■'1; ;»i^^- :> ,0^ ^ %^ "'" JT ■■■>. --^ .'> /v^ S BY ERNEST PEIXOTTO Each volume illustrated by the autbor THE AMERICAN FHONT A REVOLXrriONAKT PILGRIMAGE OUR HISPANIC SOUTHWEST PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA BY ITAUAN SEAS THROUGH THE FRENCH PROVIKCES ROMANTIC CALIFORNIA CHARLES SCRIBNERS SONS THE AMERICAN FRONT Ruins ill tlu' Main Sciuarr, Frrt'-fii-'ranicnois THE AMERICAN FRONT BY ERNEST PEIXOTTO CAPTAIN, ENCiKS., V. 8. A. ILLUSTRATIONS BY THE AUTHOR NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS MCMXIX 7?^ Copyright. 1919, by Charles Scribner's Sons Published October, 1919 OCT 2.8 1919 ©C!.A53550T /v-\^ TO THE MEMORY OF THE AMERICANS •WBOBE GRAVES MARK THE BATTLE-FIELDS OF FRANCE THIS BOOK IS REVEHENTLT INSCRIBED PREFACE I HAVE written this book in the form of a personal experience, and I hope the reader will pardon me if I have dwelt unduly upon the personal note; but it seemed to me that a simple eye-witness's account of the things that I had seen — many of them of exceptional historic interest — would be of value not only to those who might write of these events here- after, but also to many of the pilgrims who will visit the battle-fields of France later on. This sort of narrative, too, it seemed to me, was best suited to accompany the drawings that I made as literally and truthfully as possible, from nature and on the spot, and that, I hope, will find their place in the iconography of the Great War. Those reproduced in this book are but a fraction of the series that I made for the War Department, being a choice of those best suited to illustrate the text. When I reread the pages that I have written I realize how much I have left untold — left out for [ vii 1 PREFACE fear of tiring the reader, for fear of clouding the continuity of my narrative. I have, for example, scarcely mentioned the splendid work of the aviators, nor have I described the wonders of the S. O. S.: the great depots at Is-sur-Tille and Gievres, the aviation-fields at Issoudun and Romorantin, the locomotive-shops at Montoir and Nevers, the great hospitals, the camouflage depot at Dijon, and all the other vast American enterprises in France that I visited and pictured during the summer of 1918. I wish to take this occasion also to thank the officers and men who were so kind and helpful to me: my chiefs at G. H. Q., the oflficers upon whose hospitality I encroached on many an occasion, and especially my three comrades whose duties were similar to my own, Captains Wallace Morgan, Andre Smith, and W. J. Duncan, with one or the other of whom I made most of the journeys de- scribed in this book. E. P. Bellevtje (S. et O.) May 20, 1919. [ viii ] CONTENTS PAOB INTRODUCTORY NOTE xiii I. FROM HOBOKEN TO GENERAL HEADQUAR- TERS— I. Aboard the "Pocahontas" 3 II. St. Nazaire to Chaumont 16 n. THE PERIOD OF PREPARATION— I, With the Rainbow Division 27 II. With the Marines Near Verdun .... 43 III. In German Alsace with the Thirtt-Second . 56 III. CHATEAU-THIERRY AND THE MARNE— I. Belleau Wood 67 II. Along the Marne and Up to Fismes ... 80 IV. THE TOUL SECTOR Ill V. TAKING THE ST. MIHIEL SALIENT— I. Above Les Eparges 125 II. Into St. Mikiel 134 in. To THE HiNDENBURG LiNE 145 [ix] CONTENTS PAGf VI. THE GREAT MEUSE-ARGONNE 0FFENSI\T:— I. Before Montfaucox 157 II. The Road to Varennes 170 III. The Armistice and Sedan 179 Vn. WITH THE ARMY OF OCCUPATION— I. Into Luxembourg 205 II. To the Rhine and Beyond 216 [x] • ILLUSTRATIONS THE REPRODUCTIONS OF CAPTAIN PEIXOTTO's DRAWINGS ARE MADE FROM U. S. OFFICIAL PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE DRAWINGS Ruins in the main square, Fere-en-Tardenois .... Frontispiece FACING PAGE A transport with troops coming through the lock at St. Nazaire 14 Ships imloading American war material at St. Nazaire ... 18 Church in Baccarat 30 A typical village of the Lorraine front in which tlic Ameri«in troops were billeted 34 Church in Badonviller 36 Barracks at battalion headquarters on the Verdun front held by American troops 46 An American observation-post 52 The village of Soppe-le-Bas in German Alsace, used as head- quarters by a regiment of American infantry 60 American soldiers billeted in reception-room of an old Benedic- tine monastery at Massevaux, in the Toul sector ... 62 A major's dugout in Belleau Wood 78 The Marne at Jaulgonne 84 Charteves 88 Chateau-Thierry from the terrace of the old chateau .... 90 The great bridge across the Marne at Chateau-Thierrj' ... 92 Remains of Vaux 94 Ruined Torcy 96 [xi] ILLUSTRATIONS rAcnro faob Village square in Bouresches 98 The church, Cierges 102 Reddy Farm on Hill 230 104 Ruined church at Seriages, overlooking the valley of the Ourcq 106 The market-place, Fere-en-Tardenois 108 Billets in a cell of the old monastery of Rangeval 120 No Man's Land, near Thiaucourt 150 Great shell-hole near Cierges 176 The crossroads, Buzancy 190 Dim-sur-Meuse 206 Valley of the Alzette, Luxembourg 210 Men of the 32d Division in the court of the abbey, Echtemach 214 American trucks in a side-street, Montabaur 218 The Moselle* at Cochem 220 First Americans crossing the Rhine 226 MAPS VAai Sketch map of the Chateau-Thierry region 81 Sketch map of the St. Mihiel salient 115 Sketch map of the Argonne oflFensive 159 [xiil INTRODUCTORY NOTE In July, 1914, we had come up from Portugal to our studio home near Fontainebleau. On Sunday, the 23d, the banks of the Seine at Valvins and Samois were gay with summer Hfe. Men and women in white were fishing from punts; merry parties of young people were rowing or paddling about; on terraces along the river, bright with flowers and shaded by colored awnings, happy little tea-parties assembled, laughing and care-free; soldiers from the Forty-Sixth Infantry or the Seventh Dragoons, both Fontainebleau regiments, were loitering about out on their Sunday leave. Then, like a bolt from the blue, the great war- cloud swept over Europe, darkening France espe- cially with a sense of impending calamity. By the following Sunday, the Order of General Mobilization had been posted. The river was de- serted; not a being was to be seen. The boats lay moored to the banks. The gay awnings had dis- appeared and even the window-boxes with their [ xiii ] INTRODUCTORY NOTE bright flowers had been taken in. Every shutter was drawn; every house closed. Dread and grief were already in the air. Five days later I joined the local Communal Guard and, day or night, patrolled the roads, the fields, the woods, the river banks, watching for spies, for malefactors, for deserters, with orders to stop and question every one. Those were agonizing days that lengthened into weeks, lightened at last by the Victory of the Marne. In October I returned to x\merica and tried to content myself by working for various oeuvres. But I was not content. My age prevented me from entering active service or a training-camp. However, in February, 1918, I was offered a captain's commission in the Engineers with duty as one of the eight artists officially attached to the American Expeditionary Forces. This I gladly accepted, and on March 4 received telegraphic notification of my appointment. Ten days later I boarded a transport bound for France. ^Yhat I saw there forms the substance of this book. In the performance of my duty I had excep- [ xiv ] INTRODUCTORY NOTE tional opportunities and witnessed portions of all the important offensives in which the American Army was engaged. I was one of the first Americans to enter St. Mihiel. I saw the beginning of the great Meuse-Argonne offensive and, with a single com- panion, was the first American officer to enter Sedan. So I feel that this book should have value as an eye-witness's account of certain events that few people were permitted to see. [xv] FROM HOBOKEN TO GENERAL HEADQUARTERS ABOARD THE 'POCAHONTAS'' ONE of the big docks of the Nord-Deutscher Lloyd in Hoboken; a rainy, lowery day in March, 1918. Two transports lay moored at each side of the dock, upon which long columns of khaki-clad troops, both colored and white, were drawn up, checked off by their officers and slowly despatched up the gang-planks aboard the gray steamers. All officers had been notified to report on board before ten o'clock. But the day wore on until late afternoon before the last barge-load of barrack-bags and the last lot of bedding-rolls had been stowed away. Then the hawsers were cast off and we swung out into the gray, windy North River, fairly em- barked upon our great adventure — the greatest ad- venture, I am sure, that any of us aboard, no matter what our past experiences, had ever set out upon. [3] THE AMERICAN FRONT Our voyage was begun when the submarine menace was in an acute stage, and every precaution was taken from the very outset. No one but the sailors (and their naval collars were turned in) was allowed on deck as we dropped down the bay, but through a port-hole I watched the great buildings of the city move slowly by in the twilight, their countless windows twinkling with the myriad lights of their warm, steam-heated offices. It was cold and dark when we reached the outer bay, but I could feel other boats about us though they showed no lights. There were strange flashes every little while wigwagging and blinking like huge owl's eyes, while along the horizon, mysterious flares appeared from time to time, and beams from search- lights lit great circles on the low-lying clouds. At dinner we learned that we were aboard the transport Pocahontas, formerly the Princess Irene of the North German Lloyd fleet. Only one change had been made in the dining-room, now the officers' mess-room. A portrait of Pocahontas covered some decoration too German to be seen with pleasure under the circumstances. Though the Kible-silver still bore the mark of the well-known German com- [4] ABOARD THE "POCAHONTAS" pany, the men sitting about the tables were totally unlike any other transatlantic crowd. Several hun- dred army officers gave a dominant note of khaki to the white cabin, to which the uniforms of about forty naval officers added a darker note. The two colors met at the commander's table in the centre of the room where the six executive officers of the ship sat together. The meal was served very sim- ply by a few mess-boys aided by some green (in more senses than one) volunteer negro "strikers." Our first day out was fine and bright with a brisk northwest wind blowing, and the morning sun showed us that we were convoyed by a big cruiser and accompanied by several other ships, two of which were brilliantly camouflaged with the "dazzle system." Our own ship presented a busy scene. The main-decks were crowded with men in khaki and the promenade-deck with officers. A guard of seventy men was mounted at eight o'clock. Gun crews were polishing and training the six-inch guns fore and aft or were at practice loading a dummy gun on the forward-deck. Though we had more than three thousand men aboard, there turned out to be only one senior army [5] THE AMERICAN FRONT oflBcer on the ship, a major, and of the five captains two (mj- friend Wallace Morgan