The Metropolitan Division in the Argonne proper—Six weeks without rest—Direct attack impossible in the Forest—Similar history of the Keystone Division—Pennsylvania pride—Its mission the "scalloping" of the Forest edge—The stalwart men of the 35th Division—Storming the Aire heights—Fine spirit of the Pacific Slope Division—A five-mile advance projected for the Ohio Division—North and South in the 79th Division—Never in line before, it was to strike deepest.

Three National Army divisions were to be in the initial attack. It was a far cry for the men who a year before had tumbled into the training camps at home, without knowledge of the manual of arms or of the first elements of army etiquette and discipline, to the march of trained divisions forward into line of battle in France. On the extreme left of the line was the Liberty Division, from New York City. The metropolitans were given the task of taking not a town, but a forest, with which their name will be as long connected as with our largest city. Its left flank on the western edge of the Argonne Forest and its right on the eastern, the 77th had a long divisional front of over four miles; but it would have been unsatisfied if it had had to share the Forest. The Forest was its very own. The public at home seemed to have the idea that the whole battle was fought there. If it had been, the 77th would have had to share credit with twenty other divisions, which had equally stiff fighting in patches of woods which were equally dense even if they were not called forests.

It had not been until September 15th that the 77th had been relieved from the operations in the ChÂteau-Thierry region. A new division, fresh from training at the British front and in Lorraine, it had gone into line in August to hold the bank of the Vesle against continuous sniping, gassing, and artillery fire; and later, after holding the bottom of a valley with every avenue of approach shelled in nerve-racking strain, it had shown the mettle of the Americans of the tenements by fighting its way forward for ten days toward the Aisne Canal. It had been in action altogether too long according to accepted standards, though this seems only to have tempered its steel for service in the Argonne.

Ordinarily a new division would not only have been given time to recover from battle exhaustion, which is so severe because in the excitement men are carried forward by sheer will beyond all normal reactions to fatigue, but it would have been given time for drill and for applying the lessons of its first important battle experience. The value of this is the same to a division as a holiday at the mountains or the seashore to a man on the edge of a nervous breakdown. He recovers his physical vitality, and has leisure to see himself and his work in perspective.

Instead of knowing the relaxation and the joy of settling down in billets and receiving the attention of the "Y" and other ministrants, of having plenty of time to write letters home, and of receiving from home letters that were not more than six weeks old, the men of the 77th had long marches to make through ruined country, and were then switched about, in indescribably uncomfortable travel, on the way to the Argonne. The division commander made no complaint on this score; but it was a fact to be taken into consideration. The 77th was short of transport; its horses were worn down. Yet, faithful to orders, its artillery as well as its infantry was up on the night of the 24th. Owing to the length of its front, all four infantry regiments were put into line, which meant that there could be no relief for any units after they reached their destination.

We admire hardy frontiersmen, of whom we expect such endurance; but what of these city-dwellers, these men from the factories and offices, short of stature and slight of body? Who that had seen them before they entered a training camp would have thought that they could be equal to carrying their heavy packs on long marches and undergoing the physical strain of battle? Their fortitude was not due altogether to good food and the healthy rÉgime of disciplined camps; it was the spirit of their desire to prove that they were the "best" division because they were the "Liberty Division." Their hearty, resolute commander, Major-General Robert Alexander, was justly proud of them and believed in them; and they had excellent officers, who held them up by example and discipline to high standards.

Faith in the impregnability of the Forest, from ancient times a bulwark for which armies competed, had not led the Germans to neglect any detail in improving its natural defenses. In that area where for four years the French and the Germans had stared across No Man's Land at each other, the reasons for the enforced stalemate were almost as obvious as those for the truce between the whale and the elephant. Either army had at its back the cover of woodland, while the slopes about the trenches formed a belt of shell-craters littered with trunks of trees. Any attempt to take the forest by frontal attack must have been madness. Action in front must be only an incident of pressure, and confined to "mopping up," as action on either side forced the enemy's withdrawal from a cross-fire. This was bound to be our plan, as the enemy foresaw; we shall see that he governed himself accordingly.

The 28th Division, which had been on the left of the 77th in the advance to the Aisne, was again on its left. These had really been the first two American divisions to fight side by side under an American corps command, that of Major-General Robert L. Bullard. In the enterprise that they were now undertaking they had need of every detail of team-play that they had learned.

