Immediately beyond, the terrain is not so difficult. The Clignon valley becomes less rugged and gradually blends with the plateau. Toward Bézu-St.-Germain and Epieds lies a comparatively open plain with extensive stretches of fallow land. In this more open region the progress was more rapid; on July 22 the American troops took possession of Epieds, twelve kilometres from Bouresches, their starting point.
But the difficulties are more serious farther to the north, along the hills which form the southern boundary of the valley of the Ourcq. Although the depression made by the Ru d'Alland, being broad and level, is not a considerable obstacle, it is not the same beyond. The relief map shows a line of heights running from west to east, and rising higher and higher in that direction. From these heights a multitude of valleys descend to the Ourcq, from south to north, cutting the crest into hills separated by depressions. Thus the terrain is broken up in every direction and well adapted to meet an attack from the west as well as one from the south.
It was necessary to deal with all these obstacles one by one. Starting from the west, the French had to carry successively these lines of crests and depressions with their fortified villages: ridge of Monnes, July 19; ravine of Neuilly-St-Front the same evening; the hill of Latilly and its wood the 20th; La Croix and Grisolles the 21st, with their thickets and dense plantations of osiers. On the 23d the Allied troops took Rocourt and the wood of Le Chatelet; on the 24th the deep ravine of Brécy; and, finally, on the 25th, French and Americans together attacked the hill of the forest of Fère, which is 228 metres high, completely covered with woods, cut by ravines, and flanked by fortified villages. On the 27th the whole position was taken, and the Allies were on the verge of the deep valley of the Ourcq, which they were next to cross.
This line was a by no means inconsiderable obstacle. Imagine, if you please, a deep depression, twisting and turning in all directions, and from 200 to 400 metres wide, extending at least as far as Fère-en-Tardenois. It is bounded on either side by cliffs of hard limestone, 30 to 40 metres high, in which innumerable caves are scooped—the so-called boves, which are used as dwellings, with doors and windows flush with the face of the cliff. These boves are invaluable defensive positions, out of reach of bullets and shells. The valley bottom is wet and swampy, with dense clumps of poplars mingled with alder-bushes. There are numerous villages at the foot of the cliffs,—Rozet-St.-Albain, Brény, Armentières,—or on the slopes above, like Noroy. A frontal attack on such a position would have been too costly. The Allies turned the line of the Ourcq from the north. They crossed the river in force in the upper part of its course, where it has not yet attacked the stratum of hard limestone, and where the valley is wider, and the sides are less steep. Nevertheless they encountered terrible difficulties.
North of the Ourcq, indeed, the last heights of the Orxois form another chain of hills, from four to six kilometres wide—the last obstacle before we come to the plateau of the Soissonnais. These hills are of the greatest possible diversity of shape and vary in height from 200 metres at the western extremity to 230 at the eastern. Their bases consist largely of sandstone and Fontainebleau sand, with clumps of forest scattered here and there; higher up is the softer limestone, the land being entirely cleared and covered with crops. Here and there we find the remains of the former covering of clay and Fontainebleau sand—wooded ridges which expand toward the east into the wood of Seringes, the forest of Nesle, and Meunière wood. These hills, the last as we travel northward, where they command the whole of the Soissonnais, have therefore the greatest strategic value, particularly the positions of Hartennes, Plessier-Huleu, and Seringes.
Luckily these formidable defensive positions were approached from the west, astride the ridges. Starting from the forest of Retz, the French crossed the Savières with a rush, and in a single bound reached Noroy-sur-Ourcq and Villers-Hélon, which lie along one of the ridges, surrounded by orchards. On July 19 they had advanced three kilometres to the east; the strong line of the Ourcq was outflanked. On the 20th they were at Parcy-Tigny and Rozet-St.-Albain, pushing forward over the broken ground planted with sugar-beets and cereals, enlivened in spots by small clumps of trees perched on the sandstone hillocks. Thus they drew near to the heart of the position—the ridges of Plessier and of Hartennes. There the resistance was much more violent; but after three days of hard fighting, the French entered Plessier and approached the village of Oulchy-la-Ville, surrounded by picturesque heaps of sandstone blocks mingled with pines and birches. On the 25th, in the evening, they were in occupation of Oulchy-le-Château, which lies in a charming vale running down to the Ourcq. The line of the Ourcq, as to that portion where the river, flowing between high cliffs, constitutes a real obstacle, was in the Allies' hands.