and myself) had been commissioned but a fortnight before and had had no military experience whatever. The inevitable happened. Captain Morgan was made officer of the day the very first day out, and the same duty devolved upon me a day or two later — no fight task for a novice, as there were more than forty sentries to be posted, the prisoners to be guarded, and no end of regulations to be enforced, regulations upon which the very lives of all those on board depended. After luncheon a meeting of all officers was called, and the executive officer of the ship explained the "abandon-ship" drill, and an hour later this was put into practice for the first time. At the sound- ing of a particular bugle-call and the ringing of all the ship's gongs, every man aboard was immediately to leave whatever duty he might be performing and take his appointed place by one of the life-boats or rafts. I found myself in command of collapsible boat No. 13 next to the ship's bridge. One other officer was with me — an alert lieutenant, an orni- thologist (the army is made of strange birds) who had [6] ABOARD THE "POCAHONTAS" collected rare specimens in East Africa for the Smith- sonian. We had three sailors and twelve soldiers with us, the latter mostly big, raw-boned fellows from the Kentucky mountains who had never seen the sea. The "abandon-ship" drill was repeated daily, and later, when in the danger zone, twice a day, at most unexpected hours, until, by dint of practice, it worked very smoothly and with sur- prising rapidity. We dined that first night at five o'clock, and after dinner all lights were put out and we sat in the dark saloon listening to the victrola, the only things visible being the wrist-watches of the men and the faint luminosity of the port-holes. Every night thereafter we groped about the ship in total dark- ness, a few carefully screened blue bulbs placed near the floor in the corridors being the only lights per- mitted. Yet at a meeting of officers held next day we were further cautioned against showing lights even for an instant. No smoking was permitted on deck after dark; all flash-Hghts were delivered up to the adjutant until the end of the voyage. But the following morning the convoying cruiser sig- nalled that she had seen lights in one of the forward [7] THE AMERICAN FRONT holds, and a further search of the men's quarters was made. Other strict orders were rigidly enforced. Nothing was to be thrown overboard, not even a burnt cigarette or a scrap of paper, for by such bits of evidence a submarine could easily trail a ship. My turn as officer of the day came on the morrow and it became my duty to enforce these rules. At eight-fifteen a guard of one hundred and thirty-five men was mounted. At ten o'clock I accompanied the major commanding troops, the ship's doctor, the chief police officer, and an officer of the guard on a complete inspection of the ship. All the holds were visited; the dark corners of every bunk were carefully scrutinized with the aid of a flash-light, the doctor even peering under the berths in his search for bits of food or sputum. The menace of epidemics is ever present on such a voyage and absolute cleanliness was exacted. Despite its thoroughness, the inspection was rapid and businesslike, our spry major leading us briskly up and down the forward ladders, through the iron bulkhead doors, and down the main hatches into the big holds amidships; out through the mess- halls and finally into the dark holds aft where the [8] ABOARD THE "POCAHONTAS" colored troops were quartered. In the afternoon I made two inspections of all the forty -odd sentry- posts, visited the prisoners, and kept a watch gen- erally for any evidence of gambling or drinking. During the night I made three more rounds and these were a strange experience. Forward, in the fo'castle, I found the crew sleeping in hammocks suspended from the deck above, rolled like cocoons in their blankets. In the holds the soldiers* bunks, in double tiers, were placed as close together as pos- sible, leaving just space enough between for a man to pass. From them, as I passed in the darkness, an arm, a leg, a foot, or a hand would protrude, inert, and in them I caught glimpses, in the ghostly blue light, of pale faces turned up, with eyes closed in a death-like sleep. I questioned the guards at the hatches, at the water-butts, and those that watched the big stacks of life-belts; I prodded a negro sentry whom sleep had overcome. I skidded across the main -deck with the rain falUng in torrents and in the darkness could make out the submarine watches in their boxes by the rail, anxious, alert, and the great, rolling dark billows beyond. [9] THE AMERICAN FROXT I admit the dismay I felt — an artist suddenly turned soldier, in a uniform scarcely three weeks old — at being thus suddenly thrown into a position of such responsibiUty, gi^'ing and carrying out orders, trying to conceal my real feelings, *' throwing out mv chest" as I was ad\'ised to do, and strivini; to **look the part" to the grizzled old sergeants. I made my last round just before dawn and thank- fully turned over the guard at eight-fifteen, taking off my web-belt and "gat" for the first time in twenty-four hours. The high sea was now playing havoc with the men and the decks presented a sorry spectacle. At our mess the good sailors were chaffing their less for- tunate neighbors with such grim jokes as this: "Don't worry; you won't be sick coming back: you'll be in a wooden kimono." And then to add to our comfort we were all ordered to put on our life-belts and keep them on. day and night, for the remainder of the voyage. They were of a new t^'pe, quilted and filled with kapok, with big collars that stood hiirh aroimd the neck, so that, arraved in them, the officers looked hke stout Sir Walter Raleighs in blue corselets with khaki sleeves. [10] ABOARD THE "POCAHONTAS" On the ninth day out the weather changed for the better as we entered the danger zone. Early on the tenth morning, just as I came on deck, a calm clear sunrise revealed a strange object on the horizon that I at first mistook for some fishing-smacks. As it rapidly approached, however, I realized that it was the first of the destroyers that were com- ing to meet us and convoy us into port. Then a second appeared over our starboard bow and then an- other until a dozen of them surrounded us in a wide circle, brilliantly camouflaged like wasps, queerly striped with black and white, with spots between of yellow, gray-blue, and water-green. Like wasps too they darted about us, zigzagging across our bows, dropping astern, watchful, then, with a burst of speed, forging up ahead again. At eight o'clock that morning I went on duty a second time as oflScer of the day. Toward midday the cruiser that had brought us over dropped astern, swung about and headed for home alone. Other- wise the day passed uneventfully. The sunset was beautiful and the moon rose bright and clear. "A good night for Fritz," as one of the ship's officers put it. Every one was ordered out of the lowest [11] THE AMERICAN FRONT holds that night as, in case of disaster, it would be impossible to empty them quickly enough. So, as I went about the decks, in all the protected angles, I found soldiers sleeping, wrapped tight in their blankets, but shivering, nevertheless, for the head wind was bitter cold. With the two officers of the guard, I was on deck all night. There was a tense feeling on the ship. The submarine guards and the watchers in the crow's-nests had been doubled. The officers on the bridge and the men at the guns stood with the tele- phone-receivers fastened to their ears. At four- thirty, in the darkness, reveille sounded and we went about rousing the sleeping figures on the decks. The next hour was the one of greatest danger — the hour of dawn. Nothing untoward happened, how- ever, so we continued our zigzags, carefully guarded by the watchful destroyers. That afternoon the convoy split. We headed alone toward the northeast, while the other ships dropped rapidly off toward the south, toward Bor- deaux, as we afterward learned. Three of the de- stroyers accompanied us as our escort, and toward sunset we slowed down and for two hours zig- zagged, waiting. [12] ABOARD THE "POCAHONTAS" The moon came up again clear and almost full, *']ike a big plate in the sky," as some one disdain- fully remarked, and a better night to "get a tin fish in you" could not well be imagined. For a light breeze broke the surface of the sea into small choppy waves whose shadows were just about the size of a submarine, so that, had a U-boat appeared among them, the most careful watching would probably not have detected it. Just after nightfall, however, we started off at top speed for port, making a dash for it, and dawn showed a faint streak on the horizon which rapidly developed into the bare rocky cliffs of Belle-Ile-en-Mer, well-known as the summer home of Sarah Bernhardt. We now knew for the first time that we were to land at St. Nazaire. Two of our destroyers left us and were replaced by an aeroplane that hovered vigilant overhead, while the single remaining destroyer piloted us up the channel. Now, with my glasses, I could make out along the shore villages and church spires, and then in- dividual houses with buff walls and blue-slate roofs standing among pines and evergreens — the homes of France, so dear to my heart, the homes of the people for which all our hearts ached. Then I could [13] THE AMERICAN FRONT begin to see figures here and there. And then at one spot, where a wide green lawn sloped from a comfortable dwelling to a white gate by the sea, a little girl came running down across the grass and out through the gate to the shore, waving as she came a bright American flag. And that tiny speck upon the shore brought a lump into my throat and moistened the eyes of the men about me. Then I saw other people waving welcoming hands. We took a pilot aboard and entered a lock with the big Mongolia ahead of us and the Kroonland just passing out — both camouflaged with "low- visibility" colors, toned like Monet's pictures with spots of pink and green. St. Nazaire was not yet bored with the arrival of American transports. Far from it. At one side of the lock a crowd of ragged urchins scrambled for the coppers that the soldiers threw them. At the other side a dense crowd stood silent, watching our packed decks. Women and children predom- inated, many of them in deep mourning. There were a few French officers: a captain home on per- mission, tenderly holding his daughter as she sat upon a wall; a naval officer standing on a balcony [14] ABOARD THE "POCAHONTAS" beside his tired-looking wife. Behind this crowd, in motors, sat some stalwart American oflScers, bronzed and fit. The port clock stood at six as we slowly moved into the inner basins, crowded with shipping, and tied up at the old wharf of the Compagnie Generale Transatlantique. 