Our Greatest Battle (The Meuse-Argonne). Frederick Palmer
lead to further disorganization.
Could our army have had reproduced for its edification the confusion of the battle of Bull Run or of Shiloh, it would have realized the purpose of all the painstaking drill, the monotonous and wearing discipline, which made the well-ordered movement possible. Its very deliberateness in maintaining the coördination of all its units gave it a majesty in its broad and mighty sweep, which was more like the sweep of a great river than the cataract rush of the small forces of the old days, which the public still continued to visualize as a charge. I thought of it too as in keeping with the organization of modern life, in the trains entering and leaving a great city station or the methodical processes of a vast manufacturing concern.
How did our men know whether or not they were keeping their schedule? Did they look at their watches as they counted their steps? They had a monitor at first in the rolling barrage, that curtain of fire which preceded them. This was their moving shield which the guns far in rear provided for their guidance as well as protection. If they came too close to the barrage, they were exposed no less than their enemies to death from its hail.
We may have a comparison in marching behind a road sprinkler, with orders to keep just out of reach of its spray, which will be obeyed if the spray consist of nitric acid instead of water. The more guns the stronger the shield. We could never have an excess of guns as Grant had at the outset of the Wilderness campaign, when he sent many batteries of the short-range pieces of those days to the rear for want of room on a narrow front in which to maneuver them. Cæsar applied the first barrage in France in his tactical use of the shields of his legions, who owed their success to systematic training no less than we in the Meuse-Argonne. His men had to carry their own shields; the modern soldier has enough to carry without carrying his.
Suspense was most taut, it was agonizing, as every soldier knows, in the waiting hours ticking away into waiting minutes before the charge. As the final minute approached, the veteran, as a connoisseur in death's symbols, might find assurance in the strength, and apprehension in the weakness, of the supporting barrage laid down on the enemy trenches. Those of our men who had not been in battle before could have no such prescience. They did know that when they left their trenches the full length of their bodies would be exposed. They would march, rifle in hand, without firing, while only the shield of the shells from friendly guns screaming over their heads—the greater the volume, the sweeter the music—could silence the fire of rifles and machine-guns which had them at merciless point-blank range. Instantly they climbed "over the top," anticipation became realization. One ceased to listen to his heart-beats. The emotion became that of action. Suspense became objective, merged in responsibility for every man in watching where he stepped as he moved toward his goal, and for every captain and lieutenant in directing his company or platoon.
The most careful maneuvering on fields at home was poor preparation for No Man's Land, which is like nothing else in the world except No Man's Land. Millions of soldiers know it through long watches over its dreary lifeless space, and more vividly through crossing it in a charge. For four years it had been the zone of death where no soldier from either side ventured except at night on patrol or in a raid or general attack. All this time shells had been pummeling it. The rims of craters, of sizes varying with the calibers of the shells, joined each other; old craters had been partly filled by later bursts. This continued pestling of the soil with nothing to press it down but the rain made it the more spongy in wet weather and the looser in dry weather. The heads of the men bobbed as they advanced, stepping in and out of craters, and wove in and out as they passed around craters. The rims often gave way with their weight, or they slipped on the dew-moist weeds that fringed them or upon some "dud" shell hidden in the weeds, as their attention was diverted from the ground under foot by the burst of an enemy shell or of one from their own guns which fell dangerously short.
As our artillery, in order to preserve the element of surprise, had not "registered" with practice shots, it was firing strictly by the map; and, though its accuracy was wonderful, inexperienced gunners manning guns which had not had the allowances for error recently tabulated, were bound, in some cases, to send their shells wide of the mark. The big calibers might fail to destroy "strong points" that held machine-gun nests, or a battery of seventy-fives fail to cut the section of wire which was its assignment. For these mistakes the infantry must suffer. It is the infantry which always pays the price in blood for all mistakes; and the transfer of an officer to Blois or the demotion of a general officer would not bring back their dead.
Their immediate concern, as that of every infantryman had been in every charge throughout the war, as they crossed No Man's Land, was the wire entanglements. All the original wire, four years' exposure to the weather making its rusty barbs the more threatening, was still there in some form or other, though it had been ruptured or further twisted by previous bombardments whose craters only added to the difficulties of passage. Breaks had been filled by new wire, which rather supplemented the old than took its place. Additional stretches had been put out at intervals to reinforce the defense of vital points. A half-dozen strands will halt a charge in its tracks; here was a close-woven skein, from three and four to twenty yards in depth. Where the depth was greatest, it was most likely to have a continuous uncut stretch which the enemy had marked as a target for fire upon the arrested attackers.
According to photographs of selected areas, which show a few bits of wire sticking out of a choppy sea of fresh earth, every square yard of which has been lashed by shell-fire, it would seem that artillery was accustomed to do as thorough mowing as a reaper in a field of grain. Even with treble our volume of artillery fire, taking treble the length of time of our bombardment, and with every shell perfectly accurate on its target, we could hardly have accomplished any such blessed result. The best that could be expected was that lanes would be opened at frequent intervals.
A break in the uniformity of advance appeared at once when one platoon or company had a clear space on its front while its neighbors had not. Suppose that for five hundred yards of distance the guns had completely failed and for five hundred yards on either side they had succeeded: then you had two exposed flanks sweeping forward into the trenches beyond, possibly against the enfilade fire of machine-gun points especially established for this opportunity.
Where the guns had not done the work for them the men must do it themselves. If they had the torpedoes at the end of long sticks, resembling exaggerated skyrockets, they might thrust these into the meshes and explode them to gain the destructive effect of shell-bursts. If the artillery had made some breaks, they might, in their impetuosity to keep up with the rest of the line, try to pick their way. What young soldiers can accomplish in this respect is past all comprehension by elders who try to follow in their steps. The first wonder is how they were able to go through at all, and the second is how they had any flesh on their leg-bones after they had gone through. Their main reliance was on the hand wire-cutters, which had not been improved since Cuba and South Africa.
All the while that the soldier was snipping the strands and bending them back as he crawled forward, he was usually too near the trench to have any protection from the barrage, while from the trench he was a full-size target at short range. War offers no more diabolical suspense than to this prostrate soldier in his patient groveling effort, when machine-gun fire is turned in his direction. He is in the position of a man lashed to a bulls-eye. Bullets sing as they cut strands of wire around him. He feels a moist warm spot on his leg or arm and knows that he is hit. Perhaps he tries to apply the dressing to the wound; but more likely he refuses to expose himself by any movement which will attract the gunner's attention. He may be hit again and again before the inevitable final bullet brings the last of his ghastly counted seconds of existence. The bones of men who were killed in this way—"hung up" in the wire—are all along the wire of the old trench line from Switzerland to Flanders. Or perhaps, when that patient wire-cutter has taken death for granted, the machine-gun suddenly diverts its spray to other targets, and he is safe.
Such was the nature of the barrier of entanglements which had to be conquered by these young divisions of ours before they ever began fighting. Beyond its fiendish and elaborate skeins was a trench system equally elaborate in all its appointments for the real resistance. German officers and soldiers in occupation had taken all the interest in improvements, and the more as it concerned the safety of their own