; and it can blow our system — your system and my system — into the eternal past with the Bourbons and the Pharaohs … We are talking about something that can destroy the present social system. Riots and robberies and mobs and massacres cannot destroy the present social system or any social system. They can be stopped by force … The only thing that can destroy a social system is a rival social system — a real rival system — a system thought out and worked out and capable of making an organized orderly social life of its own.”

The only communication that Robins was able to establish with Woodrow Wilson was through a short report setting forth the need for an American economic commission to work with the Bolshevik government in restoring Russian commerce and industry. The President read Robins’ suggestions and noted for Lansing’s benefit that: “they were certainly more sensible than I thought the author of them capable of. I differ from them only in practical details”; and that was the end of it.

If Woodrow Wilson was having trouble finding the right words to deal with the riots and robberies and mobs and massacres daily reported to him from Russia, the German High Command, which had given up words for deeds, was not getting much better results. On the map their successes seemed staggering.

While their representatives were extorting peace terms that seemed to put the Russians at their mercy for ever, their troops were occupying the Aaland Islands to the north and getting ready to give Baron Mannerheim’s White forces the backing which was to prove decisive against the Finnish Bolsheviks. In cooperation with the Turks their military missions were penetrating the Transcaucasian regions with the Baku oilfields as their objective.

At the same time mixed Austrian and German expeditions were pushing east along the railways from the old Galician front to occupy Kiev, the capital of the independent Ukraine with which they had signed a peace early in February.

Further south resistance had ceased in Romania and Moldavia. An armistice was in force and the German generals were drafting peace terms with King Ferdinand’s government which would assure them a ninety year lease on the Romanian oilwells. With the wheat of the Ukraine and the oil of Romania the problem of supplying their armies on the western front seemed solved.

The Bolsheviks had managed during the winter since their seizure of power to achieve a certain amount of order. Up and down the Trans-Siberian, which was the spinal column of what was left of the old empire, the local soviets were controlled by Bolshevik agents. From Murmansk to Baku and from the Volga to Vladivostok, town and provincial governments were in the hands of sympathizers if not of party members. The nobility and the bourgeoisie were disfranchised. Decrees dividing the land among the working peasants, turning factories and industrial enterprises over to workers’ committees, and outlawing the exploitation of one man’s work by another, were being put into effect. The rundown machinery of czarist government fell without much struggle, from the hands of the professional people who had taken it over under Kerensky, into the hands of the Bolsheviks.

Except for a few centers of resistance in the south the dispossessed classes were hiding or in flight. Under the slogans of peace for the soldiers and land for the peasants the Bolshevik triumph seemed complete. Still Lenin hardly dared believe that his revolution was more than a fleeting affirmation of Karl Marx’s immutable principles, doomed like the Paris Commune to extinction, unless help should come from revolutionary movements in Western Europe. Not a moment must be lost in consolidating state power.

At the Seventh Congress of the Bolshevik or Majority wing of the Russian Social Democratic party, the sense of continuity with the French Communards in 1871 was given new emphasis by changing the party’s name. Henceforward it should be known as the Russian Communist Party.

Moscow was proclaimed as the seat of government and a Fourth All-Russian Congress of Soviets, made up of Communist-picked delegates, was hastily convened to ratify the Brest-Litovsk Treaty.

As fast as the brokendown railroads could carry them, German forces spread over southern Russia, opposed only occasionally by fleeting bands led by Social Revolutionaries or army officers from the old regime. On April 5 the Germans took Kharkov and a few days later the Black Sea port of Odessa.

The invasion did not succeed in adding much to the German food supply. Wherever the German economic missions appeared the countryside blew up into civil war in their faces. Other byproducts of the invasion were even more disastrous to the German cause.

The first result of the German takeover of the Ukraine was the appearance of a Czechoslovak army as a belligerent on the side of the Allies.

Among all the national aspirations of the various peoples of central Europe the demands of the Czechs for independence from Hapsburg rule had, since the beginning of the war, been looked on with particular sympathy by the French. The Slovaks, consisting mostly of slavicspeaking peasants in the hilly region that stretched east from Moravia to the Carpathian Mountains, who had long chafed under Hungarian rule, came to associate their demands for freedom with those of the more urban Czechs of Bohemia and Moravia. Under the Romanoffs panslavic circles in Petrograd assiduously cultivated these enthusiasms; backing the westernized Czechs took a little of the reactionary curse off Russian czarism.

The result was the formation of a Czechoslovak corps in the Russian Army. Czechs and Slovaks deserting from the Hapsburg armies were greeted as brothers. In 1916 a Czechoslovak national council was established in Paris with the blessing of the French and Russian governments. The Czechoslovak corps on the eastern front distinguished itself in Brusilov’s last illfated offensive.

While the Russian armies disintegrated, the Czechoslovak corps, armed with material donated by the Russians and captured from the Austrians, remained intact. Discipline was good. Morale was high. All the Czechoslovak soldiers asked was to fight for the independence of their nation.

Professor Tomas Masaryk, one of their national leaders who had lived in the States and lectured at the University of Chicago, where he was the darling of the large Czech population — Chicago being the largest Czech city after Prague — and who had further friendly connections among university people in England, went to Petrograd. There he made himself welcome to the Soviet Government.

At the time of the German advance the Czechoslovakians, now amounting to more than two divisions, were billeted in the region of Kiev. They helped local Bolshevik elements obstruct the Germans until the signature of the peace. Then they fell back in good order towards Kursk and the Don River. Masaryk signed an agreement with the Bolsheviks for their evacuation across the Trans-Siberian to Vladivostok and set off for Washington to try to arrange for their transport across the Pacific and across the United States to the western front. There was tacit agreement with the French and the British that, in return for their help in the war, Czechoslovakia would be recognized in the final settlement.

When Trotsky arrived in Moscow as Commissar for War the Czechs were already moving east. Needing every scrap of armament he could lay his hands on, he began to revise the arrangement which his government had signed with Masaryk. The Czechoslovak Legion must give up their rifles and guns. They must dismiss counterrevolutionaries and officers who had served under the Czar.

Communist agitators were sent down to lure the rank and file into a Congress of Prisoners of War being arranged in Moscow for the indoctrination of Austrian, Hungarian and German soldiers being shipped back to their homelands.

The Czechoslovaks balked. Some detachments allowed themselves to be despoiled of their artillery, but most of them hid their rifles and machineguns. They retained their officers. As Bolshevik demands grew so did the suspicions of the Czechoslovaks.

Meanwhile the French recognized what began to be known in the Allied press as the Czechoslovak Legion as part of the Allied forces and with the consent of their national council appointed the French General Janin to command them. In Paris and London the idea dawned that forty thousand Czechoslovaks might well make the spearhead of a force which, by overthrowing the pro-German Bolsheviks, would reconstitute the eastern front. Maps emphasizing the importance of the Trans-Siberian Railroad began to appear at meetings of the Supreme War Council at Versailles. In Washington ever more urgent arguments in favor of intervention were poured into the ears of President Wilson’s advisers.

Early in April the tense situation at Vladivostok, where the urban soviet was already operating under the guns of British, American and Japanese warships anchored in the harbor, broke out in violence. Some gunmen described as soldiers in uniform, held up a store and killed several Japanese. Claiming that he could get no satisfaction from the local authorities the Japanese admiral landed five hundred marines to protect the lives and property of his nationals. The British followed suit with fifty bluejackets. Under orders from Washington the American commander held off.

Chicherin, the shrewd little aristocratic bookworm who had taken Trotsky’s place as Commissar for Foreign Affairs, published one of his first appeals to the opinion of mankind. An attack from the old enemy strengthened the Bolsheviks with the newspaper reading stratum of Russian society.

In Vladivostok itself the presence of the Japanese was overshadowed by the continual arrival of detachments of armed Czechs. Under a certain amount of suspicion and surveillance from the Communist-controlled committees that managed traffic on the railroad, but without too much friction, the long freights and trooptrains of the Czechoslovak Legion continued their slow uncomfortable progress across Siberia.

The stringing of detachments of foreign troops along the very backbone of their dominion immensely complicated the problems of the Communists. As Lenin’s hopes of playing off the Allies against the Germans long enough to obtain the breathing spell he needed began to fade, a spirit of desperation permeated their leadership. They entrenched themselves behind the enormous walls, under the crushing painted vaults, and amid the tarnished splendors of the Kremlin of the ancient Moscow czars.

In their denunciations of those who disagreed with them, laden as they were with historical references to the French Revolution, terror began to be mentioned more and more as the rightful arm of the proletarian dictatorship. The names of Robespierre, Saint-Just, Fouquier-Tinville began to be pronounced in admiring tones. While Trotsky was training and disciplining his Red Army, Dzerdzinsky developed the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission to Fight Counter-Revolution, Sabotage and Speculation into a powerful secret police.

Felix Dzerdzinsky was a cultivated Pole who had received the best possible education in the German universities. As a Social Democrat he had suffered much in czarist prisons. Stories were told of his strange self-abnegation towards the other prisoners. In a cell he was always the one to clean the latrine or wash the floor. He was a wanfaced man with long white hands. Lockhart described the strange stare of his eyes between their unblinking lids.

Dzerdzinsky threw himself into the work of repression with a total abnegation of all human feelings that culminated in a mystique of massacre for its own sake, a monstrous aberration of the human mind unknown to Europe since the days of the Spanish inquisitors, when Philip II could ask himself on his deathbed if he’d killed enough heretics for the salvation of his soul. Dzerdzinsky made his extraordinary commission so feared that people hardly dared pronounce the initials by which it was known.

Dzerdzinsky’s first public enterprise, after setting up his headquarters in the office of an extinct insurance company at Lubianka, 11, won the immediate approval of the foreign colony in Moscow. The American Red Cross people, and the small group of foreign correspondents and the members of the French military mission and of the British agencies, that were still carrying on partly aboveboard and partly undercover activities, were, like the rest of the city’s population, intimidated by marauding bands of selfstyled anarchists who set themselves up in the mansions of wealthy merchants, drinking up the winecellars, and sallying forth onto the streets to rob and murder at will. One April night the Cheka, with the assistance of Trotsky’s Red Army, carried out a sudden raid on the anarchist dens, shot down those that resisted and carted the rest off to prison.