15] II ST. NAZAIRE TO CHAUMONT REVEILLE sounded again next morning at four-thirty, and promptly at seven o'clock ' the troops went down the gangways, formed upon the dock, and by eight had marched quietly away, leaving only about forty casual oflficers on the ship. There we were to remain until our orders came, our major, however, permitting us to go ashore for a while later in the morning. So Captain Morgan and I took a walk through the town — a rather stupid place as French towns go — and out by the sea to the public garden. Here we sat for a while in the sunshine — the thin weak sun of late March. There was still a distinct chill in the air, even on this favored south coast of Brit- tany. But the trees were beginning to bud and beds of daisies, tulips, and primroses spread their [ir>] ST. NAZAIRE TO CHAUMONT bright colors in the grass. The birds were nesting; cats were prowhng and searching their mates around the greenhouses, and nature was just waking after her long winter's sleep. It was only when we listened that the distant rumble of thundering lorries and the spluttering of side-cars and motorcycles told us that the war was real, as they rolled along the roads behind us, hurry- ing troops, supplies, and messages to the canton- ments back on the hills. We were forced to remain in St. Nazaire two days longer and, chained to the ship as we were, saw little of the town or its activities. Finally our orders came. All the officers were directed to proceed at once to the casual camp at Blois for assignment to duty except three of us who were to go to the En- gineer Headquarters at Angers. We made the short journey on a dull gray day, and it was a dull gray country through which we passed. Upon our arrival we reported to the Caserne des Jardins, a spacious barracks situated on high ground at the outer edge of the town. The court was filled with soldiers looking very businesslike in trench helmets and going through their gas-mask drill, [17] THE AMERICAN FRONT some of them representing the waves of gas and trying to reach the others before they could properly adjust their masks. Colonel Black, who was commanding the drill in person, greeted us pleasantly, saying, however, that he was sorry that he could not "keep us a few days," but that our orders had already come. At the ad- jutant's we got these orders directing us to proceed at once to General Headquarters at Tours. There was no train until nightfall, and as Pari- sians were flocking to Touraine in great numbers to escape the air-raids and the long-range guns, and the hotels were overfull, we were advised to wait for the morning train. Angers too was overflowing with refugees. I talked to a number of them, most of whom seemed greatly relieved to be safely out of the danger zone. But, in the court of the famous old feudal castle, I met an elderly gentleman and his charming daughter who treated the subject more lightly. He told us indeed of the latest raids, and of the bombing of St. Gervais, but he added: "I thought it was time to take my daughter away. Whenever she heard an alerte, she would go to her mirror to arrange her hair instead of descending [18] Ships Unloading Amrricun War Mat>■ (Icrman prisoners iiM' Cliurch in BadoiivilkT WITH THE RAINBOW DIVISION and orderly. In this quiet sector, this our first visit to the trenches was not as thrilling as we had ex- pected, as, beyond the trenches themselves, with their duck-walks, fire-steps, sand-bags, and care- fully braided revetments, there was little to be seen. That night, in the Officers' Club in Baccarat, I met a friend. Major Tracy of the Camouflage, with a couple of his coadjutors, and it was a fortunate meeting, for during the next few days they guided us about, showing us things we might not otherwise have seen until much later on. We visited the big gun emplacements near Re- herry, where the old "Fighting Sixty-Ninth," now the 165th Infantry, was quartered, and saw three eight-inch howitzers hidden in an apple-orchard and so well camouflaged with nettings that at a distance of a hundred yards it was impossible to detect them; we skidded through the slimy mud to a battery of 75s, and watched their lieutenant sodding the top of his dugout, which he did so care- fully that, when he had finished, the most perfect aerial photograph could not have revealed its pres- ence; then listened to him as he discoursed upon the merits of his guns, clean, glittering, and spotless [37] THE AMERICAN FRONT in spite of the mud, accompanying his explanations with the loving caresses of a father showing a favorite child. Another day, with three artillery officers, we went well up to some advanced positions beyond Pexonne to see a battery of 75s buried underground in dugouts scooped in a hillside. ^\Tiile I was busily sketching their rabbit-warren, I scarcely noted the brown smoke-puffs of shrapnel that kept bursting nearer and nearer, until I saw a lieutenant's head appear from a dugout and heard his voice calling: "Come in out of that, captain; that's a very un- healthy spot just now; they're trying to get our range. ..." One evening I attended a "show" given by the men of the French division upon our right. The theatre, though capable of holding more than a thousand people, was packed to the doors. There was a sprinkling of women and tradesmen from the town, but the vast majority of the audience was military — row upon row of officers in blue or khaki down-stairs, and soldiers packing the galleries or standing at the back as on a Caruso night at the Opera. [38] WITH THE RAINBOW DIVISION Near the stage the gold oak-leaves on a French general's hat sparkled conspicuously as he stood, surrounded by his staff, awaiting the arrival of our general, who came in just before the curtain rose. A band played exhilarating marches, and was replaced for the incidental music and accompaniments by a string orchestra also made up of soldiers. The ''stunts" were varied and amusing, some of the performers being quite well-known in the Paris music-halls. There were the heroic recitations and sentimental songs dear to the French heart; there were comics whose songs were full of Gallic license; there were fearful females fresh from the trenches, with blonde hair and painted lips, who displayed their silk stockings and lingerie with startling abandon; there were saynettes and bits of tragedy, and it was long after midnight when we groped our way home in the darkness — to be awakened at day- break by the antiaircraft guns. After a five days' stay in the sector we started back to Chaumont. As we entered Luneville a French infantry regiment was coming through and we stopped to watch it go by. How fine they looked, these weather-beaten veterans in gray steel helmets, [39] THE AMERICAN FRONT carrying their full marching equipment, and swing- ing along to the "Sambre et Meuse," with their guns held so high that, with the thin murderous bayonet that topped them, the narrow street fairly bristled with them, like the tall pikes of ancient men-at-arms. Farther on in the town we stopped to see the palace that Stanislas, ex-King of Poland, father of Marie Leszinska, built as his Versailles, a vast, pompous pile of masonry that has long been used as a cavalry headquarters, residence of some well- known general who commanded a crack division, which, like the famous division de fer of Nancy, as- sured the defense of the frontier. In the centre of its great forecourt, bestriding a rampant charger, stands a theatrical statue of Lasalle, "le beau sabreur,'^ the gallant young general of cavaliers legers, those winged couriers of the battle-field that once were the heroes of the fight, but are now replaced by real winged messengers, the Guynemers and Foncks of the aviation. We reached Nancy by noon and decided to stop and spend the night so as to see the condition of the city. We first turned into the Place Stanislas and found its smart majesty quite intact. Not one [40] WITH titp: rainbow division of Here's edifices that surround it had been touched and even Lamour's beautiful grills, superbly wrought and gilded, that have served as models for the iron- work of many an American millionaire's palace (without his knowing it), remained uninjured along one side of it and up the Place de la Carriere be- yond. In the gardens of the Pcpiniere, shaded by ash, aspens, and stately elms, a band was playing to a Sunday crowd, and all seemed strangely normal and peaceful. But when we went to see the ducal palace we found its Gothic Grande Porterie completely bar- ricaded and the tombs of the dukes in the Church of the Cordeliers adjoining buried under moun- tains of sand-bags. The Porte Desilles at the end of the Cours Leopold took on a new interest, for, built in 1785, was it not designed to commemorate as well as the birth of the Dauphin the alliance of France with the United States? Half a century ago Nancy, though the intellec- tual centre of eastern France with a famed university and scientific schools, counted only fifty thousand inhabitants. But after the War of 1870 it grew rapidly, many of the citizens of Metz and Stras- bourg, unwilling to live under German rule, emigrat- [41 1 THE AMERICAN FRONT ing to it and helping to develop its many industries, which, owing to its situation at the junction of a system of canals that connect it with the Rhine, Saone, Rhone, Meuse, and Marne, became quite important. Thus, in 1914, Nancy had become a thriving city of a hundred and twenty thousand in- habitants, a large proportion of whom lived in the newer quarters that sprang up around the Place Thiers. It was up in these newer quarters around the railroad-station that most of the damage from air- raids was done. Every house-front up there was spattered with the marks of high explosives. Every window was glassless and most of the buildings had yawning breaches in their facades. Even many of those that from the exterior looked quite intact were mere ruins within. One big group of buildings had just been bombed a night or two before and lay disembowelled like a poor picador's horse, with its entrails — timbers, stone, furniture, laths, and plaster — dragging in the street. Of the hundred and twenty thousand inhabitants, only forty thou- sand had been able to hold out during the one hun- dred and eighty raids ! [42] II WITH THE MARINES NEAR VERDUN THE jBrst time I saw the Marines was on top of the Cotes de Meuse, where they were having their first experience in the trenches. We had left Neufchateau early, passing through Gondrecourt and Ligny on the way, and had lunched at the big Popotte des Officiers, a French mess in the busy Ville Basse at Bar-le-Duc. We had taken no time to visit the picturesque Ville Haute — an- cient residence of the Dukes of Bar — but had pushed straight on via Vavincourt to Souilly. In the broad main street of Souilly there were few soldiers, but, on the other hand, before the doors of its stone houses there were many sentries, so we easily guessed it to be, as it was, a very important French Corps headquarters. At one crossroads we were saluted by no less than four sentries: an [43] THE AMERICAN FRONT American M. P., an Italian carahiniero, a poilu, and a chasseur alpin. Beyond