A successful surprise—The importance of traffic control in maintaining the advance—The "show" in the air—How the engineers built roads—And traffic blocked them—And colonels showed the traffic police how.

The veteran accepts his long service as a guarantee of efficiency; the novice is patient under instruction and open to suggestion. Our desire to do everything in the book, our painstaking individual industry under a meticulous discipline, and our willingness as beginners to learn had served us well before the battle in the concealment of our strength and plans from the enemy. There were so many of us and we were so swift in our onset that we gave the enemy the benumbing shock which on many occasions the newcomer, springing aggressively into the arena, has inflicted by a rain of blows upon a hardened adversary who has appraised him too lightly.

If the Germans had made the most of their fortifications with their customary skill, the dam might have held against the flood; for it is the touch and go of impulse that decides in the space of a second between docile hands up begging for succor and a fury of resistance to the death. Suddenly brought to face overwhelming formations, the answering sense of self-preservation prevailed in the German trenches before the German officers and non-commissioned officers, had they been in the mood, could overcome the mass instinct of their men.

The French on our left had presumably met more resistance than we in the first-line fortifications. Their attack was doubtless more professionally skillful than ours. Had they failed, for no other reason than that they had fewer men to the mile, the cost of a repulse would have been less for them than it would have been for us. The Germans knew that the French were massing west of the Argonne, and apparently accepted their attack as serious, while they thought that we would make only a demonstration. We had been right in our anticipation that they would not consider, for one thing, another major offensive by our army feasible so soon after Saint-Mihiel; or, for another, that Marshal Foch, while he was carrying on extensive operations in northern France, would have the temerity or the forces to undertake in addition such an extensive effort as that of September 26th.

Despite the honor in which open warfare was now held, a first line was still a first line, with its wire, deep dugouts and strong points, and all the approaches accurately plotted by the artillery through long practice in fire. A part of it might be readily taken at any time by thorough artillery preparation, but the victors in the early offensives had suffered enormous toll of casualties from shell-fire in organizing their new positions. Though the short artillery preparation, without registering, had proved efficacious against the Germans on July 18th and August 8th, when they were holding shallow trenches in ground which they had won in their spring offensives, it had not as yet been tried by the Allies—I may mention again—over any such length of front against the old trench system as in the Meuse-Argonne. It is only fair to say that we were not opposed in strong force, but, make any qualification you choose, by conquering twenty miles of first-line fortifications we had won a signal triumph which must have been a distressing augury to the German command.

After our "break through" there was little answering artillery fire. We had drawn the teeth of immediate artillery resistance by going through to the guns. We had captured many guns; others were forced to fall back to escape capture, and they, or any that were hurried forward, would have had to fire, not at a settled trench line, but at infantry deployed and on the move. Meanwhile our infantry must be driven to the utmost of its capacity to make the most of the headway that we had gained.

We had also to consider the dispersion and the fatigue which bring loss of momentum in an attack, just as a tidal wave spends itself in flowing inland. The farther our infantrymen went, the farther our transport must go to provide them with rations and ammunition. Thus the ability of our organization to continue the advance after the "break through" included the indispensable factor of efficient arrangements at the rear. As a division has twenty-seven thousand men, its daily food requirements are equal to those of a good-sized town, without including small arms and artillery ammunition and other material. People at home who were surprised at the length of time it took a division to march by on parade, without its artillery or transport, will have some idea of the road space required for a single division fully equipped for action and in motion.

Behind the old trench system traffic movement had settled into a routine, under the direction of policemen at the crossings, resembling that of a city. In our mobilization for the attack we had brought, aside from corps and army troops, nine divisions into the Meuse-Argonne sector. This led to the pressure which would appear in suddenly trebling the traffic of a city. Though the roads were insufficient, they were kept systematically in repair; quantities were known; we were forming up on a definite line of front. After the attack was begun, the defensive force was falling back upon its established and dependable arrangements. The offensive force—and this cannot be too clearly or vividly stated—had to build a city, as it were, by establishing new depots and camps, repairing old roads and building new roads, while traffic control in the area of advance was subject not only to the calculable requirements of a great street parade in a city, but to the incalculable requirements of a great fire and other emergencies which switch concentrations from one street to another.

