He was met by a machinegun burst and dove headfirst into the bog. By the time his troops had brushed the reindeer moss and lichen off him the Red aviators had disappeared into the forest.
“Don’t fire” was the wisecrack that passed from mouth to mouth among the doughboys with the polarbear shoulderpatch, as they suffered through the arctic winter in bloody skirmishes with the Bolos. “We are Americans!”
Chapter 21
TOUT LE MONDE A LA BATAILLE
FAR from the sound of guns Ferdinand Foch pored over his maps in his tapestryhung château of stonetrimmed brick amid the quiet greenery of Bombon. The recapture of Soissons made him Marshal of France. After he had received the decorated baton one of his entourage caught him croaking “It is not a wreath of flowers on a grave.”
Foch was a punctual man. Everything had to be on time. He always attended early Mass. Smoking a cheap stogy after his petit déjeuner he received the reports from the fighting fronts. Meals were sacred. Déjeuner à la fourchette was on the stroke of noon. Not even Weygand, his Chief of Staff, dared arrive a minute late. If he were unavoidably delayed, he’d wait to be served after the marshal had eaten. In the afternoon more conferences. Dinner was at seven sharp. Le marechale est à table. After dinner over the coffee visiting dignitaries shudderingly tried to smoke the marshal’s cheap cigars. He didn’t believe in wasting money on havanas. Early to bed. The members of his staff — known as la famille Foch—reported proudly that during the whole war the old fellow had only spent one night out of bed, during the first battle of the Marne when he had to stretch out on the floor of a small town hall. When he did have to travel, he complained jocosely that his famille wrapped him up like a package.
As summer advanced and the news from the armies improved, the marshal allowed his high spirits to express themselves sometimes at the table. “Oh ho, oh ho,” a British brigadier reported him gloating over German reverses: “Where we made a single command, they made two … that of the Crown Prince and Prince Rupert of Bavaria. I wonder whether Ludendorff knows his business; I do not believe that he does.”
As July advanced towards August, Foch began to promulgate his plan for a neverending series of attacks up and down the entire front: explaining his scheme to Colonel Repington, the most uppercrust of British war correspondents, at lunch one day the little man spluttered like a machine-gun under his bristling mustache, “Je les attaque!.. Bon!.. Je dis allez à la bataille!… Everybody gets into the fight … God knows this is the time for the maximum effort … Let’s go to work … Bon!”
This was the thesis he laid on the line for his staff: “The battle begins on one part of the front and the enemy is compelled to send there all his available reserves. Hardly has this been done when it begins again elsewhere and then again in a third place. The situation of the enemy is infernal.”
Foch’s watchword to all and sundry became: “Tout le monde à la bataille.”
When, at a general council of war at Bombon, Pershing set forth to the marshal his plans for his First American Army, both men still believed that the war would last into the following year. Pershing, with the ardent cooperation of General Bliss from Versailles, kept cabling the War Department that he wanted eighty divisions by April 1919, a hundred divisions (which would outnumber all the troops the French and British had in the field) by July.
Rumors of peace talks worried him. Peace would ruin his plans for an American army. “We must not let the people listen to rumors that the Germans are ready to make peace: there should be no peace until Germany is completely crushed,” Pershing told the marshal earnestly. The marshal couldn’t have agreed with him more. “We have pacifists who are lukewarm,” Pershing complained, “too much inclined to accept any proposition to have the war stopped.”
In their discussion of strategy for the autumn campaign the American Commander in Chief and the Marshal of France seem to have been talking at cross purposes. Pershing left Bombon believing he would be allowed to push through his longplanned drive through the St. Mihiel salient into the mining area of Briey.
His staff was already working out the details with Pétain’s subordinates. The American Army lacked heavy tanks, artillery, aviation. Since the War Department was unable to supply these necessary items they had to be borrowed from the French, for a price.
There would be delays, particularly in the arrival of the heavy artillery. Mangin needed all the big howitzers he could line up for the operation he was conducting with the British against the German lines between Soissons and Arras. There were no heavy tanks available.
Pershing took personal command of his First American Army at the old American base of La Ferté-sous-Jouarre on the Marne on August 11 and immediately moved its headquarters to Neufchâteau in the rear of the St. Mihiel salient. In Neufchâteau and the surrounding villages the officers of the sundry newly formed corps worked overtime planning the moving up of munitions and troops for what was to be the first large-scale American manoeuvre of the war. On August 30 General Pershing assumed command of all the Allied forces, American and French, in the St. Mihiel sector.
The same day Marshal Foch and Weygand arrived at Pershing’s own private quarters at nearby Ligny-en-Barrois, and asked him to approve a completely new scheme of operations, which they claimed was the logical result of the unexpected speed of the British and French advance in Picardy.
The St. Mihiel operation was to be limited to pinching off the salient, and a number of Pershing’s divisions were to be placed under French command for a completely new offensive which, instead of moving northeast into industrial Lorraine as had been planned, would push to the northwest, through the difficult terrain between the Meuse and the Aisne rivers. Thus it would form the eastern fang of a pincers of which the western jaw would be an Anglo-French drive for Cambrai.
Pershing immediately flared up: “Well Marshal, this is a very sudden change,” he quoted himself as saying. “On the very day you turn over a sector to the American army you ask me to reduce the operation so that you can take away several of my divisions.”
The discussion became heated indeed. Foch suggested, with his scornful snarl, that perhaps General Pershing didn’t care to take part in the battle at all. Of course he did Pershing asserted doggedly “but as an American army and in no other way.”
Foch insisted. Both men rose from the table where they were seated. “Marshal Foch you may insist all you please,” Pershing remembered having said, “but I decline absolutely.”
Pershing described Foch as picking up his maps and papers and leaving, “very pale and apparently exhausted,” after placing a memorandum in Pershing’s hands for further study.
Pershing was determined that Americans should no longer be used as cannonfodder to spare the troops of other Allied commanders. Though on the whole they got on better with the French than with the British, his doughboys he knew were fed up with being ordered about by the frogs. He was bound he would run his American sector as he saw fit.
The upshot of this irate discussion was that he consented to limit his St. Mihiel offensive to pinching off the German salient and promised that he would, immediately afterwards, in spite of the difficulty of changing his transport arrangements at that late date, join the French in a sweep down the valley of the Meuse starting to the west of Verdun.
“Plans for this second concentration,” wrote Pershing, “involved the movement of some 600,000 men and 2700 guns, more than half of which would have to be transferred from the battlefield of St. Mihiel by only three roads, almost entirely during hours of darkness.”