Fall of Giants

by Follett, Ken

  In no time it was dark, making the job harder. The Germans sent a storm of ordnance across the town, much of it accurately aimed at the American position on the south bank. Several buildings were destroyed, making the waterfront street look like a mouthful of bad teeth. Gus lost three machine guns to shelling in the first few hours.

  It was midnight before he was able to return to battalion headquarters, in a sewing-machine factory a few streets south. Colonel Wagner was with his French opposite number, poring over a large-scale map of the town. Gus reported that all his guns and Chuck’s were in position. “Good work, Dewar,” the colonel said. “Are you all right?”

  “Of course, sir,” Gus said, puzzled and a bit offended, thinking the colonel might believe he did not have the nerve for this work.

  “It’s just that there’s blood all over you.”

  “Is there?” Gus looked down and saw that there was indeed a good deal of congealed blood on the front of his uniform. “I wonder where that came from.”

  “From your face, by the look of it. You’ve got a nasty cut.”

  Gus felt his cheek, and winced as his fingers touched raw flesh. “I don’t know when that happened,” he said.

  “Go along to the dressing station and get it cleaned up.”

  “It’s nothing much, sir. I’d rather—”

  “Do as you’re told, Lieutenant. It will be serious if it gets infected.” The colonel gave a thin smile. “I don’t want to lose you. You seem to have the makings of a useful officer.”

  { IV }

  At four o’clock the next morning the Germans launched a gas barrage. Walter and his storm troopers approached the northern edge of the town at sunrise, expecting the resistance from the French forces to be as weak as it had been for the past two months.

  They would have preferred to bypass Château-Thierry, but it was not possible. The railway line to Paris went through the town, and there were two key bridges. It had to be taken.

  Farmhouses and fields gave way to cottages and smallholdings, then to paved streets and gardens. As Walter came close to the first of the two-story houses, a burst of machine-gun fire came from an upper window, dotting the road at his feet like raindrops on a pond. He threw himself over a low fence into a vegetable patch and rolled until he found cover behind an apple tree. His men scattered likewise, all but two who fell in the road. One lay still, the other moaned in pain.

  Walter looked back and spotted Sergeant Schwab. “Take six men, find the back entrance to that house, and destroy that machine-gun emplacement,” he said. He located his lieutenants. “Von Kessel, go west one block and enter the town from there. Von Braun, come east with me.”

  He kept off the streets and moved through alleys and backyards, but there were riflemen and machine gunners in about every tenth house. Something had happened to give the French back their fighting spirit, Walter realized with trepidation.

  All morning the storm troopers fought from house to house, taking heavy casualties. This was not how they were supposed to operate, bleeding for every yard. They were trained to follow the line of least resistance, penetrate deep behind enemy lines, and disrupt communications, so that the forces at the front would become demoralized and leaderless, and would quickly surrender to follow-up infantry. But that tactic had now failed, and they were slogging it out hand to hand with an enemy who seemed to have gained his second wind.

  But they made progress, and at midday Walter stood on the ruins of the medieval castle that gave its name to the town. The castle was at the top of a hill, and the town hall stood at its foot. From there the main street ran in a straight line two hundred and fifty yards to a double-arched road bridge across the Marne. To the east, five hundred yards upriver, was the only other crossing, a railway bridge.

  He could see all that with the naked eye. He took out his field glasses and focused on the enemy positions on the south bank. The men carelessly showed themselves, a sign that they were new to warfare: veterans stayed out of sight. They were young and energetic and well-fed and well-dressed, he noted. Their uniforms were not blue but tan, he saw with dismay.

  They were Americans.

  { V }

  During the afternoon, the French fell back to the north bank of the river, and Gus was able to bring his armament to bear, directing mortar and machine-gun fire over the heads of the French at the advancing Germans. The American guns sent a torrent of ammunition along the straight north-south avenues of Château-Thierry, turning them into killing lanes. All the same he could see the Germans advance fearlessly from bank to café, alley to shop doorway, overwhelming the French by sheer weight of numbers.

