RAIDING THE NEW FOE

American activities had hitherto been confined to what became known as the original American front, facing Lorraine beyond St. Mihiel. This was apparently an irregular line, in the vicinity of the Rhine-Marne canal, and fronting Nancy, LunÉville, Toul, and other towns whose existence became known by General Pershing's reports.

It was their "breaking in" ground. American troops there obtained an intimate acquaintance with modern warfare. The numerous trench raids that marked their operations apparently had no strategical relations to the movements on the battle line elsewhere, nor even disclosed any local tactical object. Americans and Germans seemed merely to be watching each other with lynx eyes, each on the alert to catch the other napping and steal a march for the glory of the achievement.

The casualties in these skirmishes were usually slight, and a few prisoners now and then would fall to one or the other side. But few raids took place without losses, which gradually became impressive as the engagements increased in frequency and scope. A trench raid is a trivial thing, with an inconsequential outcome when it has any outcome at all; but repeated daily, the casualties such raids produce, added to the fatalities resulting from random artillery fire, assume the dimensions of those of an extensive battle. They do not stand out as distinctive operations; proceeding upon established methods, there was a general sameness in their repetition, and they only became noticeable for the outstanding incidents that were bound to arise in each undertaking.

An early attack by the Germans was made behind a dense fog after daybreak, through which came a violent artillery barrage as a forerunner. The fog was of a density that blotted out everything but the nearest enemy positions. Through it enemy projectiles exploded on three sides of an American listening post just outside the wire, within forty-five feet of an enemy listening post. In a few minutes hundreds of high-explosive shells had dropped round the post and the surrounding ground, cutting off the men there. American artillery replied; but all traces of German dead and wounded were removed by the time the Americans had emerged from their dugouts after their barrage was raised.

The Germans followed their sortie against the listening post by a heavy bombardment of the American lines a few days later. American guns responded, shell for shell, wrecking several of the enemy's dugouts, and badly damaging some of his first-line positions. They were caved in by the American 75's, and the Germans spent several days in repairing them and patching up gaps in the barbed wire before the wrecked trenches could be reoccupied. A number of the men who were wounded slightly by shell splinters were treated in the lines with their first-aid packets and insisted on remaining at their posts until the fight was finished.

The enemy's next artillery exercise was a concentrated fire on one of the American positions with the object of obliterating it. Americans guns at once punished the German batteries with a retaliatory fire of double force, and then swept the enemy lines with a vicious barrage. Whereupon the German guns ceased firing.

The enemy presently resorted to the use of gas to harass the American positions. Aimed at a wood, a rain of shells, largely composed of gas and high explosives, came from the German minenwerfers. They burst in the air, the high explosives detonating when they came in contact with the earth, and broke into fragments among a number of men before they could adjust their masks. Other troops were overcome by the fumes while asleep in their dugouts. The fumes lingered in the gassed area long after the shells had exploded, filling shell holes and other depressions, and incapacitating men who ventured to work in the vicinity. But the American guns exacted swift retribution. They leveled a heavy fire on the German minenwerfers, and in half an hour had razed the position. Timbers were thrown high in the air, and explosions, probably of enemy ammunition, testified to American marksmanship. The ground about the German batteries was churned upside down, and there was no doubt of the fate of any German soldiers who were on the spot.

The beginning of March, 1918, saw the first pitched battle between Americans and Germans in the St. Mihiel salient north of Toul. The enemy started it by a morning raid in a driving wet snow, preceded by heavy gunfire, intermixed with poison gas. The latter was discharged on the trenches in a generous hail of shells, the Germans evidently thinking that this second cloud of gas would daunt the American troops after their previous foretaste. The Americans were not daunted; their masks quickly covered them, and few troops were affected.

The woods behind the salient were shot to pieces by the German fire. As soon as the barrage was raised on the trenches to the right of the salient, some 300 Germans swept forward under the protection of their fire. They jumped into what was left of the trenches, expecting to make a haul of prisoners; but they found the Americans ready for them.

A fierce hand-to-hand fight followed in front of wire entanglements and in shell holes. Meantime American barrage fire swept no-man's-land, catching many running Germans who had turned tail from fighting at close quarters.

The Germans were thrown back, leaving ten dead in the American trenches. Two were officers, entangled in the wire. The ground was littered with enemy hand grenades, boxes of explosives for destroying dugouts, and incendiary bombs the enemy had no opportunity of using. The enemy had paid dearly for his enterprise, but the Americans also suffered in proportion. Berlin claimed that twelve had been captured.

They had cut the American wire with caution, making no noise, but the sentry was watching their performance all the time, and let them proceed until he was sure of routing them.

Another American patrol experienced, for the first time, a German attack of liquid fire. Enemy troops were about to throw flame projectors into the American trenches when an American patrol near by opened fire on them. The Germans fled precipitately, pursued by the Americans, and dropped four projectors, two of which were flaming. All the projectors had been punctured by American shots.

The foregoing series of engagements shows that in every case the Germans were the aggressors. The Americans, in fact, were merely holding the Lorraine sector without aspiring to take the field until they were better acquainted with trench warfare. The Germans, believing they had green troops before them, were accordingly venturesome, and disposed to put them on their mettle, which they accordingly did, only to find that the supposedly raw American troops were no longer raw. The Germans themselves had contributed to ridding them of any greenness with which they credited them. The Americans had occupied the Lorraine sector as substitutes for the French, and the Germans were accordingly eager to know the quality of their new antagonists. Hence these series of raids made on the American front. Soon the tables were to be turned by the Americans conducting raids of their own.