Our Greatest Battle (The Meuse-Argonne)Palmer, Frederick
History
Our Greatest Battle (The Meuse-Argonne)
Palmer, Frederick
Argonne, Battle of the, France, 1918; World War, 1914-1918 -- Campaigns -- Western Front
Leavenworth would have no advertising. Not only for reasons of military
secrecy would censorship have no names mentioned, but also in keeping
with the ethics of regular officers that publicity was unbecoming--a
theory that was fine in the abstract, but in the application had to
deal with human nature. The names of the Leavenworth men themselves,
holding the fates of division generals in their hands, were unknown
to the public and to the mass of the army. Not reports in the press,
glorifying a unit or its commander, but the military judgment of
superiors was to form the criterion of praise. Never, indeed, had such
power come to a group of men as to the graduates of that sequestered
school in the wheat fields of Kansas, in charge of two million men.
It was interesting to watch how rapidly some of them grew under
responsibility, how used they became to accepting power as a matter
of course; and equally interesting how others remained scholars of
Leavenworth, their vision still shut within its walls.
They directed policy to keep up morale. Their propaganda never forgot
the army; and finally included, to my regret, that of hate and of
atrocities accepted on hearsay. The Stars and Stripes, the A. E. F.
newspaper, brought to France all the headlines, the snappy paragraphs,
the cartoons, the slang, which knit California to Maine, to arouse our
enthusiasm for the war. Our communiqués, much studied and revised, had
facility in concealment in place of outright prevarication, which was
the prevailing fashion to keep up the spirits of the public behind the
army by assurances that it was the enemy who was making the mistakes
and suffering the heavier casualties. Fashions in uniform received
much attention, too, from those with that inclination of mind. The
overseas cap, without a visor to keep sun or rain out of the eyes, was
none the less distinctive. We might have designed a better one the day
we started troops to Europe, if our staff at home had had information
about European climatic conditions; but the number of things in which
we might have shown prevision are too numerous to mention. They do not
count now; for the war was won. The Allied communiqués were right. Our
victory proves that the enemy made all the mistakes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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