  As afternoon turned to bloody evening, Gus watched from a high window and saw the tattered remnants of the blue-coated French falling back toward the west bridge. They made their last stand at the north end of the bridge and held it while the red sun went down behind the hills to the west. Then, in the dusk, they retreated across the bridge.

  A small group of Germans saw what was happening and gave chase. Gus saw them run onto the bridge, barely visible in the twilight, gray moving on gray. Then the bridge exploded. The French had previously wired it for demolition, Gus realized. Bodies flew through the air and the northern arch of the bridge collapsed into a heap of rubble in the water.

  Then it went quiet.

  Gus lay down on a palliasse at headquarters and got some sleep, his first for almost forty-eight hours. He was awakened by the Germans’ dawn barrage. Bleary-eyed, he hurried from the sewing-machine factory to the waterfront. In the pearly light of a June morning he saw that the Germans had occupied the entire north bank of the river and were shelling the American positions on the south bank at hellishly close range.

  He arranged for the crews who had been up all night to be relieved by men who had got some rest. Then he went from position to position, always staying behind the waterfront buildings. He suggested ways of improving cover—moving a gun to a smaller window, using sheets of corrugated tin to protect crews from flying debris, or piling up rubble either side of the gun. But the best way for his men to protect themselves was to make life impossible for the enemy gunners. “Give the bastards hell,” he said.

  The men responded eagerly. The Hotchkiss fired four hundred and fifty rounds per minute, and its range was four thousand yards, so it was highly effective across the river. The Stokes mortar was less useful: its up-and-over trajectory was intended for trench warfare, where line-of-sight fire was ineffective. But the rifle grenades were highly destructive at short range.

  The two sides pounded one another like bare-knuckle boxers fighting in a barrel. The noise of so much ammunition being fired was never less than deafening. Buildings collapsed, men screamed in the agony of wounds, bloodstained stretcher-bearers ran from the waterfront to the dressing station and back, and runners brought more ammunition and jugs of hot coffee to the weary soldiers manning the guns.

  As the day wore on Gus noticed, in a back-of-the-mind way, that he was not scared. He did not think about it often—there was too much to do. For a brief moment, in the middle of the day, as he stood in the canteen of the sewing-machine factory gulping down sweet milky coffee instead of lunch, he marveled at the strange person he had become. Could it really be Gus Dewar who ran from one building to the next through an artillery barrage, shouting at his men to give ’em hell? This man had been afraid he would lose his nerve and turn around and walk away from the battle. In the event, he hardly thought of his own safety, being too preoccupied with the danger to his men. How had that come about? Then a corporal came to tell him that his squad had lost the special wrench used to change overheated Hotchkiss barrels, and he swallowed the rest of his coffee and ran to deal with the problem.

  He did suffer a moment of sadness that evening. It was dusk, and he happened to look out of a smashed kitchen window to the spot on the bank where Chuck Dixon had died. He no longer felt shocked by the way Chuck had disappeared in an explosion of earth: he had seen much more death and des
truction in the last three days. What struck him now, with a different kind of shock, was the realization that one day he would have to speak about that awful moment to Chuck’s parents, Albert and Emmeline, owners of a Buffalo bank, and to his young wife, Doris, who had been so against America’s joining the war—probably because she feared exactly what had happened. What was Gus going to say to them? “Chuck fought bravely.” Chuck had not fought at all: he had died in the first minute of his first battle, without firing a shot. It would hardly have mattered if he had been a coward—the result would have been the same. His life had just been wasted.

  As Gus stared at the spot, lost in thought, his eye was caught by movement on the railway bridge.

  His heart missed a beat. There were men coming onto the far end of the bridge. Their field-gray uniforms were only just visible in the half-light. They ran awkwardly along the rails, stumbling on the sleepers and the gravel. Their helmets were of the coal scuttle shape, and they carried their rifles slung. They were German.