From a ridge in the midst of the old trench system in the center of our line, the nature of our task appeared as a picture, which my observation in threading my way through the streams of traffic in the rear filled in with detail. Ahead, except for occasional groups and lines appearing and disappearing in the wooded, undulating landscape, our advancing infantry seemed to have been dissipated into the earth. Their part after they were through the fortifications I shall describe in another chapter. The bridge between them and the rear was for the moment in the air, where Allied and German planes in prodigal numbers came and went on their errands of combat and observation. In the jam on the roads back of the trenches, thousands of men, of waiting machine-gun battalions and of stalled artillery, and drivers and helpers attached to traffic of all kinds, were looking aloft at a "show" which was worth the price of being packed in darkened transports, and almost worth the price of enduring army discipline.

If they might see nothing of the battle going on behind the ridge, they had grandstand seats for the theatrics of war in the air, staged on the background of the blue ceiling of heaven. I was not to see the like of this scene again in such bright sunlight. The most jaded veteran never failed to look up at the sound of machine-gun firing, which signaled that the aces might be jousting overhead. Would one be brought down? There might be only an exchange of bullets between planes in passing; then one might turn to give chase to the other; or both begin maneuvering for advantage. In shimmering flashes the sunlight caught the turning wings of planes that tumbled in a "falling leaf" when at a disadvantage, caught the wings of planes that were crippled and falling to their death.

Duels were forgotten when a German plane with no Allied plane across its path swept down toward the huge inflated prey of an observation balloon. His telephone told the observer in the basket that it was time to take to his parachute. The sight of the figure of a man, harnessed to a huge umbrella, leisurely descending from a height of a thousand feet, divided attention with watching to see whether or not the gas within the thin envelope overhead broke into a great ball of flame. If not, it was brought down to take on its passenger again; and it could be lowered with incredible rapidity for such an immense object, as the wire which anchored it was reeled in on the spinning reel on the motor-truck. There was something very modern and truly American about a motor-truck in a column of traffic towing a balloon.

Most fortunate of all the spectators were the men with machine-guns for aËrial defense mounted on trucks. They both observed and participated in the game. Many of them were in action for the first time with a new toy. They did not propose to miss any opportunity to make up for having come late into the war.

"Haven't you learned the difference between an Allied and a German plane? You're shooting at an Allied plane," an officer called to a machine-gunner.

"Yes, sir," was the reply, and he stopped firing.

"Why didn't you tell him you couldn't hit it anyway?" remarked a passing wounded man, after the officer had passed on. "But don't worry. If they miss the plane, the bullets can still hit somebody when they fall."

Entranced as they were by the spectacle, all the men who had to do with the moving of the wheels of all the varieties of transport which overflowed the roads were only the more eager to press forward. The air was not their business. Their duty was over the ridge toward the front. The artillerists had particularly appealing reasons for impatience, as we shall see. They were using rugged language, which relieved their steam-pressure without changing the fact, which was being burned into the consciousness of the whole army, that as surely as a chain is no stronger than its weakest link, a road is no stronger than any slough which holds up traffic.

The engineers had no time to spare for observing blazing balloons. Their labors in the old trench system, in contrast to the florid drama of the air, were a reminder of how completely earth-tied the army was, and how small a part of its effort was above the earth, even in the days when communiquÉs paid much attention to aces. For a mile or more every road in the immediate rear of the old French trenches had been in disuse for four years while it was being torn by shell-bursts. For the distance across No Man's Land, it had become part of the sea of shell-craters. On the German side of No Man's Land were more trench chasms, and another stretch which had been blasted in the same fashion as the French side.

Shoveling would fill many of the holes; but shoveling required labor when we were short of labor, and time when every minute was precious. It was increasingly evident every minute, too, that trucks that carry three tons, and six-inch mortars, and heavy caissons were not meant to pass over any piece of mended road that had its bottom two or three feet below the surface. They insisted upon finding the bottom and remaining there until pulled out by other traction than their own.

The division engineers were supposed to keep on the heels of the infantry, which they did with a gallantry which made amends for the inadequacy of their numbers and material. Their efficacy was dependent upon these two features and upon the prevision of the division command in mastering the problem beforehand. There were critics who said that some division staffs evidently expected their artillery and rolling kitchens to take wing; but the division staffs produced by way of answer the unfailing list of written orders on the subject, which could not be carried out. If the infantry were repulsed or checked, the engineers might share some of the fighting, as they had on more than one occasion. There seemed to be a universal apprehension, the engineers said, that an engineer might have a chance to sleep or rest, which would obviously ruin his morale. If, after the infantry had passed on, the enemy concentrated the fire of a battery on the road-builders, they were not supposed to be diverted from their labor, but to be prompt in filling new shell-craters.

