And they thought we wouldn't fight Part 44

Another German student of English among the prisoners was represented in the person of a pompous German major, who, in spite of being a captive, maintained all the dignity of his rank. He stood proudly erect and held his head high. He wore a disgusted look on his face, as though the surroundings were painful. His uniform was well pressed, his linen was clean, his boots were well polished, he was clean shaven. There was not a speck of dust upon him and he did not look like a man who had gone through the h.e.l.l of battle that morning. The American sergeant asked him in German to place the contents of his pockets on the table.

"I understand English," he replied superciliously, with a strong accent, as he complied with the request. I noticed, however, that he neglected to divest himself of one certain thing that caught my interest. It was a leather thong that extended around his neck and disappeared between the first and second b.u.t.tons of his tunic. Curiosity forced me to reach across the table and extract the hidden terminal of that thong. I found suspended on it the one thing in all the world that exactly fitted me and that I wanted. It was a one-eyed field gla.s.s. I thanked him.

He told me that he had once been an interne in a hospital in New York but happening to be in Germany at the outbreak of the war, he had immediately entered the army and had risen to the rank of a major in the Medical Corps. I was anxious for his opinion, obvious as it might have seemed.

"What do you think of the fighting capacity of the American soldier?" I asked him.

"I do not know," he replied in the accented but dignified tones of a superior who painfully finds himself in the hands of one considered inferior. "I have never seen him fight. He is persuasive--yes.

"I was in a dugout with forty German wounded in the cellar under the Beaurepaire Farm, when the terrible bombardment landed. I presume my gallant comrades defending the position died at their posts, because soon the barrage lifted and I walked across the cellar to the bottom of the stairs and looked up.

"There in the little patch of white light on the level of the ground above me, I saw the first American soldier I have seen in the war. But he did not impress me much as a soldier. I did not like his carriage or his bearing.

"He wore his helmet far back on his head. And he did not have his coat on. His collar was not b.u.t.toned; it was rolled back and his throat was bare. His sleeves were rolled up to the elbow. And he had a grenade in each hand.

"Just then he looked down the stairs and saw me--saw me standing there--saw me, a major--and he shouted roughly, 'Come out of there, you big Dutch B----d, or I'll spill a basketful of these on you.'"

All through that glorious day of the 18th, our lines swept forward victoriously. The First Division fought it out on the left, the Foreign Legion in the centre and the Second Division with the Marines pushed forward on the right. Village after village fell into our hands. We captured batteries of guns and thousands of prisoners.

On through the night the Allied a.s.sault continued. Our men fought without water or food. All road s.p.a.ce behind the lines was devoted to the forwarding of reserves, artillery and munitions. By the morning of the 19th, we had so far penetrated the enemy's lines that we had crossed the road running southward from Soissons to Chateau-Thierry, thereby disrupting the enemy's communications between his newly established base and the peak of his salient. Thus exposed to an enveloping movement that might have surrounded large numbers, there was nothing left for the Germans to do but to withdraw.

The Allied army commander, who directed the Americans on that glorious day, was General Joseph Mangin. His opinion of the immortal part played on that day by those two American divisions may be seen in the following order which he caused to be published:

_Officers, Noncommissioned Officers, and Soldiers of the American Army_:

Shoulder to shoulder with your French comrades, you threw yourselves into the counter-offensive begun on July 18th. You ran to it as if going to a feast. Your magnificent dash upset and surprised the enemy, and your indomitable tenacity stopped counter attacks by his fresh divisions. You have shown yourselves to be worthy sons of your great country and have gained the admiration of your brothers in arms.

Ninety-one cannon, 7,200 prisoners, immense booty, and ten kilometres of reconquered territory are your share of the trophies of this victory. Besides this, you have acquired a feeling of your superiority over the barbarian enemy against whom the children of liberty are fighting. To attack him is to vanquish him.

American comrades, I am grateful to you for the blood you generously spilled on the soil of my country. I am proud of having commanded you during such splendid days and to have fought with you for the deliverance of the world.