Some elements of the 28th, which was then just arriving in the ChÂteau-Thierry region, had been in action against the fifth German offensive; then it had been pushed across the Marne, where it had been put in by brigades and moved about under harassing circumstances in the ensuing counter-offensive. Later, having proved its worthiness for the honor, as an intact division it had taken over from the exhausted 32nd on the Vesle. Practically, from July 15th until it went to the Argonne it had had no rest. It had held not only the town of Fismes on the bank of the Vesle, but the exposed position of the little town of Fismettes on the other side of the river, during that period when the Germans were inclined to make a permanent stand there if their digging, their sniping, and their battering artillery fire, showered from the heights upon the 28th and the 77th in the valley, were any criterion. In the subsequent advance to the Aisne, and later in the transfer to the Argonne, the division had to submit to the same kind of irregularities and discomfort as the 77th, and to suffer in the same way for want of adequate transport and of leisure for studying its latest battle lessons for use in the next battle.

There is a general idea that such populous states as New York and Pennsylvania lack state pride, particularly in the sense of the southern states; but any state, whose National Guardsmen were numerous enough to form a complete division on the new war footing, had the advantage of the unity of sentiment of the old family, which does not have to include strangers at its board. The 28th's deeds were Pennsylvania's. It stood proudly and exclusively for Pennsylvania with her wealth and prosperity and all her numerous colleges, large and small, from Allegheny in the northwest to the University of Pennsylvania. The men were evidently capable of eating three and four square meals a day, and they looked as if they were used to having them when they were at home.

"What about politics?" the critic always asks about any National Guard division. If there were politics in the 28th it was so mixed up with marching and fighting—and the men of the 28th were always doing one or the other when I saw them—that it was unrecognizable to one so unused to politics as the writer. Certainly, it was a good kind of politics, I should say, in that Pennsylvania had taken a downright interest in her National Guard, which was now bearing fruit. The 28th's commander, Major-General Charles H. Muir, was a man of equanimity and force, who had the strength of character, on occasion, to stand up to an Army staff when he knew that its orders were impracticable. The staff respected him for his confidence in the judgment of the man on the spot.

The 28th's losses both in officers and in men in that excoriating progress from the Vesle to the Aisne had been the price of a gallantry which was a further reproof to the scepticism in certain quarters about the National Guard. Officers who had been killed or wounded had been replaced by young men who were often from the training camps though not Pennsylvanians; and in the fierce illumination of battle much had been learned about the qualities of the survivors. Some of these who had hitherto been called politicians had entirely overcome the aspersion. Others who had worn themselves out physically might be given a period of recuperation even if the division had none. The 28th had been indeed battle-tried in all that the word means. If it could have had two weeks before the Meuse-Argonne in which to digest its lessons, this would have been only fair to it as a division: though probably its determination would have been no stronger.

The 28th's front was from the edge of the Forest on its left to the village of Boureuilles on its right. Astride the Aire River it linked the Forest with the main battle-line. While maintaining its uniformity of advance on its right, its left had the same difficult maneuver in "scalloping" the eastern edge of the Forest as the French in "scalloping" the western edge. This meant that the 28th must storm the wooded escarpments which the Forest throws out on the western side of the Aire. On the eastern side of the valley were heights which interlocked with the escarpments. As one Guardsman said, the division had a worse job than a Democrat running for governor of Pennsylvania in an off year for Democrats.

Now the 28th could not succeed unless the division on its right took the heights on the eastern side of the Aire. If the 28th failed, then the whole turning movement of the Army offensive toward the main series of heights which formed the crest of the whale-back was endangered. On the right of the 28th was the 35th Division, National Guard from Kansas and Missouri, which must offer the courage and vigor which is bred in their home country in place of the battle experience which had been the fortune of the Pennsylvanians. Major-General William M. Wright had been the first commander of the 35th. He was a man of the world, most human in his feeling and sound in his principles of war, with a personality which was particularly effective with troops of sturdy individualistic character, who were unaccustomed by their tradition of self-reliant independence of thought to the arbitrary system which a regular army develops in the handling of recruits in time of peace. Leonard Wood had the same class of men from the same region in the 89th, which Wright later led in the Meuse-Argonne battle with brilliant results.

Soon after the 35th arrived behind the British lines, Wright's accepted knowledge of regular army personnel and his capacity for inspiring harmonious effort in any group of subordinates led General Pershing to set him the task of organizing corps staffs, among them the Fifth, which was to develop exemplary traditions. Major-General Peter E. Traub, a scholarly soldier, fully equipped in the theories of war, succeeded him in command of the 35th. Traub's brigade of the 26th Division had received at Seicheprey the shock of the first attack in force that the Germans had made against our troops, where the quality which the young officers and men had shown in face of a surprise by overwhelming numbers, and their prompt recovery of the town without waiting on superior orders, had reflected credit on their brigade.