It remained to complete the victory by the conquest of the eastern sector of the hills; and this again was no easy task. The French and Americans had now to approach that strong defensive position from the south. On the 28th they entered Fère-en-Tardenois; the Americans crossed the Ourcq, taking Sergy, which changed hands nine times. On July 31, after more titanic battles, they wrested Seringes from the foe. On August 1 there was a general advance all along the line, and the Allies carried the whole line of hilltops, from Plessier-Huleu to Meunière wood.
This was the end: the horizon expanded. From the heights conquered in fourteen days of fighting the Allies went down to the plateau of the Soissonnais; soon they would reach the Vesle and join hands with the troops who had retaken Soissons. Among the numberless heroes of this second battle of the Marne, they who stormed the heights of the Orxois and either outflanked or crossed the valley of the Ourcq were the bravest of the brave and are entitled to the largest share of our gratitude. The third act of the battle was played upon a terrain quite different from those preceding it. The relief is considerably simplified. The great plateau of the Ile de France, which is buried, as it were, under the accumulations of recent deposits, where erosion has worn gaps in the ridges of the Orxois, and hollowed out the deep ravines of the Tardenois, is reduced here to the substratum of hard limestone, almost entirely free from superimposed layers. So that, instead of being an uneven, swampy district, the Soissonnais is a dry level table-land, where the streams flow underground through the layers of limestone. A fertile district, too, for the surface is covered with a thin coating of loam, in which sugar-beets and cereals vie with one another in profusion of growth.
However, the plateau is intersected by occasional valleys, generally broad and deep. The two most considerable are those of the Vesle and the Aisne which come together above Soissons, at Condé, and isolate the famous Chemin-des-Dames to the north. Two tributaries, Ambleny brook and the Crise, flowing down to the Aisne, subdivide the southern portion of the Soissonnais, where the battle was fought. With respect to the plateau, these valleys are little worlds apart. Below the hard limestone, they have hollowed out a path through very soft rocks, sands, and clays; in these the streams have inevitably made large inroads, sapping the limestone cliffs which overhang them. Thus the valley bottoms are abnormally wide—from two to three kilometres near Soissons. The presence of the clayey soils makes them very moist, and we find there fields of beets and grain side by side with extensive tracts of grassland. On the lower slopes are many small fields given over to the less hardy products—beans, orchards, and sometimes grape-vines. Here are most of the villages, at the level where the water-courses, seeping through the limestone of the plateau, reappear in the shape of springs, on the impervious stratum. For the most part the villages lie along the hillsides, surrounded by trees, embellished by châteaux and parks. They are well-built and attractive, boasting churches of graceful architecture, thanks to the lovely decorative stone taken from the quarries in the limestone cliffs above, which are called boves, or croutes. A fascinating, fertile country, diversified and pleasant to the eye, before the war it might well have been taken as a sample of rural opulence.
Plateau and valleys, then, differ materially—the one monotonous and easy of access; the other, no less charming than varied, but presenting great difficulties of passage in the face of opposition. There is not a village on the plateau: only a few large farms and scattered sugar-beet refineries. In the valleys and on the slopes there are everywhere houses, châteaux, parks, orchards, and grottoes. The slender church-tower barely rises to the level of the plateau, as if to watch for the approach of an enemy. The conditions then were quite simple: on the plateau it was possible to gain many kilometres in a single rush; but in the valleys a fierce resistance was to be expected.
The French and American attack in the Soissonnais was fortunate in its starting-point. In the course of the hard-fought battles between June 15 and July 15, the French had retaken the entire valley of Ambleny-Cœuvres, and had gained a footing on the plateau to the eastward, which stretches as far as the outskirts of Soissons. To the south they had completely cleared the verge of the forest of Retz, from which they were thus able to debouch into the plain.