Jacob Peters, Dzerdzinsky’s Latvian assistant, who had learned English working in a London office, was so proud of the job he took Lockhart and Robins around to see the results of his work next morning. The dead still lay among the silk hangings in pools of blood on the ruined Aubusson carpets of the departed rich. In one diningroom, heaped with spilled food and broken bottles, a young woman lay face downwards. “Peters turned her over. Her hair was dishevelled. She had been shot through the neck, and the blood had congealed in a sinister purple clump. She could not have been more than twenty. Peters shrugged his shoulders. ‘Prostitutka,’ he said. ‘Perhaps it is for the best.’ ”

By the time the German ambassador arrived with his suite at the end of April, law and order was perfect in the mediaeval streets of the ancient capital.

Though Count Mirbach-Harff came surrounded with German experts on Russian affairs, he seems to have been as unprepared as his British and French opponents in the diplomatic bout to deal with the revolutionary scene. He was housed in the insanely ornate mansion of a departed sugar magnate named Berg. One of his first experiences was to view from his automobile in the Red Square the May Day parade held to celebrate the proletarian triumph.

Lockhart watching Mirbach seated among his aides in an open car reported that the supercilious smirk left the German’s face as he watched the ranks and ranks of illclad illfed illorganized working men march by. There was a look of strength about them. “He looked serious,” wrote Lockhart.

With the coming of summer the tensions reached the breaking point. In spite of the protests of their Social Revolutionary partners, the Communists were enforcing Lenin’s policy of sending out “poverty committees,” made up usually of the ne’erdowells of the villages, to requisition the stored grain and other possessions of their more prosperous and hardworking neighbors. Any successful farmer was a kulak.

To the cold social mathematics of Lenin’s mind it was clear that he could never establish communism if he allowed a peasant bourgeoisie to grow up in the country. The kulaks must be eliminated.

But elimination of the best farmers would disrupt the production of food. Opposition grew among the most energetic and intelligent elements of the peasantry. In the mood pervading the villages it took only a small incident, like a match dropped in a ripe wheatfield, to set the whole of Russia blazing with civil war.

On May 14 fighting breaks out at Chelyabinsk, just east of the Urals, between a trainload of Czechoslovaks headed east and a trainload of Hungarian prisoners of war headed west. A man is killed on each side.

Trotsky immediately gives orders to disarm the Czechoslovak Legion. The Legion refuses to be disarmed and continues on its way east, seizing the railroad as it goes. East of Lake Baikal their detachments have a clear track into Vladivostok, but the large forces still on the line to the west are trapped because the Communists keep control of Irkutsk, the railroad center at the southern end of the lake.

As if at a prearranged signal all Siberia shakes off the Moscow yoke. Communists on the governing committees melt away into hiding. Moderate elements, tending to favor the Allies against the Germans, take charge again. In Manchuria, with some support from the Japanese, czarist officers are organizing an army to restore the Romanoffs. In southern Russia wherever the Germans have penetrated reactionary movements come to life. In the Ukraine the parliamentary Rada has been overthrown by an old regime general giving orders as hetman. The Don Cossacks have their own government Czarist groups with German support hold the Crimea and the towns on the Black Sea coast.

The remaining warmwater ports fall to the Allies. Vladivostok has become a Czechoslovak base. At the end of June the threat of invasion from Lapland by Mannerheim’s Germanbacked Finns forces the soviet of the Murmansk region to submit to occupation by the British. When Chicherin remonstrates over the phone the president of the Murmansk soviet calls him a pro-German and says that the comrades in Moscow are in no position to understand the situation in the north.

Insurrections follow the spring thaw. “Green” armies of anarchist peasants, “White” armies dedicated to the old regime, dissident Reds of every socialist creed collect and fight and fade into the forests. Fleeting republics and governments rise and make proclamations and disintegrate into chaos again. Villages bum. Towns are pillaged. Granaries are raided, cattle driven off. Men kill and die fighting for causes they hardly know the names of.

On July 4, 1918, the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets meets in Moscow. The Left Social Revolutionaries, still represented in all the organs of the dictatorship, including the Cheka, have managed to elect a good third of the delegates. At a party caucus they decide that the parting of the ways has come. They will no longer submit to the despoiling of revolutionary peasants by the poverty committees, or to collaboration with the Germans who are shooting peasants in the Ukraine for resisting the requisition of their grain. Furthermore they demand the abolition of the death penalty.

The Congress is called to order in the old Bolshoy Theatre, where Muscovites of all factions still sit enthralled every night by the dancing of the nationalized imperial ballet which remains almost the only link to the culture of the old regime.

Lockhart, who is present in one of the boxes set aside for the Allied missions, describes the paladins of the Executive Committee seated on the stage. Sverdlov, its president, acts as chairman. At the end sits the leader of the Left Social Revolutionaries, Maria Spiridovna. Lockhart describes her as looking, with her pincenez and her dark hair pulled back smoothly on her head, for all the world like the rural schoolteacher in Tchekhov’s Three Sisters.

Maria Spiridovna is revered by all factions of the revolution. As a girl at the time of the outbreak in 1905 she shot an unpopular czarist official, suffered nameless brutalities at the hands of the cossacks and served long years at hard labor in Siberia. She shows her nervousness by ceaselessly toying with her pincenez.

The sessions are stormy to the point of madness. On the second day Maria Spiridovna makes a personal attack on Lenin:

“I accuse you,” she cries, “of betraying the peasants … of making use of them for your own ends, and of not serving their interests.” Her voice rises to a shriek. “When the peasants, the Bolshevik peasants, the Left Social-Revolutionary peasants, the Bolshevik peasants, the non-party peasants are alike humiliated oppressed and crushed — crushed as peasants — in my hand you will find the same pistol, the same bomb which once forced me to defend …”

Her words are drowned in applause and in a roar of opposing shouts and yelps and screams. Trotsky tries to speak and is howled down. Sverdlov helplessly tinkles his bell.

“Then Lenin walks slowly to the front of the stage,” writes Lockhart. “On the way he pats Sverdlov on the shoulder and tells him to put his bell away. Holding the lapels of his coat, he faces the audience — smiling, supremely self-confident. He is met with jeers and catcalls. He laughs good-humoredly. Then he holds up his hand and with a last rumble the tumult dies.”

Lenin contends that the Left Social Revolutionaries are illogical. Renewed war with the Germans will only be to the advantage of the other imperialist faction, the Allies. The Russian proletariat must quietly consolidate its power, must patiently wait for the moment when warweariness shall cause the oppressed peoples of all the countries of Europe to rise in world revolution.

In spite of Lenin’s calming speech the congress breaks out into a wild demonstration against members of the German mission seated in one of the boxes. Sverdlov adjourns the meeting.

The following afternoon, carrying identification cards signed by Dzerdzinsky and furnished them by Social Revolutionary members of the Cheka, two S.R.s call on Ambassador Mirbach on the pretext that the Cheka has discovered a conspiracy to assassinate him. He has papers says the first man. He puts his hand in his briefcase and draws out a pistol and shoots. The first shots go wild, but his companion takes careful aim and shoots Mirbach through the head. Both assassins escape through a window after exploding a couple of handgrenades in the embassy hall.

The assassination of Mirbach is the signal for a general rising of the Left Social Revolutionaries already planned against the Communists. They seize the office of the Cheka and hold Dzerdzinsky hostage. After a few hours Trotsky’s troops and the disciplined chekists restore order. Almost before it begins the revolt is suppressed. The Left Social Revolutionaries are either dead or under lock and key. The survivors are expelled from all the organs of government. Lenin’s Communists rule alone. Whoever is not for them is against them.

The same day a rising was suppressed in Petrograd and a Green army, backed, so the story went, by the French military mission in Moscow, seized Yaroslavl, important strategically as the head of navigation on the upper Volga, and held out there for a month. Meanwhile the Czechoslovak troops blocked on the Trans-Siberian threw in their lot with the anti-communists, and started moving west with the objective of fighting their way north to Archangel and effecting a junction with the British forces in the Murmansk area. As they proceeded towards the Urals, town after town fell to them without resistance. Assorted anticommunists took over the local governments and proceeded to greet them as liberators.

Ekaterinburg was one of the towns in the path of the Czechoslovak Legion. The month before, as revolt spread through Siberia, the pitiful remnants of the Romanoff family had been brought to Ekaterinburg from internment at Tobolsk, and imprisoned in what had been the mansion of a local merchant. The party consisted of the Czar and Czarina and their daughters and thirteenyearold son. With them was the family doctor and three servants. Most of them were ill from poor food and harsh treatment.

In the middle of the night of July 16 they were awakened by a firing squad acting under orders from the Urals Regional Soviet and told to go down in the cellar. The Czar had to carry his son in his arms as the boy was too ill to walk. There they were lined up against a wall. The leader of the squad told them that they were going to die. The Czar did not understand him, and leaning forward to say “What?” was shot in the face with a revolver. Immediately the executioners emptied their revolvers into the huddled figures. Those who were still groaning were finished off with bayonets. The bodies were hastily covered with quicklime and thrown into an abandoned mineshaft.

A few days later the Czechoslovaks captured the city.

Professor Masaryk had arrived in Washington from Petrograd via Vladivostok and Tokyo early that May. His arrival was eagerly looked forward to by Lansing and his counsellors in the State Department. Here at last was a returning Russian traveller in whose views the President expressed lively interest. Everything Woodrow Wilson heard predisposed him towards Masaryk. He was no arrogant millionaire or flybynight placer miner but a college professor with academic standing. The fact that he came from a small and oppressed country with a profound protestant tradition could not help but arouse the President’s sympathy. The Presbyterian in him was never far beneath the surface. Even so Masaryk had to wait in Washington more than a month, after preparatory luncheons with Lansing and House who both reported favorably, before the President could make up his mind to see him.

Their first interview was in late June. Masaryk, one of the most accomplished international lobbyists of the century, saw to it that he and the President should hit it off.

Masaryk succeeded where the British and French embassies and the Supreme War Council failed. He dramatized the plight of the poor Czechs bravely fighting their way to freedom through hordes of Germans and Hungarians armed by the Bolsheviks. Their occupation of Vladivostok, coming almost on the same day as the action of the Murmansk soviet inviting British intervention “materially changed the situation,” as Lansing cynically put it, “by introducing a sentimental element into the question of our duty.”

