Mr. Wilson's War

by John Dos Passos

  Pétain went back gloomily to his train. Haig and his generals returned to their distracted headquarters. The staff officers felt something had been put over on their chief. Being forced under French command was the price he had to pay for reinforcements.

  The French were rubbing their hands. The air was sharp. It was two and they were accustomed to their déjeuner at twelve. All present confessed to a good appetite. The President of the Republic, and General Foch and Monsieur Clemenceau and Monsieur Loucheur and their aides and secretaries walked around the corner to a highly recommended little country restaurant, L’Hôtel des Quatre Frères Aymon, where a hangup luncheon had been ordered for them.

  As they sat down to table Clemenceau and Foch, who never agreed for more than a few minutes at a time, couldn’t help a slight falling out. “Well,” growled the Tiger glaring at Foch as he tucked his napkin under his chin, “you’ve got the position you wanted so much.”

  Foch snapped back, “You give me a lost battle and ask me to win it … I consent and you think you are making me a present. I am disregarding my own interest when I accept.”

  The others intervened. Like good Frenchmen they turned their attention to the food and the wine. According to Mordacq they were in as much of a glow as if they had won a victory over the Germans. He remembered the luncheon as being distinctly gay.

  General Pershing Presses His Point

  Newton D. Baker, mouselike as usual under a derby hat that looked too large for him, was in Europe during these days of tension. He had come, he explained modestly to Pershing and Bliss, to get the feel of the war. He was getting it. Long faces in London. Long faces in Paris. Refugees in the railroad stations. Airraid sirens wailing every moonlight night. The crunch of bombs in the distance. In Paris, during the Good Friday service, a shell from Big Bertha exploded in the church of St. Gervais. The Gothic vault fell. A hundred and fifty people, mostly women and children, were killed or badly hurt.

  Wherever the Secretary of War went he was besieged with requests for American troops. The Italians wanted them. The French wanted them. The British wanted them so badly they were at last willing to forego a certain amount of lucrative commercial trade and to allot more shipping to overseas transport; but only for infantry and machinegunners, they insisted. None of the Allies wanted an independent American army; what they wanted was American cannonfodder.

  Baker’s report to Pershing was that the President was wavering on the question. Wilson had become convinced that everything must be sacrificed for unity of command. His cables strongly backed the appointment of Foch. Well and good, said Pershing, he was willing to serve under Foch, but they must never give up the plan for a separate American army.

  Out of a total strength of just under three hundred and twenty thousand men under his command in the A.E.F. Pershing had already offered his 1st Division to Pétain. Now the 2nd, 26th and 42nd divisions were ready for service. Another soon would be.

  After a long discussion at his Paris office with General Bliss and Secretary Baker on the bearing of the decision at Doullens, which they all applauded, on American plans, Pershing decided that the moment had come formally to put his troops at Foch’s disposition. After lunch he set out with General Bliss to find Foch, who was reputed to be setting headquarters up in a little hillside town between Compiègne and Beauvais, called Clermont de l’Oise.

  It was encouraging to the Americans to find the roads west of Paris encumbered by motor trucks loaded with supplies and troops heading towards the front. This confirmed the report that Foch was already filling the gap east of Amiens with French divisions. When they reached Clermont they drove around the town for a while before they could find anybody who would admit any knowledge of General Foch’s whereabouts. At last Pershing’s interpreter, Captain de Marenches, uncovered a friend at French Third Army Headquarters who detailed a poilu to guide them. He directed Pershing’s chauffeur out through the truckgardens on the edges of town and down an avenue of tall poplars to a small picturesque farmhouse.

  While they waited in the walled garden to be admitted, they admired the flowering shrubs. The place had a delicious air of quiet and seclusion. There was some pale spring sunshine. Leaving Bliss to admire a cherry-tree in bloom in the middle of the lawn Pershing was ushered into the house. He had announced he wanted a private interview.

  Pershing found Clemenceau, Loucheur and Generals Pétain and Foch deep in the study of a map laid out on the diningroom table. The French were counterattacking near Montdidier. Since the house was small, when Pershing repeated that he wanted to speak with Foch alone, the others went outside to admire the cherrytree.

  “I have come to offer our American troops for the present battle,” Pershing said. “… Artillery, infantry, aviation. Everything we have is yours. Dispose of it as you will … I have come especially to tell you that the American people will be proud to take part in the greatest battle in history.”

  Feeling that the occasion merited the effort, General Pershing addressed General Foch in French.

  No man to underplay a dramatic moment, Foch seized Pershing’s arm and rushed him out of the house to where the others were standing by the cherrytree. “Repeat what you said.” Foch was radiant.

  General Pershing repeated his carefully rehearsed speech with even greater emphasis. His aide, General Boyd, told him afterwards that his French gushed out with unaccustomed fluency under the pressure of the great moment.

  “We are here to be killed,” blurted out General Bliss in English. “How do you want to use us?”

  Pétain remarked dryly that he had already decided that with General Pershing. A spot had been picked where the American troops should go into the lines. Later Foch took credit for this decision. “I could only reply to their perfect comradeship,” he wrote, “by at once placing the First American Division facing Montdidier in the very center of the German attack.”

