The original scope of Saint-Mihiel—A winter of preparation for a spring campaign—Which is cut down to two weeks—The tide turning for the Allies—The advantage of a general attack—And especially of numbers—The tactician's opportunity—Why the Meuse-Argonne—The whale-back of Buzancy—Striking for the Lille-Metz railway—All advantage with the defense—The audacity of the enterprise—The handicaps—A thankless task at best.

We were in the fever of preparation for our Saint-Mihiel attack. Divisions summoned from the victorious fields of ChÂteau-Thierry, and divisions which had been scattered with the British and French armies, were gathering in our own sector in Lorraine. The French were to assist us with ample artillery and aviation in carrying out our first ambitious plan under our own command.

After cutting the redoubtable salient, which had been a wedge in the Allied line for four years, we were to go through to Mars-la-Tour and Etain, threatening the fortress of Metz itself. This was to be the end of our 1918 campaign. Instead of wasting our energy in operations in mud and snow, we should spend the winter months in applying the lessons which we had learned in our first great battle as an army. Officers who had been proved unfit would be eliminated, and officers who had been proved fit would be promoted. All the freshly arrived divisions from home camps and all the personnel for handling the artillery, tanks, and other material of war which our home factories would then be producing in quantity, would be incorporated in a homogeneous organization.

In the early days of September, with our troops going into position before the threatening heights of the salient, and with the pressure of the effort of forming in time an integral army increasing with the suspense as the 12th, the day set for the attack, drew near, some important officers, at the moment when their assistance seemed invaluable, were detached from the Saint-Mihiel operations. Their orders let them into a portentous secret. They were to begin work in making ready for the Meuse-Argonne attack. While all the rest of the army was thinking of our second offensive as coming in the spring of 1919, they knew that it was coming two weeks after the Saint-Mihiel offensive.

This change of plan was the result of a conference between Marshal Foch and General Pershing which planned swift use of opportunity. The German Macedonian front was crumbling, the Turks were falling back before Allenby, and the Italians had turned the tables on the Austrians along the Piave. Equally, if not more to the point for us, the Anglo-French offensive begun on August 8th had gained ground with a facility that quickened the pulse-beat of the Allied soldiers and invited the broadening of the front of attack until, between Soissons and the North Sea, the Germans were swept off Kemmel and out of ArmentiÈres and away from Arras and across the old Somme battlefield.

The communiquÉs were telling the truth about the Allies' light losses; at every point the initiative was ours. The Germans were paying a heavier price in rearguard action than we in the attack. It was a surprising reaction from the pace they had shown in their spring offensives. All information that came through the secret channels from behind the enemy lines supported the conviction of the Allied soldiers at the front that German morale was weakening.

Ludendorff, the master tactician, was facing a new problem. That once dependable German machine was not responding with the alacrity, the team-play, and the bravery which had been his dependence in all his plans. He had to consider, in view of the situation that was now developing, whether or not the Saint-Mihiel salient was worth holding at a sacrifice of men. He knew that we were to attack in force; he knew that in an offensive a new army is bound to suffer from dispersion and from confusion in its transport arrangements. If he allowed us to strike into the air, he could depend upon the mires of the plain of the WoËvre to impede us while the defenses of Metz would further stay our advance, with the result that his reserves, released from Saint-Mihiel, might safely be sent to resist the pressure on the Anglo-French front, either in holding the Hindenburg line or in the arduous and necessarily deliberate business of covering his withdrawal to a new and shorter line of defense based on the Meuse River. The German war machine, which had been tied for four years to its depots and other semi-permanent arrangements for trench warfare, could not move at short notice.

