The Illusion of Victory (35 page)

Not all the doughboys bought the YMCA approach to the problems of life and love in a foreign land. Woodrow Wilson’s moralism and Pershing’s drive for discipline and military efficiency had formed a somewhat strange alliance to sponsor the YM’s role in the war. Wilson wanted the doughboys to remain “clean” so their crusade to make the world safe for democracy would remain unsullied. Pershing wanted the lowest possible venereal disease rate, because an infected man was as useless as a casualty. The British had 23,000 men in the hospital for VD on any given day during the war and the French reported more than a million cases of syphilis and gonorrhea. Pershing flatly stated that “continence” was the ideal he expected from every doughboy. It was an ideal Pershing himself had not practiced; he had contracted gonorrhea twice in his early army days. Throughout the war, he continued to visit Micheline Resco in Paris.

Probably the general regarded the exhortation as standard hot air that no one with any sophistication was expected to practice. Some proof of this presumption was the officers’ venereal disease rate—27.7 per thousand, almost thirty times higher than the enlisted men’s rate.
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More evidence of skepticism is visible in a poem given to Marian Baldwin by a “mischievous doughboy” who took (she said) a “sly crack” at the “doctrines of the Y.”

Still, Baldwin felt most of the men who came to Aix-Les-Bains were full of gratitude, for the little they were able to do for them here.“Girlie,” one said to her, “it will seem just like a dream when we get back there.” Baldwin could only hope that “whatever seemed beautiful to them in this short ‘dream’ will stand by them to make life, and even death, easier ‘out there.’”

The day before, Baldwin continued, she had gone down to the station to see one of the troop trains off. She knew practically every man on it. Several of the women stood at the end of the platform and shook hands with each soldier as the train moved past.“They were still hanging out of the windows with hands outstretched, the setting sun shining full on their eager boyish faces, and many of them smiling bravely through a mist of tears,” Baldwin wrote. Every person left on the platform, including several army officers, was crying by the time the train vanished around a distant curve.
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In her hospital, Shirley Millard was settling into the life of a nurse.“The big [German] drive is over, and the terrific rush has stopped, at least temporarily,” she told her diary.“But the hospital is still filled.” Most of the men were too badly wounded to be moved. The hospital desperately needed their beds, because they were being swamped by a new horror: influenza.

“I thought influenza was a bad cold, something like the grippe but this is much worse than that,” Millard wrote. “These men run a high temperature, so high that we can’t believe it’s true, and often take it again to be sure. It is accompanied by vomiting and dysentery. When they die, as about half of them do, they turn a ghastly dark gray and are taken out at once and cremated.”

The hospital had become better organized. There were special wards for influenza, and others for gangrene cases, major gas burns, meningitis, fractures, and spinal injuries.“I have worked in all of them and cannot make up my mind which is worse,” Millard told her diary.
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Another worry was the German air force. Planes bombed the hospital almost every night. Often as many as forty aircraft were overhead. Millard’s heart went out to the wounded men,“helpless in bed, with arms strapped up or down . . . or legs in casts.” they knew the sound of German motors.
“Boche planes have quite a different noise from ours. It is a dismal groan, several tones deeper than the French.”

One day at dawn, Millard was on duty when the barracks next to hers took a direct hit. She rushed out to stare at “an unforgettable sight.” a tree that spread its bare, wintry branches over the barracks had “blossomed horribly with fragments of human bodies, arms and legs, bits of bedding, furniture, and hospital equipment.” It looked, she thought, like a Christmas tree in a nightmare. Heightening the horror was “the blood red sky of sunrise.”
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Around the same time, the French decided to give the U.S. First Division a chance to do something more than occupy quiet trenches. They selected as a target the village of Cantigny, which sat on a ridge opposite the division’s lines, fifty-five miles northwest of Paris. The whole division was not needed to make the attack. Pershing designated the Twenty-Eighth Regiment to do the job, and told the commander, Colonel Hanson E. Ely,“no inch” of any ground gained was to be yielded to the inevitable German counterattacks. On April 30, another German trench raid had mauled a battalion of the Twenty-Sixth Division in the lines south of Verdun, further dimming the AEF’s prestige. Lloyd George had snidely commented that this was the sort of thing that would happen again and again if the “amateur” Americans were allowed to form their own army. Pershing made it clear to everyone in the First Division that the AEF’s reputation was at stake.
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The French, anxious for the Americans to succeed, backed the operation with 386 long-range guns, trench mortars, twelve heavy tanks, flamethrower teams, and air cover. Unintentionally, the Germans also cooperated with the AEF. Quartermaster General Ludendorff was in the midst of planning his left hook at the French army’s solar plexus, to persuade them to pull their troops out of Flanders. He withdrew the crack Thirtieth Division from the Cantigny lines and replaced them with the Eighty-Second Reserve Division, which was full of overage veterans, teenage recruits and assorted other flotsam, including former railway guards. AEF intelligence rated the Eighty-Second as “third class.”
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At 4:45 A.M. on May 28, French and American artillery hurled hundreds of shells into Cantigny, smashing its ruins to total rubble. At 6:45 the doughboys advanced behind a rolling barrage and sheets of machine-gun fire. They found the soldiers of the Eighty-Second Reserve Division dazed and demoralized by the bombardment. The appearance of the clanking French heavy tanks added to their panic. Tanks were a new weapon to these Germans—they had made their first appearance on the battlefield only six months earlier, in the British assault on Cambrai. There, tougher German divisions had quickly learned how to deal with them. Many of the Eighty-Second Reserve Division surrendered; others ran. In a few hours, the Americans had occupied Cantigny with less than a hundred casualties.
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The next morning, the French trumpeted this tiny American victory in their newspapers and the headlines echoed around the world. Then, strange things began to happen. The French tanks, airplanes, flamethrowers and artillery vanished. The Germans had launched an offensive forty miles southeast of Cantigny and the French needed every soldier and weapon they could find to stop it. The Americans were left on their own to cope with German counterattacks to regain Cantigny.

