Shells exploded near. Two Mark V tanks a hundred and fifty yards on the right of him were knocked out. He saw clouds of smoke coming from the machines and the crews tumbling out of them. Men were dropping, among the infantry that tagged after. Lieutenant Arnold’s whippet passed behind a screen of trees along the side of a road.
“I ran along this belt until level with the battery when I turned full right and engaged the battery in the rear … The gunners some thirty in number abandoned their guns and tried to get away. Gunner Ribbans and I accounted for the whole lot. I cruised forward making a detour to the left and shot a number of the enemy who appeared to be demoralized and were moving about the country in all directions.”
He advanced through a railroad siding and found Australian infantrymen occupying a sunken road beyond the battery he’d knocked out. After asking their lieutenant if they needed any help he proceeded in an easterly direction along the railway embankment passing two British cavalry patrols which were taking punishment from a group of Germans in a wheatfield. He advanced on the Huns, scattered them and then proceeded along the railroad tracks, noting that a burning train was being towed away by its engine. He was searching for a spot marked on his map as a German cantonment.
“Many enemy were visible packing kits and others retiring. On our opening fire on the nearest many others appeared from huts making for the end of the valley, their object being to get over the embankment and so out of our sight. We accounted for many of these.”
Then he cruised across country firing at retreating files of enemy infantry. As he was well ahead of his supporting troops the Musical Box was taking a lot of machinegun and rifle fire. Nine tins of gasoline for refueling carried on the roof of the tank were riddled. Gasoline dripped down over the cab.
“The fumes and the heat of the engine”—Lieut. Arnold noted that he had been in action for nine hours by this time—“made it necessary to breathe through the mouthpiece of the box respirator.”
He shot up an airfield. He knocked out a truck crossing a bridge. He crossed the railway line and fired into a convoy of horsedrawn wagons with canvas tops. By this time he was under intense machinegun fire.
“The left hand port cover was shot away. Fumes and heat were very bad.” Lieutenant Arnold was shouting to his driver to turn and discontinue the action when there were two heavy concussions and the cab burst into flames.
“Carney and Ribbans got to the door and collapsed. I was almost overcome but managed to get the door open and fell out onto the ground and was able to drag out the other two men. Burning petrol was running on to the ground where we were lying. The fresh air revived us and we all got up and made a short rush to get away from the burning petrol. We were all on fire. In this rush Carney was shot in the stomach and killed. We rolled over and over to try to extinguish the flames. I saw numbers of the enemy approaching from all around. The first arrival came for me with rifle and bayonet. I got hold of this and the point of the bayonet entered my right forearm. The second man struck at my head with the butt end of his rifle, hit my shoulder and neck and knocked me down. When I came to there were dozens all around me, and anyone who could reach me did so and I was well kicked: they were furious.”
After a number of interrogations and a certain amount of face slapping Lieutenant Arnold was taken to a fieldhospital where he was given an antitetanus injection and his burns treated. When he refused to answer questions he was locked in a room with no window and kept there for five days with only a bowl of soup and a small piece of bread a day to eat. He still refused to answer questions and finally found himself at a camp for British officer prisoners at Freiburg. It wasn’t until he was freed after the armistice that he was able to turn in his report.
“August 8 was the black day …”
“August 8 was the black day of the German army in the history of this war,” wrote Ludendorff. German fear of tanks became obsessive. Crack units broke and ran. The Australians and Canadians carried their objectives in jig time. The British corps had trouble but advanced.
The French army to the south, which had few tanks, attacked after the usual artillery bombardment from Montdidier north to the Amiens sector. At first they had heavy going, but, as the confusion caused by the British penetration spread, they began to make headway.
Haig couldn’t help recording the difficulties of the French: “I returned to my train for lunch,” he noted, “and about 4 pm I called on H.Q. First French army at Conty. Debeney was much distressed and almost in tears because three batallions of his Colonial Infantry had bolted before a German machine gun. I told him that the British advance would automatically clear his front.”
By night Rawlinson’s army had advanced seven miles, had captured four hundred guns, among them a longrange weapon of the Bertha type that had been pounding the British rear back of Amiens, and taken thirteen thousand prisoners. The French caught up with them on the second day.
After the first twentyfour hours the tempo slacked. The waterlogged entrenchments of the old Somme battlefields proved a greater obstacle than the enemy. Tanks broke down and ran out of fuel. Tank crews were exhausted.
The British generals still relied on cavalry to exploit a breakthrough. The Germans proved again that with a very few machineguns they could make mincemeat of horses and riders. The whippets which had run far ahead of their units were handicapped by orders to stand by to help the cavalry. The advance petered out. By the third day the Germans were digging in tenaciously on a shortened line, but their hope of taking Amiens was gone.
