The Last Million: How They Invaded France—and England. Ian Hay
permit Hindenburg and myself to remain here a few moments longer, while you unfold it? We need not detain His Imperial Highness the Crown Prince. He is the man of Action: his task will come later. (For Heaven’s sake, Von Hertling, get him out of here, or our two military geniuses will be at loggerheads in five minutes!)
“… And now, Majesty, you suggest—? … That is a superb plan; but it appears to me—I mean, to Hindenburg—that you—we—are rating one of the nations opposed to us too lightly. … Yes, Your Majesty, I know you are going to stand no nonsense from them after the War—in fact, you warned their Ambassador, most properly, if I may say so, to that effect—but would it not be a good move, just as a preliminary, to stand no nonsense from them during the War? … Too far away? They can’t get over? Well—here are the approximate numbers of the American troops already in France. And there are a lot of them in England too. … Rather surprising? Yes. Indeed, quite a creditable feat for an unwarlike nation. I shall show these figures to Von Capelle: it will justify what I said about his submarines: in fact, it will annoy him extremely. And there are more coming. They are pouring over faster and faster. I shall tell him that too. … But the Americans have had no experience of intensive warfare? And they have fallen behind with their constructive programme—aeroplanes and artillery? Quite so. And, therefore, taking these facts into consideration, I—Hindenburg—Your Majesty will doubtless decide that our only chance is to concentrate in overwhelming strength, here and now, against one of the two enemy forces at present opposed to us, and destroy that force in detail before the Americans can throw any considerable body of troops into the line. … Expensive? Undoubtedly. … No one has ever succeeded during this War in breaking a properly organized trenchline? Agreed; but only because no one has yet been able or willing to pay the necessary price. The British might have done it on the Somme, but Haig was too squeamish about the lives of his men. British generals are handicapped in their military dispositions by a public opinion which happily does not exist in our enlightened Fatherland. I—Hin—Your Majesty can afford to do it. With all these unemployed Divisions from the Russian Front, we can go to the limit in the matter of casualties. … How many? Well, I think we can afford to lose a million men—say a million. … Yes, indeed, Majesty, your heart must bleed at the prospect; but after all, it is for the ultimate good of Humanity. … ‘One cannot make omelettes without breaking eggs?’ Admirable! Your Majesty’s felicity of phrase shows no falling off, I perceive. And yet the Americans talk of their Woodrow Wilson! Besides, it will be a million less to make trouble for Us after the War. Now, I suppose we are all agreed on the foe to be crushed? … The British? Naturally. The British! The time has come to drive them into the sea. Haig has recently extended his line twenty-eight miles—rather reluctantly, too. He has had to send troops to Italy, and he had heavy casualties in Belgium last autumn. Twenty-seven thousand killed, in fact. Still, without a supreme commander, you cannot blame the various Allied leaders for ‘passing the buck’ to one another, as the Yankees say. We can accumulate troops on his front—veterans from Russia—sufficient to outnumber him by at least three to one. That should suffice, if we stand by our decision about casualties. We will strike hard at his new positions, before his artillery has had time to register thoroughly. We will annihilate his front system of trenches by an intensive bombardment, while our new long-range gas-shells take his rest-billets by surprise and demoralize his Divisional and Corps Reserves. And I think, Majesty, that we have been a little punctilious about things like the Red Cross. After all, hospitals are a mere sentimental handicap to the efficient waging of war. Our new bombing aeroplanes might be instructed to deal faithfully with these, especially as the fool English have organized no preparation for their defence. Yes, I—we—Your Majesty will drive the whole pack of them into the sea this time! The French, isolated, can then be handled at leisure; and with Calais, Boulogne, and Havre in our hands the Americans will find that they have come too late. In fact, we can pick them off as they arrive. Thus it is that Your Majesty, like Cæsar and Napoleon, separates his enemies and then destroys them one by one. … Divide et Impera! Exactly! Most happily put, Your Majesty!”
And it was so—up to a point. Ludendorff’s plan was adopted. The necessary concentration of troops was effected with admirable secrecy and promptitude, and the parallel enterprises of sweeping the British Army into the sea and expending a million German lives were duly inaugurated. The latter undertaking succeeded better than the former: the line sagged and wavered; it was pushed here and there; but it never broke. Still, the strain was terrible, as news arrived of Monchy gone, Wytschaete gone, Messines gone, Kemmel gone; of Bapaume, Albert, Armentières, Bailleul, all gone—little hills and little towns all of them, but big and precious in certain unimportant eyes because of their associations. But the worst news never arrived. Instead, there came one morning the tale of an all-day assault by the Hun, delivered in mass from Meteren to Voormezeele, every wave of which had been broken and hurled back by impregnable rocks of French and British infantry. So disastrous was the failure of that tremendous lunge that the enemy drew off with his dead and his shame for several weeks, and the non-stop run to Calais was withdrawn from the time-table until further notice.
But the matter could not be left here. The Boche had laid a terrible stake on the table, and was bound to redeem it or perish. Plainly he would try again—maybe at some fresh point; but again. Already there were mutterings of trouble on the French Front. That he would break the line—the line which he had failed to break at Verdun in 1916, and at Ypres in 1914—seemed incredible; but he might succeed in straining it beyond the limits of perfect recovery; and if that happened, Ludendorff’s boast that America would arrive too late might be justified.
Hence the present Armada. It is only one of many. Transports have been crossing the Atlantic for months now, but never upon such a scale as this. There are thousands of soldiers in this convoy alone—men physically splendid, with nearly a year’s training behind them. They are going over—Over There—in answer to the call. Russia has stepped out of the scale, so America must step in at once if Prussianism is to kick the beam. Here they are—a sight to quicken the pulse—the New World hastening to redress the balance of the Old.
CHAPTER TWO
SHIP’S COMPANY
However, we have not reached our destination yet; which is just as well, for at present we are fully occupied in assimilating our new surroundings. To tell the truth, some of us have a good deal to assimilate. There is young Boone Cruttenden, for instance.
Little more than a year ago he was preparing to settle down in his ancestral home in Kentucky, there to prop the declining years of an octogenarian parent, Colonel Harvey Cruttenden, known in far-back Confederate days as one of General Sam Wheeler’s hardest-riding disciples. But President Wilson had upset the plans of Boone Cruttenden for all time, by inviting him and certain others to step forward and help make the World Safe for Democracy. Boone was one of the first to accept the invitation.
Several strenuous months at a training-camp of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps followed, and in due course he found himself, with a gilded metal strip on either shoulder, communicating his slender knowledge of the art of war to drafted persons who possessed no knowledge of the subject at all—just as thousands of other young men of the right spirit were doing all over the country, and just as thousands of other young men of similar spirit had been doing for more than three years in another country three thousand miles away.
“It was something fierce at first,” he confided to Miss Frances Lane, a United States Army nurse, proceeding, in company with ninety-nine others, to a Base Hospital in France.
By rights Miss Lane and her companions should not have been taking chances on a transport at all. She should have been crossing the Atlantic in a stately white-painted hospital ship, with the Red Cross emblazoned on its sides, immune by all the laws of God and Man from hostile attack. But the Red Cross makes the Hun see red. Therefore it is found safer in these days to adjust life-jackets over the splints and bandages of wounded men and send them across the water, together with the indomitable sisterhood which tends them, protected by something that makes