During the night of September 2 through 3, the exhausted troops of the 106th had been relieved by the British 122nd Infantry.1 They trudged back across the Franco-Belgian border, leaving their billets at Micmac Farm at 1:30 a.m. and marching to Napier, where they boarded a narrow gauge railway to Rattekot, Saint-Eloi. After spending what was left of the night in tents there, they made a three-hour march the following night to Wayenburg and boarded another train, though they first had to shovel out the manure left by the animals that had previously been transported in it.2 They finally entrained at 1:30 a.m. on the morning of September 5, but did not reach Mondicourt until 6:30 that evening, and then faced another two-and-a-half-hour march before finally reaching their billets at Doullens. When they at last arrived, the surviving 12 officers and 654 enlisted men of the Second Battalion of the 106th ate for the first time in thirty-six hours.
They were quartered in the ancient stone citadel on a hill just outside Doullens, or in barns in the surrounding countryside. “There were prior tenants in these barns … some of them were quite large and every night they came out of their hiding places to chase each other over the blankets of the soldier occupants … We were involved in a serious training mission and were too tired to be bothered with rats.3 We just went to sleep, pulling our lone blanket over our heads.” There were other prior tenants, too: “cooties”—lice—infested the men, their clothing, and their hay and straw bedding. Despite the army’s attempts to delouse their troops, steaming or fumigating their uniforms to kill the lice while the men stood naked and shivering, they were louse-free only until they again lay down to sleep, when they at once became reinfested.
General Read, Commander of the Second Corps that included the 27th Division, had already made a request for replacements for his depleted ranks—now 62 officers and 2,547 men short.4 The request was not answered; the 27th Division received no replacements at all until late October 1918, by which time its fighting service was at an end.
The 106th Infantry remained in Doullens for a fortnight, reorganizing the depleted ranks, which were slowly being augmented by a trickle of returning wounded and gassed men, and reequipping and retraining, despite torrents of rain that left them once more knee-deep in mud and water. These tired and bloodied soldiers showed an understandable lack of enthusiasm for drill sessions during their rest period, drawing complaints from a regimental adjutant who noted that almost seven hundred men of the 106th and the other regiments of the division were “in billets at time of inspection … this number is out of all proportion and appears beyond reason.”5
There was also a problem with men going absent without leave, some of whom must have been classified as deserters. A report produced on September 6, 1918, showed that about fifty men had been AWOL at some time during the previous fortnight, with two companies particularly badly affected. Fifteen men from Company F were AWOL for at least part of that time, including eleven who had disappeared before the regiment’s tour of frontline duty at Dickebusch Lake and Vierstraat Ridge and never returned. Seven men of Company I had been AWOL during the entire tour of duty, since early July. Whether they were ever found and what punishment was imposed does not appear to have been recorded, but the brigade commander made it clear that in every case, in addition to charges for being AWOL, he also wanted the men charged with misbehavior before the enemy.6 The implications of that were made clear in the relevant Article of War: Any officer or soldier who abandoned his post, incited others to do so, or threw away his weapon was liable to suffer “death or such other punishment as a court-martial may direct.”
The men who had been involved in the brutal fighting around Vierstraat Ridge felt an understandable need to let off steam afterward, with predictable consequences. On September 14, 1918, a military policeman entered an estaminet in Doullens just in time to stop a brawl involving a dozen men of the 106th. There were about fifteen champagne bottles on the table in front of them and the men were “in a very nasty mood.7 I realized that if I endeavored to stop them from taking the champagne with them,” the MP said, “it would mean trouble and probably necessitate the use of my gun.” He got them outside, and after more fighting among themselves in the yard and on the road in front of the estaminet, he managed to get them started on the journey back to their billets.
However, they then assaulted two British YMCA workers who were out for an evening stroll. Although the culprits were arrested, the YMCA workers’ superior, voicing the strong feelings of his staff and his YMCA executive, showed a remarkable degree of understanding in expressing the hope that the men would be dealt with as leniently as possible. His demand for action against “the sellers of strong drink, rather than the victims of it,” echoed the debate on temperance and Prohibition that was dominating the domestic political agenda back in the United States.8
Although they had been allowed a brief rest, the men of the 106th Infantry, like those in the other regiments of the 27th Division, were now in intensive training, practicing alongside British tanks for the first time. Their depleted state after the fighting on Vierstraat Ridge and Mount Kemmel was shown by the record of attendance for a tank demonstration on September 17, 1918, when almost half of the surviving members of the Second Battalion were missing, the majority of them wounded men who were still in the hospital. Depleted or not, a communiqué from General O’Ryan now informed them that in the near future they would be carrying out a mission of great importance, requiring them to serve as “shock troops.”9 That mission, now being rehearsed by these still inexperienced soldiers, was to be an attack on the enemy’s most formidable defensive system: the Siegfried Stellung—the Hindenburg Line.