Although in some ways a minor operation the German High Command heard the voice of doom in their defeat at Amiens. For the first time their armies had broken under assault. Officers had allowed themselves to be swept by panic. Divisional headquarters had allowed their records to be captured.
“We had to resign ourselves now,” wrote Ludendorff, “to the prospect of the continuance of the enemy’s offensive. Their success had been too easily gained. Their wireless was jubilant, and announced—and with truth—that the morale of the German army was no longer what it had been. The enemy had also captured many documents of inestimable value to them.”
Ludendorff immediately called in divisional commanders and field officers to meet with him at his headquarters at Avesnes. “I was told of deeds of glorious valor, but also of behavior which, I openly confess, I should not have thought possible in the German army.”
He laid the blame on pacifist propaganda. Prince Lichnowsky, who had been German ambassador in London in 1914, had allowed his account of British efforts to preserve the peace to be published in a pamphlet. The inference was that the German Imperial Government bore most of the guilt for provoking the war. The authorities were not interfering with its distribution, even to the troops. Wilson’s Fourteen Points were in every hand. Soldiers who had been prisoners of war in Russia were re-enrolled under protest and spread the Bolshevik infection through their new regiments. Joffe, Bolshevik ambassador to Berlin, was making his embassy the center for the spreading of treason and defeatism. “The army,” wrote Ludendorff, “was literally swamped with enemy propaganda.”
“The failure of August 8,” Hindenburg admitted in his memoirs, “was revealed to all eyes as the consequence of open weakness … The enemy had learned a good deal from us since the spring … he had employed against us those tactics with which we had soundly beaten him time after time.”
So seriously did Ludendorff take the defeat before Amiens that he went to Hindenburg and offered to resign as Chief of Staff. Neither Hindenburg nor the Kaiser would accept his resignation.
At an imperial conference at the Hotel Britannique at Spa on August 13 Ludendorff announced brusquely that the war must be ended. The Kaiser instructed his Foreign Secretary to start immediately working for negotiations, if possible through the Queen of the Netherlands. Next day the Emperor Charles of Austria arrived with the news that the Austro-Hungarian Army could not be expected to resist through another winter. Although Hindenburg rema
ined optimistic, Ludendorff repeated the facts as he saw them. The impression he gave to the conference at Spa was, in his own words, that “I no longer believed in a victorious issue of the war.”
32. The Indispensable Destroyers
33. Sims of the Flotilla
34. “Lafayette, here we come”
35. Weekending with Sir Douglas
36. Through the Barbed Wire
37. The Loquacious Kerensky
38. Charles G. Dawes
39. Land Ironclads
40. Discussion behind the Lines (Albert Thomas, Haig, Joffre, and Lloyd George)
41. Clemenceau Had a Way with Americans
42. The German Triumvirate
43. Foch as Chief of Staff
44. The Service of Supply
45. Château-Thierry
46. The Ruined Forest
47A. Zero Hour
47B. Machinegunners
47C. Antiaircraft
47D. The High Command
47E. The Road Back
48. Lenin in Red Square
49. Trotski of the Red Army
50. The Tiger at the Front
51. The Savor of Victory
52. The President on Parade
53. Under the Arch of Triumph
54. Reviewing the Troops
55. Among the Crowned Heads
56. Acclaim of the Crowd
57. The Formal Round
58. The Only Man Who Came Out of the Peace Conference with Credit
59. The Senator from Massachusetts
60. Four Old Men
61. The General’s Return
Chapter 20
TO SAVE THE RUSSIANS FROM THEMSELVES
IN Washington the summer of 1918 was unusually hot. Woodrow Wilson continued his relentless routine. At eight he presided, with Edith Wilson at the other end of the table, at his customary family breakfast. Visiting relatives from the large Wilson and Bolling connections were expected to appear with fresh morning faces. Through the windows Edith would point out the fourteen sheep and four lambs “doing their bit” cropping the White House lawns. After breakfast the President walked over to his office in the wing, and there dictated to his stenographer until a little before ten, when congressmen, cabinet members, or delegations that for some reason or another could not be shunted off on Tumulty, began to be admitted.
The President would listen to what his visitors had to say with cool affability. His replies were invariably noncommittal. He would ask for the problems to be put in writing so that he could decide on them later in the quiet of his study.
Lunch was at one but the President was often late. After lunch, if there were no cabinet meeting scheduled, would come formal calls from ambassadors and the like. If there were any of the afternoon left and the weather weren’t too hot he would hurry with Grayson or sometimes with Edith to the country club for a little golf, coming back to the White House in time for a bath before dressing for dinner.
When he was dressed the great mass of letters and documents that had to be signed that day were brought to him. Sometimes he had time for a glass of scotch and soda before the formal evening meal. At table guests were discouraged from talking about politics or international affairs.