The first result of Wilson’s interview with Masaryk was that the cable facilities of the State Department were placed at the disposal of the Czechoslovak representative for a message to Chicherin protesting the failure of the Soviet Government to live up to its guarantee of free and unmolested passage to Vladivostok for the Czechoslovak Legion.

A few days later the President was confiding in House, in the same letter in which he spoke of sweating blood over the Russian problem: “I hope I see and can report some progress presently, along the double line of economic assistance and aid to the Czechoslovaks.”

Wilson had already made up his mind. Two days before he wrote House he called in Secretary Baker and Lansing and Josephus Daniels and General Peyton C. March, now Chief of Staff, to his quiet upstairs study in the White House, ostensibly to consult them, but actually to announce his decision after “thinking through the processes, alone, behind his own closed door.”

“It is the clear and fixed judgment of the Government of the United States,” the President read off a small pad, “that military intervention there would add to the present sad confusion in Russia rather than cure it, injure her rather than help her, and that it would be of no advantage in the prosecution of our main design, to win the war against Germany.”

After some cogent arguments against intervening in Russia’s internal struggles, he delivered himself, possibly to the surprise of his hearers, of the proposition that military action was admissible after all: “only to help the Czechoslovaks consolidate their forces and get into successful cooperation with their Slavic kinsmen and to steady any efforts at self-government or self-defence in which the Russians themselves may be willing to accept assistance.”

He itemized the sort of assistance he was thinking of: “Assistance by a commission of merchants, agricultural experts, labor advisers, Red Cross representatives, and agents of the Young Men’s Christian Association.” But military action must come first. “The execution of this plan will follow and not be permitted to embarrass the military assistance rendered in the rear of the westward moving forces of the Czechoslovaks.”

What had started as a plan to help evacuate the Czechoslovaks had turned into a plan to secure their Siberian rear while they advanced into the heart of Russia west of the Urals. A discussion of details followed: the Japanese should be encouraged to furnish small arms, machineguns and ammunition to the Czechoslovaks besieged along the railroad. The Americans and Japanese should each furnish seven thousand men to protect the Legion’s communications.

When the President was finished he asked for comments. According to March’s notes Secretary Lansing commended the paper, Secretary Baker (who had argued himself blue in the face trying to talk the President out of it) merely nodded, Secretary Daniels approved and the general himself shook his head.

“Why are you shaking your head, General?” asked the President with some asperity. General March (noting for his private satisfaction that he had never been a yes-yes man) replied that he had already explained that he didn’t think such an expedition was militarily feasible and that besides the Japanese would take advantage of it for territorial gains.

“We’ll have to take that chance,” said the President testily.

The document was circulated to the Allied chancelleries in the form of an aide-memoire but it wasn’t till August 7 that public announcement was made that an American Expeditionary Force was being dispatched to Siberia. Masaryk immediately wrote the President an effusive note. “Your name Mr. President, as you have no doubt read, is openly cheered in the streets of Prague.”

Once a decision was made on Siberia the decision to send a detachment to help the British hold Murmansk came easy. Some lingering doubt must have remained in the President’s mind. In his answer to Masaryk he wrote that the professor’s letter was particularly appreciated because “I have felt no confidence in my personal judgment about the complicated situation in Russia, and am reassured that you should approve what I have done.”

As part of the campaign to arouse popular support for the President’s decision to send troops to Russia the Committee for Public Information began directing towards Reds and Bolsheviks some of the hatred it had stirred up against the Germans. Press reports of the Moscow terror and of the murder of the Czar and his family made this not too hard an assignment.

When Sisson returned to Washington, still tense from his nervewracking escape from Petrograd, he resumed his position as second in command to George Creel at the old house on Jackson Place. Creel further put him in charge of the foreign desk. Sisson arrived big with portent over the globeshaking repercussions he expected from the publication of his documents on the German-Bolshevik Conspiracy.

Before leaving London, where he stopped over to consult with the British intelligence services, he prepared for the explosion by ordering all C.P.I. personnel out of those parts of Russia under Communist control. A man named Arthur Bullard, who seems to have been levelheaded and wellinformed on Russian affairs, was in charge of the Moscow office. Bullard protested that he was in no present danger. Lenin’s government seemed reluctant to come to a final break with the American missions. Bullard cabled Sisson that he was getting considerable play for the President’s statements in Russian newspapers and that he wanted to stay. Sisson answered that leave he must. In an aside to a friend Sisson explained his insistence on pulling his representatives out of soviet territory as a way of impressing the administration with the importance of his revelations.

According to Major Dansey of British Military Intelligence, the members of the secret services whom Sisson talked to in London were opposed to publishing the documents at all. British military and naval intelligence and the office of the postal censor had gone over a set of the same papers sent in by a British agent named Maclaren, whom Major Dansey described as “hipped on buying documents,” and had decided that the so-called circulars were forgeries clumsily typed on the same Russian typewriter, and that such of the accompanying letters as seemed to be genuine had little propaganda value.

Though the full story of German financing of certain Russian revolutionary newspapers during the early part of the war did not come out till many years later, the British intelligence services were undoubtedly aware at that time that the Bolshevik leaders had been helped by German agencies to return to Russia and that they might have received subsidies in the period of antiwar propaganda before their seizure of power, but they saw no sense in trying to claim that Lenin and Trotsky were acting as German agents because it was untrue on the face of it. According to Major Dansey’s account he explained to Sisson that many of the documents were forgeries and urged him to go slow with them.

All through the summer Sisson kept the documents in his safe. Le Petit Parisien, a sensational French daily, meanwhile published much the same series. Lansing was expressing the fear that their publication in America would endanger the lives of the considerable number of Americans still in soviet territory. Perhaps he smelled a rat.

The situation of the Moscow Communists seemed desperate. As fast as they shot down their opponents fresh opposition reared up against their rule. The Left Social Revolutionaries were continuing their campaign of assassination against Communists and Germans. In July S.R.s killed Field Marshal von Eichorn, the German commander in the Ukraine. In August the president of the Petrograd Cheka was assassinated and the same day young S.R. named Dora Kaplan just missed killing Lenin as he left a factory in Moscow where he had been addressing a workers’ meeting. He was wounded in the neck and a bullet perforated one lung. He escaped death by a miracle.

In the wave of massacres that followed British representatives were arrested, a British officer was killed in a raid on the old Petrograd Embassy, and a state of war was declared to exist between the Soviet Government and the Allies. Even in the frenzy of repressions that continued long after Lenin was out of danger Americans were not molested.

As news of one hideous excess after another poured in from Russia, George Creel seems to have been of two minds as to whether to publish Sisson’s papers or not. Lansing was still opposed and wrote the President to that effect As was his wont Creel went over Lansing’s head direct to Woodrow Wilson.

The President said to publish. Instalments were distributed to various newspapers. The New York Times started publication in the second section of its Sunday edition on September 15.

A few days later the New York Evening Post broke the story that the documents were forged. About the same day a worried cable reached the State Department from Ambassador Page in London. He had just talked to Major Dansey and Major Dansey expressed grave doubts. Furthermore Major Dansey said that he had told Sisson, when they had talked in London, that the British thought the documents were forgeries. Page asked rather pointedly why Sisson hadn’t informed his own government of these doubts.

Creel immediately called Sisson who was out of town on the long distance phone. Sisson denied “specifically and absolutely” having had any such conversation with Major Dansey, but he did admit having met him. A couple of college professors supposed to know Russian were induced to look over the documents and to declare in writing, in a guarded sort of way, that they were genuine. Publication continued.

On the afternoon of August 2, William S. Graves, freshly appointed major general in the National Army, received a message in code from the Chief of Staff ordering him to take the first fast train to Kansas City. Graves, who had just taken over command of a division training in Palo Alto for service in France, had served for several years as secretary to the General Staff, and after pulling all the strings he knew, had finally gotten himself assigned to combat service. Worried for fear something had gone wrong with his plans, he sat up in a day coach all the way from San Francisco to Kansas City because the pullmans were full. His instructions were to proceed to the Hotel Biltmore and there to report to the Secretary of War.

When the much puzzled general stepped off the train in the Kansas City station, he was approached by a redcap who told him that the Secretary of War was waiting to see him in a private room.

His conversation with Mr. Baker was hasty because the little man was about to catch a train out.

The Secretary began by saying in a jocular tone that he was sorry but he had to send Graves to Siberia. He said he knew the general wanted to go to France and that Graves mustn’t blame General March; March had tried to get him out of the assignment. Some day, Baker added mysteriously, he might tell Graves why he had to be the one to go. “If in future you want to cuss anybody for sending you to Siberia,” he said, “I am the man.”

He pulled a long sealed envelope out of his pocket and thrust it in the general’s hand. “This contains the policy of the United States in Russia which you are to follow. Watch your step; you will be walking on eggs loaded with dynamite. God bless you and goodbye,” and he was off to his train.

The general went to a hotel, locked himself in his room and read the document in the sealed envelope. It was President Wilson’s aide memoire. So far as can be discovered, these were the only instructions he ever had from Washington.

“After carefully reading the document and feeling that I understood the policy,” the general wrote in the account he published years later, “I went to bed but I could not sleep and kept wondering what other nations were doing and why I was not given some information about what was going on in Siberia.”

If General Graves was a puzzled man reading President Wilson’s aide memoire in that hotel room in Kansas City, he was an even more puzzled man when he arrived in Vladivostok. He disembarked from the transport Thomas with a force of about two thousand men, and found there two regiments awaiting his command, which had been shipped up from the Philippines with a field hospital and transport units. The morning he landed Graves discovered, on making what he thought was a courtesy call on the ranking Japanese general, that General Otani expected the American force to serve under his orders.

Instead of the seven thousand Japanese the War Department had informed Graves were to cooperate with his expedition, he found seventy-two thousand Japanese soldiers busily engaged in taking over the Chinese Eastern Railroad and preparing for Japanese colonization of the rich soyabean regions of Manchuria.

The Czechoslovaks, he discovered, instead of retiring to Vladivostok for evacuation to Europe, had taken Irkutsk and were being encouraged by the French and British to engage in a career of conquest along the Volga. Instead of being shipped out the Legion was being used to back anticommunist movements in the civil war.

General Graves’ instructions were to help the Czechoslovaks consolidate their forces. The British and French were ahead of him on that.