The first onrush was magnificent. Starting at ten minutes to five in the morning, the Allies were within sight of Soissons at ten o'clock, having overrun the whole plateau on a front of some ten kilometres. Rarely has a more successful attack been seen in this war. It was even said that on this first day some French and Americans got as far as the suburbs of Soissons. But the danger for the Germans was too great, and they brought all their reserves thither. Moreover, they had the valley of the Crise to support their defense.
This valley is the widest and deepest of all those which eat into the plateau of the Soissonnais from the south. The very considerable depression is more than 100 metres below the surface of the plateau, which it cuts in two, effectively shutting off all progress from west to east; for on the south a narrow isthmus, that of Vierzy, barely separates it from the ravine of the Savières; and on the southeast it reaches to the foot of the wooded hills of Hartennes. Clinging to the sides of the valley and of the ravines which open into it, numerous villages—Vauxbuin, Berzy-le-Sec, Villemontoire, Buzancy—are the more difficult to capture because the artillery can hardly see them, as they lie close against the hillside. It was on the Crise, in the latter part of May, that a handful of Frenchmen held up the German avalanche from the Chemin-des-Dames.
The Germans paid us back in July. Sheltered in the ravines and windings of the valley, their artillery, being almost invisible, had nothing to disturb its aim. The villages, the orchards, the grottoes, crammed with machine-guns, were so many fortresses; the whole valley was a veritable hell. There were incessant counter-attacks, which the Allies, on the bare plateau, entirely devoid of cover, could repel only with the greatest difficulty. They pushed forward step by step, and by fits and starts. On the 19th our troops were hard put to it to hold the ground they had taken the day before; on the 20th they barely began to nibble at the ravines, at Ploisy and L'Echelle. On the 21st the Americans took Berzy-le-Sec, and the French were astride the lower waters of the Crise; on the 23d they went down into the ravine of Buzancy. But not until the 25th did they gain possession of the promontory of Villemontoire; and only on the 29th did a Scottish division, after three days of forward fighting, carry Buzancy. This last success, to be sure, was decisive, for it uncovered the upper valley of the Crise. And so, on August 2, the enemy gave way; that day the Allies crossed the valley along its entire length, and advanced across the eastern side of the plateau as far as the Vesle. On the same day they entered Soissons—at last. The ancient capital of the French kings, the city which formerly disputed the claim of Paris to be called the metropolis, is now no more than a mass of ruins. For four long years the war has laid its heavy hand upon her; and it is no new thing for her, since she had played an important military rôle in 1814, 1815, and 1870. She owes it to her fine location, in the heart of a broad valley, where the roads from south and east meet. Let us hope that her martyrdom will soon come to an end.
Here ended the second battle of the Marne. The Allies have regained possession of the whole plateau which extends from the Marne to the Vesle and the Aisne. They have established themselves in the valleys of those great rivers, from Soissons to Braisne, Bazoches, and Fismes—even to Rheims. They find there formidable obstacles to be overcome: a broad, moist, sometimes swampy bottom; facing them the cliff of the Chemin-des-Dames and the plateau of the Vesle, with its cap of limestone, and its numerous windings lined with villages and grottoes. Except in case of a surprise or a voluntary retirement, it will be a hard job to carry these positions. But sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. The results already achieved are fine enough to justify us in declaring ourselves satisfied.
The work done in their début, by the American troops in conjunction with our own, was magnificent. They fought against victorious soldiers sure of success, and whipped them. They were engaged on a difficult terrain. In the south they were obliged to cross a broad river and wide valleys, to scale cliffs bristling with defensive positions. In the center they were confronted by a confused entanglement of broken ground, hills and ravines, woods and open fields, bisected by a deep valley half-concealed by trees. In the north they became acquainted with the snare formed by plateaus falling abruptly away into the wolf-trap of ravines, where the enemy, lying in ambush, refused to give ground. The Americans triumphed over all these obstacles, and deserve to be reckoned the peers of the best soldiers in the world. On the other hand, fighting as they have fought in these countrysides, so typically French in their simplicity and grandeur, and seeing all their charms foully outraged, our attractive villages destroyed, our churches—graceful masterpieces, in almost every case, of the Middle Ages—desecrated and shattered, they have come to understand France better; they have had a share in her misfortunes and in her hopes.
