“Your letter of Nov. 12 arrived this week and it was a dandy letter too. You can’t imagine how much pleasure and inspiration I get out of your letters all so nice and tender and homey.” By gas-fired lamplight in the drafty confines of a quaint farmhouse where he was bunking with another officer, Lt. Jim Hartney spent the first moments of 1918 writing his girlfriend, his “Dearest Margaret,” back home in Minneapolis. Their correspondence, steady since Jim’s time in Plattsburg Officer Training Camp the previous summer, simultaneously warmed the chill of her worry and his homesickness. Imploring her to not let herself “get all fussed up over a little old war,” he added, “I hope the new year will have lots of good luck in store for both of us.” He typically closed his letters with the understated “God bless you my sweetheart,” or a quick “yours,” and she would end her letters to him, her “dearest beloved,” with “heaps of love.” But the blank slate of a new year and rumors of impending action filled him with sufficient inspiration—and perhaps passing thoughts of mortality—to close this letter with deeper sentiment: “I love you, Margaret.”
* * *
One week later, General Bullard gathered his top officers in his headquarters to announce a move to the front lines. A hot fire blazed in the chateau’s stone fireplace, and Bullard, his slim figure wrapped in a wolfskin coat, shivering and suffering another severe bout of neuritis, forced a calm air of outward tranquility. Ever impatient with inaction, the dawn of a New Year renewed his frustration that “nine months had now passed since we had put ourselves in the war and we were still there by declaration only.” But despite the physical aches now invading his body, his officers and staff noted his spirits soared with the announcement.
The division was moving into the Seicheprey sector, the southern face of the Saint-Mihiel salient. Bullard’s soldiers were to relieve the Moroccan Division currently holding the four-mile front, and they would enter the trenches, for the first time, as a war-strength division—infantry, artillery, engineers, and machine-gun companies. This move was General Pershing’s answer to recent Allied demands for amalgamation of American forces into their established units along the front.
In December, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George had pressed for “half-trained American companies or battalions” to be thrown into the trenches with British divisions. And the French had petitioned Washington, DC, directly for AEF infantry regiments to be divvied up to strengthen French units at the front. To these overtures, Secretary Baker responded by cabling Pershing that “identity of our forces” was from here on deemed “secondary to the meeting of any critical situation by the most helpful use possible of the troops” at his command.
As with the bulk of his wartime directives to Pershing, Baker’s message was deferential. And while the cable signaled a slight shift from Wilson’s order of the early summer, it again underscored Pershing’s “full authority to use the forces” of the AEF as he saw fit. Pershing’s most cherished strategic dream—consistent with Wilson’s initial order—was a self-contained, all-American section of the front. Not ready to loosen his tight grip on that vision, Pershing employed his autonomy by translating Baker’s words narrowly. He read “any critical situation” to mean “emergency,” and at present, he saw none. But he did bend somewhat to the Allied entreaties, sending the 1st Division to man the Seicheprey front under French command. And by ordering the full division into the line as one, under its own flag, he wisely set a precedent of enduring importance, ensuring no AEF divisions would be split apart through the course of the war.*
* * *
“Everyone was relieved that the period of training was at an end,” noted George Marshall, retained by General Bullard as operations officer and promoted to lieutenant colonel. With a shortage of trucks and no rail lines in the path toward Seicheprey, division troops would have to walk the twenty-four-mile journey, made all the more difficult by more severe winter weather. A “terrific blizzard” hit the night before their march, which they were forced to make in threadbare uniforms on what Marshall described as “roads heavily glazed with smooth ice.” Pvt. Ruben Nelson vented to his diary, “The roads are full of ice and snow … many men fell out on this march.” General Summerall would later describe the “bitter cold” and his shivering artillerymen coaxing exhausted, emaciated horses forward through “deep snow and ice on the roads.” Their “progress was slow” as “horses constantly fell,” and wheeled guns and supply wagons slipped sideways on the ice of paved roadways and overturned into ditches. One captain heard General Bullard remark that the first day of the five-day trek to Seicheprey was the “worst day he had seen troops out in 35 years of service.” Years later, Marshall remembered this march, the bite of the north wind that “penetrated the thickest clothing,” and the soldiers, “exhausted by their efforts to make progress against the strong head wind along the slippery surface of the highway.” War aside, it was a journey of the type that would be retold well into old age by those who shared its difficult passage.