As for “getting into successful cooperation with their slavic kinsmen,” there were now twentyfour warring governments on Russian soil with little in common except hatred of the Communists.

As for “efforts at self-government” the only election to take place in Vladivostok, supervised by the Czechs and the Allied marines, had resulted, to everyone’s chagrin, in a victory for the Communists.

As for assisting the Russians in “self-defense” the problem, as Lenin succinctly stated it, was: “What Russians?”

While, in consequence of President Wilson’s “thinking through of the processes,” General Graves and his puzzled doughboys were set to patrolling the eastern end of the Trans-Siberian Railroad in furtherance of international intrigues loaded with a sort of dynamite of which they were but dimly aware, another group of young Americans found themselves, with some astonishment, joining in the invasion of northwestern Russia.

At Stoney Castle in England the 339th Infantry, recruited from mechanics, clerks and factory workers mostly out of Milwaukee and Detroit, was training for service in France, when all at once the men were ordered to turn in their Enfields and instead were issued oddlooking long rifles which had been manufactured in the United States for the Imperial Russian Army. Before they had a chance to target these unfamiliar weapons they found themselves huddling in three small British transports, headed it was thought for Murmansk.

A few days out from Newcastle the violent influenza then epidemic broke out. There were no medical kits along. Without assistance from the army medics some recovered and many died. The colonel in command had orders to report to the British General Poole in Murmansk to assist in guarding stores. A few days out of Murmansk he received orders over the wireless to proceed instead to Archangel, four hundred miles to the southeast in the inner reaches of the White Sea.

Two days after Graves landed in Vladivostok the survivors and convalescents from the flu epidemic found themselves being disembarked under a chill drizzle in the outlandish arctic city, overtopped by the onion domes of its outlandish cathedral that had a huge vividly colored fresco of the Last Judgment emblazoned on its outside wall.

“The troopships Somali, Tydeus and Nagoya rubbed the Bakarita and Smolny quays sullenly and listed heavily to port,” wrote an officer of the regiment. “The American doughboys grimly marched down the gangplanks and set their feet on the soil of Russia.” The recollection stirred him to a certain eloquence: “The dark waters of the Dvina River were beaten into fury by the opposing north wind and ocean tide, and the lowering clouds of the Arctic sky added their dismal bit to this introduction to the dreadful conflict which the American sons of liberty were to wage with the Bolsheviki during the year’s campaign.”

One lucky battalion was detailed to patrol the town and at one point found themselves operating its streetcars. The other two were shipped immediately, one batch in boxcars and another in open barges towed up the Dvina, to the fighting front. General Poole, the British officer in command, found his French and British troops hardpressed in their scattered outposts where they were fighting to keep open communications up the Dvina and down the railroad to Vologda.

The Allied contingents, hitherto content with protecting Murmansk against the German and the Finnish Whites, had moved into Archangel, just a month before the arrival of the American infantry, in the wake of a revolution against the Communists carried out by a group calling themselves popular socialists. They were joined by the refugee embassies from Vologda, including American Ambassador Francis, who by this time had lashed himself into a holy frenzy of detestation of the Communists. General Poole, their enthusiastic commander, with the support of the Allied diplomats, was implementing the plan which had first been formulated by the French: his forces would move down the railroad to Vologda to meet the Czechoslovaks advancing west from Ekaterinburg and the Urals. He laughed off the idea that the Red Army might interfere with this strategy of cutting European Russia in two. The Legion had just captured Kazan. The Reds seemed everywhere in flight. In mid August General Poole cabled the War Office: “I am quite cheerfully taking great risks.”

General Poole was a sanguine man. The exploit of a bunch of American sailors made him particularly sanguine about the use of American troops.

One of the Allied flotilla anchored in the river off Murmansk was the ancient cruiser Olympia, which had been Admiral Dewey’s flagship at the battle of Manila Bay. Tired of months cooped up on board under the leaden arctic sky, fifty gobs from the Olympia under an ensign volunteered to join in the landing at Archangel.

They wanted a chance to fight the Bolos. Among the rank and file of the Allied expedition there was no nonsense about helping “to steady any effort at self-government or self-defense” in Russia. The Tommies called the Communists Bolos and that was who they were there to fight.

Finding that instead of Bolo rifles, Archangel resounded with popular socialist speeches, the gobs decided to go look for the enemy. Searching among the ruined engines of the railroad yards, some of their number found an antique woodburning locomotive with a funnel stack that would run. They stoked it up, hitched it to a couple of flatcars and set off to see the country.

They went rattling off down the track in pursuit of the last Red train to pull out. They stoked so merrily that the Bolos didn’t dare stop to burn the bridges until, about thirty miles south, the gobs had a hotbox. The time it took to repair the hotbox gave the Bolos time to burn the next bridge and to deploy their machinegun squad. They put up a lively resistance against any further advance. The ensign got a wound in the leg and the gobs dug themselves in around their train to wait for relief from General Poole’s infantry.

This little incident made the gobs from the Olympia the heroes of the Allied command at Archangel, and when General Poole saw more Americans arriving, without consulting their commanding officer, a regular army colonel who seems to have been, to say the least, a retiring man, he immediately shipped them, sick or well, to his advanced posts, scattered in log huts among the swamps and stunted woodlands on the banks of the Dvina or along the railroad towards Vologda.

The fact that the Bolos had an organized army came as a shock to the Allied command. General Poole’s sanguine plans came to nothing. The Reds soon produced an armored train on the railroad and gunboats on the river. Red planes flew reconnaissance flights above American outposts. The officers particularly, most of them “ninety day wonders” who tried to get it all out of the book, were hard to convince that the Bolos had aviation. One day a somewhat unpopular major ran towards a plane that had crashlanded in a clearing. “Don’t fire,” he was shouting, “we are Americans!”

He was met by a machinegun burst and dove headfirst into the bog. By the time his troops had brushed the reindeer moss and lichen off him the Red aviators had disappeared into the forest.

“Don’t fire” was the wisecrack that passed from mouth to mouth among the doughboys with the polarbear shoulderpatch, as they suffered through the arctic winter in bloody skirmishes with the Bolos. “We are Americans!”

Chapter 21 TOUT LE MONDE A LA BATAILLE

FAR from the sound of guns Ferdinand Foch pored over his maps in his tapestryhung château of stonetrimmed brick amid the quiet greenery of Bombon. The recapture of Soissons made him Marshal of France. After he had received the decorated baton one of his entourage caught him croaking “It is not a wreath of flowers on a grave.”

Foch was a punctual man. Everything had to be on time. He always attended early Mass. Smoking a cheap stogy after his petit déjeuner he received the reports from the fighting fronts. Meals were sacred. Déjeuner à la fourchette was on the stroke of noon. Not even Weygand, his Chief of Staff, dared arrive a minute late. If he were unavoidably delayed, he’d wait to be served after the marshal had eaten. In the afternoon more conferences. Dinner was at seven sharp. Le marechale est à table. After dinner over the coffee visiting dignitaries shudderingly tried to smoke the marshal’s cheap cigars. He didn’t believe in wasting money on havanas. Early to bed. The members of his staff — known as la famille Foch—reported proudly that during the whole war the old fellow had only spent one night out of bed, during the first battle of the Marne when he had to stretch out on the floor of a small town hall. When he did have to travel, he complained jocosely that his famille wrapped him up like a package.

As summer advanced and the news from the armies improved, the marshal allowed his high spirits to express themselves sometimes at the table. “Oh ho, oh ho,” a British brigadier reported him gloating over German reverses: “Where we made a single command, they made two … that of the Crown Prince and Prince Rupert of Bavaria. I wonder whether Ludendorff knows his business; I do not believe that he does.”

As July advanced towards August, Foch began to promulgate his plan for a neverending series of attacks up and down the entire front: explaining his scheme to Colonel Repington, the most uppercrust of British war correspondents, at lunch one day the little man spluttered like a machine-gun under his bristling mustache, “Je les attaque!.. Bon!.. Je dis allez à la bataille!… Everybody gets into the fight … God knows this is the time for the maximum effort … Let’s go to work … Bon!”

This was the thesis he laid on the line for his staff: “The battle begins on one part of the front and the enemy is compelled to send there all his available reserves. Hardly has this been done when it begins again elsewhere and then again in a third place. The situation of the enemy is infernal.”

Foch’s watchword to all and sundry became: “Tout le monde à la bataille.”

When, at a general council of war at Bombon, Pershing set forth to the marshal his plans for his First American Army, both men still believed that the war would last into the following year. Pershing, with the ardent cooperation of General Bliss from Versailles, kept cabling the War Department that he wanted eighty divisions by April 1919, a hundred divisions (which would outnumber all the troops the French and British had in the field) by July.

Rumors of peace talks worried him. Peace would ruin his plans for an American army. “We must not let the people listen to rumors that the Germans are ready to make peace: there should be no peace until Germany is completely crushed,” Pershing told the marshal earnestly. The marshal couldn’t have agreed with him more. “We have pacifists who are lukewarm,” Pershing complained, “too much inclined to accept any proposition to have the war stopped.”

In their discussion of strategy for the autumn campaign the American Commander in Chief and the Marshal of France seem to have been talking at cross purposes. Pershing left Bombon believing he would be allowed to push through his longplanned drive through the St. Mihiel salient into the mining area of Briey.

His staff was already working out the details with Pétain’s subordinates. The American Army lacked heavy tanks, artillery, aviation. Since the War Department was unable to supply these necessary items they had to be borrowed from the French, for a price.

There would be delays, particularly in the arrival of the heavy artillery. Mangin needed all the big howitzers he could line up for the operation he was conducting with the British against the German lines between Soissons and Arras. There were no heavy tanks available.

Pershing took personal command of his First American Army at the old American base of La Ferté-sous-Jouarre on the Marne on August 11 and immediately moved its headquarters to Neufchâteau in the rear of the St. Mihiel salient. In Neufchâteau and the surrounding villages the officers of the sundry newly formed corps worked overtime planning the moving up of munitions and troops for what was to be the first large-scale American manoeuvre of the war. On August 30 General Pershing assumed command of all the Allied forces, American and French, in the St. Mihiel sector.