Throughout the war Germans persisted in the assumption that by nightly raids from bombing machines and Zeppelins they could spread terror among the Allies and weaken their morale. They did succeed in killing a large number of defenseless men and women, but this was the only result of these attacks. A vivid account of these night raids is given in the narrative following.
When the first offensive began to the north of us, we, who were stationed in the American Canteen at E——, not more than fifteen miles from Rheims, were thrilled by the sight of the thousands of automobile trucks, which like a mighty river flowed ceaselessly by our canteen carrying French troops up to the English front; and we grew sad when we beheld ambulance convoys hurrying in the same direction.
We could not be oblivious to certain signs which pointed to renewed activity in our sector. The American ambulance boys predicted with the emphasis and at the same time with the vagueness born of surmise instead of exact knowledge, that we should "see something doing" in a few weeks.
What chiefly excited our curiosity, however, was the scarcity of German airplanes. Although the days were clear and fine for observing, only occasionally did the barking of guns call us outside to behold a little white, shimmering object skipping defiantly through extremest blue while tufts of woolly cloud broke far below it, serving only to aid us in detecting the almost invisible plane. One came over one night just about sunset, and called us and our dinner guests from the beginning of a meal. Another paid us an early morning call. Then for nearly three weeks we enjoyed undisturbed rest at night. Not once did the "alerte" send us shivering to damp cellars; not once did we hear the deep "boom" followed by a savage jar and rattle which differentiates the falling bomb or torpedo from the cannon. We said, fatuously, that we believed all the airplanes were engaged up on the English front, and that at last our mastery of the air must be firmly established.
It was on a Monday that the news of the second offensive reached us. Trains from Paris were delayed and the Paris papers did not arrive, but the ambulance men told us there was a German offensive from Rheims to Soissons. Next day the canteen was crowded with permissionaires hastily recalled from leave and hurrying to join their regiments at the front. Most of them had passed through, ten to two days before, in the subdued good humor with which the poilu hails his bath, disinfecting, clean clothes, and relative security of body while on a ten days' leave. They were going back to face death, mutilation, and an experience which drives many men mad. There was no undue hilarity about them, but a quiet determination which has been reflected in the stand made by the armies. Here and there a weakling had tried to escape thought in drink, but the percentage of that sort was very small.
On Tuesday more news drifted in, and that night I did not fully undress on going to bed. So strongly can the sense of optimism be grown from little habit that a respite of three weeks from bombing attacks had almost (though not quite) convinced me there would never be any more. I may explain that I was serving as canteen accountant, and occupied a tiny three-room apartment across the street from the canteen, between it and the railway station, and I took my meals at one of the two Red Cross houses maintained in E——.
When a town is bombed, the Germans have various objectives, principally the railway stations, troop barracks, canteens, munition dumps, food stores, and hospitals. As a rule, when private homes are destroyed, it is because they happen to be close to these points of attack. Torpedoes are too expensive to be wasted in chance destruction.
In towns in the war zone, great precaution is taken to prevent even a thin line or dot of light from showing at night. Only the railroad shows its signal lights, and these are put out at the first alarm, while all moving trains come to a standstill and extinguish what lights they carry. The lamps in passenger coaches are always put out when the train enters the war zone. So the bombing aviator has a rather difficult task in getting his bombs exactly where he wants them. The bomb must be released about a thousand feet in advance of the object aimed at, and the plane must pass over and reverse its course before a second bomb can be thrown at the same target. The course of a plane can be followed by tracing its bombs.
My position during a bombing raid was most unenviable. A torpedo cast at the railway station and going a bit too far was likely to land on the two-story brick house in which I was lodged. One cast at the canteen, and falling short, was likely to do the same.
It is fashionable among the workers in France to affect great indifference to danger. I am free to confess that I am not a particularly courageous woman. My imagination is active, and on nights when we expect a bombing raid I always go through a period of misery before going to bed. I would not for anything leave the war zone, but I have always a lively vision of coming out of slumber to the accompaniment of fearful noise and the crashing of the building atop, and then my coward imagination paints pictures of lying torn and anguished under settling weights of being burned alive while disabled and unable to extricate myself. Oddly enough, all my terrors vanish with the falling of the first bomb. I cannot remember being in what the English call a "blue funk" while a raid is going on, though many a time I have been in one beforehand.