By the time the first battalions relieved the French troops in the muddy front lines near Seicheprey on January 21, the frost had thawed and signs of early spring appeared. “The weather is much better now, the sun out, the snow gone, and the mud fast drying,” Lt. George Redwood wrote his mother in Baltimore; “Everyone is beginning to feel more industrious and energetic now that less time is put in keeping warm.” Lt. Sam Ervin wrote his grandfather back in North Carolina, describing “spring weather” that “makes one desire to go bare-footed, a-swimming and a-fishing.” But from back in the trenches, where all conditions—weather especially—were analyzed by the effect on war’s calibrations, many officers viewed the emerging warmth as a spur for rekindled action. “[W]ith the prospect of spring,” Lt. Richard Newhall later recalled, “came also the prospect of renewed activity which the men welcomed with excited enthusiasm.”
The sector was swampy and, as one soldier described, “the front lines lay in low, marshy valley, so that the trenches were always awash with mud.” Rain had replaced the snow, and as General Bullard observed, “men and officers were in the mud day and night.” As with Sommerviller, no offensives had been staged by either side in this region, and the trenches on both sides had been well established by more than three years of static occupancy. Although told it was a “quiet” sector, doughboys cycling through the trenches in ten-day shifts quickly found it to be, in the Division History’s words, “neither quiet nor restful.” “This was a real fighting front,” Lieutenant Newhall noted. “It was a sector of raids, patrolling, and intermittent bombardment.” Lt. Irving Wood agreed, calling it “a very lively sector with raids, shelling and machine-gun firing going on all the time … a very nerve racking place.” It was, as Major Roosevelt described, “our first real taste of war.”
* * *
For most 1st Division doughboys, the Seicheprey sector was also their first real taste of the dreaded mustard gas. Since first introducing poison gas to the war two years before, the Germans had become proficient in dosing the Allies, mostly in high concentrations via explosive artillery shells shot deep behind the front lines into artillery emplacements to render gun crews ineffective or into billeting areas to cause mass casualties among sleeping units. Through February and March, division muster rolls swelled with gas casualties, and though typically not fatal, the repeated phrase “gassed in action” in unit morning reports did little to describe the gruesome effects of what Marshall called this “hideous phase of warfare.”
Mucus poured out of eyes, and eyelids swelled with red sores, causing blindness that was typically temporary though sometimes permanent (ten years after the war, one engineer officer gassed at Seicheprey could still see only “a strong light”). All exposed skin rashed over red, then bubbled up into large blisters as painful as second- and third-degree burns. Those who breathed it got bloody noses and coughed uncontrollably as their throats closed, swollen with airway blisters. Gagging, choking, writhing men who made it to a field hospital in time to have air tubes shoved down their throats were still left with incurable tongue sores and often without a voice. Sgt. Clem Woodbury of Michigan wrote home after getting gassed: “I couldn’t speak for about a month and the gas burns on my body were very painful.”
Heavy and carried by fickle winds, mustard gas settled on the ground and pooled in unexpected places. An artillery officer noticed two men washing their faces in “water from a shell hole which happened to contain ‘mustard’ and six hours later they were scarred and burned terribly as with a hot iron.” On another occasion he saw a French soldier “burned from sitting in the grass where a mustard shell had burst.” Even a small whiff could leave men with severe cold-like symptoms, as well as diarrhea, nausea, and vomiting that persisted for weeks.
The feared brownish-yellow cloud shot immediate terror into soldiers who feared its effects more than bullets or shrapnel. The reach of German guns lobbing gas shells seemed to be limitless, and doughboys grew quickly familiar with the hollow “plunking” sound of a mustard-gas projectile hitting the ground, followed by the hiss of pressurized gas escaping, then men with eyes squeezed shut flailing to strap on ill-fitting masks. “As soon as the shells hit the ground they explode and great clouds of poisonous gas rise,” Pvt. Stanley Mindikowski of Chicago complained in a letter home. “No matter how soon you adjust your mask you get a whiff of that stuff, and if the attacks are repeated those little whiffs begin to work on you, and before you know it you’re ready for the hospital.”
Doughboys were issued the British Small Box Respirator, or “SBR,” a cumbersome, uncomfortable mask most soldiers couldn’t tolerate for longer than a few minutes. Pvt. Jesse Evans wrote in his diary that the SBRs “were not the easiest things to fight in,” and one officer called them “painfully oppressive.” General Bullard later shared his own aversion: “It seemed to me in all my trials and efforts that I should be smothered if I remained longer than three minutes in that gas mask.” Many men managed to acquire the less-oppressive French mask, which was nothing but a filter that covered the face. “I put on the French because it is more quickly adjusted … It is cheese-cloth about an inch thick, soaked in chemicals,” Private Evans told his diary.
