Chapter XX: The First Two Battles

While Generalissimo Foch was strengthening his long line, with American troops as flying buttresses, those sectors delegated to the Americans in their own right saw two battles, within a few weeks of each other, which attained to the dignity of names. The battle of Seicheprey, the first big American defensive action, and the battle of Cantigny, the first big offensive, the one in the Toul sector, the other in Picardy, were the occasions of the American baptism of fire. The one was so valiant, the other so brilliant, and both were so reassuring to the high commands of the Allies, that they would deserve a special emphasis even if they had not the distinction of being America's first battles.

On the night of April 20-21 the German bombardment of Seicheprey, a village east of the Renners wood, and just northwest of Toul, grew to monstrous proportions. Frenchmen who had seen the great Verdun offensive, in which the German Crown Prince had made a new record for artillery preparation, said that the heavy firing on the American sector eclipsed any of the action at Verdun.

The firing covered a front of a mile and a quarter. The bombardment was of high explosive shells and gas, apparently an effort to disable the return fire from American artillery. But all through the night the artillerymen sent their shells, encasing themselves in gas-masks.

Toward dawn the attack began. A full regiment of German soldiers, preceded by 1,200 shock troops, advanced under a barrage. Halfway across No Man's Land the American artillery laid down a counter-barrage, and many of the Germans dropped under it, but still the great waves of them came on, focussing on the village of Seicheprey.

The impact of their terrific numbers was too powerful to be withstood at once. The American troops fell back from some of their first-line trenches, which the first bombardment had caused them to hold loosely, and part of the forces fell back even from the village. The Germans marched into the village, evidently believing it to have been totally abandoned, carrying their flame-throwers and grenades, but making no use of them. Suddenly they discovered that certain American troops had been left to defend the village, while the main force reformed at the rear, and hand-to-hand fighting in the street became necessary. An American commander sent word back that the troops were giving ground by inches, and that they could hold for a few hours.

Seicheprey, the first big American battle, had every element of the World War in little. Before the loss of the village, which occurred about noon, the troops defending it had fought from ambush and in the open, had fought with gas and liquid fire, with grenades, rifles, and machine-guns. In the inferno the new troops were giving proof of valor that was to come out later and be scattered broadcast, as a measure of what America would bring.

In and out of the streets of Seicheprey, in its little public square, from the yards of its houses, hundreds of American soldiers were fighting for their lives. France lay behind them, trusting to be saved. Other Americans were behind them, racing into formation with French troops for the counter-attack. The defenders of Seicheprey, "giving by inches," had a battle-cry of their own, brief and racy, of the football-fields: "Hold 'em."

After a while the Germans took Seicheprey. The hideously pressed, slow-giving outpost moved back. Before the day had finished the shell-stripped streets of Seicheprey, sheltering the invaders, weltered again under the first American shells of the counter-attack. By nightfall the troops were creeping forward under the counter-barrage. The army, reformed, refreshed, and replenished, was on its way to take its own back again. The counter-battle lacked the monstrous gruelling of the first attack. It took less time. The superiority of numbers had shifted to the other side, and the white heat of determination did its share.

The Germans held Seicheprey about four hours.

The main positions of the army, which were threatened, were untouched because of the stoutness of the resistance at the village, and most of the first-line positions were retaken with the rush of the counter-attack.

The German prisoners who were captured had many days' rations in their kits and extra loads of trench-tools on their backs. They had intended to hold the American trenches for several days, facing them the other way, before they commenced the new attack, which, in the plan of the German high command, was to break apart the French and American lines where they joined, above Toul. Once this wedge was into the Allied vitals the rest was to be easy.

Though Seicheprey did not count as a big battle in point of numbers engaged or numbers lost, it loomed large enough in the importance it had strategically. The German high command obviously expected little or nothing from the "green American troops." The shock troops had been rehearsed for weeks to take the American lines and hold them till the Allied line should be broken apart. In fact, it was nobly planned. The only compliment the Americans could squeeze out of it was that the Germans were sent over in many places eight to their one. But the capture of Seicheprey lasted just four hours, and the disruption of the Franco-American line remained a mere brain-child of the Wilhelmstrasse.

The French soldiers who joined the counter-attack told thrilling stories of the Americans. They told that in one place north of Seicheprey, an American detachment was separated into small groups, and was cut off from the company to which it belonged through the entire fight. Behind the Americans and on their left flank were German units, but they could have retired on the right. They decided to stay and fight, so there they stayed, notwithstanding incessant enemy bombardment.

In the town of Seicheprey a squad of Americans found a few cases of hand-grenades. With these they put up a tremendous fight through the whole day, holding to a strip at the northern end of the village. They refused to surrender when they were ordered to, and at the end of the fighting only nine of the original twenty-three were left. By the grace of these nine men Seicheprey was never wholly German, even for the four hours.

