The Illusion of Victory (34 page)

For three sleepless days and nights, Millard lived this nightmare on the edge of the
Kaiserschlacht.
She watched Dr. Le Brun, a brilliant young surgeon from Lyons, who stayed on his feet, gulping black coffee, operating, operating, for the entire seventy-two hours. Toward the end, he hung onto the door of the operating room and muttered,
“La gloire, la gloire! Bah! C’est de la merde!”
(Glory, glory, it’s all shit!)

Finally, one of the French nurses led Millard away to a bedroom in the château. She lay there, listening to “Roses Are Blooming in Picardy” wailing in her head and Dr. Le Brun saying, “
La Gloire . . . la gloire . . .
” She thought of her fiancé at Camp Upton. She felt years and years older than him. She had crossed a river of blood since she had seen him.“How would I feel about him when we met again?” she wondered.
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The Smith College volunteers also had a terrifying brush with the
Kaiserschlacht
. They were working at Grecourt, a French town in the path of the oncoming Germans, close to the hinge between the two Allied armies. They received all sorts of assistance from both French and British officers who admired their work in eleven surrounding villages.

The Smithies had organized local women into a sewing and knitting industry, replanted fruit trees, set up libraries, and restocked farms with cows, goats and pigs. At first their worst enemy was the cold. A woman correspondent from the
New York Evening Sun
lived with them for a while and reported on the weather, among other things.“After your first day there, you’ve discarded silk stockings and are wearing one if not two pair of the heaviest made woolens, and you’ve borrowed every available woolie not in use.”
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On March 21, the crash of Bruchmuller’s guns was soon followed by a British officer who told them to flee. The Germans had broken through and were coming on like a tidal wave. There was no hope of stopping them. Instead, the Smith women decided to stay and help their villagers to escape. They drove down roads jammed with retreating troops and fleeing civilians to take old people to hospitals and railroad stations. They also fed hungry exhausted Tommies. Mile by mile, often with German shells falling close, they retreated with the British to Amiens. There they endured an air raid that had bombs “popping like cannoncrackers” from 8:30 P.M. until 4 A.M. The next day they decided to find safer quarters and settled in Beauvais, where they did their best to feed refugees and wounded Tommies as they were loaded on hospital trains for evacuation to England. Gradually the Smithies realized there would be no more reconstruction work until the war was over. But they remained determined to stay in France, no matter how many miles the Germans gained. Grimly, they headed back to Paris and began volunteering as ambulance drivers, canteen workers and nurses.
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In Paris, the Smith women found a city in a state of near hysteria. To keep the French off balance while the storm troopers demolished the British army, General Ludendorff had moved three gigantic guns into the forest of Crépy-en-Laonnois, near Laon, seventy miles from Paris. Called
Wilhelm Geschütze
in honor of the kaiser, the superguns were manned by German sailors, who nicknamed them “Big Berthas,” after a member of the Krupp family. The specially designed 112-foot-long barrels fired a 200-pound shell into the stratosphere, from whence it descended into the middle of Paris.

The first shell landed at 7:26 A.M. on March 23 and was followed by twenty-two others, killing sixteen people and injuring twenty-nine. Three days later, another shell struck the crowded church of Saint-Gervais during services, killing seventy-five worshippers and wounding ninety. The bombardment continued through March 30. By that time, the Parisians had calmed down and decided the Berthas were no worse than the sporadic German air raids. The civilians accepted the inevitable casualties with the same stoicism that the poilus displayed at the front.

Technical problems with the Big Berthas soon limited their rate of fire. One gun exploded, killing or wounding seventeen of its crew. The guns were erratic. On some days, shells missed Paris entirely, exploding in the countryside beyond the city. French long-range guns and planes retaliated with shells and bombs that forced the Germans to move the guns to new positions. The Berthas would fire again in coming weeks, but there was no longer any danger of panic. Subways and buses continued to run, Parisians went about their business, more or less ignoring the rain of random death. But this brutal weapon deepened French hatred of Germany and spelled future trouble for Woodrow Wilson’s dreams of world peace.
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For the moment, peace was not on anyone’s mind. The success of the storm trooper tactics in the first
Kaiserschlacht
encouraged Quartermaster General Ludendorff and Field Marshal von Hindenburg to attempt one of their wildest dreams—the isolation of the British army in France by cutting its supply lines to the channel ports. The Germans were aware that the French army had lost its enthusiasm for the war. A British defeat would virtually guarantee an early French surrender. So Ludendorff ordered Colonel Bruchmuller to work on another section of the British front.