A generalization might consider the war on the Western Front as two great battles and one prolonged siege. For the first six weeks there had been the "war of movement," as the French called it, until the Germans, beaten back from the Marne, had formed the old trench line. Throughout the four years of siege warfare that had ensued, the object of every important offensive, Allied and German, had been a return to the "war of movement." After a breach had been made in the fortifications, the attacking army would make the most of the momentum of success in rapid advances and maneuvers, throw the enemy's units into confusion, and, through the disruption of the delicate web of communications by which he controlled their movements for cohesive effort, precipitate a disaster. The long preparations which had preceded the offensives of 1915, 1916, and 1917 had always given the enemy ample warning of what to expect. He had met concentrations for attack with concentrations for defense. The sector where the issue was joined became a settled area of violent siege operations into which either side poured its fresh divisions as into a funnel. Succeeding offensives, in realization of the limitations of a narrower sector,—which only left the advance in a V with flanks exposed,—had broadened their fronts of attack; but none had been broad enough to permit of vital tactical surprises after the initial onset. The attrition of the man-power of the offensive force had so kept pace with that of the defensive that the offensive had never had sufficient reserves to force a decision when the reserves of the defensive were approaching exhaustion. Moreover, the Allies had never had sufficient preponderance of men, ordnance, and munitions to warrant undertaking the enterprise, which was the dream of every tactician, of several offensives at different points of the front at the same time or in steady alternation.

Now from Soissons to the sea the French and British were developing a comprehensive movement of attacks, now here and now there, in rapid succession. This drive was not a great impulse that died down as had previous Allied offensives, but a weaving, sweeping, methodical advance. Not only was German morale weakening and ours strengthening, but attrition was now definitely in our favor. Ludendorff's reserves were all in sight. His cards were on the table; we could feel assured that we knew fairly well how he would play them. Our own hand was being reinforced by three hundred thousand men a month from the immense reserves in the American training camps. We could press our initiative without fear of being embarrassed by serious counter-attacks taking advantage of our having overextended ourselves.

Thus far, however, the Germans were still in possession of their old trench system, except at a few points; our counter-offensive had only been recovering the ground which the Germans had won in their spring and summer offensives. Now that the tide had turned against him, Ludendorff, if his situation were as bad as we hoped, had two alternatives, and a third which was a combination of the two. One was to fall back to the proposed shorter line of the Meuse. This would give him the winter for fortifying his new positions. As a shorter front would allow him deeper concentrations for defense and the Allies less room for maneuvers in surprise, it must be their purpose to prevent his successful retreat by prompt, aggressive, and persistent action. The other alternative was to make a decisive stand on the old line, where for four years the Germans had been perfecting their fortifications. If we should overwhelm them when he was holding them rigidly, we should have the advantage of a wall in fragments when it did break. The third plan was to use the old fortifications as a line of strong resistance in supporting his withdrawal. Broadly, this was the one that he was to follow.

Everything pointed to the time as ripe for the fulfilment for the Allies of the tactical dream which had called Ludendorff to his own ambitious campaign in the spring of 1918. Marshal Foch would now broaden his front of alternating attacks from Verdun to the North Sea, in the hope of freeing the Allied armies from trench shackles for a decisive campaign in the open. The American part in this bold undertaking was to be its boldest feature.

If a soldier from Mars had come to Earth at any time from October, 1914, to October, 1918, and had been shown on a flat map the fronts of the two adversaries, he would have said that the obvious strategic point of a single offensive would be between the Meuse River and the Argonne Forest. This would be a blow against the enemy's lines of communication: a blow equivalent to turning his flank. If the soldier from Mars had been shown a relief map, he would have changed his mind, and he would have perfectly understood, as a soldier, why all the offensives had been in the north, from Champagne to Flanders, where breaking through the main line of defenses would bring the aggressor to better ground for his decisive movement in the open. He would also have understood why the front from the Argonne to the Swiss border had been tranquil since the abortive effort of the Germans at Verdun.

When Ludendorff undertook his great offensive of March, 1918, he did not repeat Falkenhayn's error, but turned to the north, where the Allies had made their attacks. In that Lorraine-Alsatian stalemate to the south, with the Vosges mountains and interlocking hills from Switzerland to the forts of Metz as the stronghold of the Germans, and the forts of Verdun, Toul, Epinal, and Belfort as the strongholds of the French, the odds were apparently too much against an offensive by either side to warrant serious consideration. Yet a watch was kept. Over the French mind was always the shadow of a possible German offensive toward Belfort; and, when the sector which our young army was to hold in Alsace and Lorraine had been first discussed in July, 1917, the French excluded the defense of a portion of the front opposite Belfort, with the polite explanation that they preferred to hold that themselves. But the Germans never did more than make the feint of an offensive in the south, which Ludendorff used in the winter of 1918 to draw off French troops and guns from the north: for the army with the numbers and the initiative of offense can always force the defense to waste movements to meet threats of attack. This was another advantage which the Allies could now use in keeping Ludendorff in doubt as to where our real blows were to be struck.