Whichever version they preferred, soldiers went nowhere without their masks, and at the signal for gas—either a green flare or a klaxon horn—all else was dropped in place until masks were on. Strolling behind the front lines one night, Lieutenant Colonel Marshall heard the baritone wheezing of a klaxon and asked a nearby enlisted man, who was urgently throwing on his own SBR, whether the alarm was real or just practice. The man snapped back: “Put on your mask, you damn fool, and don’t ask questions.” When later learning of this episode involving his operations officer, General Bullard praised the alert soldier: “I was never able to find this young man, or I would have caused him to be promoted.”
Far more than in Sommerviller the previous fall, in the Seicheprey sector, 1st Division soldiers endured the whole harsh reality of trench life, of which mustard gas was just one part. To the injuries caused by gas and sniping and shelling was added the insult of constant discomfort. “[T]here were vermin and rats and mud to the waist,” Major Roosevelt later recounted. Maggots—soldiers called them “vermin” and “cooties”—invaded everything, feeding on dropped ration tins and rat carcasses and planting eggs in the boots and uniforms of sleeping troops. One platoon leader remembered waking from fitful sleep “picking out cooties and their eggs” from his underclothes.
“I carry a blanket with me and that is indispensable,” Lt. Vinton Dearing wrote home, describing the eighteen-inch-tall, two-foot-wide dirt dugout where he shaved while lying down and seized the rare “luxury” of “sleeping with one’s shoes off.” Trenches themselves were described by Lieutenant Newhall as “soaked with rain till they are masses of mud, strewn with equipment of all kinds.” He wrote of “living in the mud and sleeping in a rat-infested dug-out,” and rubbing down his feet each morning with whale oil to prevent trench foot, then checking to see that his men did the same. His good friend George Haydock had his own answer for trench rats: “we even had to go so far as to shoot a couple of them.”
The rain of the French spring was relentless. “The men either huddled against the side of a trench or stretched their ponchos from parapet to parapet, and sat beneath them in a foot-deep puddle of water,” Major Roosevelt recounted. Through the taxing conditions, young platoon leaders searched for ways to motivate their troops. Lieutenant Haydock wrote home: “It is pretty hard to ask a man to be on the alert for fourteen hours, standing in mud, and then get him to do any work in the day-time.” This lack of any sleep strained many soldiers. Twenty-five-year-old Lt. Robert Anderson wrote his father back in Wilson, North Carolina: “The most disagreeable part about the trenches was the mud and water in one sector and over five nights with about four hours sleep in all.”
During their ten-day shifts at the front, most troops survived on cold rations and very little drinkable water. “We had only two canteens of water each, for 24 hours,” Lt. Dick Dacus later recounted, and it had to be stretched “for drinking, washing, and shaving.” Pvt. Ruben Nelson wrote in his diary, “The only thing we lack is something to eat.” When hunger hit them through the day, they had to depend on their reserve rations, described by one officer as “soaked and muddy hardtack” and canned beef dubbed “corned willie.” Soldiers in the front lines were allotted one warm meal per day, carried forward to the sector’s edge in Marmite cans on supply carts under the cover of darkness. Chow parties were sent out through communication trenches and across open ground in rear areas to retrieve food, a perilous journey of two miles or more through German shellfire.
“They just couldn’t get that meat to us,” Cpl. Patrick Slamon of Boston, Massachusetts, later remembered. “They tried hard enough, but no man could get through the fire that was laid down by the Germans and reach us.” The few cans that made it through were filled with cold stew and potatoes, a thick soup Lieutenant Ervin called “slumgullion.” George Marshall noted “a favorite method of preparing the meal” was to mix it up and pour molasses over the top, and he later remembered one soldier reasoning that “they might as well mix it up outside as well as inside.” As General Bullard later quipped: “Food and coffee were always cold and the water warm. But that is war.”
Through the dragging minutes of the night’s darkness, it was hunger and exhaustion that stretched men’s nerves. In the daylight, with every inch of the American trench top covered by overlapping fields of German machine gunners and snipers, it was the fear of getting shot. As Bullard explained, “a head, a hand, any sign of a human body shown above the trenches anywhere immediately drew the fire of the enemy.” But at all hours and in all weather, the greatest danger—and the most draining on the spirit of a soldier—was the shelling.