  Pershing’s chivalrous gesture was made much of in the French press. He was invited to accompany Bliss to the next meeting of the Supreme War Council, hurriedly called for April 3 at the town hall at Beauvais. The British were late again, so the American generals and their aides had leisure to admire the huge old cathedral left unfinished so many centuries ago. When they entered the town hall they found a certain assurance among the delegates. The German drive was petering out. Amiens was no longer in danger. The boche had outrun his supply. Foch’s selfconfidence was catching. In the conference room Lloyd George, with his mane of white hair and his queasy smile, was very much in evidence.

  As soon as Clemenceau called the meeting to order Foch rose to explain that now that the front was stabilized his instructions to coordinate the movements of the armies had been complied with. He wanted more specific powers. Lloyd George pointed out that after three years of war nothing had been accomplished … What had just happened, he added nervously, had stirred the British people very much and it mustn’t be allowed to happen again or the people would start asking questions and somebody would be called to account. He threw the ball to the Americans.

  General Bliss read out the Doullens resolution and said that Foch should be given broader powers. Pershing came out flatfootedly for a supreme commander and declared that commander should be Foch.

  Lloyd George strode across the room to where Pershing was sitting and grabbed him by the hand. “I agree fully with General Pershing.”

  When Haig’s turn came to speak he said that there had been unity of command right along. He saw no need for anything more.

  It was decided to draft a resolution. Pershing pointed out when the draft was submitted to him that there was no mention of an American army.

  Pétain said there wasn’t such a thing. The American units were either in training or amalgamated with the British or the French.

  Pershing stood his ground. He was not an eloquent man. He tended to start with “er er er” when he spoke. He managed to get across his message that if there wasn’t an American army yet there damn soon would be. The res
olution he subsequently approved granted Foch complete strategic direction of the Allied armies, but left tactical direction of the British, French and American forces in the hands of their national commanders. To mollify Haig a clause was added allowing these commanders to appeal to their home governments if in their opinion Foch’s instructions placed their armies in danger.

  Foch had to be satisfied with a qualified command, but Pershing had won his point; an American army was included on a par with the French and British.

  Operation “Georgette”

  It was the boche who conferred the supreme command on Foch. Hardly a week had elapsed after the conference at Beauvais, when, just as the various Allied headquarters were getting their breath and settling back into the old routine with the assurance that things were quieting down, on April 9 Ludendorff made his next move. Prince Rupert of Bavaria’s group of armies attacked the British lines again, this time in the valley of the Lys south of Ypres.

  This was operation “St. George,” reduced in scope by Ludendorff’s fear of risking too much of his reserve to the point where staff officers referred to it scornfully as operation “Georgette.” The tactics were the same as in the first drive. The German command picked the moment when a Portuguese division that had been suffering miseries from insufficient clothing and poor supplies in the trenches was slated for relief. Seven carefully trained assault divisions converged in a surprise attack while the relief was being carried out. The Portuguese broke and ran. The relieving brigades became entangled in the rout. The thinly held British lines on either side melted away.

  The success was greater than Ludendorff had dared hope. The movement he intended as a diversion to draw Allied reserves from his spearhead at Montdidier became a major offensive. On April 11 the British pulled out of Armentières, long famous in drunken singing and latrine talk as a rest center for British Tommies. The situation became so desperate that Haig issued the order: “Every position must be held to the last man. There must be no retirement. With our backs to the Wall, and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight to the end.”

  Even so the retreat continued. All the ground so many British and Canadian lives were squandered to regain in front of Ypres was lost. As the spring had been unusually dry the German divisions were able to work their way across the swampy valley of the Lys to the high ground to the westward. For a while it looked as if the British armies would be driven back on Boulogne and Calais.

  In spite of daily appeals to Pétain and Foch, French reinforcements were slow in arriving. When they did appear their chief feat of arms was to help the British lose their most important position on Mount Kemmel to the southwest of Ypres. Still the British managed to hold Ypres itself and the essential railroad center of Hazebrouck.

  By the end of April the British could count around three hundred thousand casualties, dead, wounded and prisoners, since March 21. The German losses were almost as heavy. Ludendorff had extended his lines in two huge salients, but in each case he had fallen short of his strategic objective, which had been Amiens in the first offensive and Hazebrouck in the second. Mordacq had been assuring Clemenceau that this would happen. “Les boches n’ont pas le cran,” he said. The Germans haven’t the gall.

  Foch was now firmly in the saddle. Brought up from boyhood in the theory of toujours l’offensif he was collecting the mass of manoeuvre he’d preached at the Ecole de Guerre and biding his time for a counterstroke. He retained his confident swagger. When British officers begged him to send more troops to their assistance he consistently refused. “C’est la bataille du nord,” he would say with a shrug of his shoulders.

  As the German pressure slackened, the French and British began to become insistent again that American units should be incorporated in their own armies as fast as they landed. At the conference of the Supreme War Council at Abbeville they gave Pershing a bad quarter of an hour.