Despite huge initial advances, the great German offensive that spring had not achieved its ultimate objective of dividing the British and French armies and breaking through to the Channel. It had also represented something of a last throw of the dice. Germany’s economy, starved of raw materials by the British blockade of the North Sea ports, was struggling to supply enough war matériel and munitions for the troops, or even enough food and clothing for the population at home. German forces had suffered massive casualties, for which even the transfer of troops from the Eastern Front following the collapse of Russia into revolution could not compensate, and now the floods of fresh American troops arriving daily in Europe were tilting the balance of manpower ever more heavily in the Allies’ favor.
The last German hopes of outright victory had evaporated when the great spring offensive faltered and stalled. Now, massed behind the fortifications of the Hindenburg Line, the German war aim was simply to weather whatever Allied storm might break against them, and then, negotiating from a position of rough parity, secure a peace that would allow them to retain as many as possible of the territorial gains in Belgium and France that they had made in the autumn of 1914.
When not carrying out their training and practice maneuvers, the men of the 106th Infantry and the other regiments of the 27th Division were told to get all the sleep they could.10 In between the endless hours of rehearsal for the attack and the sleep they were encouraged to get, Monk and his comrades also found time for some recreation, including a regimental athletics meet. There were also hundreds of stray dogs wandering the areas behind the lines, and many were adopted as pets by the American soldiers. Given his fondness for animals, it was no surprise that Monk found himself one, “a poor waif of a cur he picked up somewhere behind the lines in France” and took with him from billet to billet.
The 106th rested at Doullens until September 23, when they once more marched to a railhead and boarded the familiar boxcars, heading “in the general direction of the big show.” The 15 officers and 635 men of the Second Battalion boarded their trains at 2:30 that morning, their numbers increased by the return of gassed and wounded men.11 In all, 39 officers and 2,058 surviving men of the 106th Infantry, accompanied by a baggage train of 60 limbers, journeyed by train to the dismal Tincourt area. Every soldier was burdened with a greatcoat, a British Lee Enfield .303 rifle, a hundred rounds of ammunition, and their rations for the day. A convoy of thirty trucks carried each battalion’s additional ammunition: 140,000 rifle rounds, and 50,000 rounds for the Lewis machine guns.
Trains taking troops to the front traveled at five miles an hour, each locomotive pulling forty-eight boxcars with a total capacity of nineteen hundred men, capacity that was routinely exceeded by 10 percent.12 Soldiers went to great lengths to avoid being jam-packed into the stinking boxcars, and orders had to be issued to train commanders to stop men from riding on the roofs. As the trains rattled nearer to the front lines, the landscape they passed through was cratered by shell fire “like microscopic pictures of the moon.” Once beautiful cities were “just heaps of brick and debris, not a living thing to be seen, even the trees all shot off, leaving nothing but stumps, which look like ghosts in the moonlight. The graveyards are turned upside down by terrific shell fire. The ground is covered with all the signs of a great battle—smashed guns of every caliber, wrecked tanks, dead horses and here and there a dead Boche overlooked by the burying parties.”
The men of the 106th first realized that they were going directly into the line when the train rattled through war-ravaged Péronne, close to Saint-Quentin and Cambrai, where heavy fighting was still continuing.13 They passed through the war-scarred region around Albert and across the Somme, its banks pocked with shell holes and littered with barbed wire. The Germans had given up an area some fifty miles deep as they retreated to the Hindenburg Line, but they left behind a wilderness.
The Germans cut down trees, not even sparing the orchards; they set villages on fire and gutted towns, using explosives to demolish the buildings that fire alone could not destroy. They poisoned the wells, destroyed every road and railway bridge, tore up the rails, blew in the embankments and tunnels, and detonated mines under every crossroads, leaving craters that made the roads impassable. The Germans also left booby traps: steel helmets, pianos, door handles, the steps of dugouts or houses. They exploded when touched, costing the advancing troops many lives. Only the hedgerows were left standing in this vast wasteland, to serve as cover for concealed machine-gun nests.
Monk and his comrades eventually detrained at Tincourt after a fifteen-hour train journey. They then marched to Villers-Faucon, where they bivouacked under fire from enemy guns while a battery of their own howitzers roared back throughout the night. The next night they returned to the front lines, passing salvage corps hunting through the wreckage for any war matériel that might be retrieved. Scores of enemy dead lay strewn across this ground; the American troops had been warned not to touch them in case they had also been mined by the retreating Germans.14
The 106th Infantry’s route to the front ran due east, through the village of Ronssoy. Just beyond it, they took over a position covering four thousand yards of the front lines. Facing them were the formidably strengthened and ferociously defended outposts of the Hindenburg Line, commanding a series of trenches running along a narrow plateau two hundred yards or so from the eastern bank of the Saint-Quentin Canal.15 A deep railroad cutting in front of the canal and a small river, both strongly fortified, commanded the line of advance and exposed attacking troops to fire from a warren of concrete machine-gun nests. The rising ground beyond the formidable outworks was the main Hindenburg system, “stuck full, like pins in a pin-cushion, of all types of automatic weapons of every caliber and breed.”