Tuesday night some subtle instinct warned that trouble might come. In accordance with a natural forethought I slipped into a suit of underwear and woollen stockings under my nightdress. I must have been asleep in three minutes after my head touched the pillow, for I was dead tired.
I wakened with the sense that I had heard a gun, and, with one stockinged foot thrust out of bed, wondered sleepily whether it was the first, second or third of the alerte, or whether indeed I had not wakened from a dream of a gun. Probably it was the last gun of the alerte, for the next sound was the thunderous roar of a bomb which clearly had landed close by (it got a railway shed and a freight car on the tracks behind me). The terrific noise and the shock to our building, which rattled as if it were coming down, considerably accelerated my movements. I snapped on the electric torch which always lay, together with my cap and slippers, beside the bed, slipped a skirt over my nightdress and my great-coat atop, and got into the cap and slippers in record time. But by the time I had crossed the flagged passage and wrestled with the lock of the "grande porte" there was no getting out of the house. The canteen, directly across the street, lay in utter darkness, lights out, doors locked. There was no hope of using it as a short cut to the abris, or shelter, on the other side, while to try to go around it was almost certain death. The sky was ablaze with breaking shells from our seventy-fives; shrapnel was falling like hail in the streets, while the steady "pup-pup" of machine-guns—both our own and the bombing planes'—advised all who could to remain under shelter. The noise of our guns and of the bombs was like a small inferno.
I stayed it out—about twenty minutes—alone in that dark flagged hallway, and it was lonesome. When the shrapnel and machine-gun fire let up sufficiently to make it safe, I crept along under the shelter of the eaves to the door of a courtyard next door where I knew one of our cooks lived. She had invited me a few days before, to refuge there instead of trying to get over the abris, because, she said, the whole upper lofts were full of hay, and it had been demonstrated that bombs will not penetrate to any depth in hay. But the door was locked, and though I beat upon it with my electric torch, nobody heard me. I finally took advantage of a lull in the firing, when the Germans went back to their own lines for more ammunition, to get over the abris.
There one of the women on night duty at the canteen told me that the directrice and everybody else not on night duty, had gone up to the evacuation hospital about ten o'clock, in response to a call for aid from the French authorities.
In E—— there were half a dozen large hospitals. The wounded, chiefly English, were coming in faster than the hospital corps could handle them. They needed our help, not only in registering the men—very few of whom understood any French—but in feeding and giving water.
I got to the hospital the next day and worked steadily till eight thirty. Then an ambulance driver gave me a lift as far as the canteen, and I managed to get a cold supper at our mess.
I was hardly in my office before I heard a knock at the door, which, as I was alone in the house, I always locked at night as soon as I entered. In response to my "Who's there?" a voice, guided by my English, replied, "I am an English officer." I threw open the door without a second's hesitation. A young officer, weary, white-faced, stood there, beginning to apologize as he saw my uniform and white veil. He was simply "done," he said—and he looked it. He had found every hotel was full, and, seeing a few gleams of light behind the shutters, he had knocked in the hope of finding shelter for the night. I knew that the woman at the canteen who would go off duty at midnight was scheduled to go immediately to the hospital to work until seven in the morning and that I could occupy her bed after I came back from the hospital, and I offered my apartment to the officer for the night. He was most grateful, and I rushed over to the canteen to get him a pitcher of hot water and a cup of chocolate. But there I found a group of French officers, who said they had neither sleep nor rest for three days and nights, pleading for some place to lie down. As there was a comfortable leather couch in my office, besides a wide soft couch over which I had laid my steamer rug, and, in addition, an exceedingly soft double bed in my room which I thought the tired Englishman ought to be willing to share with an equally tired man, I proffered my hospitality, which was gratefully accepted. I piloted them across to the office, and returned to the canteen, hoping to find an American ambulance boy who would run me over to the hospital.