“I guess the worst thing is to sit in the bottom of a trench and listen to the shells come,” Richard Newhall wrote his mother. “There isn’t anything to do but sit tight and wonder where the next one is going to land.” The incessant bombardments “are indeed very noisy things and make you move around with a crook in your back,” Newhall’s buddy George Haydock wrote home, “or else hang on to the front of the trench as if you expected it to get away from you.” German artillery fired mortar rounds and shells of all kinds into the American lines, from 77mm “whiz-bangs” (“we were usually on our stomachs by the time the bang came,” Haydock remarked) to the large 150mm “Jack Johnsons,” nicknamed by soldiers for the famous heavyweight boxer.
The detonation of a German high-explosive shell sent lead balls and steel fragments the size of railroad spikes cutting through anything in their path—weapons, canteens, wooden trench supports, and human flesh. Some troops hit directly were cut in half, others had arms and legs ripped off, and a few disappeared, shot to unrecognizable pieces, reported in death records as “nothing left to bury.” Many who were hit survived, like Sgt. Paul Chamberlain, who wrote home to Kansas from a field hospital after shrapnel tore into his shoulder: “There’s a bunch of scrap iron in those Dutch shells and it got me.” Some died simply from the concussion, found lying without a scratch as if sleeping, their bones shattered and insides turned to soup.
With unexplainable chance, some shells caused no physical damage at all. “Perhaps it is good luck,” Lt. Jim Hartney admitted in a letter to his girlfriend, Margaret. “I’ve been through a couple of these bombardments and it is extraordinary how little damage is done.” Hartney even witnessed six shells hit the chow party, which only “knocked the cups out of their hands but … left the men uninjured.” The only commonality of artillery blasts was the shattering impact they could have on the minds of men, and contrary to the earthly proverb, what did not kill them often left them weaker. As George Marshall would describe: “A 3" shell will temporarily scare or deter a man; a 6" shell will shock him; but an 8" shell, such as these 210mm ones, rips up the nervous system of everyone within a hundred yards of the explosion.”
* * *
Never one to be a silent spectator in events and determining the same for the division he was shaping, General Bullard issued an order: “Be active all over no man’s land; do not leave its control to the enemy.” His Alabama childhood had been filled with stories of the gloom and low morale that contributed to Confederate defeat: “I remembered the tradition of the loss of heart, aggressiveness, and morale of the Confederates shut up in the trenches at Vicksburg.” And his own experience in the Philippines taught him that being “shut up in trenches” caused soldiers to lose “all aggressiveness, all spirit of offense.” Now, resolute that his men would not fall prey to the same dejection, he directed that patrols for intelligence occur nightly and raids as often as possible, with coordinated artillery support.
Patrols consisted of a handful of volunteers stripped of gear to avoid the noise of buckles and metal clips, armed only with pistols, trench knives, bolt cutters, and at least one compass. Led by a single officer, the team would low-crawl to the German lines in the dark of night to note locations of enemy machine guns and scout for changes to their trenches. Bullard considered nightly patrolling “extremely dangerous but very necessary work.” Pvt. John Johnston of La Crosse, Wisconsin, later remembered his own slow crawl across no-man’s-land on patrol: “If you kept your head down there was no firing from the Germans, but the minute you lifted it (we crawled most of the time) they started the machine-guns.”
Raids, with a purpose of capturing prisoners and stealing materiel, were far deadlier and more daring, and required more planning. Infantry officers coordinated with the artillery for an orchestrated storm on a small section of German lines. The 155s would fire a box barrage around the targeted trench while the 75s laid down a “creeping barrage” in no-man’s-land, moving forward in pre-planned intervals behind which the raiding team would advance to the enemy lines, where otherwise civilized men were suddenly thrust into sharp spasms of violence that laid bare their basest, most primal instincts.
Pvt. Arthur Hansen of Reno, Nevada, volunteered to participate in a raid on the German trenches, and he described the encounter in a letter home. Led by a lieutenant, they crossed no-man’s-land behind the artillery barrage, a journey he did not find alarming until they reached the enemy lines. “We got into their trench and started the slaughter. It was then that I killed my first man. He was a big, husky man—it is all bunk about the Germans being underfed—and he came at me with the bayonet.” With his own bayonet fixed on the end of his Springfield, Private Hansen reacted in kind. “It was simply a case of being quick or dead, and that time I was quick and speared him on the end of my bayonet.” Of the raid’s grim toll, Hansen wrote with dispassion: “We killed as many as we could and took sixteen prisoners.”