Souilly the road was full of movement. American artillery trains were coming down and with them long strings of motor-trucks loaded with Marines, thundering along at top speed until the earth fairly trembled with them. Then we began to pass regiments of chasseurs alpins marching up, and we realized that a relief was going on. Between Ancemont and Dieue we crossed the marshes of the Meuse and soon arrived at Sommedieue. Here the streets and the place, camouflaged with long strips of burlaps hung across it en echelon, were swarming with soldiery. The dark-blue chasseurs were massing at one end, getting ready for billeting. Our Marines, in olive-green, were gathered over by the river, washing, shaving, scrubbing in their efforts to get clean after their stay in the trenches. Superb fellows they were, these *' leather-necks," these *' hard-boiled guys," as they liked to call themselves, who were so soon to become famous at Belleau Wood — ^fit comrades for the renowned "blue devils" of France who were gathering to relieve them. We left our car in the square, walked out over [44 1 WITH THE MARINES NEAR VERDUN the river and beyond the last house in the village, and I, for one, wondered whither we were going, when our guide turned up into a dense grove of ever- greens. There, hidden securely away among the pine-trees and further artfully concealed with a natural camouflage, we found Division Headquarters in a group of wooden huts that looked like a camp in California. The Chief of Staff greeted us dubiously, explaining that the division was "on the move," and that he did not know whether we could go up or not. But, after telephoning to Brigade Headquarters, he gave us permission to proceed. So, returning to our car, we motored out through the Forest of Amblonville to a big main road — the national highway from Verdun to Metz — and I read upon a milestone: "Ver- dun, 11 kilometres." Beyond the famous Fort du Rozellier, that bars this important road, we turned into the woods again and found, as at Sommedieue, Brigade Headquarters cunningly concealed in a dense forest. The general's aide-de-camp received us and, as we finished washing up after our long ride, told us that the general would like to see us. We found [45] THE AMERICAN FRONT him waiting outside the hut — General Harbord, then a brigadier just up from G. H. Q., where he had been Adjutant-General, a handsome figure of a soldier, dressed with such great care that, in this country' of sticky mud, I have never forgotten his immaculate riding-boots. He explained that he could not keep us at headquarters that night, but would send us up in his car to a battalion head- quarters in a part of the line that he thought very interesting. A few miles' ride along a camouflaged road brought us to a point at the bottom of a hill where we were told that the motor could go no farther. So, getting out, we walked on until we found, hidden away in an abandoned quarry, some barracks and magazines buried under row upon row of sand-bags. The of- ficers' quarters in another quarry farther on con- sisted of a number of tiny chambers dug in the solid earth and faced up with stone, a high talus pro- tecting their doors and windows from flying shell fragments. The battalion commander. Major Sibley, greeted us most cordially, had some supper reheated for us (it was long after mess-time), and then sent us in care of a lieutenant down into the trenches. [46] WITH THE MARINES NEAR VERDUN Battalion headquarters were on the top of the Cotes or Hants de Meuse, a long line of flat-topped hills that dominate the Woevre. The main high- way from Verdun to Metz intersects these hills by taking advantage of a cleft between two of them. About midway down the slope there stood a village, Haudiomont, now but a few crumbling walls, and around this village our first-line trenches bent. Two companies of the Sixth Marines were holding these trenches, and I was to stay with one company commander while my companion stayed with the other. Our guide led us down the hill through the com- municating trenches that wriggled and doubled on each other — boyaux, as the French call them — filled with argillaceous mud, ankle-deep, squashy, red, and so slippery that it was a constant effort to keep one's feet. Sometimes there were duck- walks, and then the going was better. At last we reached Haudiomont, or, more exactly, an outlying group of its buildings, now mere fragments of walls cutting shapeless silhouettes against the sky. Here I decided to stay with Lieutenant Noble, who, though but twenty-four, was commanding a [47] THE AMERICAN FRONT company of two hundred and ninety men, a company that specially distinguished itself at Belleau Wood. He proposed a walk before dark, and, looking criti- cally at my shoes, which were very stout ones, said : "Those won't do; you'd better let me fit you out with rubber boots." WTien I had put these on, with my *'tin hat," mj' gas-mask at the "alert," and my trench cane, I started on my first real tour of the trenches. The men, as we passed, stood flattened against the platted revetments, watching. Ever^'^ little while the pap-pap-paf of a machine-gun sounded startlingly close, for the Boche trenches at certain points were only a hundred yards away, and at others were even connected with ours by bits of abandoned boyauXy now choked with barbed wire. Thus we slowly made our round of the little sector held by Lieutenant Noble's company, he meanwhile taking careful note of everything — machine-guns, auto- matics, rockets, hand-grenades, having some of the latter thrown so as to test them. Here and there a ruined bit of wall appeared above the parapet — all that remained of some peasant's comfortable home. Finally we reached the farthest outpost near what [48] WITH THE MARINES NEAR VERDUN had been the railroad-station with the Hotel de la Gare opposite. Here, I was told, the raids usually came in, and as the machine-guns rattled my com- panion remarked: "They're at it early to-night; I wonder if there's something doing." We then began our trip back, crossing under the Metz road by a tunnel, seeing some strongholds organized in the houses that once bordered the road — chouses that still bore the livid marks of liquid fire burned upon their faces from the last attack, and ended our tour at Lieutenant Noble's dugout. This dugout was in a small cellar. A door ripped from some old Brittany armoire closed its entrance, over which an army blanket also hung, so that, when the door opened, no streak of light could be seen. The chief piece of furniture was a large square table on which were spread maps, photographs, and papers. A fat, short candle sputtered on a bit of wood that did duty as a candlestick. A rude chair, a mirror, a primitive fireplace made of a few bricks, and a soldier's bed made of a few boards, chicken-wire, and straw, completed its furnishings. My host took his place by the table and told me to take what comfort I could out of the bed, adding: [49] THE AMERICAN FRONT "I'm going to let you live my life to-night just as I live it. I'll show you the orders as they come in, and you can see what a company commander's night is like in the trenches." So, as the orderlies and runners came in with their despatches, he showed these to me: an important change in orders for rockets and signals to go into effect at once; orders for marching on the morrow and what to carry; the Intelligence report for the day; company papers to sign, etc. At times, as the door opened, the bright white light of flares, more brilliant than any moonlight, lit up the walls outside; and everj^ little while I went outdoors to watch these flares and star-shells illuminate the dead expanse of No Man's Land. Volleys from machine- guns, sharp and sudden and short rattling barrages from the 75s kept up an intermittent racket. At midnight an orderly appeared, lit a smoky fire, and brought in a hot supper — the principal meal in the trenches, for only at night can cooking be done — a steaming bowl of soup full of meat and vegetables, canned peas, a cup of chocolate, and thick slabs of buttered bread — ^a very substantial meal. I was especially anxious to see dawn break over [50] WITH THE MARINES NEAR VERDUN No Man's Land, so had arranged to have a runner come for me at 3 a. m. and take me to an observa- tion-post. He arrived upon the minute and led me off in the same general direction I had taken the night before, his gun with its fixed bayonet catch- ing a glint of light now and then. It was still so dark that the men could just be seen standing on the fire-steps peering into the night. Suddenly a gun went off quite near me; then others up and down our line. Rifle-shots are contagious in the night. Why did he shoot.'* He thought he saw something moving in the darkness. We reached a ruined building where, I was told, there was an observation-post up sufficiently high to command an extended view. I climbed some rickety steps and found myself on a broken flooring with a few roof -beams overhead, between which I could see the stars. One corner of the ruined walls was screened off with some old cloths and blankets. Inside this enclosure I found a chink in the wall, the blankets being hung so as to prevent light from showing behind this chink. With my eye glued to this loophole, I peered out into the darkness. The first streaks of dawn soon [51] THE AMERICAN FRONT came, and revealed the smashed timbers of the rail- road-station and crumbling walls of the Hotel de la Gare quite near. A blasted tree or two still stood, sentinel-like, along the white road to Metz. The fields — if fields they could be called — beyond were pitted and pockmarked with shell-holes, and just below me, in the immediate foreground, was a vast tangle of barbed wire, torn and twisted into perfect thickets, among which I could distinguish, here and there, the braided revetments of our trenches. Along the nearer edge of the wooded hill beyond lay the German first-line outposts. The sharp morning air was cold and still, and in this stillness I heard a cough — for every sound was audible — then the tac-tac-tac of a machine- gun; then silence again. And then, as the day bright- ened, the birds awoke and filled the silent waste with the carol of their voices. A gray cat climbed softly down a fallen beam below me hunting for his breakfast. Then came the sound of low voices quite near and, though I could hear no words, the familiar American twang sounded strangely out of place in these surroundings. The machine-guns were now actively astir again [5^2 1 An American Ohscrvat ion-Post In llu' former village of Haiulioniont. on the front line near Verdun, overlooking the roail to Metz WITH THE MARINES NEAR VERDUN and occasionally the 75s awoke the echoes. The sun rose in a cloudless sky, and the mystery, the witchery, the dread of the night were gone. I climbed back to headquarters through the viscous mud that glued to my boots at every step until my feet became enormous and heavy as lead. Then walked six kilometres back to Brigade Head- quarters, admonished as I departed to "keep over to the left behind the camouflage, for otherwise remember you are under observation." I lunched at the general's mess and, as we were finishing, the French liaison officer, who had made the entire Ver- dun campaign, proposed that we motor over to those historic fields. It was but a short ride. We soon left the friendly cover of the woods and came out into the utter desolation of the Verdun hills. There we got out and began to walk. As we advanced the spectacle was terrifying. Shell-hole overlapped shell -crater; the earth was ploughed and torn, blown up and smashed down again. Every step was a pitfall. Weapons of every description, grenades, canteens, shells, casques, ac- coutrements, bits of uniforms stained with a putrid [53] THE AMERICAN FRONT red-browTi varnish, and in certain shell-holes whitening bones sticking out of the stinking water, and in one a boot floating with a foot still in it. Though it was Maytime, the only vestige of green that Nature could bestow was a few blades of grass on the edges of the new craters. "Do you know where you are?" asked the French officer. *'No.