UUSB LIBKAKX AMERICA IN THE WAR V OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT \ I 3 5 - AMERICA IN THE WAR OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT BY HEYWOOD BROUN FORMERLY COBBESPCXNDENT FOR THE "NEW YORK TRIBUNE" WITH THE AMERICAN EXPEDITIONARY FORCE ILLUSTRATED NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1919 OOPTRIOHT, 1918, BT CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS CONTENTS CHAPTBB PASB I. THE LANDING OF PERSHING 1 II. "VivE PAIR-SHANG!" 11 III. THE FIRST DIVISION LANDS 29 IV. THE FOURTH OF JULY 44 V. WHAT THEY LIVED IN 53 VI. GETTING THEIR STRIDE 66 VII. SPEEDING UP 81 VIII. BACK WITH THE BIG GUNS 96 IX. THE EYES OF THE ARMY 107 X. THE SCHOOLS FOR OFFICERS 117 XI. SOME DISTINGUISHED VISITORS 124 XII. THE MEN WHO DID EVERYTHING . . . 134 XIII. BEHIND THE LINES 145 XIV. FRANCE AND THE MEDICOES 158 XV. IN CHARGE OF MORALE 168 XVI. INTO THE TRENCHES 177 vi CONTENTS CHAPTER PAOB XVII. OUR OWN SECTOR 189 XVIII. A CIVILIAN VISITOR 200 XIX. A FAMOUS GESTURE 212 XX. THE FIRST Two BATTLES 224 XXI. TEUFEL-HUNDEN . .. M r . ; . . 2 - XXII. THE ARMY o* ^IANCEUVRE ..... 248 XXIII. ST. MmiEL 266 XXTV. MEUSE-ARGONNE BEGINS 279 XXV. CEASE FIRING 291 GENERAL PERSHING'S REPOI 301 ILLUSTRATIONS The battle of Seicheprey Frontispiece FACING PAGE General Pershing in Paris, July, 1917 16 Buglers of the Alpine Chasseurs, assisted by their military band, entertaining American soldiers of the First Division 64 U. S. locomotive-assembling yards in France 154 Red Cross Hospital at Neuilly, formerly the American Ambulance Hospital .' 166 Secretary Baker riding on fk j ; ear- during his tour of in- spection of the American Expeditionary Forces . . . 202 TJ. S. Marines in readiness to march to the front .... 244 The capture of Sergy 262 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT CHAPTER I THE LANDING OF PERSHING A SHIP warped into an English port. Along her decks were lines of soldiers, of high and low degree, all in khaki. From the shore end of her gang-plank other lines of soldiers spread out like fan-sticks, some in khaki, some in the two blues of land and sea fighters. Dec- orating the fan-sticks were the scarlet and gold of staff-officers, the blue and gold of naval offi- cers, the yellow and gold of land officers, and the black of a few distinguished civilians. At the end of one shore-line of khaki one rigid private stood out from the rest, holding for dear life to a massive white goat. The goat was the most celebrated mascot in the British Army, and this was an affair of price- less consequence, but that was no sign the goat 2 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT intended to behave himself, and the private was responsible. Weaving through this picture of military pre- cision, three little groups of men waited rest- lessly to get aboard the ship. One was the lord mayor of the port city, his gilt chains of office blazing in the forenoon brightness, with his staff; another was the half-dozen or so of distinguished statesmen, diplomats, and mili- tary heroes bringing formal welcome to Eng- land; the third was the war correspondents and reporters from the London newspapers. The waiting was too keen and anxious for talk. Excitement raced from man to man. For the ship was the Baltic. The time was the morning of June 8, 1917. The event was the landing of John J. Pershing, commander of America's Expeditionary Force. And the sol- diers with him were the herald of America's com- ing the holding of her drive with an outpost. When the grandchildren of those soldiers learn that date in their history lessons it is safe to assume that all its historical significance will be fairly worked out and articulate. It is equally safe to say that in the moment THE LANDING OF PERSHING 3 of its happening few if any of its participants, even the most consequential and far-seeing, had a personal sense of making history. Of all the pies that one may not both eat and have, the foremost is that very taking part in a great occasion. All the fun of it is being got by the man who stays at home and reads the news- papers, undistracted by the press of practical matters in hand. True, for the landing of General Pershing there was the color of soldiery, the blare of brass bands, the ring of great names among the wel- comers. There was, of course, the overtone pic- ture of a great chieftain, marching in advance of a great army, come to foreign lands to add their might to what, with their coming, was then a world in arms. The future might see, blended with the gray hulk of the Baltic., the shadowy shape of the Mayflower coming back, still carry- ing men bound to the service of world freedom. But what they saw that morning was, after all, a very modern landing, from a very modern ship, with sailors hastily tying down a gang- plank, and doing it very well because they had done it just that way so many times before. 