One artillery officer wrote home of the box barrage that his battery fired while supporting a raid: “Our artillery fire was so intense that when our infantry went over they found the trenches and dugouts demolished and only dead Germans in them, excepting one dugout in which there were ten who bravely refused to surrender and were blown out by hand grenades.” As General Bullard recounted of the common trench raid, “[I]ts suddenness, its hand-to-hand deadly encounters, its carnage at close quarters with daggers, pistols, and fearful explosives, its shattering, bloody, merciless action, make it terrible to both raiders and raided.”
The first successful raid evoked from General Bullard’s typewriter a commendation for the critical role played by the artillery. But General Summerall, never timid when bold measures were required, needed no nudging from Bullard to take the fight to the Germans. His gun batteries had been under fire and gas attack day and night, and he ensured his gunners “vigorously replied.” His 155s hurled high-explosive shells on known German artillery positions, his 75s lobbed gas shells behind the German lines at all hours, and he planted his trench mortar battery six hundred yards from the enemy trenches to inflict maximum, close-range damage.
A man of enterprising ideas, Summerall—dubbed “Sitting Bull” by his loyal men—rewrote the US Army’s script on gunnery. He combined his headquarters with Bullard’s for better coordination in planning, assigned artillery liaison teams to each front-line infantry unit, and arranged for phone lines to be run from infantry command posts back to the artillery batteries for better real-time fire support. Confidence soared as riflemen in the front lines no longer felt trapped in the event of enemy bombardments or raids. With one flare signal, a platoon leader up in the trenches was instantaneously connected with the full array of firepower scattered three and four miles behind his men. “The support from our artillery came the moment the red rocket went into the air,” Pvt. Ruben Nelson wrote admiringly in his diary. “Almost before it was at its height our barrage fell.”
Sitting Bull’s inventive energy not only animated the entire artillery brigade but also served to consummate the marriage between infantry and artillery. And with machine-gun companies formed and integrated with front-line riflemen in first and second parallels for “defense in depth,” and with a regiment of engineers working on fortifying trenches and taking on the perilous, nightly task of repairing barbed wire out on the edge of no-man’s-land, all the disparate components of the division were finally working as one.
It is hard to pin down that elusive moment when the 1st Division became the “Fighting First,” but it likely occurred during the eleven and a half weeks in the Seicheprey sector, a place that gave these doughboys their real schooling in the lifeless crucible of the trenches. They discovered that success “over here” was measured by yards of pockmarked, unlivable land, and sometimes it was marked only by mere survival. They now understood, with appalling clarity, the “Sausage Machine” of the Western Front—a comparison drawn by British soldier-turned-writer Robert Graves, “because it was fed with live men, churned out corpses and remained firmly screwed in place.” They learned that life in the trenches was an assault on all five senses—sight stolen, lungs seared, and skin burned by mustard gas; hearing deafened by artillery blasts; fear and panic as palpable a taste as the cold “slumgullion” they forced down; with even breathable air fouled by the ever-present stench of excrement and death.
And like their British and French counterparts had learned time and again over the past three and a half years, the doughboys arrived at the frustrating realization that there, as elsewhere all along its length, the Western Front remained “firmly screwed in place.” Winter ended as it began, with trenches full of cold, miserable men, a few hundred yards from enemy lines still maddeningly immovable. Then, as if marking the seasonal change with an exclamation, spring broke with a storm.
* * *
Just before dawn on March 21, over 200 miles northwest of the 1st Division trenches, a rain of shells from over 6,000 German guns struck the British 5th Army lines across a fifty-mile front in the valley of the Somme. The bombardment, brief but intense, “shook the entire battle front.” An Army major over 40 miles away at the French headquarters in Compiègne likened the distant roar to “a surf of ten thousand breakers on an uneven shore.” The crushing barrage was followed by a massed infantry attack, and with a concentrated blow of over sixty-four rested, full-strength German divisions—many recently transferred from the Eastern Front—against two dozen tired, depleted British divisions, the push-back was swift and a breakthrough threatened.
The onslaught was the opening of Germany’s grand offensive, code-named Kaiserschlacht (“Emperor’s Battle”). The attack was the brainchild of Gen. Erich Ludendorff, the strategic planner pulling the strings of the military behind the field-marshal baton of the aging chief of the German general staff, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg. “Owing to the breakdown of Russia,” Ludendorff would later explain, “numerically we had never been so strong in comparison with our enemies.” With 192 German divisions in the West and more on the way, and with American mobilization swiftly gathering steam, Ludendorff believed the circumstances “all called for an offensive that would bring about an early decision.” Early enough, he hoped, to tip the scales against the Allies before the United States arrived in force. As he would reason, “This was only possible on the Western Front.”