Now it was the German artillery that came cascading down on the doughboys, who were dug into open slopes, with Pershing’s orders not to yield an inch of ground. German planes strafed them with impunity and gave their artillery information that murderously improved its accuracy. The American cannon, mostly French 75s, did not have the range to reach the German heavy guns.

The Eighty-Second Reserve Division’s counterattacks were as mediocre as the rest of its performance. The division never managed to coordinate its attacks with the artillery; the Americans easily beat them off. But the German big guns did not need the infantry to inflict awful damage on the Americans. Within twenty-four hours, a third of the Twenty-Eighth regiment was dead or wounded. On May 29, Ely reported his front line was “pounded to hell and gone.” His men had to be relieved in twenty-four hours, or he would “not be responsible” for what happened next.
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Ely’s words of warning were reinforced by visible evidence of imminent breakdown. One American lieutenant went berserk, leaped out of his shell hole, and began shooting at fellow Americans. Before they could fire back, a German shell shredded him. The Germans were using 210-mm guns, whose eight-inch shells, Captain George Marshall glumly noted,“rip[ped] up the nervous system of everyone within a hundred yards of the explosion.” Still, General Robert Lee Bullard, the First Division’s commander, was loath to relieve Ely’s men.“The whole world is watching the Twenty-
Eighth Infantry,” Bullard told the worried colonel.“We must continue to hold Cantigny at all costs.” the general did not want to reveal that the American victory was turning into a semidefeat.
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On the third day, a staff officer from Bullard’s headquarters visited Ely and told him, in the cheerful tones often used by those who are safe from flying bullets and shrapnel, that he was sure the Twenty-Eighth Regiment could hold. In response, Ely roared, “These men have been fighting for three days and three nights. . . . There are three other regiments [in the division] who have had their sleep. . . . It is an injustice not to relieve the[se] men.” He added that five of them were not worth what one was worth when they attacked—and caustically suggested the staffer could “put it [all] down in your notebook” and quote him verbatim to General Bullard.

That night, the Eighteenth Regiment relieved Ely’s battered men. He described them coming out of the front line “hollow-eyed and with sunken cheeks,” so exhausted that they fell asleep if they sat (or fell) down. More than 1,000 of their buddies were killed or wounded, which Ely thought “was a high price to pay for an unknown village of relatively little value.” But Cantigny was not about winning the war. It was about proving that Americans could handle combat on the Western Front.
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Pershing’s friend, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, who had told him that the French were finished, had dinner with the general and his staff not long after Cantigny. She described their almost manic elation at this “success.” at the top of their voices they told each other the conduct of Ely’s men had been “magnificent.” Pershing became so excited, he slammed his fist on the table and shouted, “I am certainly going to jump down the throat of the next person who asks me,‘Will the Americans fight?’”

The AEF commander cited Cantigny in a cable to the War Department, asserting that the battle proved that all further talk about amalgamation should be dismissed out of hand. “It is my firm opinion that our troops are the best in Europe and our staffs the equal of any,” the general declared. The Americans should “start organizing our own divisions and higher units” as soon as possible. Pershing’s reaction was more a comment on the psychological beating he had taken from the French and British since he came to France than a realistic assessment of the military situation. Forty miles southeast of Cantigny, the German army was close to winning the war.
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Once more concealing his movements with astonishing success, Quartermaster General Ludendorff had moved his attack divisions south and concentrated them around the town of Laon, opposite the French Sixth Army north of Soissons. The front line ran along a commanding ridge, the Chemin des Dames, named for a carriage road hacked out of the limestone escarpment and used for outings by the ladies of France’s ancien régime. The French had captured the ridge the previous autumn in a limited offensive, one of two minor pushes General Pétain ordered to camouflage the morale of his mutinous army. A press officer at headquarters had christened the ridge the outer rampart of Paris. It was rugged country, with numerous small deep valleys and steep hills.

On May 27, Ludendorff had forty-one divisions in and around Laon. Facing him were eleven understrength French and British divisions, all decidedly second or third class. The four British divisions had been mauled in the March and April offensives and had been sent to the Chemin des Dames for a rest. There had scarcely been a shot fired in the sector for almost a year. It was known as the sanitarium of the Western Front. Among the French divisions was one that had been especially mutinous in the 1917 upheaval—its men had never forgiven the commander of the Sixth Army, General Denis Duchene, for his ruthless use of firing squads to restore order.

Pétain, still the commander of the French field army, had issued orders for a defense in depth. But Ferdinand Foch, flexing his command muscles as generalissimo in chief of the entire Western Front, had canceled the order and insisted that the front lines be fully manned, to make sure not a millimeter of France’s sacred soil was surrendered. The obedient Duchene had packed almost every man in the Sixth Army into a three-mile wedge between the Chemin des Dames and the Aisne River—perfect targets for Colonel Bruchmuller’s orchestra of big guns.

When Foch was appointed generalissimo in late March, the
New York Times
had devoted a full page of its Sunday edition to him, calling him “The First Strategist in Europe.” He was about to flunk his first test.
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Ironically, an American intelligence officer, Captain Samuel T. Hubbard, with nothing better to do—the semitrained AEF divisions had yet to be organized into a serious army—predicted that the next German offensive would hit the Chemin des Dames. The French loftily ignored his warning. General Duchene, known as “the Tiger” to his admirers, spent the night of May 27 in Paris with his mistress.
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