To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [184]
And then, gradually, it appeared that Irish conscripts for the Western Front might not be so urgently needed after all.
Despite the expanse of newly captured French territory that now bulged ominously toward Paris on the map, all was not going well for the Germans. "The threat of an American Army gathers like a thunder-cloud in the rear of our other enemies," a German officer wrote in his diary, and every week brought that threat closer. The brief window of opportunity for a decisive German victory was starting to close.
Furthermore, the very speed of the German advance had caused a problem commanders had not anticipated. Short of food for months, consuming a diet heavy on turnips and horsemeat, exhausted German troops kept halting, against orders, to gorge on tempting supplies of French wine, British rum, canned beef, bread, jam, and biscuits left by the retreating Allies, and to slaughter cows and chickens taken from French farmers. It was a bad blow to German morale to see how well fed the Allies were—especially after soldiers had been repeatedly told that the U-boat campaign had left the enemy starving.
A new wave of German attacks in early June 1918 stalled when they reached the natural barrier of the Marne River and encountered fierce resistance from newly arrived American troops at Château-Thierry and in the wheat fields around Belleau Wood, names that would go down in U.S. military lore. When withdrawing French soldiers urged a U.S. Marine officer to do the same, he replied, "Retreat? Hell, we just got here." The several weeks of fighting at Belleau Wood were the largest American battle since the Civil War. By the time it was over, in late June, some three-quarters of a million U.S. troops were in Europe, with shiploads more arriving almost daily. The balance of forces on the Western Front was now changed for good.
In addition to confronting Americans eager for battle, the German high command found danger in another quarter. The impact of the Russian Revolution was beginning to ripple through the German army. As its divisions of Eastern Front troops were transported to France and Belgium, the generals discovered that revolutionary ideas had come with them. Having read German-language newspapers distributed by the Bolsheviks or fraternized with soldiers from the fast-dissolving Russian army, many had lost all ardor for combat.
"Our victorious army on the Eastern Front became rotten with Bolshevism," a senior German general told an American newspaper after the war. "We got to the point where we did not dare transfer certain of our eastern divisions to the West." Soldiers shipped to the Western Front turned rowdy, firing shots from train windows, and from one troop train in May 1918 carrying 631 men, 83 deserted along the way. Cynical troops chalked "Cattle for Flanders" on the sides of the railway cars taking them west, and in half a dozen German cities underground networks sprang up to aid deserters. Leftist sympathizers—the Wheeldon family's German counterparts—provided men with shelter, money, forged papers and ration cards, and instructions on the best spots to slip across the border into neutral Holland.
Ludendorff, the German commander in the west, was not yet done, however; he ordered more attacks in July. His grasp on reality slipping, he also ordered his collapsing Turkish allies to undertake operations in Mesopotamia that would supposedly be a first step toward threatening British control of India. He was not the only German holding out hope for a last-minute