The massive attack force was led by Gen. Oskar von Hutier, whose innovative tactics on the Eastern Front had won such lopsided victories over the Russians and Italians that General Ludendorff built the entire spring offensive around—and ordered all involved troops be thoroughly trained in—the “Von Hutier method.” His approach to a successful attack involved a brief but devastating preparatory bombardment, followed by a wave of Stoßtruppen (storm troops), who would advance quickly across no-man’s-land behind a creeping barrage then prod enemy lines in a search for weak points to penetrate, avoiding strongpoints and machine-gun nests. Second and third waves of infantry would then follow, disable remaining resistance left untouched by the hurried first wave, exploit the ruptures in the lines and drive the enemy into the open. As Remains of Company D author James Carl Nelson explains: “The Germans had beaten Pershing to open warfare.”
So far, the tactics were proving devastatingly effective. In the first day, German troops advanced over 4 miles into Allied lines, taking over 20,000 British prisoners. By the third day, the push-back was 12 miles deep, and four enormous German Krupp guns were moved close enough to bombard Paris (twenty shells would kill 256 Parisians in just the first twenty-four hours). In the days following, the Germans crossed the River Somme, portending a wedge between the British and French Armies. And within a week, Von Hutier’s troops had captured over 90,000 Allied prisoners and 1,300 guns and pushed the lines in some places 40 miles west, threatening the critical rail and road junction at Amiens so essential to Allied supply lines.
On a front frozen through three and a half years of strategic impasse, where victories had been claimed over the capture of mere yards, the German Army’s geographic gains were momentous. In Berlin, the kaiser proclaimed a national holiday to celebrate, gave schoolchildren the day off, and professed “the battle won. The English utterly defeated.” He bestowed on Field Marshal von Hindenburg the Grand Cross of the Iron Cross with Golden Rays, which was, prior to this, historian Sir John Keegan would note, “last awarded to Blücher for the defeat of Napoleon in 1815.” For the Allies, it was their darkest hour. An emergency meeting of Allied commanders on March 26 gave French General Foch overall charge of united Allied forces. French divisions were rushed north to help seal the breach, where British forces were running out of land and men. In London, Prime Minister David Lloyd George declared in desperate tones, “The last man may count.”
Back down in the Seicheprey trenches, George Marshall worried that the German attack “threatened to bring the war to a sudden conclusion disastrous to the Allies,” and General Bullard noted, “The whole Allied world, especially America, was shocked beyond measure at the might of this blow.” Throughout the division’s ranks, news of the offensive spread at viral speed. “The big drive is on now in the west,” Lt. Jim Hartney wrote his “dearest Margaret” back home, where he supposed there was “considerable anxiety.” Knowing her thoughts would turn next to the question of him seeing combat, he added: “Just what part we will play is questionable but whatever it is we pray that we may play it creditably and that good fortune may attend us all.” Troops in the front lines heard “alarming reports … of the progress of a great German drive in Picardy,” one captain would later recall, “and it was general felt by the rank and file that the division might take an active part on that front.”
General Bullard himself wondered what part his troops would play. “Fighting had to be done at once,” he believed, “or it would be too late.” Even down in his sector, more than two hundred miles from the Kaiserschlacht drive, he “began to see long, calm processions of French troops going northwest to fill the great gap … They were very quiet, very serious, with the air of veterans who face everything.” As yet, there was no word from Pershing about a movement to the battlefront, though Bullard hoped it was imminent. Back in December, in the privacy of his diary, Bullard had confided, “[O]ur General Pershing is not a fighter … He is a worldly-wise, extremely ambitious, and confidence-inspiring man, but not a warrior.… I shall be very glad to find myself mistaken.” Just weeks later, he found himself mistaken when Pershing sent Bullard’s division to the fighting front at Seicheprey. And in the greatest crisis of the war, Bullard was soon to be proven mistaken yet again, as the Big Chief maneuvered to get America in the fight.
Up to this point, General Pershing had been working toward combining his first four scattered divisions, once trained, into a planned I Corps—a first step toward his assertive vision of an all-American sector along the battle front. But with news from the British front painting what he described as “an extremely dark picture of disaster,” Pershing deemed this the qualifying “emergency” he had read into Secretary Baker’s January directive, and he determined to “do everything possible to render assistance.”