The heights of the Saint-Mihiel salient, which look directly across the plain of the WoËvre to the fortress of Metz, may be said roughly to have formed the left flank of the Lorraine-Alsatian stalemate. They continue onward in the hills which are crowned by the forts of Verdun, and then across the Meuse River for a distance of twenty miles through the bastion of the Argonne Forest, where they gradually break into the more rolling country of Champagne. The Meuse winds past Saint-Mihiel and through the town of Verdun, and then, in its devious course, swings gradually to the northwest until, at Sedan, it turns full westward.

Our new offensive was to be between the Meuse River and the western edge of the Argonne Forest. East of the forest is the little river Aire, and between its valley and the valley of the Meuse rises back of the German front a whale-back of heights, as I shall describe them for the sake of bringing a picture to mind, though the comparison is not absolute. The practical summit of the whale-back is to the eastward of the village of Buzancy. We may use Buzancy as a symbol: for it is only in a highly technical history that the detail of names, confusing to the general and even the professional reader, is warrantable. The summit of the whale-back gained, you are looking down an apron of rolling ground and small hills toward the turn of the Meuse westward past Sedan, where the German Army surrounded the French Army in the Franco-Prussian War.

To the northeast, readily accessible to attack, are the Briey iron-fields, which were invaluable to the Germans for war material. Along the valley of the Meuse after it turns westward, and along the Franco-Belgian frontier runs the great railroad from Metz to Lille, which is double-track all the way and in large part four-track. Incidentally this connected the coal fields of northern France with Germany, but its main service was to form the western trunk line of communication for the German armies in Belgium and northern and eastern France. It was linked up with the railways spreading northward into Belgium and southward toward Amiens and Paris in the arterial system which gave its life blood to the German occupation. If this road were cut, the German troops in retreat would have to pass through the narrow neck of the bottle at LiÉge.

The dramatic possibilities of gaining the heights of Buzancy and bringing the Lille-Metz tracks under artillery fire had the appeal of a strategic effect of Napoleonic days. The German staff had been fully aware of the danger when, in their retreat after their repulse on the Marne, which the world saw only as the spectacle of the French Army inflicting a defeat on an advancing foe, it used its tactical opportunity for choosing, with comparative deliberation, advantageous defensive positions from the Argonne Forest to the Meuse at the foot of the whale-back.

For future operations it was depending upon more than the elaborate fortifications of that line. Every hundred yards from the foot of the whale-back to the summit was in its favor in resisting attack. Higher ground leads to still higher ground, not in a regular system of ridges but in a terrain where nature cunningly serves the soldier. Nowhere might the defense invite the attack into salients with a better confidence, or feel more certain of the success of his counter-attacks. All roads, and all valleys where roads might be built, were under observation. Heights looked across to heights on either side of the two river troughs, heights of every shape from sharp ridges and rounded hills to peaked summits crowned by woods. Tongues of woods ran across valleys. Patches of woods covered ravines and gullies where machine-gunners would have ideal cover and command of ground. Reverse slopes formed walls for the protection of the artillery. The attack must fight blindly; the defense could fight with eyes open.

Had the Allies attempted an offensive in the Meuse-Argonne sector in the first four years of the war, the long and extensive preparations then regarded as requisite for an ambitious effort against first-line fortifications would have warned the Germans in time to make full use of their positions in counter-preparations. All the advantage of railroads and highways were with them in concentrating men and material. It might not be a long distance in miles from the Argonne line to the Lille-Metz railway or to the Briey iron-fields, but it was a long distance if you were to travel it with an army and its impedimenta against the German Army in its prime. When attrition was in his favor in the early period, the German might well have preferred that the Allied offensive of Champagne, or Loos, or the Somme, or Passchendaele, should have been attempted here: thus leaving open to him, after he had inflicted a bloody repulse in this sector, the better ground in the north for a telling counter-offensive.