  Gus ran to the nearest machine-gun emplacement, behind a garden wall. The crew had not noticed the assault force. Gus tapped the gunner on the shoulder. “Fire at the bridge!” he shouted. “Look—Germans!” The gunner swung the barrel around to the new target.

  Gus pointed to a soldier at random. “Run to headquarters and report an enemy incursion across the east bridge,” he shouted. “Quick, quick!”

  He found a sergeant. “Make sure everyone is firing at the bridge,” he said. “Go!”

  He headed west. Heavy machine guns could not be moved quickly—the Hotchkiss weighed eighty-eight pounds with its tripod—but he told all the rifle grenadiers and mortar crews to move to new positions from which they could defend the bridge.

  The Germans began to be mown down, but they were determined, and kept coming. Through his glasses, Gus saw a tall man in the uniform of a major who looked familiar. He wondered if it was someone he had met before the war. As Gus looked, the major took a hit and fell to the ground.

  The Germans were supported by a terrific barrage from their own artillery. It seemed as if every gun on the north bank had trained its sights on the south end of the railway bridge where the defending Americans were clustered. Gus saw his men fall one after another, but he replaced every killed or wounded gunner with a fresh man, and there was hardly a pause in the firing.

  The Germans stopped running and began to take up positions, using the scant cover of dead comrades. The boldest of them advanced, but there was no place to hide, and they were swiftly brought down.

  Darkness fell, but it made no difference: firing continued at maximum on both sides. The enemy became vague shapes lit by flashes of gunfire and exploding shells. Gus moved some of the heavy machine guns to new positions, feeling almost certain this incursion was not a feint to cover a river crossing somewhere else.

  It was a stalemate, and at last the Germans began to retreat.

  Seeing stretcher parties on the bridge, Gus ordered his men to stop firing.

  In response, the German artillery went quiet.

  “Christ Almighty,” Gus said to no one in particular. “I think we’ve beaten them off.”

  { VI }

  An American bullet had broken Walter’s shinbone. He lay on the railway line in agony, but he felt worse when he saw the men retreating and heard the guns fall silent. He knew then that he had failed.

  He screamed when he was lifted onto the stretcher. It was bad for the men’s morale to hear the wounded cry out, but he could not help it. They bumped him along the track and through the town to the dressing station, where someone gave him morphine and he passed out.

  He woke up with his leg in a splint. He questioned everyone who passed his cot on the progress of the battle, but he got no details until Gottfried von Kessel came by to gloat over his wound. The German army had given up trying to cross the Marne at Château-Thierry, Gottfried told him. Perhaps they would try elsewhere.

  Next day, just before he was put on a train home, he learned that the main body of the United States Third Division had arrived and taken up positions all along the south bank of the Marne.

  A wounded comrade told him of a bloody battle in a wood near the town called the Bois de Belleau. There had been terrible casualties on both sides, but the Americans had won.

  Back in Berlin, the papers continued to tell of German victories, but the lines on the maps got no nearer to Paris, and Walter came to the bitter conclusion that the spring offensive had failed. The Americans had arrived too soon.

  He was released from hospital to convalesce in his old room at his parents’ house.

  On August 8 an Allied attack at Amiens used almost five hundred of the new “tanks.” These ironclad vehicles were plagued with problems but could be unstoppable, and the British gained eight miles in a single day.

  It was only eight miles, but Walter suspected the tide had turned, and he could tell by his father’s face that the old man felt the same. No one in Berlin now spoke of winning the war.

  One night at the end of September, Otto came home looking as if someone had died. There was nothing left of his natural ebullience. Walter even wondered if he was going to cry.

  “The kaiser has returned to Berlin,” he said.

  Walter knew that Kaiser Wilhelm had been at army headquarters in the Belgian hill resort called Spa. “Why has he come back?”