One New England boy passed through the enemy barrage seven times to carry ammunition to his comrades. A courier who was twice blown off the road by shell explosions carried his message through and dropped as he reported. A lieutenant with only six men patrolled six hundred yards of the front throughout the day, holding communications open between the battalions to the right and left of him. A sanitary-squad runner captured by the Germans, escaped them and made his way into Seicheprey, tending the wounded there till help came. A machine-gunner found himself alone with his gun, and on being asked by a superior officer if he could hold the line there, replied that he could if he were not killed. He did. A regimental chaplain went to the assistance of a battery which was hard pressed, and carried ammunition for them for hours, then took his turn at the gun.

These make no roster of the heroes of Seicheprey. There were hundreds of them. But the censor's passionate aversion to details of all battles has scotched the narrative of heroes for the present.

Cantigny will warm the cockles of the American heart as long as it beats. There was a battle that for spirit, flare, brilliancy, came up to the rosiest dream that ever was dreamed, in Washington, or London, or Paris.

Cantigny, like Seicheprey, was not an engagement of great numbers. It was a little town that was hard to capture. It commanded a fine view of the American lines for miles back, and it had been able to withstand some violent attempts earlier, so it was particularly desirable. And it was in a salient, so that it formed an angle in the line. Its taking straightened the line, heartily disgruntled the Boches, who lost 200 prisoners and many hundred wounded and dead in defending it, and it gave the American troops their first taste of the offensive. But more than all that, it gave these same troops a record of absolutely flawless workmanship which, if not large, was at least complete.

The capture of Cantigny and 200 yards beyond it, which included the German second line, took just three-quarters of an hour.

In the niggardly terms of the communique: "This morning in Picardy our troops attacked on a front of one and a fourth miles, advanced our lines, and captured the village of Cantigny. We took 200 prisoners and inflicted on the enemy severe losses in killed and wounded. Our casualties were relatively small. Hostile counter-attacks broke down under our fire."

It was on the morning of May 28. At a quarter to six a bombardment began. At a quarter to seven the troops went over the top. The barrage went first, a dense gray veil. Then came twelve French tanks. Just behind the tanks stalked the doughboys.

The soldiers moved like clockwork. There were no unruly fringes to be nipped by the barrage. There was no break in the methodical stride. They went forward first a hundred yards in two minutes. Then the barrage slowed to a hundred yards in four minutes. In a little while the troops had arrived at the edge of the village; then the close-quarter fighting began.

At 7.30 a white rocket rose from the centre of Cantigny, dim against the smoky sky, to tell the men behind that "the objective is reached and prisoners are coming."

The Americans found the enemy in confusion and unreadiness, and the initial resistance from machine-guns at the town's edge was easily overcome. Where the burden of hard fighting came was in routing the Germans out from the caves and tunnels and cellars of the town into which they had retired.

There was a long tunnel in the town, which, after furious fighting, was surrounded and isolated. The flame-throwers were placed at both ends of the tunnel, and that episode was ended. Some of the caves were large enough to hold a battalion. These were handled by the mopping-up troops, who threw hand-grenades.

The prisoners began to file back almost immediately. One grinning Pittsburgher, wounded in the arm, marched in the rear of a prison squad. "That's handin' it to them Huns, blankety-blank 'em," he said cheerfully.

The village caught fire from the bombardment and the firing of the tunnel, and for hours after its capture the soldiers had to fight flames.

The first of the American "shock troops" went from the village on to the German second-line trenches, and under a hail of bullets from German machine-guns dug themselves in and faced the trenches the other way.

All that day they held their prize unmolested. They had all the high ground beyond Cantigny, and an approach was, to put it mildly, precarious. But by five of the afternoon the German counter-attacks had begun. One wave after another stormed half-way up the hill, then tumbled down again, broken under the American artillery. Four counter-attacks were made against Cantigny, but all of them failed. The new positions were consolidated, under heavy fire and gas attack, and there they stayed.

This gallant battle called forth intemperate commendation from the headquarters of the Allies. The French despatch to Washington told officially of the high opinion the French held of it, and there were many congratulatory telegrams from London. The press of London and Paris glowed with praises. The London _Evening News_ wrote:

"Bravo, the young Americans! Nothing in to-day's battle narrative from the front is more exhilarating than the account of their fight at Cantigny. It was clean-cut from beginning to end, like one of their countrymen's short stories, and the short story of Cantigny is going to expand into a full-length novel, which will write the doom of the Kaiser and Kaiserism. We expected it. We have seen those young Americans in London, and merely to glance at them was to know that they are conquerors and brothers in that great Anglo-Saxon-Latin compact which will bring down the Prussian idol.... They do not swagger, and they have no war illusions. They have done their first job with swift precision, characteristic of the United States, and Cantigny will one day be repeated a thousand-fold."

_The Times_ wrote:

"Our allies know the significance of that as well as we do. So, too, do the German generals and the German statesmen. It means that the last great factor between autocracy and freedom is coming into effective play on the battle-field.... There could be no reflection more heartening for the Allies or more dismaying to their adversaries."

"Their adversaries," meanwhile, were doing what they could to keep their dismay to themselves. In the German announcement of the loss of Cantigny there was mention only of "the enemy." The German people were not to know for a while that the "ridiculous little American Army" had got to work.