The Germans began backing off the Marne. From that day on, their movement to date has continued backward. It began July 18th. Two American Divisions played glorious parts in the crisis. It was their day. It was America's day. It was the turn of the tide.

CHAPTER XX

THE DAWN OF VICTORY

The waited hour had come. The forced retreat of the German hordes had begun. Hard on their heels, the American lines started their northward push, backing the Boche off the Marne.

On the morning of July 21st I rode into Chateau-Thierry with the first American soldiers to enter the town. The Germans had evacuated hurriedly. Chateau-Thierry was reoccupied jointly by our forces and those of the French.

Here was the grave of German hopes. Insolent, imperialistic longings for the great prize, Paris, ended here. The dream of the Kultur conquest of the world had become a nightmare of horrible realisation that America was in the war. Pompously flaunted strategy crumpled at historic Chateau-Thierry.

That day of the occupation, the wrecked city was comparatively quiet.

Only an occasional German sh.e.l.l--a final parting spite sh.e.l.l--whined disconsolately overhead and landed in a cloud of dust and debris in some vacant ruin that had once been a home.

For seven long weeks the enemy had been in occupation of that part of the city on the north bank of the river. Now the streets were littered with debris. Although the walls of most of the buildings seemed to be in good shape, the scene was one of utter devastation.

The Germans had built barricades across the streets--particularly the streets that led down to the river--because it was those streets that were swept with the terrific fire of American machine guns. At the intersections of those streets the Germans under cover of night had taken up the cobblestones and built parapets to protect them from the hail of lead.

Wrecked furniture was hip deep on the Rue Carnot. Along the north bank of the river on the Quai de la Poterne and the Promenade de la Levee, the invader had left his characteristic mark. Shop after shop had been looted of its contents and the fronts of the pretty sidewalk cafes along this business thoroughfare had been reduced to sh.e.l.ls of their former selves.

Not a single living being was in sight as we marched in. Some of the old townsfolk and some young children had remained but they were still under cover. Among these French people who had lived for seven weeks through the h.e.l.l of battle that had raged about the town, was Madame de Prey, who was eighty-seven years old. To her, home meant more than life. She had spent the time in her cellar, caring for German wounded.

The town had been systematically pillaged. The German soldiers had looted from the shops much material which they had made up into packages to be mailed back to home folks in the Fatherland. The church, strangely enough, was picked out as a depository for their larcenies. Nothing from the robes of the priests down to the copper faucet of a water pipe had escaped their greed.

The advancing Americans did not linger in the town--save for small squads of engineers that busied themselves with the removal of the street obstructions and the supply organisations that perfected communication for the advancing lines. These Americans were Yankees all--they comprised the 26th U. S. Division, representing the National Guard of New England.

Our lines kept pus.h.i.+ng to the north. The Germans continued their withdrawal and the Allied necessity was to keep contact with them. This, the Yankee Division succeeded in doing. The first obstacle encountered to the north of Chateau-Thierry was the stand that the Germans made at the town of Epieds.

On July 23rd, our infantry had proceeded up a ravine that paralleled the road into Epieds. German machine guns placed on the hills about the village, swept them with a terrible fire. Our men succeeded in reaching the village, but the Germans responded with such a terrific downpour of sh.e.l.l that our weakened ranks were forced to withdraw and the Germans re-entered the town.

On the following day we renewed the attack with the advantage of positions which we had won during the night in the Bois de Trugny and the Bois de Chatelet. We advanced from three sides and forced the Germans to evacuate. Trugny, the small village on the edge of the woods, was the scene of more b.l.o.o.d.y fighting which resulted in our favour.

Further north of Epieds, the Germans having entrenched themselves along the roadway, had fortified the same with a number of machine guns which commanded the flat terrain in such a way as to make a frontal attack by infantry waves most costly. The security of the Germans in this position received a severe shock when ten light automobiles, each one mounting one or two machine guns, started up the road toward the enemy, firing as they sped. It was something new. The Germans wanted to surrender, but the speed of the cars obviated such a possibility. So the enemy fled before our gasoline cavalry.