^ You're in the village of Fleury.'* I had already seen a few ruined villages, and I have seen many since, but few have I beheld ruined as Fleury was ruined. Usually a bit of the solid masonry of a church is left, or a few segments of wall or a road that was once a street, but here at Fleury no trace of a town remained; not a gate nor a doorway nor a bit of broken wall rose above the utter desolation. Nothing but stones and bits of furniture; beams and broken household utensils, like the debris that accumulates in vacant lots on the outskirts of great cities. And when I raised my eyes to the far horizon the spectacle was everywhere the same. Not a tree; not a green thing. Hills as bare as the palm of your hand. T\Tiere once had been orchards, vineyards, [54] WITH THE MARINES NEAR VERDUN and well-kept woods, now were lunar solitudes, vast stretches of desert, utterly devoid of life. Not utterly, however, for down in a hollow I saw the fierce tongues of batteries and heard the roar of their voices and I knew that, hidden away in the bowels of the earth, in great excavations, men were hiding. Off to the north rose Douaumont and to the eastward Vaux, for we were standing just where the last German waves had beat them- selves in vain against the adamantine ring of outer fortresses. And toward the southward I could see a citadel, two spires, some gaping roofs, and chimneys without smoke — ^Verdun, the City Impregnable, whose name will go down through the ages linked with the greatest battle in history. [55] m IN GERMAN ALSACE WITH THE THIRTY- SECOND IN the beginning of May, I heard, through a friend attached to G 2 of the First Army Corps, that one of our divisions was going into hne down in German Alsace near the Swiss border, in a sector that the French had conquered in the be- ginning of the war and had held ever since. I spoke of this to my chief at G. H. Q., and he promised to get me down there — a promise he kept so well that, a few days later, he took me down himself in a big Cadillac. I look back upon this trip as something in the nature of an excursion. We started on a beautiful May morning, the air clear and crisp; the sun, for the first time, was bright and warm; the hills and fields clothed with their new spring dress. One by one the towns went flying by: Mirecourt, headquarters [56] IN GERMAN ALSACE of gallant General Castelnau; Epinal, with its memories of the images dear to every French child's heart; Remiremont, set in its ring of verdant hills. No sign of war was anywhere in evidence save, here and there in the villages, groups of soldiers in hori- zon-blue en repos. At Le Thillot we chose the short and steep road over the mountains via the Ballon d'Alsace, one of the most famous view-points in the Vosges, A series of sharp zigzags soon brought us well above the valleys until these lay spread out beneath us like colored contour maps, and then were blotted out by forests of evergreens where woodmen with their oxen were hauling logs or patiently stacking cord-wood in neat graded piles along the roadside. The road became steeper. Our powerful engine snorted but took the hills easily. The woods opened and barren uplands appeared. A sentry at a barrier stopped us to inspect our magic pink headquarters pass just as we reached the highest point of the road. The colonel proposed a climb to La Vierge, a huge figure of the Virgin that tops the Ballon d'Alsace. He set off at a great pace, climbing around the fields of barbed wire that [57] THE AMERICAN FRONT defended the summit until we reached the statue that dominates a vast sweep of the Rhine Valley. The buttresses of the Ballon plunged steeply down into the valleys that I was to visit within the next few days. Thann, Massevaux, Mulhausen, Alt- kirch lay spread in the plain, and along the horizon we could feel, though we could not actually see it, the Rhine, then the goal of all our desires. We coasted down through the woods again and arrived at Belfort, France's great frontier fortress, toward four o'clock. The town had suffered sorely from air-raids, but its life was still going on. And, as I passed through it, I caught a glimpse of the great Lion, more than seventy feet long, that Bar- tholdi carved from the solid red sandstone cliff that holds Vauban's famous citadel upon its sum- mit — the Lion de Belfort who, raising himself on his haunches, growls toward Germany, commemorat- ing Denfert-Rochereau's heroic defense of the city during the terrible winter of 1870-187L Through the ancient Porte de Brisach we left the city and followed out the so-called "trouee de Belfort," the vulnerable gap between the Vosges and the Jura, the possession of which by an enemy [58] IN GERMAN ALSACE would lay France open to an invasion from the east. Finally we reached La Chapelle-sous-Rougemont. In this small town were established the head- quarters of the division — which I found to be the Thirty-Second — to which I was going. As we ar- rived, the inspiring notes of a band of the chasseurs alpins, those blue devils so intimately connected with the Vosges campaigns, greeted our ears, setting our pulses going with the fast rhythm of the marches and the brilliant flourishes of their trumpets. Division Headquarters occupied an ordinary Adrian barracks divided into offices by rough pine partitions. Into one of these offices my chief led me and introduced me to the division commander, Major-General Haan, the man who had trained the division in Waco, Texas, brought it to France, led it afterward into its first fights, and made it what it was, one of the crack divisions of the A. E. F., the only National Guard unit chosen later to form pa-rt of the Army of Occupation on the Rhine. He was more than kind to me during my stay with his men, and his aide-de-camp guided me to the most interesting points in the front line. To- gether we visited the observation-posts beyond [59] THE AMERICAN FRONT Soppe-le-Bas and peered through narrow slits in these steel boxes at Ammertzwiller and Bern- haupt-le-Bas, ruined villages in No Man's Land where the Germans had their O. P.'s. Again, we walked out along the abandoned Canal du Rhone to a lock in which one of our outposts were estab- lished and, on the way back, got a good shelling from the German batteries that were trying to locate our artillery positions. We visited these too and, for the first time, I heard the bark of the 240s — ^a roar, especially when the guns fired in salvos of four, that set my ears ringing. But these were the only bits of real warfare that I witnessed in that sector. Both ofiicers and men were straining at the leash, so to speak, eager to get out and fight and push their way to the Rhine, but held back, and for excellent reasons, by the High Command. I saw one or two sham battles, however. One afternoon General Haan asked me to go with him on a tour of inspection, accompanied by his officier de liaison, a remarkable major who looked like an Irishman in a French colonial uniform, and by his French aide-de-camp, who had received eighty- [60] =3 :i IN GERMAN ALSACE two wounds, the only visible sign of which was a black patch over one eye. As we drove along, I watched with interest the effect of the two stars on their red field that signalled the general's car. Everybody was "on his toes." The M. P.'s stiffened and gave their smartest salutes; the sentries rattled their guns in their snappiest manner. We stopped in a field near Giromagny to watch an infantry battalion advance under cover of the artillery over a supposed No Man's Land to take a village beyond. The platoons worked their way forward slowly, signalling to each other so as to keep in touch by means of rockets fired from pis- tols. Every little while they stopped, took what cover they could find, and then went on again. It all looked very quiet and far removed from the dash and clatter of the bayonet charge that the stay-at- home might expect, and yet, when I saw the real thing later, I realized that this was, generally speak- ing, what modern warfare actually looked like. Later, quite by myself, I spent a couple of days in exploring the north end of the sector in a side- car, my first experience with a "wife-killer." One day I sketched in and around Massevaux, or Mas- [61] THE AMERICAN FRONT munster as the Germans call it, the principal town of the valley of the Doller — a typical Alsatian burg with high-pitched roofs and half-timbered houses, seat of a famous abbey of nuns founded in the eighth century. Just before the French Revolution the abbey, which had become so important that Catherine of Russia was sent to it to be educated, was to be rebuilt and enlarged. An architect from Strasbourg was called in, Kleber by name, the same who afterward became so renowned as a general. The main building that he designed was destroyed by fire, but if it may be judged by the portions that remain, no great artistic loss was suffered, for Kleber would seem to have been a much better soldier than architect. Up the valley beyond Massevaux the reserve battalions of the 125th Infantry were billeted through little manufacturing villages, Kirchberg, Oberbruch, Dolleren, whose tiny cottages resembled the houses in Noah's Ark, our men towering enor- mous beside their diminutive doors and windows. On Sunday the people, misshapen, homely, trooped to church, dressed in strange clothes, and those queer bonnets that one sees in certain parts of south- [62] IN GERIVL\N ALSACE ern Germany, and their guttural patois, at that period of the war, sounded singularly obnoxious to the ear. As south Alsace is much more germanophile than the northern end of the province, I was constantly interested in watching the attitude of its inhabitants toward our soldiers. Indifferent they certainly were not, and I thought most of them distinctly surly and ill-tempered, which impression was con- firmed by many of our officers. As I bumped along the road beside my driver with his rifle strapped down the