The same day Marshal Foch and Weygand arrived at Pershing’s own private quarters at nearby Ligny-en-Barrois, and asked him to approve a completely new scheme of operations, which they claimed was the logical result of the unexpected speed of the British and French advance in Picardy.

The St. Mihiel operation was to be limited to pinching off the salient, and a number of Pershing’s divisions were to be placed under French command for a completely new offensive which, instead of moving northeast into industrial Lorraine as had been planned, would push to the northwest, through the difficult terrain between the Meuse and the Aisne rivers. Thus it would form the eastern fang of a pincers of which the western jaw would be an Anglo-French drive for Cambrai.

Pershing immediately flared up: “Well Marshal, this is a very sudden change,” he quoted himself as saying. “On the very day you turn over a sector to the American army you ask me to reduce the operation so that you can take away several of my divisions.”

The discussion became heated indeed. Foch suggested, with his scornful snarl, that perhaps General Pershing didn’t care to take part in the battle at all. Of course he did Pershing asserted doggedly “but as an American army and in no other way.”

Foch insisted. Both men rose from the table where they were seated. “Marshal Foch you may insist all you please,” Pershing remembered having said, “but I decline absolutely.”

Pershing described Foch as picking up his maps and papers and leaving, “very pale and apparently exhausted,” after placing a memorandum in Pershing’s hands for further study.

Pershing was determined that Americans should no longer be used as cannonfodder to spare the troops of other Allied commanders. Though on the whole they got on better with the French than with the British, his doughboys he knew were fed up with being ordered about by the frogs. He was bound he would run his American sector as he saw fit.

The upshot of this irate discussion was that he consented to limit his St. Mihiel offensive to pinching off the German salient and promised that he would, immediately afterwards, in spite of the difficulty of changing his transport arrangements at that late date, join the French in a sweep down the valley of the Meuse starting to the west of Verdun.

“Plans for this second concentration,” wrote Pershing, “involved the movement of some 600,000 men and 2700 guns, more than half of which would have to be transferred from the battlefield of St. Mihiel by only three roads, almost entirely during hours of darkness.”

A million tons of supplies would have to be accumulated along the Voie Sacrée back of Verdun while American transport was busy in getting materials up to the Neufchâteau area for the St. Mihiel operation. “When viewed as a whole,” wrote the general, “it is believed that history holds no parallel of such an undertaking.”

For the St. Mihiel offensive some three thousand guns of all calibers were brought in, not one of them of American manufacture. A little less than half were manned by the French and the rest by American gunners. Forty thousand tons of ammunition were placed in readily accessible dumps.

Communications, consisting of telegraph and telephone lines, radio and a carrier pigeon corps, had to be connected with a central switchboard at Ligny-en-Barrois.

Convoys of trucks, some American but most of them French, moved back and forth from nineteen railheads, to bring up food, clothing and equipment which had been shipped from the American ports.

Nearly thirty thousand beds were ready in field hospitals provided by the Medical Corps.

Colonel Billy Mitchell for the first time commanded a really substantial airforce, some twelve hundred planes including French and British reinforcements.

There was still a total lack of heavy tanks and a shortage of light tanks. That meant that the doughboys would have to cut their own way through the barbed wire instead of having passages opened up for them by the tanks.

The total strength of the fighting forces under Pershing’s command was 550,000 Americans and 110,000 French.

It had been hoped to attack on September 8. In spite of elaborate efforts to hoax the Germans by loud radio talk, and the setting up of a dummy headquarters to prepare an imaginary offensive in the Belfort region, the Germans were well aware of the American plans. The St. Mihiel offensive had for some time been the talk of the Paris cafés. Swiss and German newspapers started writing it up two weeks before it actually took place. The four day final delay gave the Germans a chance to pull a large number of their troops safely out of the salient.

This retirement had already begun when the American artillery barrage began an hour after midnight on September 12. A certain amount of shellfire was wasted on empty trenches. There’d been a heavy rain that night and at dawn the mist and drizzle shielded the movements both of the attacking Americans and of the retreating Germans.

Lacking tanks, teams of American engineers cut passages through the barbed wire with wirecutters. They laid down paths of chickenwire over the entanglements, a procedure which caused astonishment among the French, because nobody had thought of it before.

The attack, consisting of a twopronged operation, with more or less simultaneous assaults from the south and from the west, was carried out promptly and successfully. The Germans were outnumbered eight to one. In spite of spirited patches of resistance they were not able to get all their troops out before the mouth of the sack was closed on them.

In thirtysix hours two hundred square miles of French territory and a line of railroad were cleared of the enemy. The threatening height of Montsec, which had long terrorized the Allied entrenchments, fell with hardly a struggle. Something under sixteen thousand prisoners and four hundred and fifty guns of various calibers were taken at a cost of only seven thousand casualties.

On September 13 General Pershing, accompanied by General Pétain, made a triumphal entrance into the town of St. Mihiel which had suffered, by an odd fortune of war, very little damage. They were greeted by excited schoolchildren waving the tricolor and by the deputy mayor at the Hôtel de Ville. The inhabitants had been on the whole welltreated by the boche, they were told, except that all the ablebodied males had been carried off in the evacuation. News soon came that the Germans had to move so fast in their retreat that they had turned their prisoners loose ten miles out of town.

As the triumphant generals were leaving, they met Secretary Baker, who had a way of turning up when something important was going on, driving in unannounced with a bashful grin on his face. “I regretted,” wrote Pershing, “he could not have gone in with General Pétain and me.”

The following Sunday, Monsieur Clemenceau appeared at Pershing’s headquarters. It was his custom to visit the frontline troops every Sunday. He demanded to be taken up to Thiaucourt, which was the recaptured town closest to Metz. Pershing, who thought the place was still being shelled, and knew the road would be blockaded with truck traffic, because the move to the Verdun sector was already beginning, said he was sorry, “We cannot take the chance of losing a Prime Minister.” Clemenceau insisted. Pershing compressed his thin lips. When Pershing said no he meant no. The Tiger was furious. He made a try anyway and had to turn back.

To make things worse it turned out that President and Mrs. Poincaré, driving in a little later, had, in the course of a tour which included the ruined remains of a pleasant little country house they’d had on the heights overlooking the Meuse, been allowed to visit Thiaucourt.

At dinner at American headquarters Clemenceau bristled and would not be mollified. His distaste for Pershing turned into a fixed antipathy. All the way back to Paris he grumbled to his aides about the stupid way the Americans handled their military traffic. “They wanted an American army,” he growled. “Anyone who saw, as I saw, the hopeless congestion at Thiaucourt will bear witness that they may congratulate themselves on not having had it earlier.”

The mopping up of the St. Mihiel triangle was hardly completed before Pershing moved his First Army Headquarters to Souilly on the Voie Sacrée between Verdun and Bar-le-Duc. The mairie at Souilly had been the chief French command post during the period of the great defense. The American officers felt a catch in their throats as they trooped up the worn steps. Their objectives lay to the northwest of the hills and fortresses that had been so drenched in blood during the battles of the previous years: Mort Homme, Hill 304, Vaux, Douaumont.

To mask the enormous movement of troops and munitions into the Meuse-Argonne sector, preparations for the dummy offensive through the Belfort Gap were ostentatiously stepped up. A phantom of Pershing’s old plan for a drive into the Bassin de la Briey was projected into the press. Pershing’s communiqué spoke of American doughboys as advancing on Metz.

At Belfort an army headquarters was established under command of General Bundy and bona fide preliminaries set in motion for an eastern drive to coincide with the imaginary movement against Metz from Thiaucourt. Twentyfive heavy tanks were brought up by night and went clanking in and out of patches of woodland where they would be heard by boche sentries across the lines. Preparatory raids and reconnaissances were made. An American Intelligence colonel was careful to drop a brand new wellmarked sheet of carbonpaper, from a letter to Pershing describing how all was in readiness for the offensive, in the scrapbasket in his room at a Belfort hotel where it was promptly scooped up by the German espionage.

Meanwhile correspondents were given false leads, a press bureau was set up in Nancy to cover the attack, and the Allied wireless, using an easily decipherable code, started talking about the formation of an American Tenth Army which was to spearhead the eastern offensive. Whether or not the Germans were completely taken in by this ruse de guerre, the threat was serious enough to cause Ludendorff to move several divisions into Alsace and Lorraine.

At dawn on September 26 nine American divisions, amounting to two hundred and forty thousand men, jumped off into the old nomansland of the defense of Verdun. They had quietly replaced the French holding troops during the night, while one of the heaviest artillery bombardments of the war combed the German positions. The front on which they were to advance extended twentyone miles from the Meuse to the western fringes of the plateau of the Argonne Forest where they were to keep contact with Gouraud’s Fourth Army advancing through the plains of Champagne east of Reims.

Pershing’s objective was to cut, in the vicinity of Sedan, the trunk line of railroad which furnished the Germans their chief lateral communication across their entire front from Metz to Valenciennes on the edge of Flanders. Giraud’s objective was the same railroad a few miles further west at the important highway center of Mézières.

The staffs of the hastily improvised American corps had hardly two weeks to lay their plans for the sort of operation that usually took months to prepare. Since the three seasoned divisions had not had time to struggle out through the overloaded roads from the St. Mihiel sector, the initial attack had to be made mostly by raw troops who had not learned how to protect their lives on the battlefield. They were attacking one of the most defensible regions on the western front.

The day dawned clear. For a while it looked as if the Allied airplanes would have the sky to themselves. The correspondents were invited up to watch the opening moves. From the shellshattered hump of Mort Homme they looked north and west down the Meuse valley which tapered funnelwise towards Sedan thirtyone miles away behind the misted hills. The whole great funnel was dominated by the heights on the east bank of the Meuse, where the German artillery, once it recovered from the pounding of the first bombardment, was ready to do deadly work. To the west the treecrowned promontories of the Argonne Forest cut into the valley with a series of steep ridges culminating in an occasional height. In the distant foreground, overlooking the first day’s objectives, was the ruined town of Montfaucon. Behind it was another ridge and behind that, fifteen miles away, was the hill village of Buzancy. Artillery in Buzancy would command the Meuse valley and the Sedan-Metz railroad.

At first everything seemed to go well. The Germans were almost as outnumbered as they had been at St. Mihiel. The main obstacle the American doughboys encountered was the mud in the shellchurned region of the old nomansland back of the heights that had defended Verdun. Roads had to be rebuilt foot by foot. Almost at once the infantry outran their field artillery and the tanks which were supposed to protect them.