At 4:15 A.M. on April 9, which happened to be Ludendorff ’s birthday, Bruchmuller unleashed another rain of steel and gas on a mere eleven miles of a far more crucial British sector—Flanders. Little more than fifteen miles behind the lines lay Hazebrouck, a rail center through which was funneled almost all the supplies for the British Expeditionary Force. Without it, General Haig’s army would become a marooned whale, bereft of food and ammunition.

Four attack divisions of General Ferdinand Quast’s Sixth Army converged on a single Portuguese division holding a central piece of this eleven-mile front. The Portuguese were a 20,000-man token force, sent by their government to affirm their centuries-old alliance with England. The men had no enthusiasm for this murderous war, nor did their officers; their commanding general spent most of his time in Paris. Why the British entrusted such a vital part of the line to them can only be explained as further proof of Field Marshal Haig’s appalling generalship.

Their uniforms stained yellow with gas, the men from the Iberian Peninsula sprinted for the rear at a pace that made the soldiers of the British Fifth Army look like slowpokes. Not a few of them stole the bicycles of a British cycle battalion that rushed forward to support them and did not stop pedaling until they reached the English Channel at Le Havre. Another 6,000 surrendered on the spot.
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Storm troopers poured through the gap and assaulted British divisions on the flanks, producing more panic and a less rapid but no less ominous retreat. The British First Army fell back five miles, while General Sir Herbert Plumer’s Second Army was thrown back from Messines Ridge, which the British had captured at horrendous cost in the battle of Passchendaele. Soon Quast’s Sixth Army had linked up with General Sixt von Armin’s Fourth Army, which had joined the offensive north of Armentières. By April 12, the breach was thirty miles wide and ten miles deep. Hazebrouck was only five miles away.

A desperate Haig issued an order that had the trumpet of doom in it. “There is no other course open to us but to fight it out. Every position must be held to the last man; there must be no retirement. With our backs to the wall, and believing in the justice of our cause, each of must fight on to the end. The safety of our homes and the freedom of mankind alike depend on the conduct of each one of us in this crucial moment.”
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Haig did more than write apocalyptic orders. He put Plumer, his best general, in charge of the battle, and rushed Australian reinforcements from Amiens. The Aussies had become the storm troopers of the British army. When the going got tough, Haig invariably turned to them. They paid a horrendous price for their devotion to the empire. Their casualties at war’s end were a staggering 87 percent of their expeditionary force.

Fighting stubbornly and at times ferociously, the British began making the storm troopers pay for every foot of ground. The French also moved several divisions into Flanders. Although they did not go into action, they threatened the German left flank, forcing Ludendorff to divert troops from the drive on Hazebrouck. Slowly, as the month of April dwindled, the storm troopers ran out of steam again. On April 29, Ludendorff called off the offensive, with Hazebrouck uncaptured. But in a final show of confidence, the German commander ordered an attack on a French division holding Mount Kemmel, one of the key heights in the monotonously flat Flanders plain. The poilus fled in disorder, convincing Ludendorff that a blow at the French lines near Paris would panic them into withdrawing their forces from Flanders. Then he and Colonel Bruchmuller would swing north to throw a final haymaker at the British Expeditionary Force.
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These German victories added up to bad news for General John J. Pershing in more ways than one. After the first
Kaiserschlacht
had annihilated the British Fifth Army and mauled the Third Army, the frantic Allies convened a summit conference at Doullens, to which they did not even bother to invite Pershing or any other American. The only general who seemed interested in fighting was short, fiery Ferdinand Foch, until recently in disgrace for squandering his men in slaughterous attacks. The politicians persuaded Haig and Pétain to accept him as a supreme commander to coordinate the collapsing battle line.