4 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT The Royal Welsh Fusiliers were down to give a military welcome, with their mascot and their crack band. The lord mayor, Lieutenant-Gen- eral Pitcairn Campbell, Admiral Stileman, and other men from both arms of England's service were there, not to feel of then* feelings, but to make the landing as agreeable and convenient as possible, and to convey to General Pershing, with Anglo-Saxon mannerliness and reticence, their great pleasure at having him come, As soon as there was access to the ship Gen- eral Campbell and Admiral Stileman went aboard and introduced themselves to General Pershing. They met, also, a few of the Ameri- can staff-officers, and returned salutes from the privates who made up the Pershing entourage of 168 men. There were congratulations on the ship's safe arrival, which reminded General Pershing and some of his officers that they wanted, before leaving the ship, to pay their respects to the skipper who had carried them through the danger zone without so much as a sniff at a submarine. This done, the little company of officers THE LANDING OF PERSHING 5 walked down the gang-plank, talking cheerily of their satisfaction at meeting, of their hard work on the ship, of the weather, and what-not, all the while the soldiers on the decks behind them waved hands and handkerchiefs in a general overflow of well-being, and finally set foot in England ! One may not go too far in describing the contents of a general's mind without some help from him, but it's a fair guess that if General Pershing is as kin to his kind as he seems to be, the very precise moment of this setting foot in England escaped his notice altogether, and was left free for the historian to embroider how he pleased. For General Pershing was in the act of being led to the salute of a guard of honor by General Campbell. And almost im- mediately after that precise moment the Welsh Fusiliers' band began the " Star-Spangled Ban- ner," and again it's a good bet that General Pershing and his staff thought not a thing about England and a lot about home. But so the historic moment came, and so it went. And presently the American vanguard was finding its places in the special train to London. 6 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT Perhaps England knew that a great hour was in the making, for her rolling green hills gave back the warmth of a splendid sun, and her hedgerows and wild blooms braved forth in crystal air. Those of the newcomers who saw England first that afternoon thanked their stars fervently that England and democracy were on the same side. In mid-afternoon the train reached London, and here the Americans were greeted, not alone by soldiers and England, but by the English. The secret of their coming, carefully kept, had given the port civilians no chance. But they knew it in London and the station was crowded to its doors. General Pershing stepped from the train as soon as it stopped. Ambassador Walter Hines Page came over to him, both hands outstretched, and asked leave to introduce another general who had taken an Expeditionary Force to France- General Sir John French. Other introductions followed to Lord Derby, General Lord Brooke, and Sir Francis Lloyd. And there was a hearty handshake from a fighter who needed no intro- duction Rear-Admiral William E. Sims. THE LANDING OF PERSHING 7 Inside and outside the station the civilians cheered. None of them needed to have General Pershing pointed out to them. He was unmis- takable. No man ever looked more the or- dained leader of fighting men. He was tall, broad, and deep-chested, splendidly set up; and to the care with which Providence had fash- ioned him he had added soldierly care of his own. He might have been patterned upon the Freudian dream of Julius Csesar, if Julius was in truth the unsoldierly looking person they made him out to be, whose majesty lay wholly in his own mind's eye. The gallant look of General Pershing fanned the London friendliness to contagious flames of enthusiasm. He and his officers were cheered to their hotel, the soldiers were cheered to their barracks in the Tower of London. At the hotel they found three floors turned over to them, arranged for good, hard work, with plenty of desk-room, and boy and girl scouts for running errands. Squarely in the entrance was a money-changer's desk, with a patient man in charge who could, and did, 8 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT name the number of cents to the shilling once every minute for four days. A little English lady who visited America complained bitterly, just after arrival, "Why didn't they make their dollar just four shillings?" thereby summing up the only really valid source of acrimony between England and America. The money- changer made the international amity complete. Once installed, General Pershing and his staff fell to and worked, continuing the organization that had been roughly blocked out on the Bal- tic, and building up the liaison between English and American army procedure, begun by the help of British and Canadian officers on board, by frequent conferences with England's State, War, and Navy Departments. The day after the arrival General Pershing went to "breakfast at Windsor," the first meet- ing between America's fighter and England's King. Here, at last, the moinentousness of the matter found voice. King George, having done with the introduc- tory greeting, said earnestly: "I cannot tell you how much your coming means to me. It has been the great dream of my life that my THE LANDING OF PERSHING 9 country and