The correspondents and the staffofficers up on Mort Homme watched with rapt interest through field glasses and telescopes olivedrab dots and lines moving forward according to schedule over the green land beyond the shellscarred area. The correspondents went back to Bar-le-Duc to write fanciful descriptions of a seven mile average penetration and of the taking of Montfaucon.

Some of them did have a qualm of suspicion before they left the observation post. A plane which they’d been admiring overhead as one of ours, made a sudden dive at them. When it opened up with its machine-guns there was no more doubt that it was a boche. Staffofficers and newspapermen crawled for cover among the pebbly shellholes.

The truth came out gradually as night came on. The Americans had broken the first German defenses, but Montfaucon was still in German hands and the American divisions were scattered helter-skelter over a terrain perfect for defense by groups of machinegunners. They had insufficient artillery and almost no tank support. Their transport was mired in the nomansland behind them. Communications had to be by runner or carrier pigeon. From an observation post in Montfaucon the Germans continued to direct withering artillery fire on the advancing skirmish lines. To the left what the doughboys called the Oregon Forest turned out to be another Belleau Wood, only on a larger scale.

Next day the 313th Infantry, Marylanders from the 79th Division, did sure enough take Montfaucon, at very great cost, but it was late afternoon before the cellars and ruins of the town and the adjacent woods had been cleared of the enemy. Even then the German strong points turned out to be on the next ridge behind. The delay in getting up artillery, due to traffic snarls on the almost impassable roads, gave the German General von Gallwitz the chance he needed to deploy his reserve divisions and to reinforce his great guns which carried on an enfilading fire from the heights east of the Meuse. To make things worse the weather became rainy.

The days that followed were hideous for the Americans. German crack divisions were brought in to mount their usual skillful counterattacks. The troops were plagued with influenza, which throughout the army was killing almost as many men as machineguns and shrapnel. The roads up into the fighting areas were hopelessly inadequate. There were never enough tanks. Food and ammunition came up by fits and starts. The posts of command kept losing touch with their advance units. By the last day of September progress had stopped. General Bullard in command of the III Corps operating in the battlescarred regions along the River Meuse, remembered it bitterly as a time of “wavering and standstill.”

Meanwhile Gouraud’s Fourth French Army, which had made a good start the first day, was slowed to a crawl by a carefully fortified German position on a chalky hill known as Blanc Mont, which dominated the western fringes of the Argonne Forest, as Montfaucon had dominated its eastern defiles.

Further west French armies were beginning to make progress in the Chemin des Dames section, the combined British and French moves towards St. Quentin and Cambrai were doing well, and in the extreme north the British and French and Belgians were meeting with light resistance as they advanced through the boggy lands in front of Ypres.

It began to be apparent that the German defenses, which the American divisions were battering themselves to pieces to break, were the pivot on which the whole German line from Sedan to the Channel was executing a gradual retirement. The manoeuvre was to pull back the armies step by step to a shorter line along the whole length of the Meuse as a door closes on its hinges.

The High Command was determined to hold the pivot at all costs.

Headquarters at Souilly was a grim place during the last days of September. A stream of orders that lashed like whips issued from the office of Pershing’s Chief of Staff. Drive forward. Drive forward. There must be no yielding in the face of counterattacks. Brigade and divisional command posts must be continually moved up to keep in touch with the fighting lines. Woe to the officer who weakened at the task.

General Pershing himself gave no air of flurry. Bullard described him as visiting his corps headquarters and inquiring “about things in a very good-humored, agreeable, almost careless way; yet I knew that underneath his easy manner was inexorable ruin to the commander who did not have things right.”

As the fighting dragged out from day to day, with little result but confusion and casualties, generals lost their commands; field officers or “ninety day wonders” who proved timorous or incapable of leadership were ordered to the rear. Constant dismissals and the high mortality among the firstrate officers and noncoms in the fighting meant that the command in all the units involved was constantly changing. This added to the difficulty of attaining the tight organization needed in such difficult country and against such a skillful enemy. Straggling and desertion became the problem of the day.

“The hardest work I did or saw done in France,” noted Bullard, “was the holding of men to duty in service and battle. In the early days some of our military theorists who had been little at the front, desired to reduce the military police … As our fighting increased these military police had, on the contrary, to be augmented in every way possible. An unbroken line of them now followed our attacks.”

Besides the difficulty of keeping an army, made up at least half of raw recruits, decently led and supplied, and headed in the direction of the enemy, Pershing had other battles on his hands.

By letter and cable he was carrying on a continual skirmish with the War Department in Washington for more trucks. He was in desperate need of horses. He didn’t have enough locomotives. He was still dependent on his allies for tanks, for most of his airplanes and, except for a few naval guns, for ordnance. “After nearly eighteen months of war,” he wrote, “it would be reasonable to expect that the organization at home would have been more nearly able to provide adequate equipment and supplies, and to handle shipments more systematically.”

Besides the struggle with the War Department, where the high and mighty General March was not proving as much help as Pershing had hoped, he had his vendetta with Clemenceau.

On another of his Sunday jaunts the Tiger turned up at Souilly in his automobile and insisted on visiting Montfaucon. Pershing pointed out that the place was a target for German shells and spoke of the impassable roads. Clemenceau determined to try, and got caught in a road jam caused by the supply trains of a relieving division getting tangled with the division being relieved. It was worse than Thiaucourt. He went back to Paris more intent than ever to divest Pershing of his command.

A few days later Weygand arrived from Foch with the suggestion, which Pershing suspected of having originated with the President of the Council, that the French Second Army take over command of the Americans in the Argonne Forest. Pershing turned Weygand down cold.

Clemenceau never could understand why the Americans took so long in the Meuse-Argonne. The Tiger was in a hurry. He could see victory on the horizon. He was daily more impatient. He had flattering reports of advances from the western parts of the front. He blamed the stalemate in the Argonne on Pershing. He had long been intriguing against him through the French missions in Washington. In the end he wrote Foch a violent letter:

“… You have watched at close range the development of General Pershing’s exactions. Unfortunately, thanks to his invincible obstinacy, he has won out against you as well as against your immediate subordinates … The French Army and the British Army … are pressing back the enemy with an ardor that excites worldwide admiration; but our worthy American allies, who thirst to get into action and who are unanimously acknowledged to be great soldiers, have been marking time since their forward jump on the first day; and in spite of heavy losses, they have failed to conquer the ground assigned to them.”

His solution was that, unless Pershing submitted to Foch’s orders and accepted the advice of capable French generals, Foch should immediately appeal to President Wilson to have him removed. “It would then be certainly high time to tell President Wilson the truth and the whole truth concerning the situation of the American troops.”

Foch did not respond directly to this outburst. He sent Monsieur Clemenceau an order of battle showing that out of thirty American divisions available for the front, ten were already with French or British armies, and only twenty under Pershing’s direct command. He pointed out slyly that perhaps he might find ways to increase the ten and decrease the twenty. For the rest of their lives the topic remained a bone of contention between the marshal and the prime minister.

“Having a more comprehensive knowledge of the difficulties encountered by the American Army,” Foch wrote in his official memoirs, “I could not acquiesce in the radical solution contemplated by Monsieur Clemenceau.”

While the raw Americans were slogging their way through the blasted woodlands and the ruined hillvillages of the Argonne and the Meuse against troops who used all the grim education of four years of fighting to make them pay dear for every step they gained, the political structure behind the German Army was breaking up.

The eastern alliance was the first to crumble.

In spite of the efforts of a German field marshal and of battalions of stormtroops the Turkish Army in Palestine allowed itself to be surprised and outmanoeuvred in mid September by Allenby’s force of British colonials and rebellious Arabs, at Megiddo, north of Jerusalem. The Turkish Army was swept back in hopeless rout on Damascus. The remnants fled towards Aleppo.

Almost at the same time General Franchet d’Esperey’s ramshackle coalition of French and British and Italians and Greeks and Serbs and Albanians defeated the Bulgarian Army in the Balkans. Communist orators started haranguing mobs in front of the royal palace in Sofia and gave the selfstyled Czar Ferdinand such a fright that on September 30 he concluded an armistice on terms of unconditional surrender. The Allies couldn’t move in soon enough to protect him from a Red uprising. What was left of Mackensen’s army had to retreat in a hurry across the Danube, leaving behind great quantities of rolling stock and the imperial hopes for a Berlin to Baghdad railroad and all that it implied.

Pro-Allied politicians took over in Bulgaria and a few days later Ferdinand abdicated in favor of his son. The loss of Bulgaria meant that communications between Germany and Turkey were cut off. Food riots and seditious strikes in Prague and Budapest disrupted the Hapsburg empire. Separatist movements came out into the open. In Vienna the Emperor Charles’ government hung by a thread.

In Berlin the immediate result of the fall of Bulgaria was that the elderly chancellor, Count Hertling, resigned in despair. The voices of the Social Democrats in the Reichstag, and of such Independent Socialists as were still out of jail, were raised louder than ever in demanding an end to the war and democratic reforms at home. Criticism of the Hohenzollerns began to appear in the press.

Democrats and moderate liberals joined in the clamor which rose to such a pitch that the Kaiser Wilhelm, from his military headquarters at Spa, was constrained on that same September 30 to issue a proclamation that from now on “the German people shall effectively co-operate in deciding the destinies of the Fatherland.”

As a successor to Hertling the Kaiser chose Prince Max of Baden. Prince Max, the heir to the throne of the Grand Duchy of Baden, had been long known as a moderate liberal. He had expressed opposition to schrecklichheit in general and to the submarine campaign in particular. He had announced his approval of the Reichstag resolution of July 19, 1917, calling for peace without annexations or indemnities. He immediately put forth the proposition that the interests of America and of Europe entire would best be served by a liberal coalition, in which a democratized Germany would play its part against the spread of Bolshevism.

In his first official address to the Reichstag he declared that Germany was ready to accept the Fourteen Points as a basis for peace. When Wilson, through Lansing, replied that Germany must first show good faith by evacuating all conquered territory, his answer was that Germany was prepared to do so. He suggested the appointment of a mixed commission to arrange the details.

