Although the armies in the field were still intact and disciplined, demoralization was spreading through the rear echelons. The High Command was in a panic. The story was being told that Ludendorff was so upset by the news of the successes of Foch’s general offensive that he fell in a fit on the floor.
A wave of despair went through all the little courts of the kingdoms and dukedoms and principalities that made up the hierarchy of the empire. The middle classes were bitterly disillusioned as it became clear that the sacrifices of the war had gone for nothing. The working people, who since the terrible “turnip winter” of 1916–17 had gone on working long hours for low pay under conditions of undernourishment that occasionally reached the point of famine, began to turn towards the Russian example. The Russian masses had driven out their tormentors, why not the Germans?
After all Germany was the cradle of socialism. The German Socialist Party had for years been the largest and most respected in Europe. Split into two wings in 1914 by the problem of whether or not to support the war, the patriotic majority now became the mainstay of Prince Max’s hopes of rapidly improvising a liberal and selfgoverning Germany to meet the specifications of a Wilsonian peace according to the Fourteen Points. In all the German courts people of similar sympathies began to draft reforms. As a gesture of conciliation towards the Independent Socialists, who had opposed the war, the Chancellor amnestied their leaders sent to jail by the old government.
The day Karl Liebknecht, one of the fieriest of the antiwar socialists, was released he addressed an excited crowd to demand the Kaiser’s abdication and a socialist workers’ republic. From the workers in the Berlin munitions factories and from the sailors of the fleet at Kiel came answering mutterings in premonition of revolt.
Germany teemed with agitators. Adolf Joffe had spent a busy summer at the old Russian Embassy on the Unter den Linden. He had established cordial relations with a group of welltodo radicals in Berlin. He helped a number of Reichstag deputies from Independent Socialist constituencies to subsidize newspapers. Moscow rubles paid the expenses of orators and organizers who carried the Communist line to every corner of industrial Germany.
Carl Radek, fiery, humorous, resourceful, under the cloak of diplomatic immunity, was fomenting a German revolution on the Communist model. Lenin’s paladins in the Kremlin, beset on every hand by counterrevolution, were pinning their hopes for safety in the workers’ revolution they believed could be provoked upon the collapse of German militarism.
The middleclass liberals and the soberer hierarchy of the trade unions and the established officials of the Social Democratic Party saw a way to peace and selfgovernment through President Wilson. The younger, wilder, more reckless fringe of the German working class were calling for Lenin and the red flag and for the total destruction of the existing order.
While empires teetered to a fall, and rumors of peace flickered like heatlightning beyond the horizon, the American doughboys, struggling over ridge after ridge through thickets tangled with barbed wire, had no thought except to kill in order not to be killed. The weather was cold. Almost continuous rain increased the difficulties of supply. Gradually more and more American divisions became involved until, at the peak of the fortyseven day battle the First Army numbered more than a million men, and Ludendorff had thrown in forty of his shrunken divisions to oppose them.
Almost imperceptibly the tide was turning in the valley of the Meuse.
French forces drove the German artillery off the high ground on the east bank of the river. This enabled the 1st Division successfully to outflank the forest plateau from the east and thus relieve a battalion of the New York 77th cut off in the forest, when units on either side had failed to reach their objectives. Commanded by Charles Whittlesey, a New York lawyer in civilian life, the battalion, without food and almost without water, fought off German attacks from every side — including one polite request written in English inviting the major to surrender — for the better part of a week before the 1st Division’s advance caused the Germans to quit the forest in a hurry. Five hundred and fifty officers and men of that battalion entered the woods. One hundred and ninetyfour walked out.
Two American divisions loaned to Gouraud managed to storm Blanc Mont from the rear. With that dangerous height in American hands the whole French line could move again.
Corporal John Aasland of the 5th Marines left notes of the assault in his diary: “October 3. At 4:30 A.M. the whistle blew and we packed up and stood by. The 6th Marines were to have the front the first day and we were to support them.
“The two regiments in the front line pulled a good stunt last night. At 11:00 P.M. they sneaked over into the German front line in the darkness and captured all the Germans there, then stayed there all night unbeknown to the Germans in the Second and Third lines, and used the German front as a jumping off place … The artillery opened up only five minutes before the attack started so by the time the Germans were half ready, the front line was … on their way to Blanc Mont ridge.
“We in support followed the 6th Marines by 600 yards … We advanced in line of combat groups. Crossed a creek and waded in water a foot deep, just enough to get wet. Broad daylight arrived, the sun shining brightly, and we had no fog to screen us. The enemy balloons behind the line were giving instructions to the artillery — which there was plenty of — so they started to shell us for fair … When the fire was not quite so heavy we reached a narrow gauge railroad where we stopped again. On the barbed wire hung limbs of men who had been blown up before, around which lay blue cloth, the remains of the unsuccessful attacks of the French on this place.
“Up again and here comes machinegun fire from the left. We drop and lay perfectly still in the grass and weeds: someone from the extreme left will be sent after the machineguns. The firing stops. The whistle blows and we are up and start again. Sometimes when the whistle blew I got up real quick and looked around. Outside of the men right next to me I could see no one. Six inches of grass and the color of the army uniform made us invisible. If we could lay still all the time it would be soft. Looks funny when the whole line stands up and starts to move again: just like they came from nowhere.
“Now and then a man was killed and a wounded man called ‘First Aid’ … but this isn’t bad yet … We are strung out in a trench with the Germans in the woods ahead of us. Every now and then machine gun fire comes our way. A heavy barrage began which plastered around us … On our way up the trench it was evident that other points in the woods had caught it also. Here and there were dead men lying in the trench. Soon we reached the top of Blanc Mont Ridge where the 6th Marines and 9th Infantry had been since yesterday noon. They were dug in in a shallow trench, right on top of the hill but with trees to screen them from the air.”
Out of the welter of sudden death and hairbreadth escape, of men advancing in skirmish lines, pinned down in the muck of old trenches, scuttling out of harm’s way among broken treetrunks, some deeds became legendary.
There was a solemn young man from the Tennessee mountains who, being an elder in his church, and pledged to the Ten Commandments, entered the army as a conscientious objector. An officer at the training camp, noticing that he was a remarkably good shot with a rifle, read the Bible with him and proved to him by chapter and verse that “Thou shalt not kill” did not apply to a just cause and that Jehovah was also the God of battles.