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The defense of Château-Thierry at the beginning of the month and the operations there and at Belleau Woods had, however, important practical as well as moral effects. The fighting was of a purely local character, but it came at a critical moment and at a critical spot.
The history of the German evacuation of the salient would have been very different had the French got east of Buzancy on the 18th. Front and the Americans captured Courchamps, Torcy, and Belleau. Sixteen thousand prisoners and fifty guns were captured, but there was nothing like a German rout.
He had a French name, but a Spanish face; and Cartier, meeting him one day in the street, exclaimed: "Pamphilo de Narvaez, or his ghost!" "I have been twice mistaken for that Spaniard, whose name I never heard till I came to this place," said the young man. "My name is Narcisse Belleau.
I was in Paris on the fourth day of July, when your Marines, just from Belleau Wood, marched for your national fete, and I said to myself as they came on, 'That is a new man! Such heads they had, so fine there, behind the ears. Such discipline and purpose. Our people laughed and called to them and threw them flowers, but they never turned to look... eyes straight before.
The capture of Bouresches, and Belleau Wood, the capture of Vaux on July 1st, the gallant help which an American machine-gun battalion gave the French in covering the French retreat across the bridge at Château Thierry, before it was blown up, and foiling the German attempts to cross, and the German move towards Paris, were perhaps, writes a British military authority, "the most splendid service, from a military standpoint, the Americans rendered to the Allied Cause.
June 3 Five German submarines attack the coast and sink eleven ships. June 5 U. S. marines fight on the Marne near Chateau Thierry. June 9 Germans start fourth phase of their drive by advancing toward Noyon. June 10 Germans gain two miles. U. S. marines capture south end of Belleau wood. June 12 French and Americans start counter attack.
From Nova Scotia came Tupper, Henry, Ritchie, McCully, and Archibald; while New Brunswick was represented by Tilley, Johnston, Mitchell, Fisher, and Wilmot. They selected John A. Macdonald as chairman. The resignation of Brown had left Macdonald the leader of the movement, and the nominal Canadian prime minister, Sir Narcisse Belleau, was not even a delegate.
Then came the enemy counter-attacks, but the marines held. In Belleau Wood the fighting had been literally from tree to tree, stronghold to stronghold; and it was a fight which must last for weeks before its accomplishment in victory. Belleau Wood was a jungle, its every rocky formation containing a German machine-gun nest, almost impossible to reach by artillery or grenade fire.
The Germans, Cowan told him, had been stopped at Chateau-Thierry in an epic stand made by the 2nd and 3rd Divisions, A.E.F., and a few days later the Marines had crowned themselves with a new glory when, in liaison with the French, they had stormed the edges of Belleau Wood, gained a foothold, and then tenaciously pushed slowly forward in the bloodiest and bitterest battle yet waged by the untried American forces.
But those that remained were wiped out by the American method of the rush and the bayonet, and in the days that followed every foot of Belleau Wood was cleared of the enemy and held by the frayed lines of the Americans.