The lack of material ready on wagons for immediate movement to the front left them to gather what material they could on the spot. They could not use barbed wire, and in places that seemed the only thing in sight. They tore out trench timbers, which often proved rotten from four years in moist earth, they gathered stones where stones could be found and used these to make something more solid than loose earth turned by the shovel; and they sent hurry calls to the rear for trucks of material, which themselves might be stalled on the way forward in the jam of waiting traffic. The more sticks and stones filled in a bad spot, the more were needed as the earth underneath continued to yield. When a truck-driver saw that the truck in front, which belonged to his convoy, had passed through a rut, he determined that where his leader could go he could follow, and he drove ahead, cylinders roaring with all their horse-power. When he was stuck, he spurred them to another effort. Meanwhile his wheels were probably sinking, and he had delayed the mending of the break in any satisfactory way while the truck in front backed up to put out a towline, and all hands in the neighborhood added their muscular man-power to cylinder horse-power. The Germans had raised in the shell-torn earth of the trench system another barrier than that of their fortifications to a swift drive for their lines of communication.

Their own limited opportunities in "passing the buck" did not exclude the engineers from easing their own mental, if not physical, burden by remarking with acid intensity that a little better traffic control on the part of some of the people who were complaining would help matters. No one who had been along the roads could deny that this point was well taken. If not the experience of other offensives, our traffic demoralization at Saint-Mihiel should have been a warning to us, though most of the men who had learned their lessons in that sector were still occupied there. We had the admirable example of the British transport, which, after confusion in the Somme battle resembling ours at Saint-Mihiel, had developed in practice under fire a system which seemed automatic.

The number of guns and ammunition-caissons and the length of a column of divisional transport were calculable quantities. Their order of precedence behind the infantry was largely a settled formula. The number of roads and their state of repair must be known not only on the map but by practical observation. Some were narrow country roads, which would accommodate only "one-way" traffic, and others would accommodate traffic going both ways. Having all these factors in mind, the program must include the disposition of labor battalions where they would be needed in making prompt repairs, when heavy trucks cut up roads, especially one-way dirt country roads.

We had written out extensive instructions for traffic regulation, which were to be enforced by military police who were new to the task and insufficient in numbers. The same thing happened to the military police on September 26th as happened to the New York City police during the parade of the 27th Division, when the crowd broke through the police lines into the line of march. In this instance, when aggressive commanders of artillery and convoys saw an opening, they made for it without regard to traffic regulations, though their ardor may have meant only delay in the end.

Thus the military police had paper authority which they could not enforce. Their minds were kept in confusion by the confusion of personal directions they received from volunteer experts. They were overwhelmed in rank; and respect for rank had been drilled and drilled into them. A colonel is a colonel and a mighty man; a lieutenant-colonel is a mightier man than a major, who in turn outranks any captain in charge of a section of road. What was the use of proclaiming a road "one-way," when a staff officer appeared and declared it "two-way"? What was there to do when another staff officer appeared with an outburst against the disobedience of regulations that had interlocked traffic going both ways on this same one-way road?

This is not saying that the personal initiative of a passing senior officer was not serviceable, when he confined his effort to breaking a jam, without reorganizing the system in one locality, and thereby throwing it out of gear in other localities. With the best of intentions, colonels fresh from home who had not seen a large operation before were particularly energetic. Some of their remarks stirred memories of Philippine days when the transport of an expeditionary battalion was in difficulties. The burden of the world was on their shoulders. When they gave an order, they wanted no suggestive "But, sir——" from any captain or major, though they complained that reserve officers lacked both initiative and discipline. As each colonel departed in the blissful consciousness that it had taken a trained soldier to "straighten things out," the traffic officers, in the interval before another appeared with contradictory orders, might indulge their sense of humor with the reflection that numerous "fool colonels" must be wandering about France with a free hand in impressing their rank upon juniors.

The biggest "fool colonel" or general was he who, to avoid walking, took his car in the early part of the day across the freshly made road over the trench system, thereby delaying the carts of machine-gun battalions. When his car was stalled, he received about as much sympathy as the driver of a truck stalled on a road which did not belong to his division. Not being a colonel, the driver might be made the public object of language which did not consider rank or human sensibilities.

In no result was the fact more evident than in our traffic direction that in making a large army we must crack the mold of a small army. In time our capacity for organization would make a new mold. Meanwhile, though it might be applied at cross-purposes, our American energy, adaptable, tireless, furious, and determined, must bring results. The many broken-down trucks in ditches beside the road were only the inevitable casualties of a prodigious effort. Let the infantrymen keep on advancing; we would force their supplies up to them in one way or another.