  The plausible Lord Reading had been working on President Wilson in Washington and had, so it seemed, brought him around to the belief that the outcome of the war depended on merging the identity of the American troops in the British and French forces. Lloyd George had in his hands a message from the White House acquiescing in the British plan to bring over only American infantry and American machinegunners instead of complete divisions. Lloyd George and Lord Milner, seconded by Clemenceau and Foch, started on Pershing and Bliss with arguments in favor of this plan as soon as they showed their faces in the conference room. Bliss had little stomach for debate, but Pershing held his ground.

  He was fond of reminding the French that when they’d sent Rochambeau overseas to serve with the Americans in the Revolutionary War, it had been with the understanding that he would have a separate command, but this time he answered in his halting way, wearing his grimmest poker face, that since it looked as if the American Army was going to have to bear the brunt of the war from now on it was essential for all concerned that the Americans should fight the way they’d fight best, and that was as a separate unit. The debate became so acrimonious that Clemenceau adjourned the conference, saying that Foch and Milner and Pershing had better argue the matter out in private.

  As soon as they were alone in a small room Foch turned on Pershing and asked in his rasping voice, “You are willing to risk our being driven back to the Loire?” Pershing answered yes it was a risk that had to be taken. They argued so long that the three prime ministers became impatient and rapped on the door. Milner went to open the door and Pershing heard him whisper to Lloyd George, “You can’t budge him an inch.”

  Pershing rose to his feet. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I have thought this program over very carefully and I will not be coerced.”

  In the end he agreed to follow the British plan for two months but no longer. He overcame Italian opposition by promising Orlando to send a complete American regiment to Italy. On the eventual autonomy of the A.E.F. he would not yield an inch. “We parted with smiles,” wrote Clemenceau, “that on both sides concealed gnashings of teeth.”

  After all this demand for infantry General Pershing was somewhat amazed, upon arriving back at his headquarters at Chaumont, to receive a letter from Marshal Haig asking for ten thousand artillerymen. Pershing answered politely that the British had not yet furnished the howitzers they had promised. If Haig would furnish the guns and the instructors he would man six batteries for him. Haig withdrew his request.

  “A year a month a week and a day …”

  It was agreed that three more American divisions should immediately be added to the three already holding quiet sectors and that the 1st Division should be placed under orders of the VI Corps of the First French Army in front of Montdidier. To carry out this arrangement the 1st was relieved on the St. Mihiel salient by the 26th or Yankee Division under General Edwards. In the confusion that was spreading over the rear of the French armies as a result of the German drives, the conduct of the relief became thoroughly snarled up. As if to prove that it wasn’t only between allies that disagreements flourished, the staffs of the two American divisions fell out among themselves. Valuable time was taken up at Chaumont sorting out charges and countercharges until Pershing called up both divisional commanders and told them sharply to drop it.

  The boche added to the confusion by constant shelling and a crippling gas attack. The Germans seemed bound to make the front as hot as they could for their new enemy. The New Englanders of the 26th Division had hardly learned to find their way through the labyrinth of old trenches that led to an advanced post in the ruins of the village of Seicheprey when the German artillery closed down on them with a box barrage which was followed by a raid in overwhelming force.

  The garrison of Seicheprey was wiped out. When finally dislodged by a counterattack, in which the adjoining French division had to be called on for help, the boche carried off a hundred and eightyseven prisoners, including five officers. The casualties were heavy all around. The German radio exulted in the defeat of the Yankees and a corresponding gloom f
illed Allied headquarters.

  A year, a month, a week and a day after the declaration of war the Americans scored their first victory.

  Between April 7 and April 16 the 1st Division went through an intensive course in training in open warfare in a hilly region sprinkled with old Norman keeps around Gisors to the northwest of Paris. Pershing wanted to shake loose any trench warfare habits the men might have picked up from associating with the French in the eastern sectors. Then in three days the division was marched seventyfive kilometers up into the rear of the Sixth French Army. The night of the twentysecond the advanced brigade relieved the French division which was holding on by its eyelashes in front of the village of Cantigny.

  It was a springtime landscape of long gently sloping green hills. The tileroofed houses of Cantigny clustered prettily around its chateau on the slope of a hill that hid the strategically important valley beyond, where a main line of railroad ran through Montdidier in the direction of Paris. Since the French had only fallen back into that region three weeks before they had not had time to construct their usual elaborate system of entrenchments and dugouts. The front was a line of occupied shellholes running through a wheat field. It wasn’t a sector, the defensiveminded French officers told the Americans, but something that might be made into a sector.

  Cantigny and the ridge behind it dominated the countryside. Its possession was essential for the counterattack Pétain’s headquarters was planning in the direction of Montdidier. The French had recaptured Cantigny twice and had twice been driven out. The shallow valleys and the plain in front of the village was under continual shelling by the wellplaced German artillery. Ravines and patches of woodland were continually saturated with poison gas. The first weeks were spent by the Americans in counterbattery fire and in digging down into the soft chalk subsoil. The flimsy houses of the region were no protection at all. Lathe and mud-plaster walls went up in dust with every shell’s concussion. Headquarters and posts of command had to be established in the wine cellars and storage caves which luckily abounded under every farmhouse.