yours would join in some great enterprise . . . and here you are. ..." After this visit, prolonged by an inspection of the historic treasures of Windsor Castle, General Pershing made the rule of unbroken work for himself and his officers till his task in London was finished and he should leave for France to join his First Division. He made what he expected to be a single ex- ception to this rule. He went to a dinner- party, at which he met Lloyd-George, Arthur Balfour, just back from his American mission, and half a dozen others of commensurate dis- tinction. He found that his exception was no exception at all. The English do not merely have the reputation of doing their real work at their dinner-parties they deserve that reputa- tion. Staff-officers, telling all about it later on, said that it could hardly have been distinguished from a cabinet meeting, or a report from the Secretary of State for War. So were the final plans made and the business of the nations settled. Concerning all these meetings and all the na- tional feeling that was behind them, General 10 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT Pershing and his officers were of one voice that England's welcome had been precisely of the sort that pleased them most. It was reti- cent, charming, too genuine for much open ex- pression, too chivalrous at heart to be obtrusive. What with spending most of each twenty- four hours at work, the American vanguard finished up its affairs in four days. And early on the morning of June 13, long before the break of day, General Pershing and his officers and men boarded their Channel boat, the Invicta, and set sail for France. CHAPTER H "VIVE PAIR-SHANG!" THE Invicta came into Boulogne harbor in the early morning, to find that her at- tempts at a secret crossing had amounted to nothing at all. Everybody within sight and ear-shot was out to show how pleased he was, riotously and openly, indifferent alike to the hopes of spy or censor. The fishing-boats, the merchant coastwise fleet, the Channel ships and hordes of little pri- vately owned sloops and yawls and motor-boats all plied chipperly around with "bannieres etoilees" fore and aft. The sun was very bright and the water was very blue, and between them was that exhilarating air which always rises over the coasts of France, whenever and wher- ever you land on them, which not all the smoke and grime of the world's biggest war could deaden or destroy. The Invicta s own flags were run up at the 11 12 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT harbor mouth. Again the lines of khaki-col- ored soldiers formed behind the deck-rails, and again the chieftain from overseas stood at the prow of his ship and waited the coming of a historic moment. When the Invicta was made fast and her gang-plank went over, there was a half -circle of space cleared in the quay in front of her by a detachment of grizzled French infantrymen, their horizon -blue uniforms filmed over with the yellow dust of a long march. Behind the infantrymen the good citizens of Boulogne were yelling their throats dry. When General Pershing stopped for an instant's sur- vey at the head of the gang-plank, with his staff-officers close behind him, the roar of wel- come swelled to thunder and resounded out to sea. When he marched down and stepped to the quay, there was a sudden, arresting silence. Every soldier was at salute, and every civilian, too. In that tense instant a new world was be- ginning, and though it was as formless as all beginnings, the unerringly dramatic and sensi- tive French paid the tribute of silence to its birth. The future was to say that in that in- "VIVE PAIR-SHANG!" 13 stant the world allied on new bases, that men now fought together not because their lands lay neighboring, or were jointly menaced by some central foe, but because they would follow their own ideal to wherever it was in danger. An American general had brought his fighters three thousand miles because a principle of world order and world right needed the added strength of his arms. And never before had American soldiers come in their uniforms to do battle on the continent of Europe. The moment's silence ended as startlingly as it began. Bands and cheerers set in again on one beat. The officers who had come to make a formal welcome fell back and let the unpre- pared public uproar have way. General Pershing and his officers walked through aisles strenuously forced by the infan- trymen, to where carriages waited to carry them through the Boulogne streets. It must have seemed to the little American contingent as if every Frenchman in France had come up to the coast for the celebration. From the carriages the crowds stretched solid in every direction. The streets were blanketed 14 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT under uncountable flags. Every window held its capacity of laughing and cheering French- women. Children ran along the streets, shrilling "Vive FAmerique!" and laughing hilariously when their flowers were caught by the grateful but embarrassed American officers. When the special train to Paris had started the officers mopped their faces and settled back for a modest time. But they reckoned with- out their French. Not a town along the way missed its chance to greet the Americans. The stations were packed, the cheers were incessant, the roses poured in deluges into the train- windows. But at the Gare du Nord, in Paris, the official French greeting was too magnificent to be pushed aside further by mere populace. There were cordons of soldiers drawn up in the station, stiff at attention, making aisles by which the French officials could get to the Americans. There were officers in brilliant uni- form, covered with medals for heroic service. There were massed bands, led by the Garde Republicans. "Papa Joffre" was there, with "VIVE PAIR-SHANG!" 