The German note had hardly, through the good offices of the Swiss ambassador, reached President Wilson’s desk, before the newspapers were full of the latest German atrocity. A submarine torpedoed the passenger steamer Leinster on the ferry service between England and Ireland.

The timid discussion of the desirability of a negotiated peace that had begun among the Allies and particularly in the English press, was drowned in a chorus of outrage. The news was crushing to the hopes of German liberals. Philipp Scheidemann, the Social Democratic leader, whom Prince Max had taken into the cabinet, declared to the Reichstag: “We must try to put ourselves in the enemy’s place and view the state of affairs objectively … the frightful disaster of the torpedoing of a passenger steamer in which six hundred people, among them many women and children lost their lives … is terribly exasperating. The U-boat war should come to an end at once.”

Although the armies in the field were still intact and disciplined, demoralization was spreading through the rear echelons. The High Command was in a panic. The story was being told that Ludendorff was so upset by the news of the successes of Foch’s general offensive that he fell in a fit on the floor.

A wave of despair went through all the little courts of the kingdoms and dukedoms and principalities that made up the hierarchy of the empire. The middle classes were bitterly disillusioned as it became clear that the sacrifices of the war had gone for nothing. The working people, who since the terrible “turnip winter” of 1916–17 had gone on working long hours for low pay under conditions of undernourishment that occasionally reached the point of famine, began to turn towards the Russian example. The Russian masses had driven out their tormentors, why not the Germans?

After all Germany was the cradle of socialism. The German Socialist Party had for years been the largest and most respected in Europe. Split into two wings in 1914 by the problem of whether or not to support the war, the patriotic majority now became the mainstay of Prince Max’s hopes of rapidly improvising a liberal and selfgoverning Germany to meet the specifications of a Wilsonian peace according to the Fourteen Points. In all the German courts people of similar sympathies began to draft reforms. As a gesture of conciliation towards the Independent Socialists, who had opposed the war, the Chancellor amnestied their leaders sent to jail by the old government.

The day Karl Liebknecht, one of the fieriest of the antiwar socialists, was released he addressed an excited crowd to demand the Kaiser’s abdication and a socialist workers’ republic. From the workers in the Berlin munitions factories and from the sailors of the fleet at Kiel came answering mutterings in premonition of revolt.

Germany teemed with agitators. Adolf Joffe had spent a busy summer at the old Russian Embassy on the Unter den Linden. He had established cordial relations with a group of welltodo radicals in Berlin. He helped a number of Reichstag deputies from Independent Socialist constituencies to subsidize newspapers. Moscow rubles paid the expenses of orators and organizers who carried the Communist line to every corner of industrial Germany.

Carl Radek, fiery, humorous, resourceful, under the cloak of diplomatic immunity, was fomenting a German revolution on the Communist model. Lenin’s paladins in the Kremlin, beset on every hand by counterrevolution, were pinning their hopes for safety in the workers’ revolution they believed could be provoked upon the collapse of German militarism.

The middleclass liberals and the soberer hierarchy of the trade unions and the established officials of the Social Democratic Party saw a way to peace and selfgovernment through President Wilson. The younger, wilder, more reckless fringe of the German working class were calling for Lenin and the red flag and for the total destruction of the existing order.

While empires teetered to a fall, and rumors of peace flickered like heatlightning beyond the horizon, the American doughboys, struggling over ridge after ridge through thickets tangled with barbed wire, had no thought except to kill in order not to be killed. The weather was cold. Almost continuous rain increased the difficulties of supply. Gradually more and more American divisions became involved until, at the peak of the fortyseven day battle the First Army numbered more than a million men, and Ludendorff had thrown in forty of his shrunken divisions to oppose them.

Almost imperceptibly the tide was turning in the valley of the Meuse.

French forces drove the German artillery off the high ground on the east bank of the river. This enabled the 1st Division successfully to outflank the forest plateau from the east and thus relieve a battalion of the New York 77th cut off in the forest, when units on either side had failed to reach their objectives. Commanded by Charles Whittlesey, a New York lawyer in civilian life, the battalion, without food and almost without water, fought off German attacks from every side — including one polite request written in English inviting the major to surrender — for the better part of a week before the 1st Division’s advance caused the Germans to quit the forest in a hurry. Five hundred and fifty officers and men of that battalion entered the woods. One hundred and ninetyfour walked out.

Two American divisions loaned to Gouraud managed to storm Blanc Mont from the rear. With that dangerous height in American hands the whole French line could move again.

Corporal John Aasland of the 5th Marines left notes of the assault in his diary: “October 3. At 4:30 A.M. the whistle blew and we packed up and stood by. The 6th Marines were to have the front the first day and we were to support them.

“The two regiments in the front line pulled a good stunt last night. At 11:00 P.M. they sneaked over into the German front line in the darkness and captured all the Germans there, then stayed there all night unbeknown to the Germans in the Second and Third lines, and used the German front as a jumping off place … The artillery opened up only five minutes before the attack started so by the time the Germans were half ready, the front line was … on their way to Blanc Mont ridge.

“We in support followed the 6th Marines by 600 yards … We advanced in line of combat groups. Crossed a creek and waded in water a foot deep, just enough to get wet. Broad daylight arrived, the sun shining brightly, and we had no fog to screen us. The enemy balloons behind the line were giving instructions to the artillery — which there was plenty of — so they started to shell us for fair … When the fire was not quite so heavy we reached a narrow gauge railroad where we stopped again. On the barbed wire hung limbs of men who had been blown up before, around which lay blue cloth, the remains of the unsuccessful attacks of the French on this place.

“Up again and here comes machinegun fire from the left. We drop and lay perfectly still in the grass and weeds: someone from the extreme left will be sent after the machineguns. The firing stops. The whistle blows and we are up and start again. Sometimes when the whistle blew I got up real quick and looked around. Outside of the men right next to me I could see no one. Six inches of grass and the color of the army uniform made us invisible. If we could lay still all the time it would be soft. Looks funny when the whole line stands up and starts to move again: just like they came from nowhere.

“Now and then a man was killed and a wounded man called ‘First Aid’ … but this isn’t bad yet … We are strung out in a trench with the Germans in the woods ahead of us. Every now and then machine gun fire comes our way. A heavy barrage began which plastered around us … On our way up the trench it was evident that other points in the woods had caught it also. Here and there were dead men lying in the trench. Soon we reached the top of Blanc Mont Ridge where the 6th Marines and 9th Infantry had been since yesterday noon. They were dug in in a shallow trench, right on top of the hill but with trees to screen them from the air.”

Out of the welter of sudden death and hairbreadth escape, of men advancing in skirmish lines, pinned down in the muck of old trenches, scuttling out of harm’s way among broken treetrunks, some deeds became legendary.

There was a solemn young man from the Tennessee mountains who, being an elder in his church, and pledged to the Ten Commandments, entered the army as a conscientious objector. An officer at the training camp, noticing that he was a remarkably good shot with a rifle, read the Bible with him and proved to him by chapter and verse that “Thou shalt not kill” did not apply to a just cause and that Jehovah was also the God of battles.

Corporal York was not only a crack shot but an accomplished woodsman. The Argonne was not too different from the Appalachian hills he’d been raised among.

Advancing through the woods with his squad he managed to get around behind a battalion field headquarters of the enemy.

The Germans were startled by the first American volley and threw up their hands and surrendered, but a German machinegunner in front of them slewed his gun around and shouting to the Germans to lie flat killed six doughboys and wounded the sergeant in command.

Taking charge, protected by a tree and a dead buddy on either side of him, Corporal York knocked off every man of the machinegun squad. When he ran out of ammunition for his rifle, he pulled out his automatic pistol and dropped a lieutenant and seven men who tried to rush him.

Then sticking his pistol in the German major’s back he coolly started him towards the American lines. Flushing German machinegun nests from behind as they went the party trooped back to headquarters.

“Corporal York,” he announced, with a precise salute to the startled battalion adjutant who thought it was a German raid when he saw them coming through the trees, “reports with prisoners, sir.”

Asked how many prisoners he had he answered, “Honest, Lieutenant, I don’t know.”

The adjutant counted them as they filed by, headed for the rear. One hundred and two, including a major, two lieutenants, and twentyeight machineguns.

By the end of October the news that filtered through from the rear has begun to tell on even the most disciplined of the German troops.

On October 28 mutiny breaks out in the Kaiser’s battle fleet. When orders come to put to sea the stokers on the battleship Markgraf drop their shovels and go trooping off the ship. When they are arrested by a squad of marines, the whole crew leaves the ship in protest. Other ships strike in sympathy. The sailors parade through the city and are met by red flags and orators telling them of the great part the sailors of the Baltic fleet played in the Russian Revolution. In a short time the whole naval base, almost without resistance from the officers, is in the mutineers’ hands and the revolt is spreading to other ports, to war factories, to Berlin.

At Imperial Headquarters at Spa the Kaiser and von Hindenburg dismiss Ludendorff as Chief of Staff. Almost immediately word comes that as a result of the Italian victory at Vittorio Veneto the Austrian armies have disintegrated; that the Hapsburg government is begging President Wilson for an armistice; that mobs with red flags fill the streets of Vienna; that the Emperor Charles has abdicated and fled.

Meanwhile the Belgians have taken Ghent and its U-boat pens. The British are past St. Quentin and Cambrai. The French have swept through the Chemin des Dames and taken Laon.

Along the Meuse the American First Army, having at last attained a smoothrunning organization under the direct command of a levelheaded oldtimer named Hunter Liggett, stands poised on the heights of the last ridge. Buzancy is behind them. There are American bridgeheads on the Meuse.

On to Sedan has been the watchword. At last the doughboys are ready to bear down on Sedan, but orders keep coming from Foch that send the American divisions slewing off to the east. Word goes around that they never will see the city they have shed so much blood to reach. The honor of taking Sedan will be reserved for the French 40th Division of Gouraud’s army.

Late on November 7 a message is delivered to the commanding generals of the I and V Corps who are nearest to Sedan, at the far left of the American front. The reason they are nearest to Sedan is that Gouraud’s army can’t keep up with the mad pace of their advance. The doughboys are still full of ginger.

The message reads: “General Pershing desires that the honor of entering Sedan should fall to the First American Army … Your attention is invited to the favorable opportunity now existing for pressing our advance throughout the night. Boundaries will not be considered binding.”