The physique and the good humor of the men of the 35th had been the admiration of everybody who had seen them after their arrival in the British area. The Guardsmen of Kansas had a fine tradition linked up with the career of Frederick Funston, who was in the fullest sense what is known as a born soldier. He was a combination of fire and steel; of human impulse and inherent common sense. His initiative was in tune with that of his Kansans. Through the authority of their faith in him he applied stern discipline.

With its left on Boureuilles and its right on Vauquois, the 35th must storm the heights of the eastern wall of the Aire under flanking artillery and machine-gun fire from the escarpments of the Forest, unless these were promptly conquered by the 28th. No finer-looking soldiers ever went into action. Their eagerness was in keeping with their vitality. Compared to the little men of the 77th, who were overburdened with heavy packs, they were giants of the type which carried packs of double the army weight over the Chilcoot Pass in the Klondike rush. Their inheritance gave them not only the strength but the incentive of pioneers. Whoever had the leading and shaping of such a body of American citizens had a responsibility which went with a glorious opportunity. The stronger the men of a division, the abler the officers they require to be worthy of their potentiality. Given the battle experience of the 77th, under a Pershing, a Wood, a Bullard, a Summerall, or a Hines, and a group of officers as such a leader would have developed, the work of the 35th would never have become a subject for discussion: but we shall come to this later on.

On the right of the 35th we had the 91st, National Army from the Pacific Coast, as the left division of the Fifth or center Corps, with its front from Vauquois to Avocourt. Its commander was Major-General William H. Johnston, a redoubtable fighter and vigorous for his years, as anyone could see at a glance. There was no question as to the character of his men, who were six thousand miles from home. Their physique was as good as that of the 35th, as you know if you know the region where they were called to service by the draft. Never before under fire, they were to fight their way through woods by a frontal attack, and then under the enemy's observation into an open ravine, and on through that up forbidding slopes. An appealing sentiment attached to this division from the other side of the continent, no less than to the 77th, from which it differed in its personnel as the Pacific Slope differs from the streets of New York. There were city men in its ranks, but not in the sense of city men from New York; and there were ranchmen, and lumbermen, and those among them who spoke broken English were not from tailors' benches.

On the right of the 91st was the 37th, Ohio National Guard under Major-General Charles S. Farnsworth, a regular officer of high repute, who was to take the division through its terrific experience in the Meuse-Argonne and afterward to Belgium. Why so excellent a division as the 37th should not have been earlier in France may be referred to geography, which gave an advantage to National Guard divisions from the seaboard states. The 37th had waited and drilled long for its chance, which now came in generous measure. After breaking through the trench system it must storm by frontal attack, for a depth of three miles, woods as thick as the Argonne; and this was only a little more than half the distance set for a single day's objective. Therefore, without previous trial in grand offensives, it was assigned a mission which would ordinarily have been supposed to be disastrous against even a moderate defense. The 37th was without its own artillery, but it had been assigned on short notice the artillery of the 30th Division, which, however zealous and well-trained, had not worked with the division or ever operated in a serious action, let alone protected infantry advancing for such a distance over such monstrously difficult ground.

On the right of the 37th was the 79th, National Army drawn from Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia. Major-General Joseph E. Kuhn, who was in command, was well-known as an able engineer officer. He had served as an attachÉ with the Japanese in the Russo-Japanese War, seeing more of the operations than any other single foreign officer; and he had been an attachÉ in Germany early in the Great War, afterward becoming president of the War College in Washington. Aside from this equipment his untiring energy, his high spirits, and his personality fitted him for inculcating in a division confidence in itself and its leadership.

The 79th, with men from both sides of Mason and Dixon's line, united North and South in its ranks. Since its arrival from the States it had hardly had time to become acclimatized. In place of its own artillery, which was not yet equipped, it had not even a homogeneous artillery brigade. Of American artillery (aside from seventeen of the French batteries upon which we were relying so largely for our preliminary bombardment) it had three regiments, less six batteries, from the experienced 32nd Division, and one regiment from the 41st Division. Though the 79th had never been under fire before, though it had only training-camp experience, it was expected, after taking the first-line fortifications, to cover the most ground of any division on the first day, and though it did not have to fight its way through any important woods it was to proceed along the valley of the Montfaucon road, passing over formidable ridges which were under the observation of woods on either flank capable of concealing any amount of enemy artillery.