15 his co-missioner, Viviani; Painleve, then Min- ister of War, and presently to have a while as Premier; General Foch, Marne hero, now generalissimo, and Ambassador William G. Sharp. These, with General Pershing, Major Robert Bacon, a member of Pershing's staff and lately ambassador to France, and two or three other staff -officers, found open motor-cars waiting to drive them to the Hotel Crillon, on the Place de la Concorde, the temporary American head- quarters. Dense crowds of soldiers patrolled the streets leading down to the Grand Boulevards, through which the distinguished little procession was to take its way, and other soldiers lined up at attention in the boulevards. Paris turned loose, with her heart in her mouth and her enthusiasm at red heat, is not easily forgotten. On this June day her rap- tures were immemorial. They were of a sort to call out the old-timers for standards of com- parison. Every sentence now spoken in France begins either "Avant la guerre" or "Depuis la guerre." 16 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT Nobody can ignore the fact that with August, 1914, the whole of life changed. To the old- timers who wanted to tell you what Paris was like the afternoon Pershing arrived, there were only two occasions possible, both "Depuis la guerre." The first great day was that following the order for general mobilization, when exaltation, defiance, threat, and frenzy packed the na- tional spirit to suffocation, and when the streets flowed with unending streams of grim but undaunted people. Tragic days and relief days followed. But the next great tune, when tragedy did not outweigh every other feeling, was that 14th of July, 1916, when the military parades were begun again, for the first tune since the war, and in the line of march were detachments from the armies of all the Allies. The third great French war festival was for Pershing. The crowds were literally every- where. The streets through which the motors passed were tightly blocked except for the lit- tle road cleared by the soldiers. The streets giving off these were jammed solid. American flags were in every window, on every lamp-post, Copyright by the Committee on Public Information. General Pershing in Paris, July, 1917, "VIVE PAIR-SHANG !" 17 on every taxicab, and in every wildly waving hand. Although the soldiers could force a way open before the motor-cars, no human agency could keep the way free behind them. The Parisians wanted not merely to see Pershing they wanted to march with him. So they fell in, tramping the boulevards close behind the cars, cheering and singing to their marching step. Only when General Pershing disappeared under the arched doorway of the Hotel Crillon, and let it be known that he had other gear to tend, did the city in procession break apart and go about its several private celebrations. But all that afternoon and all that night, wherever men and women collected, or chil- dren were underfoot, it was "Vive 1'Amerique" and "Vive le Generale Pair-shang" that echoed when the glasses rose. When General Pershing, after the tremendous experience of his European landing, asked for the quiet and shelter of his own quarters at the Crillon, his intention was that his retirement should be complete. He said flatly that a man who had just witnessed such a tribute to his 18 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT country as Paris had made that afternoon was no better than he should be if he did not feel the need of solitude. But the inevitable aftermath of the great event the world over is the talking with the newspapers. And sure enough, no sooner was General Pershing safe in his retreat than the Paris reporters were knocking at the door. The American correspondents who had trav- elled over from London on the Invicta had had emphatic instructions to stay away, story or no story. But one distinguished Frenchman broke the rules, and to Frangois de Jessen, of Le Temps, General Pershing did finally give a statement. How reluctantly one may see from the statement's contents. "I came to Europe to organize the participa- tion of our army in this immense conflict of free nations against the enemies of liberty, and not to deliver fine speeches at banquets, or have :nan published in the newspapers," said Gen- eral Pershing. "Besides, that is not my bus?- ness, and, you know, we Americans, soldiers and civilians, like not only to appear, but to be, businesslike. However, since you offer me an "VIVE PAIR-SHANG!" 