Instead of sulking for being ignored, Pershing made his only grand gesture of the war. He drove to Foch’s headquarters outside Paris and in rea
sonably good French declared: “I have come to tell you that the American people would consider it a great honor for our troops to be engaged in the present battle. I ask you for this in their name and my own.” Everyone applauded the performance. It made headlines. But Pershing soon learned he had embraced a rattlesnake.
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Pershing thought Foch would put the four available American divisions into line as an Army corps. Instead, Foch assigned them to quiet sectors, piecemeal, after the battle for Amiens subsided. Next Foch dispatched a cable behind Pershing’s back, telling President Wilson that unless 600,000 infantrymen were shipped to Europe in the next three months, unattached to any divisions for use as replacements in the French and British armies, the war was lost.
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Pershing fought the Frenchman with his only weapon—an immense stubbornness and rocklike faith in his vision of an independent American army. Even when Secretary of War Newton Baker was cajoled into backing Foch by the devious Tasker Bliss, who seized the first opportunity to revoke his capitulation to Pershing, the AEF commander clung to his determination.

In May, after the second German offensive, the Allies convened another conference at Abbeville. This time, Pershing was invited; in fact, he was the principal reason for the meeting. Every leading politician and general in France and England was determined to change his mind. Alone, Pershing faced Prime Ministers Lloyd George, Clemenceau and Italy’s Vittorio Orlando; plus Foch, Haig and a half dozen other generals and cabinet officers. Bliss, who was also present, did not say a word in Pershing’s support. The others raged, screamed, cursed and pleaded—but Pershing refused to let the Americans fight in units smaller than a division—and he insisted even this concession would be temporary, pending the formation of an American army.

“You are willing to risk our being driven back to the Loire?” Foch shouted.

“Gentlemen,” Pershing said. “I have thought this program over very deliberately and will not be coerced.”
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Pershing’s gamble was growing more awesome with every passing day. Even his chief of staff, James Harbord, admitted that if he had been British or French, he would have favored amalgamation. Only his old friend and shrewd head of the General Purchasing Board, Brigadier General Charles Dawes, retained his faith in Pershing’s judgment. “John Pershing, like Lincoln, recognized no superior on the face of the earth,” dawes wrote in his diary.
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A sense of foreboding was settling deep in the spirit of many Americans. Marian Baldwin had joined the YMCA and had been assigned to Aix-Les-Bains, a resort town where the AEF had taken over numerous buildings, including a mammoth gambling casino, for a leave center. On February 27, 1918, Baldwin wrote anxiously to her favorite correspondent:“The papers are certainly discouraging reading now, and the facts that don’t get printed make one sick. Great things are brewing up the line and the trainloads of boys that leave here every day to go back, carry the most determined lot you ever saw, although every one knows what his fate may be.”
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Aix-Les-Bains was Pershing’s solution to the social purity problem. He had emphatically endorsed the stateside ideal of a “clean” army, free of venereal disease. One of his early edicts was a regulation making venereal disease a court-martial offense, meaning it would go into a man’s permanent record. He also decreed ferocious punishments for any doughboy who molested an unwilling Frenchwoman.

The First Division had barely landed in France when a peasant girl claimed she had been attacked while bringing her cows in from her family’s pasture. The soldier claimed she had flirted with him and he had only been trying to kiss her. Within twenty-four hours, the stunned man was court-martialed and sentenced to thirty years in Fort Leavenworth, the army prison.
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To keep the AEF out of Paris, with its 75,000 prostitutes, Pershing set up Aix-Les-Bains and similar centers, where sports, concerts, nature walks, movies and a small staff of American women (fifteen at Aix-Les-Bains) strove to offer an alternative to the mademoiselles. The women were an important component of this program. They were there to remind the doughboys of the girls back home, to whom many had pledged their affection.