Immediately the advance becomes a race. The officers of the Rainbow Division of the I Corps lash up their tired men, their dying horses, their wornout transport and drive due north for Sedan. By morning they are on the heights overlooking the railroad yards and the historic plain, but in territory which Foch has assigned to Gouraud’s army. Having run out of ammunition the 165th Infantry storms the last hill with cold bayonets.

General Summerall, in command of the V Corps, orders his 1st Division also to be in Sedan by morning. The men of the 1st, worn out by long fighting along the difficult fringes of the forest, footsore and short of food and ammunition, take him at his word and march all night at a desperate pace. So doing they tangle with advancing supply columns of the I Corps. With the dawn, more dead than alive, the men pour out on the heights above the city. In the confusion they have marched clean through the Rainbow Division’s rear and come out even further to the left in territory reserved for the French. Everybody is lightheaded with fatigue.

In the course of their rush a 1st Division patrol has captured the dazzling young general just placed in command of the Rainbow, whose name is Douglas MacArthur. On account of his habit of taking the wire out of his cap they took him for a boche when they blundered into his small reconnaissance group studying out the road into Sedan.

At the same time Pétain is raising a storm at the headquarters of the French Fourth Army. The Americans are notified that the French 40th Division may find it necessary to open up with their artillery to clear the sector assigned to them for an advance.

For a few hours the situation is tense indeed.

MacArthur laughs off his capture. The Rainbow Division brings up its field kitchens to feed the men of the 1st who, although orders have come for them to retire, are pronounced too tired to move. Stiffly worded apologies go back and forth between the various staffs.

A French unit breaks the ice by asking an American unit to dinner and invites them to come along with the French into the city. The Americans are constrained to refuse.

Reluctantly Pershing has issued orders that no Americans shall enter Sedan. “Under normal conditions,” he wrote later in his memoirs, “the action of the officer or officers responsible for this movement of the First Division directly across the zones of action of two other divisions could not have been overlooked, but the splendid record of that unit and the approach of the end of hostilities suggested leniency.”

Early in the morning of November 8 on a siding in a tract of state forest known as the Wood of the Eagle near Compiègne, Marshal Foch waits in his headquarters train for the arrival of the German commission come to sue for an armistice.

At 7 A.M. the Germans, led by Matthias Erzberger, Prince Max’s Secretary of State, arrive haggard and sleepless on the train which has brought them from the firing lines.

At nine they are received in his office car by Marshal Foch. He is accompanied by General Weygand, Admiral Sir Rosslyn Wemyss, British First Sea Lord of the Admiralty, and by British Admiral Hope, with their staffs. No other Allied delegates are present.

The Germans are stiffly greeted by General Weygand, representing the Allied armies and by Admiral Hope representing the navies.

Sphynxlike at the head of the table Foch asks the Germans why they have come. Cold hatred rings in every word. The Germans ask to know the conditions under which the Allies will agree to an armistice.

Foch’s curt words are that he has no conditions.

The Germans ask leave to read President Wilson’s latest note authorizing Marshal Foch to lay down the conditions. All Germany is waiting breathless for an armistice according to the Fourteen Points.

Foch insists that to have an armistice they must first ask for it.

The Germans request an armistice.

Then Weygand reads an outline of the conditions.

The conditions are:

“Immediate evacuation of all invaded countries within thirty days by German troops and of all of Germany west of the Rhine. The Rhineland to be occupied by Allied troops.

“Immediate repatriation without reciprocity of all prisoners of war.

“The delivery of an enormous list of various types of guns and of seventeen hundred airplanes.

“The delivery of five thousand locomotives and a hundred and fifty thousand cars and of five thousand motor trucks, all in good condition.

“The surrender of all submarines, of ten battleships and of a long list of other naval vessels.”

The armistice is for thirtysix days, but renewable. Meanwhile the blockade of Germany is to continue.

The German delegates are so aghast they can hardly speak. Erzberger says hoarsely he cannot even discuss such conditions without communicating with his government.

Even while he is speaking his government is melting away. A workers’ republic is proclaimed in Bavaria. Prince Max announces the Kaiser’s abdication in Berlin and promptly resigns. A new Cabinet is formed of Social Democrats and Independent Socialists. Friedrich Ebert, as prime minister, proclaims a German republic.

Kings, princes and grand dukes go scuttling off in all directions. Leaving Hindenburg alone at Imperial Headquarters to struggle with the problems of the armies, the Kaiser and the Crown Prince board their imperial train and take refuge in Holland.

The commissioners make a play of communicating with their government but there is no government in Germany. Revolution roars through the land. All night of November 10 they argue for better terms.

Foch, who has only left the train long enough to attend Mass that Sunday morning, sits icily obdurate at the end of the table. He lets the others argue as they will.

It is the second night that the marshal has spent out of bed in the course of the war.

“We slept but little,” he told one of his aides afterwards. “During the evening we had resumed our discussions. I lay down from eleven to one. Then we started arguing again till five fifteen that morning. At last they signed … and I saw Erzberger brandish his pen and grind his teeth when he signed the document. I was then glad that I had exerted my will, and employed the means of exerting it, for the business was settled.”

Orders are immediately telegraphed out. At eleven in the morning firing ceases along the whole line from Switzerland to the sea.

The very day and hour that the firing ceased on the western front, when the soldiers of the German and Allied armies were feeling themselves all over and crying out: By God I’m alive, three hundred Americans, supported by a company of Royal Scots and a few Canadians, were on the point of being overwhelmed by an assault of Russian Red Army troops in a group of log huts far upstream from Archangel on the Dvina River.

The village of Toulgas, under command of an American captain, was one of the fortified posts lost in the bogs and forests of north Russia left over from the sanguine British General Poole’s ambitious plan to sweep south to join the Czechoslovak Legion. Now the Czechoslovaks had fallen back on the Trans-Siberian, and Poole had been replaced in command of the north Russian expedition by General Ironside, who saw at once that his problem was to consolidate his forces and so avoid another Gallipoli.

Ironside set the Allied troops to building blockhouses. On November 10 his second in command General Findlayson inspected the position at Toulgas and pronounced the village quite safe from attack. Winter was late setting in and the boggy forests had not frozen hard enough in his opinion to allow the passage of troops. At the same time, since the Allied gunboats had retired to Archangel to escape being caught in the ice when the river froze, he took it for granted that the Red Army gunboats were tied up at their base at Kotlas, a good hundred miles to the south.

On the morning of November 11 the garrison of Toulgas was startled at breakfast by riflefire up the river to the south of them and cries of “Urrah, Urrah” from an attacking force. Through darkness and freezing dawn mist the Bolos had crept up on a squad of Americans occupying a cluster of charcoalburners’ huts at the upper end of the village.

Led by their lieutenant the Americans quickly fell back under fire across a little stream, past the church and the priest’s house to the blockhouses in the central group of huts. At the same time the crash of rifle-fire and the ratatat of machineguns were heard from the log huts to the north of the village. The field hospital was in one of them. As no attack was expected from that quarter the field hospital was completely open and the only defense of the two Canadian fieldguns set in emplacements to shoot south was a few American rifles and a Lewis machinegun.

As luck would have it the Bolos, commanded by a great brigand of a man in an enormous black fur hat, took time off to loot the first huts they came to. The leader stalked into the hospital and ordered his soldiers to kill the sick men lying there. With great presence of mind the British noncom in charge offered the leader a bottle of rum and brought out everything he had in the way of rations. At the same moment what turned out to be a young woman, dressed in bundles of rags like the rest, burst into the hut with a rifle cocked and threatened to shoot any man who laid hands on the sick. This was the Bolo leader’s girlfriend, a great strapping woman who had followed him through darkness and muck to the battlefront.

Food, drink and the lady’s charms did their work. The Bolo countermanded his order and, leaving her in charge of the hospital, continued the assault.

The delay gave the Canadians time to pull their fieldpieces out of the slots and to swing them around and to load them with closerange shrapnel. They were expert gunners who had served on the western front. They allowed the yelling Bolos, attacking in a mass, to reach just the right distance and then touched off a blast point blank. The Bolos wavered, took a second blast and fell back on the huts and the edges of the forest, leaving the field littered with dead and wounded.

Meanwhile the main body of Americans, protected by log walls, were holding off the attack from the south. There were casualties on both sides but the Bolos’ loss was much heavier. Clearing out snipers with a series of sorties the Americans and Britishers held off any further attack until early darkness fell.

During the night the American captain was cheered by blinker signals from a British post two miles across the river. When the message was decoded it turned out to be a demand that he account for six dozen Red Cross mufflers his outfit had been supplied with, and for which no receipt had been furnished. The night of Armistice Day when all the world was frenziedly celebrating an end to the war, the men of the little garrison at Toulgas slept on their guns.

Next morning five Red Army gunboats appeared around a bend in the river under the low arctic sun and started shelling. Rumor went around that Trotsky himself was aboard. This attack was no casual skirmish. The Russian guns outranged the Canadian fieldpieces so that they could lob shells at will into the long straggle of huts where the Americans and Britishers stood tense at their rifles and machineguns behind slits in the log walls.

The bombardment continued intermittently for three days. Though the attack to the north fizzled out with the death of the big Bolo leader in the black fur hat, repeated efforts to rush the little bridge that formed the northern entrance into Toulgas’ one muddy street had to be beaten back. A shell wrecked the American blockhouse and the priest’s house from which machinegun fire could be directed at the bridge. The church remained defensible.

The fourth morning before the late dawn an American company crept into the woods around the charcoalburners’ huts where the Russian attackers were camping. The plan was to attack with as much noise as possible. It worked. The Bolos were surprised asleep. The hut where their ammunition was stored was set afire and made such a racket that the Bolos thought a whole division was on their trail and either ran off into the forest or surrendered.

The counterattack saved the day. That and the arctic winter. Zero temperatures froze the Dvina and drove the Red Army gunboats back to Kotlas.

When things quieted down the Russian woman, who had seen her Bolo lover breathe his last, turned out to have taken excellent care of the sick and wounded. Her story was that she had been a member of Kerensky’s Women’s Battalion and was following the war for the sport of it. She remained as a nurse in the Allied hospitals, and was revered by the doughboys under the title of Lady Olga.

To the American troops, who had lost twentyeight dead and seventy wounded, the siege of Toulgas became known as the Battle of Armistice Day.