  Otto’s voice dropped to a near-whisper, as if he could not bear to say what he had to say in a normal voice. “Ludendorff wants an armistice.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  October 1918

  Maud had lunch at the Ritz with her friend Lord Remarc, who was a junior minister in the War Office. Johnny was wearing a new lavender waistcoat. Over the pot-au-feu she asked him: “Is the war really coming to an end?”

  “Everyone thinks so,” Johnny said. “The Germans have suffered seven hundred thousand casualties this year. They can’t go on.”

  Maud wondered miserably if Walter was one of the seven hundred thousand. He might be dead, she knew; and the thought was like a cold lump inside her where her heart should be. She had had no word from him since their idyllic second honeymoon in Stockholm. She guessed that his work no longer took him to neutral countries from which he could write. The awful truth was that he had probably returned to the battlefield for Germany’s last, all-or-nothing offensive.

  Such thoughts were morbid, but realistic. So many women had lost their loved ones: husbands, brothers, sons, fiancés. They had all lived through four years during which such tragedies happened daily. It was no longer possible to be too pessimistic. Grief was the norm.

  She pushed her soup dish away. “Is there any other reason to hope for peace?”

  “Yes. Germany has a new chancellor, and he has written to President Wilson, suggesting an armistice based on Wilson’s famous Fourteen Points.”

  “That is hopeful! Has Wilson agreed?”

  “No. He said Germany must first withdraw from all conquered territories.”

  “What does our government think?”

  “Lloyd George is hopping mad. The Germans treat the Americans as the senior partners in the alliance—and President Wilson acts as if they could make peace without consulting us.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “I’m afraid it does. Our government doesn’t necessarily agree with Wilson’s Fourteen Points.”

  Maud nodded. “I suppose we’re against point five, about colonial peoples having a say in their own government.”

  “Exactly. What about Rhodesia, and Barbados, and India? We can’t be expected to ask the natives’ permission before we civilize them. Americans are far too liberal. And we’re dead against point two, freedom of the seas in war and peace. British power is based on the navy. We would not have been able to starve Germany into submission if we had not been allowed to blockade their seagoing trade.”

  “How do the French feel about it?”

  Johnny grinned. “Clemenceau said Wilson was trying t
o outdo the Almighty. ‘God himself only came up with ten points,’ he said.”

  “I get the impression that most ordinary British people actually like Wilson and his points.”

  Johnny nodded. “And European leaders can hardly tell the American president to stop making peace.”

  Maud was so eager to believe it that she frightened herself. She told herself not to be happy yet. There could be such heavy disappointment in store.

  A waiter brought them sole Waleska and cast an admiring eye at Johnny’s waistcoat.

  Maud turned to her other worry. “What do you hear from Fitz?” Her brother’s mission in Siberia was secret, but he had confided in her, and Johnny gave her bulletins.

  “That Cossack leader turned out to be a disappointment. Fitz made a pact with him, and we paid him for a while, but he was nothing more than a warlord, really. However, Fitz is staying on, hoping to encourage the Russians to overthrow the Bolsheviks. Meanwhile, Lenin has moved his government from Petrograd to Moscow, where he feels safer from invasion.”

  “Even if the Bolsheviks were deposed, would a new regime resume the war against Germany?”

  “Realistically? No.” Johnny took a sip of Chablis. “But a lot of very powerful people in the British government just hate the Bolsheviks.”

  “Why?”

  “Lenin’s regime is brutal.”

  “So was the tsar’s, but Winston Churchill never plotted to overthrow him.”

  “Underneath, they’re frightened that if Bolshevism is a success over there it will come here next.”

  “Well, if it’s a success, why not?”

  Johnny shrugged. “You can’t expect people such as your brother to see it that way.”

  “No,” said Maud. “I wonder how he’s getting on?”

  { II }

  “We’re in Russia!” Billy Williams said when the ship docked and he heard the voices of the longshoremen. “What are we doing in fucking Russia?”