handle-bar, I caught, out of the tail of my eye, many a sour glance cast in our direction — the kind of glance that, in the old legends of the country, turned wine to vinegar. But, as I have said before, this little trip of mine into German Alsace was quite in the nature of an excursion, a glimpse of a charming country in May- time. But it was my last peaceful experience. The period of preparation of our combat divisions was almost ended. The hour of their active participa- tion in battle was at hand, sooner than any one could have expected. When next I saw the Thirty -Second, it was pushing its way up to Fismes. [63] THE AMERICAN FRONT By the time I returned to Neufchateau, the month of May had ahnost passed. On Thursday, the 30th, the Germans broke through between Soissons and Reims, and a few days later had fought their way into Chateau-Thierry, where they had been tem- porarily halted. Those were dark days — ^in many ways the darkest of the war. While hoping for the best, every one feared the worst. [64] Ill CHATEAU -THIERRY AND THE MARNE I BELLEAU WOOD CHATEAU-THIERRY had been taken and the Germans were on the Marne again only fifty miles from Paris. On the 1st of June I was ordered to that city on a special mission. The only other American in the compartment was a colonel, just back from the Philippines, who, having reported at G. H. Q., was now on his way to rejoin his old command, a regi- ment in the Third Division. At Bar-sur-Aube we found his troops on the move, the station littered with field equipment and crowded with men in khaki. At Troyes the depot was filled with refugees — the first tide of forlorn-looking derelicts bound they knew not whither. Here ensued a long delay, and after that we made very slow progress. At Romilly the tide of refugees increased, and as our train drew [67] THE AMERICAN FRONT in they broke their bounds and hterally stormed it, fining with their pitiful bundles every available corner. At Nogent the same sad picture — the plat- forms a confused and swaying mass of humanity laden with every conceivable object: bedding, bird-cages, clothing, boxes, bags, and household articles piled into baby -carriages. Strings of locomotives from the repair-shops and roundhouses of Chateau - Thierry were being towed into comparative safety. One felt the Germans very near, as indeed they were, this line being the next one menaced in any new advance. Now we began to meet troop-trains one after another until the tracks were fairly choked with them, hastening up reinforcements where they were sorely needed. We were due in Paris at 6 p. m., but at that hour were still creeping along many miles from the city. Long stops followed and it was 1 A. M. when we finally reached the suburbs. I was just congratulating myself that the long jour- ney was over when we were shunted off on to a sid- ing. Suddenly the heavens lit up, streaked with the tall shafts of search-lights. Innumerable new stars [68] BELLEAU WOOD and constellations blinked and twinkled in the firmament and the barking voices of the antiair- craft guns told us we were in for an air-raid. Nearer came the lights. New batteries awoke. Bright flashes streaked the sky and the din grew momentarily louder. Two women in our compart- ment almost went into hysterics, continually crying, as we tried to reassure them: ^'Que voulez-vous; nous sommes des femmes !"" And it was terrifying, out in the open night with only the roof of the car over- head for protection. The din reached its climax; the lights grew dimmer, the barrage more distant, and we thought that all was over. But a new cres- cendo arose. Again the flashes; again the roar of the guns and the bursting bombs, and again all died away. It was a long raid — four separate attacks, one after another; then, after nearly two hours' delay, quiet was restored, and at 3 a. m. we pulled into Paris and emerged from the Gare de I'Est into the Stygian darkness of unlighted streets. . . . When I returned to G. H. Q. a few days later, the first fights in Belleau Wood had already taken place but the wood was not yet entirely cleared. [69] THE AMERICAN FRONT So, with two comrades, I set off by motor in that direction. We had a long day's ride via Joinville, St. Dizler, and Vitry-Ie-FranQois. The road de- scended the valley of the Marne, following, for the most part, the river itself, which gathers size before your eyes. Beyond Vitry we entered the bare open reaches of La Champagne, marked here and there with the lonely graves of the brave fellows who fell while trying in vain to stem the first German advance. The road lay straight before us for miles, rolling up and down a monotonous succession of hills one after another. Though we were well behind the lines, at times the traffic was intense. Chains of camions, making an infernal clatter and din, thundered along at light- ning speed, enveloped in sickening clouds of dust. Under the deep hoods their drivers' faces appeared, covered with a whitish mask of limy powder, spread thickest on their eyebrows and beards and in the wrinkles of their foreheads, until they looked like some strange creatures of the Nibelungenlied or men in the legends of the Norsemen. We passed a big American camp near Sommesous, [70] BELLEAU WOOD and beyond that, strings of British aviation lorries and ambulances driven by dusty blond English- women. At Connantre we waited at the railroad- crossing while long trains of Italians went by on their way up toward Chalons or Reims. All the resources of the Allies were being rushed up to parry the next desperate blow. We reached Montmirail toward evening, and next morning set out for the headquarters of our Second Division, which we learned were in a chateau not far from Essises. This we found without much trouble, though every precaution had been taken to conceal the importance of the spot. An M. P. stopped us some distance away and ordered our car parked under the trees. We were then led through the woods and by the shaded walks of the vegetable-garden to a back door of the hand- some chateau, whose main gates remained closed as if the place was uninhabited. Inside, however, we found it teeming with ac- tivity. Orderlies and stenographers filled the bil- liard-room; the Intelligence and telephones occupied a large drawing-room. The Chief of Staff received us in a smaller salon in which the furniture had been [71] THE AMERICAN FRONT pushed back and replaced by a big work-table on horses, upon which were spread large-scale maps concealed by papers. After questioning us, he sent us up to Brigade Headquarters, where, in an abandoned farm, La Malmaison, beyond Viffort, we found General Sladen. We told the general of our desire to see and make drawings of Chateau-Thierry- — ^a desire at that time not easy to gratify. He showed us on the map where we might go and sent his aide-de-camp with us as far as regimental headquarters. Here we were sup- pHed with a runner who led us out through the fields and woods to a hill just above Nesles. The town, surrounded as it was with artillery positions, was being shelled and the detonations sounded uncom- fortably near. Then as we walked farther on, a sniper's bullet zinged between one of my companions and myself and snapped off a branch of a sapling just beside us. After that we proceeded very cautiously, finally stepping from the fringe of woods into an orchard. The ground fell away down to the Marne, and there, directly opposite, only a mile or so away, looking quite peaceful — unbelievably so, in fact — [72] BELLEAU WOOD lay Chateau-Thierry. Rumor had it that the town had been destroyed and burned. Yet every httle while, as the sun shone through rifts in the clouds, it lighted up different parts of the city — the ware- houses round the depot on the near side of the river, the conspicuous tower of the church of St. Crepin, the emplacement of the old chateau, and, from this distance, little damage appeared. On the hills be- yond the city the Germans lay concealed and every little while a shell would come singing toward us with that strange wabbly noise that we grew to know so well, and would burst behind us over toward Nesles; and every little while a black puff of smoke or a gray one, breaking beyond the city, would show the effectiveness of our reply. TVTien we had completed our sketches, we turned back, little realizing, in those dark days, that in a short space of time, we should be walking in Chateau-Thierry's ruined streets. Next day we set out for Belleau Wood. After some trouble we found the headquarters of General Harbord's brigade in a deserted farmhouse. La Loge, situated on the main road from Paris to Chateau-Thierry, a little beyond Montreuil-aux- [73] THE AMERICAN FRONT Lions. This was the same brigade that I had visited near Verdun and, up to that time, it had done all the fighting in the Bois de Belleau. From La Loge we w ent on to Maison Blanche, the headquarters of Colonel Neville's regiment, the Sixth Marines, in which we found the colonel conferring with his second in command and one or two other officers, but he left presently to make a tour of inspection in the wood. The lieutenant-colonel took us about and showed us the big fresh shell-holes in the orchard and a new hole gaping in the roof. We carefully concealed our car in the woods near by and he gave us a runner to guide us to Belleau Wood, saying, as we parted: " Go as far as you like, but be sure to keep fifty paces apart on the way out." Thus spaced in single file, we set out through shell-torn fields and bits of woodland where the branches hung limp, snapped off by bullets, and where the narrow paths were choked by fallen trees. Through an opening we could see Lucy-le-Bocage lying off to the left, ruined, desolate, deserted. From this point on, we followed a little ravine or gully that afforded us some protection (for the shells were coming over) and through which the men made [74] BELLEAU WOOD their way to and from the wood. Here and there a pile of fresh earth, marked with a bit of paper fastened to a stick and with a steel helmet placed upon it, showed where some poor fellow had paid the ultimate price. Then we reached a culvert that carried the road from Lucy to Bouresches across the ravine. Under the protection of its stone supports, we found a first- aid dressing-station established, and here we stopped a moment to rest. A few wounded lay about wait- ing to be sent back. Above my head a great tree had been lopped off by a shell and lay across the gully. The bottom of the ravine itself was littered with debris of every description, with parts of gas- masks, cans, canteens, broken stretchers, rifles, cartridge-belts, and fragments of bloody uniforms ripped from wounded men — sorry relics of suffering. There were too the articles from their pockets: tobacco-tins, gum, cards, and especially bits of torn letters from home. And as I sat in this scene of anguish, my eye caught these words written on a fragment of paper: "A son such as I have found you to be. God grant that you may be returned to that mother has and will be my constant prayer.'