After dinner came consultations with close advisers such as Baker or Creel or with Colonel House if he were in town. Then the President would retire to his study, often helped by Edith, who liked to arrange his manuscripts for him, and would pore over the papers he’d collected during the day and make his shorthand notes or type out on his own typewriter the private memoranda from which his state papers or public speeches would gradually evolve. It was often long after midnight before he got to bed.
Saturday mornings he would try to play a full eighteen holes of golf, usually with Grayson, or with Edith if she felt up to it. Sundays he attended the Central Presbyterian Church. He always listened to the sermon with attention: he was a connoisseur of sermons as some men are of wines. In the afternoon he would collect the ladies of the family and take them motoring around one of his unchangeable itineraries in the White House car.
In Touch with World Movements
Woodrow Wilson’s first wife’s brother Stockton Axson, then serving as Secretary of the American Red Cross, was a frequent visitor that summer. “Stock,” as he called him, was one of the men the President loved best. Their friendship was tinged perhaps by a certain nostalgia for academic days and for his lost life with Ellen whose death he still could not bear to think of.
Dr. Axson remembered a conversation they had one Sunday afternoon in late June of that year as so significant that, when Ray Stannard Baker asked him for anecdotes to include in his Life and Letters some years later, he told about it in detail. Axson came to lunch at the White House after church and found the President in “one of his most loveable talking moods.” When Axson and the Wilsons were alone after the meal, Wilson suddenly asked him whom he would name for the next President.
Present company was excepted, they agreed. Axson suggested McAdoo. The President answered that he loved Mac as much as Stock did, but that the next President must have great powers of reflection as well as being a man of action. “Now nobody can do things better than Mac, but if Mac ever reflects, I never caught him in the act.” He said Newton D. Baker was the best man but he could never be nominated. “The next President will have to be able to think in terms of the whole world,” he went on. “He must be internationally minded … the only really internationally minded people”—Wilson was thinking aloud—“are the labor people. They are in touch with world movements.”
After the war the world would change radically. Governments would have to do things now done by individuals and corporations. Waterpower, coalmines, oilfields would have to be government owned. “If I should say that outside,” he exclaimed, “people would call me a socialist, but I am not a socialist. And it is because I’m not a socialist that I believe these things.”
He added that he believed this was the only way communism could be prevented—Dr. Axson told Ray Baker he wasn’t sure Wilson used the word communism, which wasn’t yet in circulation, perhaps he said bolshevism—“the next President must be a man who is not only able to do things, but after having taken counsel and made a full survey, be able to retire alone, behind his own closed door, and think through the processes, step by step.”
Thinking through the Processes
Woodrow Wilson, during those summer months, though brilliantly persuasive in his public appearances, was tortured by perplexities whenever he retired behind his own closed door, to think through the processes, step by step.
At home, now freshly stimulated by Bolshevik propaganda against capitalism and war, there was that “baneful seething” among the workingclass and the foreign born that never ceased to worry him.
The very Sunday Dr. Axson remembered as the date of their cosy after-luncheon talk, Eugene V. Debs, who proclaimed himself a socialist but whose basic notions of the democratic process were not too different from the President’s, was arrested in Cleveland charged with making statements that violated the Espionage Act.
There was the troublesome agitation for the pardon of the syndicalist Tom Mooney convicted of bombing a preparedness parade in San Francisco, that would not down. There was the sedition of the now leaderless I.W.W., that was interfering with the cutting of timber in the forests of Oregon and Washington.
Strikes kept interrupting war production. The immediate problem on the President’s desk was a strike being fomented against the Western Union Telegraph Company that threatened a tieup of communications inconceivable in wartime. The President’s remedy for that was a bill being speeded through Congress to take over the telephone and telegraph services as the railroads had been taken over six months before.
Abroad, it was not the military problems that gave Wilson sleepless nights. Though he enjoyed thinking about the navy, he had little taste for the strategy and tactics of land warfare. He left that to the professionals. He recoile
d from the thought of mass bloodshed. What few details of combat reached him came strained through the congenial mind of his Secretary of War. The problem that tortured him was political: whether or not to intervene in the ruined Romanoff empire that lay across the eastern third of the hemisphere, writhing in agony like a snake run over on the road.
Lloyd George’s plausible friend, Lord Reading, the British ambassador, was at Wilson almost daily urging the British point of view, which was that Allied expeditions should be landed at Murmansk on the Arctic coast and at Vladivostok in the Far East to keep the stocks of war materials piled up in these two ports from falling into German hands. The bogy he kept presenting to the President was that the Brest-Litovsk peace, which was resulting in a seemingly friendly exchange of embassies between the Bolsheviks and the Imperial German Government, would produce an alliance from which the Germans could draw men and materials for the war in the West.
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