On the fifth day of the German offensive, Pershing paid a late-night visit to the headquarters of Gen. Philippe Pétain at Compiègne. The American placed at the French Army chief’s disposal “any of our divisions that could be of service”—an offer he tempered with the voiced expectation of their eventual “assembly under their own commander.” It was a meeting charged with historic consequences, an exchange of command decisions from which hung the fate of tens of thousands of America’s best and brightest. Always precise in his words at such weighty moments, General Pershing was careful to not only frame his offer as temporary but also to use the word “divisions,” still holding firm on his resistance to an amalgamation of any smaller AEF units. With his contribution to the emergency thus pledged, Pershing departed and gave orders to all AEF divisions to “be held in readiness for any eventuality.”
Three afternoons later, Pershing carried his nation’s offer to the field headquarters of the newly appointed Supreme Allied Commander, General Ferdinand Foch. Pershing used broken French, but his words were equal to the moment: “I have come to tell you that the American people would consider it a great honor for our troops to be engaged in the present battle.… Infantry, artillery, aviation, all that we have is yours; use them as you wish. More will come, in numbers equal to requirements. I have come especially to tell you that the American people will be proud to take part in the greatest battle of history.”
It was obvious to Pershing that Marshal Foch was “very much touched,” and the words of the American offer found their way into Parisian newspapers by the next morning, “written up in much better French than I actually used,” Pershing would quip. George Marshall, who would himself one day master the delicate diplomacy of war by coalition, later judged this to be the moment when General Pershing “rose to greatness.” By giving control of his prized divisions over to Pétain and Foch, Pershing had, in Marshall’s view, “laid all his cards on the table and directed every move toward the salvage of the Allied wreck.”
The next morning, in his journal at his Chaumont headquarters, General Pershing recorded, “At Pétain’s request, the 1st Division ordered to battle line, which Mr. Baker said people at home would enthusiastically approve.” The chief ordered the remaining AEF divisions—the 2nd, 42nd, and 32nd—into “quiet” sectors to replace French divisions needed for the front, and he sent the 26th to relieve the 1st at Seicheprey. General Bullard’s men were ordered northwest for brief training before heading into the center of the German attack.
* * *
Of getting Pershing’s order to move to the front, General Bullard would later write, “Never a commander received an order more gladly or started on a service to which he looked forward with more lively anticipation.” After getting relieved in the trenches during the dark of night, division troops, loaded down with full packs, marched at dawn in long, muddy columns toward the town of Toul and loaded into trains. The move to a new front “was a matter of great elation,” Lt. Richard Newhall noted. “We were going where there was real fighting in progress.” Major Roosevelt perceived that the men in his battalion “were delighted” with the thoughts of impending battle: “Men do not like sitting in trenches day in and day out, and being killed and mangled without ever seeing the enemy,” he explained, “and this promised a fight where the enemy would be in sight.”
The swift movement of 28,000 men, 1,700 animals, and 1,000 wagons over a network of roads and railways already clogged with urgent movements of a national army of more than 3 million presented what one unit history called “a test of administrative ability,” resulting in a “feat which will probably never be explained.” Marching toward Toul, the columns of doughboys—end-to-end—stretched the entire 17 miles of roadway. At the train station, fifty-car trains loaded with 1st Division troops, guns, and supplies steamed off toward the front every hour, ’round the clock, for three days.
As with other journeys by rail across the country, the doughboys were crammed into their “forty-and-eight” freight cars for a clattering ride that continued day and night. “With straw in the bottom, we had comfortable quarters,” Lieutenant Dearing wrote home of the boxcar he shared with half his platoon; “at night with our feet pointed towards the center we slept well.” Each crowded car carried a box of bread and “corn-willie” in one corner, and an empty bucket for drinking, shaving, and washing in another. Only two stops per day were made, those for water and hot coffee. “To go to the toilet,” one soldier later recounted, “one clambered around the end of the car to the couplings,” where, in the cold wind at full-speed, soldiers relieved themselves with “pants down, in precarious balance.”
The division’s temporary destination was the open plains surrounding Gisors, a commune on the northwest outskirts of Paris—beautiful countryside bearing “no scars and no desolation of war,” the Division History reminds us, as this land “had not been defiled by the enemy.” Here, the troops were to train in open warfare before entering the front lines. They drilled day and night in pleasant spring weather on fresh plateaus of what Major Roosevelt described as “a beautiful peaceful country, the most lovely we had seen yet in France.”
In the midst of training came word on April 9 that the Germans launched a second offensive against the British lines, this one up in Flanders, threatening a breakthrough to the coast that would cut off a large number of Allied units. German troops advanced ten miles across a 24-mile front, prompting England’s Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig to issue a desperate plea to his Tommies: “Every position must be held to the last man. There must be no retirement. With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause each one must fight on to the end.”