I sighted a group of the familiar uniforms, and was heading for it when, bang! went a falling bomb, without any warning alerte. The next instant all lights were out, and the French soldiers were swarming through the door. As all the other women in the canteen had set duties to perform—putting out fires, locking up money and food—and I, not being on duty, had none, I stationed myself at the door, calling out to the soldiers where they would find shelter. Being transients, they did not know where to find refuge. But long before the canteen was empty, the machine-gun bullets were sweeping the street and the shrapnel was raining down. Two American boys came up in the darkness, and one said in the quietest tone of authority, "Get between us, lady!" They backed me up against the side of the canteen, close under the shelter of the eaves, and stood one on each side of me. I had no trench-helmet, so one of them took his sheepskin driving coat, folded it, and put it over his head and mine. As soon as a lull in the firing permitted, we ran across the street to the abris. The Germans went back several times for more ammunition and continued the bombing for nearly two hours.
One of our workers, who was at the hospital, told me that her first impulse was to run for an abris as we would do at the canteen, but when she looked about her and saw everybody composedly going on with duty, she gathered herself together and did the same—"Although," she added, "my teeth just rattled at first." Some of the wounded were terrified and begged not to be left; and that called out the mother instinct in the women, so that they forgot to be afraid.
The Germans swept the hospital with their machine guns and did their best to bomb it, but fortunately made no hits. It was finally necessary to put out all lights and to cease work. It was a most trying ordeal, because the buildings were of pine, close together, and a direct hit probably would have started a fire which would have burned the wounded as they lay.
About half past one I went up to our mess and crawled into an empty bed. The next morning when I awakened it was to the sound of distant cannon. This meant that the battle was drawing nearer.
An especially hard day kept me on the strain from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. and when I returned to the mess I found no dinner and no servants. Our directrice, anticipating evacuation, had dismissed them. Only a little Belgian refugee, a sort of "slavey," hung on, because she had no other place to go. Tired out, I managed to make an omelet and a cup of tea, and to fry some griddle cakes to replace the bread which was conspicuous by its absence. Then I stationed myself in front of the canteen hoping to flag a passing ambulance. An American driver stopped his car, and a Frenchman, who was beside him on the front seat, jumped down to help me up. This man had a bandage around his throat, and when I asked him if he was wounded, he made a hissing sound in reply. The American driver explained that he could not speak because he had a bullet through his windpipe. There were six badly wounded men on the stretchers inside, but we heard not a sound from them.
I shall not soon forget that night I had steeled myself to meet horrors, and knew that I must not let them affect me. Yet in spite of terrible wounds, there was little sound of suffering. The place was wonderfully quiet.
When I got inside of the receiving room, a group of our women who had been at work all afternoon were still moving about, white and hollow-eyed with fatigue. A French doctor asked if I could not bring some food there from the canteen. It was Thursday. Some of the men had been wounded on Tuesday, and had had no food and little water.
I found an English girl with an empty ambulance, who risked a reprimand for leaving without orders, and we flashed back to the canteen, and loaded up with twenty gallons of hot chocolate, bread, about three hundred hard boiled eggs, some kilos of chocolate, and raw eggs and sugar. We flew back to the hospital; but there was a big convoy of ambulances just in, so that we could not get up to the main buildings. We scouted around in the dark to find a place to deposit our stuff and open a temporary kitchen, and, returning to the ambulance, we came across a wounded boy who had sunk on a bench. The ambulance driver had passed him, making his way on foot, but being full-up, she was unable to give him a lift. He was wounded in the chest, was exhausted, and had no great-coat. It was absolutely necessary to get him under cover and to give him warmth and nourishment. We put our arms around him and tried to help him along, but soon it was apparent that he had not the strength to make the reception ward.
The English girl said, "You hold him up while I get a stretcher"; so I jammed myself up against the side of a building and put my arms about the boy while his weight grew heavier and heavier against me. I could not let him slip, because the roadway was narrow and a long string of ambulances, without lights, was passing. He never uttered a sound, but his arms moved convulsively. As he felt himself growing weaker, he put them around my neck, and clung to me precisely as a frightened child would. It seemed an age while I waited there, warning off ambulances that were about to shave us too closely. I could not help wondering where that boy's mother was, what she was doing, or if he had a mother. And I thought some terrible thoughts about war and some wicked ones about Germans.