Linking these fortified trenches were three strong points—Quennemont Farm, Guillemont Farm, and the Knoll—a thousand yards in front of the main Hindenburg Line defenses and connected to them by switch lines (sunken communication trenches) and deep, concrete-lined tunnels. These concrete bastions, with concealed dugouts and machine-gun nests every twenty to twenty-five feet, stood on a high ridge, bare of trees. Artillery was ranged onto the sloping, open ground in front of the strongpoints, where the densely tangled barbed-wire defenses were designed to shepherd attackers into preordained fields of fire so that they could be blown apart by shell fire and raked by light and heavy machine guns, Minenwerfer (mine-throwers), antitank guns, field guns, and powerful Flammenwerfer (flamethrowers). “To a depth of six miles extended this foreground, gullied and hollowed into spots where machine guns waited.”16
An offensive could not be successfully launched against the Hindenburg Line itself until the outposts had been neutralized, but successive attacks by British and Australian troops had failed, with British troops suffering a casualty rate of 80 percent. The American troops of the 27th Division were now to attempt what their far more numerous and experienced British allies had failed to do. Already depleted by combat casualties over the previous three months, the division was also now losing men to the influenza pandemic, which had begun to affect American forces around the middle of September. Moreover, since most of the division’s fighting strength was being held back for the main assault against the Hindenburg Line, the 106th Infantry was to attempt this first herculean task alone; “in short, one regiment of the division was now to accomplish what five British divisions had repeatedly failed to accomplish.”17
General O’Ryan had nominated the 106th Infantry to make the attack, a curious decision since, after its earlier losses, it was already the weakest of the four regiments that made up the 27th Division, with only 41 surviving officers and 2,037 men. By comparison, the 105th Infantry had 73 officers and 2,659 other ranks, and the 107th and 108th both had more than 80 officers and almost 3,000 other ranks. The objective of the attack, supported by tanks and a rolling barrage, was defined as the occupation of the rearmost trenches of the outer line of the Hindenburg system, a distance of about eleven hundred yards from the American lines.
The keynote order was summed up in five words: “The men must go forward.”18 All three battalions of the regiment were to attack together across the four-thousand-yard front. They were assured that the enemy troops defending the strongpoints would surrender, but “whether they do or not, the leading elements must go on, leaving to the mopping-up parties in the rear the task of dealing with them.” All ranks were also warned that neither heavy shelling nor enemy counterattacks would be regarded as justification for withdrawal. The line was to be held irrespective of casualties.
The men of the 106th Machine Gun Company were given equally daunting orders. Their role would be crucial in slowing and halting enemy counterattacks, giving the American infantry time to prepare defensive positions or launch their own counterattacks. But every machine gunner knew that his life expectancy in a defensive action was estimated at just thirty minutes. He was expected never to “surrender his position or abandon his gun.19 He will disable it and defend himself to the last second of his life with every means at his disposal. These means are grenades, revolvers, clubs, stones, fists.”
On the night of September 24 through 25, the 106th Infantry moved forward into the front lines, replacing the exhausted and woefully depleted British 18th and 74th Divisions. Monk and his comrades passed through the devastated town of Albert, reduced by constant shelling and bombing to a sprawling heap of rubble and dust. Beyond, rain had made the chalk roads slippery, and the shell holes were filled with stinking water, overlain with a film of mustard gas. The detritus of ferocious combat lay on every side: live shells and ammunition, bombs, rifles, shell craters so numerous that they pitted the ground like smallpox scars, collapsed trenches, twisted wire entanglements, endless rough graves, and many more bodies decomposing in the open for want of men to bury them. The Americans had to steel themselves against such sights and march on toward the baleful glow of shell fire and Very lights that marked the front lines.
For forty-eight hours before the attack, a continuous barrage had fallen on the German positions. The guns of nine artillery brigades, firing every twenty to thirty seconds, launched an avalanche of mustard-gas shells—the first time the British artillery had used the gas, long a German weapon—followed by a barrage of high explosive, shrapnel, and more mustard gas. In total, three quarters of a million shells were fired, creating “noise such as no mortal ear ever heard before.”20 The results were revealed later, when the advancing troops “could not pass five feet without having to cross over the dead body of a German.”