Events moved with even more urgency as the division prepared to be thrown into the line to help the Allies. “Where would we be put?” General Bullard wondered to himself at his chateau headquarters, shaking with chills and nearly crippled again by a new attack of neuritis. The week before, just as his division was departing Seicheprey, he had been forced into the hospital, struck by the “excruciating pain” in his arm and shoulder. But after four days—and with the help of his loyal medical officer’s concocted story of a car-door mishap—Bullard successfully “jumped” the hospital to rejoin his men, even though the pain remained so debilitating he would carry it, as he would later write, “until [he] was a shadow.”
Amid the “constant sound of heavy cannonading” from the front some forty miles away, lectures and drill filled daylight hours, a training schedule capped off with a division-wide maneuver witnessed by General Pershing himself. Standing out immaculate in his shined boots and creased trousers beside General Bullard—who struggled to conceal his physical pain—the chief’s confidence in his favored 1st Division was buoyed by the sharpness and discipline on display before him. “Both officers and men were in splendid condition, notwithstanding their long rail journey,” he noted, “and all were ready for the test of actual battle.” Looking around him, Pershing noticed “[t]he countryside was radiant with its green meadows and early flowers.” This contemplation of the aesthetic, rare for him, was doubtless prompted by thoughts of where he was sending these soldiers. “[O]ne could not help thinking,” he later revealed, “how different would be those other fields on which this unit was soon to be engaged.”
After a chilly day of rest, during which the men wrote letters and began packing while the officers all went to see Pershing’s “Farewell to the First” in the courtyard of Bullard’s headquarters, the division set off at dawn, April 17, for their three-day march to the front lines. Pvt. Ruben Nelson wrote in his diary, “[W]e started on a long march not knowing where to.” For troops who had spent the past month moving from muddy trenches to cramped boxcars to ’round-the-clock drill, the march through the French countryside was a pleasant one. “Spring was on the land, the trees were budding, wild flowers covered the ground, the birds were singing,” Major Roosevelt noted. “Our dusty brown column marched up hill and down, through patches of woods and little villages.” Lt. George Haydock saw “some wonderful old houses and gardens, and landscapes that make me feel as though I were in a dream” as he led his platoon across the rolling French plains. “It’s a queer world and a crazy war,” he said. Lt. Jim Hartney’s impression was just as agreeable, writing in a letter home, “Our move has been to quite an extent a pleasure trip … ‘Touring France’ we call it.”
Many of those “Touring France” were urged into the same sentiment. “I wouldn’t change places with anyone in the states now,” Lt. Vinton Dearing wrote his mother in Massachusetts, “not until the war is over or I have accomplished something worthwhile.” Lt. Irving Wood later described the passage as “more like a pleasure jaunt than a march into battle,” though signs of the war began growing. Refugees from villages recently overrun by the Germans—the elderly, children, mothers bearing babies and every possession they could carry or haul by wagon—streamed away from the front. Green pastures and flowered fields progressively crumbled into brown earth and scorched villages. And, as Lieutenant Wood described, “each day brought the sound of the guns closer.” A war correspondent making the journey with the 1st Division described reaching a point “where the rumble of guns, like distant thunder, is heard.”
“This was what we had crossed the Atlantic to do,” observed Lt. Richard Newhall. Ever characterized by a razor-sharp discernment, the tall, slim, bespectacled Harvard PhD-turned-platoon-leader could, with scholarly detachment, recognize the emotions and human reactions of the soldiers under his charge. “They knew the discomforts of trench life” and “had experienced some of the lesser horrors of shell fire,” he noted, “[b]ut they were still innocent of modern warfare in its complete hideousness.”
The men of Newhall’s platoon—as with the division as a whole—spanned a generation, some in their late thirties and others still teenagers. Just months before, they had been clerking in banks, laboring in factories, or attending high school. Now service in the cause of country, that great equalizer of class and age, was merging them into a single, uniform force. It was apparent to Newhall that, for them, “the war was still an adventure,” and among them he spotted “an eagerness to go ‘over the top,’ which was born of ignorance and the spirit of adventure.” Newhall carried no illusions about the challenges and dangers of this “adventure,” but it was curiosity that animated his troops, who “did not know what they were going into, and they were intensely eager to find out.”
And so Newhall led the soldiers of his platoon, sixty men of the division’s endless stream of 28,000, formed in khaki columns stretching along dusty roads from horizon to horizon, with packs on their backs and rifles over their shoulders, marching with a firm step toward “the sound of the guns” and the “adventure” of war.