Mr. Wilson's War

by John Dos Passos

  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 Fighting Engineers

  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.

  Tactical 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.

  A Plan for the Knockout

  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.

  The Sixth Engineers

  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 straggle
rs 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.