* [75] THE AMERICAN FRONT An ambulance appeared for a moment on the road above the culvert, loaded its human freight, and turned back again. Stalwart Marines with rifles and packs made their way cautiously through the ravine on their way up to the wood. In the heat of the June afternoon the smell of the clotted blood and the stings of the big gray horse-flies grew unbearable. We climbed out of the gully and stood for a moment on the open road, looking at the desolation over toward Bouresches, then dropped down into the ravine again, and continued our way until we reached the south end of the Bois de Belleau. Here, by good fortune, I found Major Sibley's battalion, the very one that I had visited near Hau- diomont. The major greeted us warmly and led us over to his dugout, situated among those of his men in the thick of the woods. Belleau Wood, now become so famous in Amer- ican annals of the war, is but a little stretch of wood- land, running north and south, scarcely more than a mile in length and half a mile wide. It is composed for the most part of small trees that grow in clusters from a single root and interlock their branches to [76] BELLEAU WOOD form thickets so dense that it is with difficulty that one pushes his way through them or sees more than a few yards ahead. Here and there taller trees — ^birches, beeches, and oaks — tower above this smaller growth, and in certain parts of the wood, especially toward its east front, the ground rises into steep eminences crowned with big gray boulders that form ideal shelters for machine-gun nests. In this tangled bit of woodland, a veritable fortress, the Germans had securely established them- selves in their forward thrust toward Paris, and it was from this stronghold that our gallant Marines had had to drive them. Seated near his dugout, with the shells whistling overhead and at times snapping off the branches near us, the major told us of the attack, describing how his men fought their way into the wood, wriggled on their bellies through the dense underbrush, and finally charged the machine-gun nests hidden in the rocks and clubbed the gunners over the heads with the butts of their rifles. Lieutenant Noble's com- pany, it seems, was in the thick of it, suffered severely, but behaved like heroes, and their com- mander was recommended for the D. S. C. [77] THE AMERICAN FRONT None of us, I am sure, at that time realized the importance of the engagement nor the place it would take in American history. We only thought of it as the first "real scrap" that our soldiers had been in, and knew that their behavior in it gave most brilliant promise for the future. There, about us in the wood, were the men who had done the work. And truly a strange picture they made, scattered among the trees, each buried to the shoulders in his sandy dugout, for all the world like prairie-dogs peering from their burrows. Some were busily cleaning their guns, or polishing up their accoutrements; while others were rearranging their kits and brushing their muddy uniforms. Peck- ing about among them I noticed a small speckled hen — Si strange sight, indeed, in such a place — and I asked about her. "Why, that's Lucy," the major said. And he told us that when his men took Lucy-le-Bocage this little chicken was the only living thing they found there. Though food was very scarce, Lucy's life was spared and she became the battalion mascot, pecking for crumbs with impunity though followed by hundreds of hungry eyes. [78] A Major > Diijiout in licllcaii Wood BELLEAU WOOD Toward evening the bombardment redoubled in intensity. The colonel returned from his tour of the wood, and we started back with him toward his headquarters. Hostile planes hovered overhead and several times we had to take cover in the edge of the woods. The shells too were falling uncom- fortably close. Wlien we reached Maison Blanche again we found that a big one had just burst in the court, wrecking an outhouse and killing a man. Our chauffeur told us that he was in our car when he heard the shell coming. He didn't know how it happened, but when it exploded he was under the car. Sand-bags were being piled in the farmhouse windows that were wide open when we left. When we finally departed ciuite late in the eve- ning, the colonel's last words to us were specific: "Beat it like hell !" And we did. We spent a few days more sketching in this Bel- leau sector, one of them with another battalion of the same regiment that had taken part in the fight but was now in reserve. Then, as there seemed little prospect of any immediate new activity, we returned to our station at Neufchateau. [79] II ALONG THE MARNE AND UP TO FISMES ABOUT a monili later, that is, on July 15, the Cennans delivered their last desperate blow. This time, however, it fell against a solid wall. At only one important point did that wall break. The French, sorely pressed, yielded along the Marne from Jaulgonne to Chatillon, and the Germans, crossing the river, threatened to pour up the Surmelin Valley and continue their march toward Montmirail and Paris. But a thorn stuck into their side. Four regiments of Americans belonging to the Tliird Division still stood firm along the river, stretching from Chateau- Thierry nearly to Jaulgonne, spoiling their plan and impeding their advance. Then, on the 18th, Marshal Foch delivered his smashing counter-stroke, and the German retreat [80] ALONG THE MARNE AND UP TO FISMES Sketck-rnap of tfie Chateau-Thierry reyloa began — a retreat that was not to stop until the war ended. Each day thereafter shortened the depth of the Chateau-Thierry pocket, until, by the 27th [81] THE AMERICAN FKOXT of July, its southernmost edge lay in front of Fere- en -Tardenois, wliere, along the heights that dominate the Ourcq, the Germans tried desperately to arrest the Allied advance at least long enough to permit their sliattered divisions to retreat. But here again their line was broken, and, by the 3d of August, the pocket was entirely wiped out, and the Amer- icans had reached Fismes on tlie road between Sois- sons and Reims. A few days after this Allied offensive began, I again set out for the Chateau-Thierry region, by the same road that I had before taken. This time, however, I headed from Montmirail directly toward the Marne, descending the Surmelin Valley that I have just mentioned. Its westerly side lay in the American area, and khaki was the prevailing color in the villages, but across the valley I could see French regiments moving up, the bright July sunlight glittering on their guns and bayonets and on the long muzzles of the loos. As we entered Crezancy, we found it crowded with Americans. It too was the first to^^^l that was smashed to bits. Shells had ploughed through its houses like knives through cheese. Disembowelled, ALONG THE MARNE AND UP TO FISMES their walls stood tottering. Their red tiles, shaken by terrific concussions, had slid from the roofs and lay in heaps, littering the streets, leaving only the bare beams and rafters, skeleton-like, against the sky. The church was hopelessly shattered and our men were eating their "slum" in its battered pews. Across the street a Red Cross Ambulance was estab- lished, and a large house that our men designated as '*The Chateau" was being used as the head- quarters of the Thirty-Eighth Infantry. Here we stopped for lunch, and it was lucky for us that we did so. I found myself placed next to the colonel, Ulysses McAlexander, a "regular," now promoted to a generalship. I began to ask him about the battles that had just taken place and he, in answer, began to tell me what his regiment had done on the two first crucial days of the German push. I was, I think, the first outsider he had talked to since those stirring days, and he became quite excited — as ex- cited indeed as I was, for it was a thrilling story to listen to thus at first hand. Briefly this is what he told me. Four American [83] THE AMERICAN FRONT regiments (as I have before stated) defended the Marne from Chateau-Thierry eastward to Crezancy : the Fourth, Seventh, Thirtieth, and his regiment, the Thirty-Eighth, which held the right of our Hue with the French adjoining. The main-Hne tracks of the railway from Paris to Metz and Strasbourg run along the south bank of the Marne, and he was advised to use their embankment as his principal line of defense. This he did, but he also decided to place men all along the river-bank itself in rifle- pits dug among the reeds, and never to let the Ger- mans even set foot on his side of the river. He inquired of the French adjoining about his right flank, and was assured that it was strongly defended and perfectly safe. But here again he determined to take no chances, so had trenches dug en echelon up the side of a hill that commanded a wide field of fire tmvard the French. "I don't know what they thought of me," he said, "but I never asked." When the Germans delivered their terrific blow, his men along the river stood firm in their rifle-pits and prevented a landing. AATien the French fell back upon his right, his trenches on the hill became [84] ALONG THE MARNE AND UP TO FTSMES of paramount importance and enabled him success- fully to defend his exposed flank, so that his regi- ment stuck like a wedge out into the enemy lines, to their eternal discomfiture. To illustrate his story better, he left the tabic and returned with some maps and photographs in his hand. Among the maps was one taken from a captured German officer showing the plan of their main attack. All the arrows that marked the line of their intended advance converged toward a bend of the river between Mezy and Jaulgonne with Cre- zancy as its centre, for Crezancy lies at the mouth of the Surmelin Valley, up which they were to ad- vance. And it was the wedge of the Thirty-Eighth In- fantry that stopped their advance. The air-photos clearly corroborated this, for they showed the Ger- man tracks down to the north bank of the river, and on the south bank where a Landwehr regiment succeeded in crossing opposite the Thirtieth, and where other units crossed in to the area occupied by the French. But no tracks could be seen on the south bank in fnmt of Crezancy. When we had finished lunch, the colonel asked: [85] THE AMERICAN FRONT "\Miat are you doing this afternoon?'