Our Greatest Battle (The Meuse-Argonne). Frederick Palmer
"different from any other and a lot worse." We had to cross brooks and swamps as an incident to conquering the other features of the landscape. If we missed any kind of fighting on the first day of the battle, it was in store for us in the later stages.
Oh, that word liaison! That linking up of the units of the attack in proper coördination! Is there any man of the combat divisions who does not know its meaning or who wants to hear it again? It never came into slang at home in the same way as camouflage; but it is a thousand times more suggestive of the actualities of war. Liaison between the French and the American armies, between corps, divisions, brigades, regiments, battalions, companies, platoons, squads, and individual soldiers. Liaison between infantry and artillery and trench mortars and planes and tanks! If you did not have it, why, the adjoining commander might be as much to blame as you, at least, and you could say that he was altogether to blame. It may be said that the history of the war will be written in terms of positions taken, and of positions which were not taken because coöperating units failed to keep their liaison. They were not up. When I mention that there were difficulties of liaison in writing of any division, I am not saying who was at fault, as no one person was, perhaps, more than another.
Other generals might be promoted and demoted, but General Liaison remained the supreme tactician. "Establishing liaison" was fraught with more heartaches and brain-aches than any other military detail. Men prowled through the night in gas-masks under sniping rifle and machine-gun fire and artillery fire, to ascertain if the unit supposed to be on their flank was there: perhaps to receive a greeting from an officer hugging a fox-hole, "Why aren't you fellows keeping up with us?"
Liaison was most difficult in woods, though the fighting was not necessarily always the severest there. Men naturally took to the paths instantly they advanced into woods, and these, if they were not stopped by machine-gun fire, advanced ahead of those in the deep underbrush. A stretch of unseen wire might arrest a part of the line, without the men in liaison on the right and left, as they plunged through the thickets, knowing that it had been stopped. The sheer business of keeping any kind of formation was distracting enough, without the sudden bursts of machine-gun fire, which might be so powerful that there was nothing to do except to take cover and consider a plan for silencing or capturing the gun. Unless the casualties were so serious that it was suicidal not to halt and mark out a plan for capturing the nest, and as advancing was a sure way of locating machine-guns and a prompt way of overwhelming them, we swept on in the spirit of our instructions and impatience. Captured machine-guns littered the paths of our battalions, in tribute to the effect of our impetuous rush upon gunners who continued to forget their orders to stand to the death when they saw the tidal wave of our soldiers about to swamp them.
As the day wore on and the enemy began to recover from the shock of the surprise of our initial onset, we encountered an increasing volume and fury of machine-gun fire from hill to hill across valleys, sweeping down ravines, plunging from crests and by indirect aim over crests, from village houses and from both directions where village streets crossed. At critical points it was supported by concentrations of shell-fire. Along that road, at the edge of this patch of woods, along that stretch of river bottom, the German's artillery laid down barrages over a space already swept by bullets, to hold positions by which he set as much store in his plans as we in ours.
"Why aren't you getting on?" division commanders asked, or tried to ask—as communication did not always permit the message to arrive promptly—when the pencilings on the map were not keeping up to the schedule of progress toward the objectives. It was an easy question; the answer might be in the lack of resolution of a regimental or battalion commander, in the character of the resistance to his troops, or in their disorganization under new and severe trials. After further ineffectual efforts the battalion and regimental commanders might say that progress was impossible without reserves.
Should the division commander send them? Expending his reserves on the first day of a long battle might place him in a dangerous position in face of a later and graver emergency; but he had the word of a subordinate that they were necessary. Had that subordinate in his first serious engagement become too readily discouraged? What was the extent of his losses? They were a criterion for judging his balance of assets for continuing the attacks, though they did not include the exhaustion of the men, their mood of the moment, or the disruption of liaison of their units.
The division commander might sit rigid with the front of Jove, which he thought was the chief item of the military formula, and say: "I want no excuses. Take the position!" Or he might keep on pressing in his reserves, in the determination that his division would be up on time; for Corps Headquarters were depending on him. The pencilings moving toward the corps objective were his record in the battle. If the pencilings were in a V-shape, that was bad. It meant that some of his elements were in a salient, in danger of being "squeezed."
Sometimes the pencilings were farther advanced than the troops. The wish being father to the thought, observers who saw a charge entering a woods took it for granted that it would go through the woods. Aviators sometimes mistook German soldiers in movement for our own; again they misread the maps, and placed our troops on a ridge ahead of their actual position. Company leaders might make the same mistake. The incentive to "get there" involved eagerness to send back word that you were arriving. A little group of gallant men who pushed through a wood or gained a crest might have been swept back by machine-gun fire by the time their proud report had reached division headquarters. Instead of having commanding ground as a "jumping-off place" for the next stage of advance, they might be hugging the reverse slope, exposed to fire from three sides immediately they showed themselves.
Regular as well as reserve officers who had never before been in action were to prove again that no amount of study of the theory of war, invaluable as it is, may teach a man how to keep his head in handling a thousand or three thousand men under fire. West Point cadet drill, Philippine jungle and "paddy" dikes, Leavenworth staff school, army post routine, and border service had no precedent of experience for the problems of maneuver which they now had to solve. It was all very well to say that the men were all right; but another thing was keeping your men together. I saw a regular colonel violating, in a singular reaction to amateurishness, the simplest principle of organization—the same that keeps subordinates informed of the location of a business superior—by having no post of command where he or an adjutant could be found with orders or reports. Some colonels remained steadily at their headquarters, without absenting themselves for personal inspection in any emergency; others moved restlessly about the field, trying to apply to three thousand men the personal direction of a platoon commander. Every subordinate who witnessed such an exhibition by a superior was bound to lose confidence in the command. I am not thinking of a lack of physical bravery when I say that there were instances of colonels and brigadiers voicing pessimism in the presence of subordinates. They might have become good judges or good philosophers, but they were not meant by nature, at least in their lack of battle experience, to drive home an ambitious offensive movement. Others had too much blind initiative; they were the kind that would drive head downward at a stone wall. Others were amazingly cool, determined, and efficient. These the men would follow against any odds.
Being human, our men who symbolized the pencilings on the map had muscles and nerves which were subject to fatigue. They had no visualization of their goals. If they could have been shown a flag on a mountainside, which they must reach before they "knocked off" for the day, the incentive for keeping on would have been more directly applied. All they saw was the slope or woods ahead of them. Their knowledge of the battle plan was limited to their orders to keep on going. After nights when suspense and suppressed excitement had allowed them little sleep, they had been going all day from 5.30 in the morning—going through barbed wire and trenches, over uneven ground, as they fought their way not only under fire but under the strain of that wearing mental concentration of trying to remember and apply all they had learned in their training and in previous actions.
Physically, the task set for our troops had seemed almost superhuman. Many had taken enough steps to cover in a straight line twice the distance they had traveled. To the eye of a hurrying observer, these myriad figures, whether dashing toward a machine-gun nest, or ducking to avoid an outburst of fire, or coming wounded across the fields, had the attraction of the ardor and fearlessness