The Germans were withdrawing across the river Ourcq, whose valley is parallel to that of the Marne and just to the north. The enemy's intentions of making a stand here were frustrated by violent attacks, which succeeded in carrying our forces into positions on the north side of the Ourcq. These engagements straightened out the Allied line from the Ourcq on the west to Fere-en-Tardenois on the east, which had been taken the same day by French and American troops.

By this time the German withdrawal was becoming speedier. Such strong pressure was maintained by our men against the enemy's rear guards that hundreds of tons of German ammunition had to be abandoned and fell into our hands. Still the retreat bore no evidences of a rout.

The enemy retired in orderly fas.h.i.+on. He bitterly contested every foot of ground he was forced to give. The American troops engaged in those actions had to fight hard for every advance. The German backed out of the Marne salient as a Western "bad man" would back out of a saloon with an automatic pistol in each hand.

Those charges that our men made across the muddy flats of the Ourcq deserve a place in the martial history of America. They faced a veritable h.e.l.l of machine gun fire. They went through barrages of shrapnel and high explosive sh.e.l.l. They invaded small forests that the enemy had flooded with poison gas. No specific objectives were a.s.signed.

The princ.i.p.al order was "Up and at 'em" and this was reinforced by every man's determination to keep the enemy on the run now that they had been started.

Even the enemy's advantage of high positions north of the river failed to hold back the men from New York, from Iowa, Alabama, Ohio, Illinois, Minnesota and Indiana, who had relieved the hard fighting Yankees. These new American organisations went up against fresh German divisions that had been left behind with orders to hold at all cost. But nothing the enemy could do could prevent our crossing of the Ourcq.

On July 30th the fighting had become most intense in character. The fact that the town of Sergy was captured, lost and recaptured nine times within twenty-four hours, is some criterion of the bitterness of the struggle. This performance of our men can be better understood when it is stated that the enemy opposing them there consisted of two fresh divisions of the Kaiser's finest--his Prussian Guard.

After that engagement with our forces, the Fourth Prussian Guard Division went into an enforced retirement. When our men captured Sergy the last time, they did so in sufficient strength to withhold it against repeated fierce counter attacks by a Bavarian Guard division that had replaced the wearied Prussians.

But before the crack Guard Division was withdrawn from the line, it had suffered terrible losses at our hands. Several prisoners captured said that their company had gone into the fight one hundred and fifty strong and only seven had survived. That seven were captured by our men in hand to hand fighting.

While our engineer forces repaired the roads and constructed bridges in the wake of our advancing lines, the enemy brought to that part of the front new squadrons of air fighters which were sent over our lines for the purpose of observation and interference with communications. They continually bombed our supply depots and ammunition dumps.

After the crossing of the Ourcq the American advance reached the next German line of resistance, which rested on two terminal strongholds. One was in the Foret de Nesles and the other was in the Bois de Meuniere.

The fighting about these two strong points was particularly fierce. In the Bois de Meuniere and around the town of Cierges, the German resistance was most determined. About three hundred Jaegers held Hill 200, which was located in the centre of Cierges Forest, just to the south of the village of the same name. They were well provided with machine guns and ammunition. They were under explicit orders to hold and they did.

Our men finally captured the position at the point of the bayonet. Most of its defenders fought to the death. The capture of the hill was the signal for a renewal of our attacks against the seemingly impregnable Meuniere woods. Six times our advancing waves reached the German positions in the southern edge of the woods and six times we were driven back.

There were some American Indians in the ranks of our units attacking there--there were lumber jacks and farmer boys and bookkeepers, and they made heroic rushes against terrific barriers of hidden machine guns. But after a day of gallant fighting they had been unable to progress.

Our efforts had by no means been exhausted. The following night our artillery concentrated on the southern end of the woods and literally turned it into an inferno with high explosive sh.e.l.ls. Early in the morning we moved to the attack again. Two of the Kaiser's most reputable divisions, the 200th Jaegers and the 216th Reserve, occupied the wood.