* "Nothing," I rephed, "except my sketching." "Do you want to go over the field with me?" he inquired — and j'ou can guess my reply. So he called his orderly, picked up his stout cane with a Prussian officer's black-and-silver sabre-knot twisted round it, and we set off. First we proceeded to the eastward past Moulins and as far as a hill back of Varennes. Here he turned off the road and led us off' at a clipping pace through the wheat-fields toward the Moulin Ruine that had been his P. C. And there, on the lower slopes of this hill, he showed us the trenches he had dug. Khaki caps and coats and heaps of empty cartridges lay in them. Their field of fire toward the river was wide and open. Some of the dead had already been buried but many had not, and all sorts of things lay in the tall ripe wheat. The July sun was ardent and tliere was a sickening odor in the air. As we walked about, the colonel, with his cane, raised the fallen wheat enough to show the direction in which it lay, trampled one way as the Boches advanced and in the opposite direction as they fell back before his murderous fire. [80] ALONG THE MARNE AND UP TO FISMES Next he led us down across the railroad embank- ment to the Marne — ^here an open quiet-running river, perhaps thirty yards wide — and showed us the rifle-pits dug along its bank. Grenades lay about in quantities, mingled with American equipment, but nothing Boche. There were new graves here and there, and before one of these the colonel stopped and raised his hand to his cap in salute. "Do you know who lies here.'''* he asked. "No? Corporal O'Connor. Corporal O'Connor hid himself here in the reeds and waited until the first boat- load of Germans — men of the famous Sixth Grena- diers — ^had almost succeeded in getting across, and the man in the bow was just reaching with his grap- pling-hook to catch the shore. Then he rose from his hiding-place and gave them his grenades full in the face, sinking the boat and killing all its occu- pants. He also was killed where he stood." This spot upon the Marne where the Germans never crossed should be hallowed forever by every good American, for here, to my mind, was marked the turning-point of the war. Continuing our walk along the river, we reached [87] THE AMERICAN FRONT a point between Mezy and Charteves where the Germans did succeed in getting across in the area occupied by the Thirtieth Infantry. To our left, Mezy's beautiful old Norman church-tower still reared itself sadly against the sky, surrounded by the shattered remnants of its parishioners' homes. Across the river Charteves' church la}^ in ruins, only a fragment of its tower pointing like a thin finger toward heaven, calling for vengeance. The golden wheat-fields of the Ile-de-France and its rolling hill-slopes covered with gardens and orchards, made, by contrast, these scenes of desola- tion the more poignant. To the north the rumble of the cannonade sounded like the constant roll of drums. We left the river and turned back through fields strewn thick with Boche equipment. The ditches were filled with debris and with objects that stank of clotted blood. I picked up a helmet and found it full of matted dark hair. After that I didn't care to investigate nor look for souvenirs. All the Ger- mans that got across were either killed or taken prisoner. We had now completed our tour of Colonel Mc- [88] ALONG THE MAUNE AND UP TO FISMES of shattered villages along the river that lay within the range of our artillery: Jaulgonne, Mont St. Pere, Blesmes, Glands — razed to the ground, every one of them, their buildings so formless that, in the dazzling sunlight, they resembled only the reefs of some coral islands — a "joli pays,'* as one decrepit old peasant bitterly remarked to me. For, now that the tide of battle had been pushed back even a little, a few poor old people, having nowhere else to go, were already wandering back, returning to seek their ruined homes, searching among the debris for their scattered possessions, lamenting the disappearance of their household utensils, pointing shudderingly at mattresses soaked with blood. All was cliaos and confusion where only a few days before had been order and con- tent. Chateau-Tliierry itself was by no means hope- lessly ruined; had, in fact, only suffered in spots. Many of its streets were quite intact. Others were but a mass of debris. The Church of St. Crcpin was filled with plunder, collected by the Germans, read}^ to be taken but abandoned at the last minute in the hurry of their departure. [01] THE AMERICAN FRONT The handsome stone bridge across the Marne had been dynamited and the hea\y masonry of two of its arches lay blocking the channel, but already blue-coated engineers were swarming over it like ants restoring a trampled ant-hill. Long, serpent- like columns of kliaki-clad troops crawled over the two pontoons to the eastward and clattered along the stone-paved quays into the city on their way northward to reinforce the attack. I climbed to the site of the old chateau that Charles Martel, according to tradition, built in the eighth century for good King Thierry. What scenes its gray old walls had witnessed ! Taken by the English in the thirteenth century, retaken by Charles the Fifth a half century later, besieged and assaulted again and again, its ruins saw the fierce combats of 1814, when the irresistible soldiers of the Great Napoleon drove off the Prussians and Russians who left twelve hundred dead upon the ground and eighteen hundred prisoners in the hands of the vic- tors. But what imaginative soothsayer would have dared to prophesy that the next time a battle was waged beneath its venerable walls it would be the youth of far America that would again rout the [ 9-2 ] ALONG THE MARNE AND UP TO FISMES Hun and make the name of Chateau-Thierry forever glorious in the annals of American history ! There it lay beneath me, the silent city, utterly deserted save for the long columns of khaki-clad troops marching ceaselessly along the river. The belfry of St. Bothan and the sturdy tower of St. Crepin still rose intact above the broken roof-tops, while, near at hand, the lantern of the Hotel de Ville cut its battered silhouette against the sky. A great square of houses that bordered the main street, gutted by air-bombs, were now mere empty shells, scorched and blackened by fire. Beyond the river, the soft green slopes of the Marne hills, covered with woods and wheat-fields and orchards, seemed, by contrast, a mockery to the tragedy of the shat- tered city. Off toward the right rose the slopes of Hill 204, that redoubtable stronghold of the enemy, his citadel from which he commanded a view of all the Marne Valley. Later on, I spent an afternoon wandering through its defenses. Rifle-pits and shelters, dug- outs and P. C.'s, excavated deep into the sand under gigantic boulders, honeycombed the ground under its rounded brow, which was ravaged and torn by [93] THE a:\ieuican front sholl-liolos and oompletoly donudod of its woods, only a few blaokonod stiiinps slaiidini;' like the last few hairs on a bald head. The Boehes had just left and the pits were full of debris: beddini;- and mattresses stolen from the ruined \'illai;es near by, overcoats and field-gray uniforms, Mauser rifles, bayonets, heaps of "potato- mashers" (as our boys call the Boelie hand-grenades) mixed with cigarette boxes, bits of eatables, and the fcldpostbricfs so plentifully supplied to the German army — all the rubbish, in fact, of a hastily aban- doned camp. From the crest of the hill, where the Paris road turns to descend the other side, 1 could look down into the village of Vaux, now, alas, but a heap of ruins bordering the highway. When our gallant ^Lirines had finally cleared the enemy from Belleau Wood, they straightened out their line through Bouresches and, by the end of June, prepared to take Vaux. Xot a house in the town escaped the withering artillery -fire that preceded the attack. Every German shelter in the town was sought out and peppered, and when the infantry rushed it on July 1, they even went beyond A^ )m3 .= -2 '^ ALONG THE MARNE AND UP TO FISMES and gained a foothold on the lower slopes of Hill 204. I wanted to appreciate the pleasant sensation of even this small advance, so decided to make a detour, going round by Nogent I'Artaud, so as to reach the Paris road again at a point near Maison Blanche, where Colonel Neville had had his head- quarters when I first was in Belleau Wood. His house now stood empty and the roads and woods about it were deserted. We could motor on beyond without even hearing the whistle of a shell, and in- stead of crawling up through that narrow ravine, could take the open road straight into Lucy-le- Bocage and out over the top of the culvert where the dressing-station had been, to the fields beyond Belleau Wood. Here too all was quiet and deserted. But among the gray boulders where the machine-guns had been, I found fresh copies of the Boston Transcript and the Springfield Republican that told me where the New Englanders of the Twenty-Sixth had relieved the Marines of the Second. The Twenty-Sixth was put in line here early in July, and lay in its hastily dug trenches along the [95] THE AMERICAN FRONT east front of the wood, harassed night and day, until the great AlHed offensive opened on the 18th. Then, in haison with the French on its left, it went over the top. Torcy and Belleau were taken in the jBrst rush, and our men in their eagerness even charged up the slopes of Hill 193 beyond, but had to be recalled to await haison with the troops on their left. A day or two later they were at it again and this time puslied over the hills of the Marne, on to the plateau of the Orxois and to the slopes that descend to the Ourcq. They left their traces along their path of victory. The fields in front of Belleau Wood were dotted with lonely graves — sometimes one, sometimes three together, sometimes a group of six. A rude wooden cross marked each grave, with a musket stuck into the ground beside it and a flat khaki- colored helmet hung upon it. Of the little chain of villages, Bouresches had suffered most. Nothing but ruins surrounded its place, in whose centre rose a tree, an oak centuries old, whose vast wide-spreading leafy arms had long shaded the picturesque square. Now it stood a [96] p^ a~ ALONG THE MARNE AND UP TO FISMES gaunt skeleton, shot to pieces, its branches lopped off, amputated one by one, its trunk riddled and pitted and peppered by bullets and shrapnel. As I finished a drawing of it, it dawned upon me that it was noon and that I had only had a cup of coffee and a bit of bread for breakfast very early in the morning. There were a few French soldiers in the village and I hailed a sergeant and asked if he knew where I could get something to eat. He led me to a house where six officers were gathered round a table. It was the best room they could find. Its four walls were standing but a shell had torn a big hole in the ceiling, a hole that had been covered with a tarpaulin to keep the rain out. No glass in the windows, of course, and a door that could not close. The table was the ordinary "dining-room table" of the petite bourgeoisie, lengthened with its leaves, and covered with a red-and-white checked oilcloth. The dishes were gathered from the wreckage of a dozen china-closets, but carefully and symmetrically ranged along the table, to which two vases of field flowers added an almost festive note. The food was passed by an ordonnancey sl hirsute old terri- [97] THE AMERICAN FRONT torial of fierce appearance but very gentle manner who performed his service quietly and well. And as I shared this lengthy luncheon and lis- tened to the unceasing conversation, I could not help thinking of the many x\merican messes that I had attended, where everything was put upon the t