The girl came with her stretcher at last, and we got the boy on it. Then we went about setting up our feeding station. Hungry men limped in, bandaged mostly about the head, and how they consumed hard boiled eggs and drank hot chocolate! I left the English girl dispensing food and drink, while I took to the badly wounded a mixture of beaten egg, hot milk and sugar. Here and there men asked for a piece of chocolate or bread, but most of the wounded wanted only the liquid food. They would say with their awful English cockney accent, "Ah! that's good!" or "Prime stuff!" or "Could you spare a little more, sister?" In spite of dreadful wounds, they were full of pluck.
For the next two hours I gave water and egg mixture to all sorts and conditions of men—English, French, Canadians, Moroccans, Senegalese. The doctor asked if I knew enough to administer morphine hypodermics, and I regretfully admitted that I did not, while I registered a vow to learn. Then some American Red Cross men appeared, and some English doctors. Before midnight three or four long Red Cross trains had been filled with wounded, and sent out. Yet at that hour more than five hundred wounded men still lay on their stretchers on the grass outside. And all the while, as I worked, I thought of how, as soon as the moon came up, we should hear the familiar roar and rattle of the bombs, and of how the shrapnel and machine gun bullets would rain down on those upturned faces.
But, grace to heaven, the Germans did not come that night! At midnight I went into Ward 4, where some of the worst wounded had been placed. Stretchers had been laid on top of the beds and flat on the floor on both sides of the central aisle, till one could hardly move. Most of the wounded seemed to sleep. Only here and there one begged for water, and these men were usually wounded in the abdomen where not even water could be given. We could moisten their lips and wipe off the hot feverish faces, and that was all.
By one o'clock it was evident that the most of what could be done had been done. Another section of our women had arrived with more food, and I went out to the covered way between the receiving room and the operating room, to steal a ride home on the driver's seat of some departing ambulance. An English boy, who had been gassed, asked me hoarsely if I could get him a blanket, and I did so. Another man was there, on whose eyelashes and eyebrows something that looked like ice seemed to hang. I think it was an application to soothe gas-burns.
It was two o'clock before I got to bed at the mess. The English officer was still occupying my apartment. I might pass off my action in resigning it to him as philanthropy, but candor compels me to admit that I was glad of an excuse to stay at the house where there was company in case of a bombing raid.
Friday was a long, tense day. The French merchants and all the people with whom we had dealings, anticipating our withdrawal, swarmed in with accounts. When the G.A.N. (Grand Armée Nationale) sent in its request for a check (previously, I had been obliged fairly to windlass their bill out of them), I knew the French would evacuate. The Commandant sent for the Directrice, and advised her to follow French headquarters wherever it might move. He said he was evacuating all French hospitals and had turned over all evacuation hospitals to the English. No more wounded French were to be brought into E——.
All day I worked without food, and after 7.30 got supper for myself and three companions. We hoped for a night's rest, but the Germans began bombing us at dusk, and kept it up till daylight. They were after hospitals, as we knew by the fact that the dropping bombs were at a distance from us and the regular line. All night the machine-gun battle went on—our own guns at E——, warring with the sweeping planes overhead. We got so tired of going to shelter, and so accustomed to the firing, that we finally stayed in our rooms and even opened our shutters to peer out into the calm summer sky. Shells were bursting and ground signals of colored lights were streaming skyward. It was too exciting to sleep until we gave out from sheer exhaustion. I managed to get an intermittent slumber from four until seven.
As there was no breakfast at our mess, I went to the canteen for a cup of coffee, and found the place crowded. The French Commander said that our town was due to be shelled before long as we were getting in range of the German guns. We decided not to go until we had to, but to cease keeping the canteen open at night; to sell only hot coffee, chocolate, bread, cheese, eggs and apples by day—thus omitting our hot meal—and to divide our forces, one part to run the canteen, another to organize a temporary canteen on the grounds of the evacuation hospital, and still another to maintain the rolling canteen at the railway station. The streets were almost blocked with refugees. I saw one unconscious woman in a wheelbarrow being trundled by a boy. Regiments went through, going up to the front, the men's faces stern and set. The sound of the battle grew louder and louder.