Thus an Allied effort toward MÉziÈres, Sedan, and Briey would have been madness until the propitious moment came. Had it really come now? Anyone who was familiar with the history of warfare on the Western Front might ask the question thoughtfully. Bear in mind that we had not yet taken Saint-Mihiel and were not yet certain of our success there; and that from Soissons to Switzerland the old German line was intact. North of Soissons we had broken into it at only a few points. In the event that they had had to make a strategic withdrawal, the Germans had always followed the tactical system of a full recoil to strong chosen positions, where they resisted with sudden and terrific violence and held stubbornly and thriftily until they began one of their powerful counter-thrusts.

In my "America in France" I have told of our project, formed in June, 1917, when we had not yet a division of infantry in France and submarine destruction was on the increase, for an army of a million men in France, capable of the expansion to two million which must come, General Pershing thought, before the war could be won. That far-sighted conception and the decision which was now taken are the two towering landmarks of the troublous road of our effort in France. By July 1st, 1918, we had a million men in France, or nearly double the number of the schedule arranged between the French and American governments. We should soon have two millions.

When the Allies called for more man-power, in the crisis of the German offensive of March, 1918, the British had supplied the shipping that brought the divisions from our home training camps tumbling into France. They were divisions, not an army; and in equipment they were not even divisions. They had been hurried to the front to support the British and French as reserves, and they had been thrown into battle to resist the later German offensives. There had been no niggardliness in our attitude. We offered all our man-power as cannon-fodder to meet the emergency. Across the Paris road behind ChÂteau-Thierry we had given more than the proof of our valor. In the drive toward Soissons and to the Vesle we had established our personal mastery over the enemy. We had pressed him at close quarters, and kept on pressing him until he had to go. The confidence inherent in our nature, strengthened by training, had grown with the test of battle. We had known none of the reverses which lead to caution. More than ever our impulse was to attack.

ChÂteau-Thierry had taught Marshal Foch that he could depend upon any American division as "shock" troops which would charge and keep on charging until exhausted. Now he would use this quality to the utmost. To the American Army he assigned the part which relied upon the call of victory to soldiers as fresh as the French on the Marne, and, in their homesickness for their native land, impatient for quick results. If a Congressional Committee, knowing all that General Pershing knew, had been told of the plan of the Meuse-Argonne, they would probably have said: "No leader shall sacrifice our men in that fashion. We will not stand by and see them sent to slaughter."

The reputation of a commander was at stake. Should we break through promptly to the summit of the heights, then we might take divisions, corps, even armies, prisoners; but that was a dream dependent upon a deterioration in German staff work and in the morale of the German soldier which was inconceivable. The great prize was the hope of an early decision of the war; in expending a hundred or two hundred thousand casualties in the autumn and early winter, instead of a million, perhaps, during the coming summer. At home we should be saved from drafting more millions of men into our army; from the floating of more liberty loans; from harsher restrictions upon our daily life; from the calling of more women and children to hard labor; from the prolongation of the agony, the suspense, the horror, and the costs of the cataclysm of destruction.

There were more handicaps than the heights to consider: those of our unreadiness. If we had failed, this would have meant the burden of criticism heavy upon the shoulders of the commander-in-chief, who would have been recalled. Dreams of any miraculous success aside, it was not the example of the swift results in a day at Antietam, or the brilliant maneuver of Jackson at Chancellorsville, but the wrestling, hammering, stubbornly resisting effort of the men of the North and South in the Appomattox campaign which was to call upon our heritage of fortitude. In that series of attacks which Marshal Foch was now to develop, our part as the right flank of the three great armies was in keeping with the original plan of 1917: only we were facing the Meuse instead of the Rhine. Without sufficient material or experience, we were to keep on driving, not looking forward to the dry ground and fair weather of summer but toward the inclemency of winter. There against the main artery of German communications we were to launch a threat whose power was dependent upon the determined initiative of our men. Every German soldier killed or wounded was one withdrawn from the fronts of the British and French, or from Ludendorff's reserves which must protect his retreat; and every shell and every machine-gun bullet which was fired at us was one less fired at our Allies. It was to be in many respects a thankless battle, and for this reason it was the more honor to our soldiers.