That night we bundled our bedding into the Ford camion, and slept in one of the deep champagne caves. I had volunteered to go on duty at the canteen at six the next morning, and arriving there on time, found two or three hundred tired and hungry men waiting for the doors to open. The night before a great thermos marmite had been filled with boiling coffee, and we were able to begin feeding the men without delay. All day we did a tremendous business. About half past nine a German plane came over, tried to bomb us, and swept the street with a machine gun. We continued serving and pouring out coffee. The aviator killed a woman and child who were standing in a garden, and then one of our machine guns got him. The plane, a three passenger one, came tumbling down into the public square. The pilot was caught with both legs under the engine and was badly hurt, but the observer and the gunner were uninjured. An infuriated Frenchman, who had seen the killing of the woman and child, rushed up and killed the gunner as they lifted him out. I got these facts from an American staff car driver who assisted in extricating the pilot. That morning, our guns got three German planes.
At one that afternoon I left the canteen, and went home for the bath which I had missed that morning. I had just finished dressing when a German shell passed over the house, killing, as they said, twenty-seven persons.
I elected to stay over night at the hotel instead of going to the champagne cave. No sound disturbed the night except the distant thunder of the battle and the bursting of shells which were falling about a thousand yards short of the town. The Germans were trying to destroy the bridge over the Marne, to cut our communication with Rheims, but they did not have the range.
Volumes of detailed narrative could not sum up more graphically what the American Army did in France than did the summary written by General Pershing, presented in the following pages.
With French and British armies at their maximum strength, and all efforts to dispossess the enemy from his firmly intrenched positions in Belgium and France failed, it was necessary to plan for an American force adequate to turn the scale in favor of the Allies. Taking account of the strength of the central powers at that time, the immensity of the problem which confronted us could hardly be overestimated. The first requisite being an organization that could give intelligent direction to effort, the formation of a General Staff occupied my early attention.
After a thorough consideration of allied organizations it was decided that our combat division should consist of four regiments of infantry of 3,000 men, with three battalions to a regiment and four companies of 250 men each to a battalion, and of an artillery brigade of three regiments, a machine-gun battalion, an engineer regiment, a trench-mortar battery, a signal battalion, wagon trains, and the headquarters staffs and military police. These, with medical and other units, made a total of over 28,000 men, or practically double the size of a French or German division. Each corps would normally consist of six divisions—four combat and one depot and one replacement division—and also two regiments of cavalry, and each army of from three to five corps. With four divisions fully trained, a corps could take over an American sector with, two divisions in line and two in reserve, with the depot and replacement divisions prepared to fill the gaps in the ranks.
Our purpose was to prepare an integral American force which should be able to take the offensive in every respect. Accordingly, the development of a self-reliant infantry by thorough drill in the use of the rifle and in the tactics of open warfare was always uppermost. The plan of training after arrival in France allowed a division one month for acclimatization and instruction in small units from battalions down, a second month in quiet trench sectors by battalion, and a third month after it came out of the trenches when it should be trained as a complete division in war of movement.
Very early a system of schools was outlined and started, which should have the advantage of instruction by officers direct from the front. At the great school center at Langres, one of the first to be organized, was the staff school, where the principles of general staff work, as laid down in our own organization were taught to carefully selected officers. Men in the ranks, who had shown qualities of leadership, were sent to the school of candidates for commissions. A school of the line taught younger officers the principles of leadership, tactics, and the use of the different weapons. In the artillery school, at Saumur, young officers were taught the fundamental principles of modern artillery; while at Issoudun an immense plant was built for training cadets in aviation. These and other schools, with their well-considered curriculums for training in every branch of our organization, were coordinated in a manner best to develop an efficient army out of willing and industrious young men, many of whom had not before known even the rudiments of military technique. Both Marshal Haig and General Petain placed officers and men at our disposal for instructional purposes, and we are deeply indebted for the opportunities given to profit by their veteran experience.