19 opportunity to speak to France, I am glad to make you a short and simple confession. "As a man and as a soldier I am profoundly happy over, indeed proud of, the high mission with which I am charged. But all this is purely personal, and might appear out of pro- portion with the solemnity of the hour and the gravity of events now occurring. If I have thought it proper to indulge in this confidence, it is because I wish to express my admiration of the French soldier, and at the same time to ex- press my pride in being at the side of the French and allied armies. "It is much more important, I think, to an- nounce that we are the precursors of an army that is firmly resolved to do its part on the Continent for the cause the American nation has adopted as its own. We come conscious of the historic duty to be performed when our flag shows itself upon the battle-fields of the world. It is not my role to promise or to prophesy. Let it suffice to tell you that we know what we are doing, and what we want." Two rememberable experiences waited the next day for General Pershing. The first was 20 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT his visit to des Invalides, the tomb of Napoleon ; the second, his appearance in the French Cham- ber of Deputies. If he had known what it was to be the hero of all Paris at once, he was to learn how special groups regarded him, and what the French highest-in-command thought fitting for America's leader. At all of General Pershing's appearances in Paris in these first days a detachment of sol- diers had to be constantly before him, widening a way for him through the crowds that waited his coming. On the morning of his visit to the tomb of Napoleon the broad Champs de Mars, in front of des Invalides, was impassable except by the soldiers' flying wedge. Shouts in French rang out steadily as he made his way toward des Invalides' entrances, and suddenly a man cried, in accented English: "Behind him there are ten million more." But once inside des Invalides General Persh- ing was alone with General Niox, who was in charge of the famous treasure building, and General Joffre, Between Pershing and Joffre there had begun one of those intense friendships that form too impetuously for ordinary expla- "VIVE PAIR-SHANG!" 21 nation. It was full-grown at the end of their first meeting, a matter of seconds. And though at this time their friendly intercourse was halted sometimes by the fact that neither spoke the other's language, they were continually together. So it was General Joffre who walked beside him when General Pershing followed General Niox down to the entrance of the crypt, and stood before the door. All the world may go to this door, if its behavior is good, but only royal applicants may go beyond it. General Pershing was to go inside. General Niox handed him the great key, then turned away with Joffre, while Pershing, after a mo- ment's hesitation, fitted the key and crossed the threshold. When he came out again he was taken to see the Napoleonic relics, which lay in rows in their glass cases. Two of them, the great sword and the Grand Cross cordon of the Legion of Honor, had never been touched since the tune of Louis Philippe. As Pershing and Joffre bent over them General Niox came to a momentous decision. He opened the cases and handed the two to General Pershing. France could do no more. 2 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT Pershing held them for a moment and no- body spoke. Then he handed back the cordon, kissed the sword-hilt and presented it, and in profound silence the three men left the treasure hall. Between this visit and that to the Chamber of Deputies there were many official calls, in- cluding one to President Poincare at the Elysee Palace, which ended in a formal luncheon to Pershing by President and Madame Poincare, with most of the important men of France as fellow guests. General Pershing was recognized as he en- tered the gallery of the Chamber of Deputies, and all other business except that of doing him honor was promptly put by. Full-throated cheering began and would not die down. Fi- nally Premier Ribot commenced to speak, and the deputies stopped to listen. "The people of France fully understand the deep significance of the arrival of General Pershing in France," he said. "It is one of the greatest events in history that the people of the United States should come here to struggle, not in the spirit of ambition or conquest, but "VIVE PAIR-SHANG!" 23 for the noble ideals of justice and liberty. The arrival of General Pershing is a new message from President Wilson which, if that is possible, surpasses in nobility all those preceding it.*' And Viviani said, a few minutes later: "Presi- dent Wilson holds in his hand all the historic grandeur of America, which he now puts forth in this fraternal union extended to us by the Great Republic." These two speeches opened a flood-gate. Long after the cheering deputies had said their good-bys to General Pershing, the French writ- ers, made articulate by the example of Ribot and Viviani, were busily preparing appreciations and commentaries of the Pershing arrival. The most picturesque of these was Maurice de Wa- leffe's, in Le Journal: "'There are no longer any Pyrenees,' said Louis XIV, when he mar- ried a Spanish princess. 'There is no longer an ocean,' General Pershing might say, with greater justice, as he is about to mingle with ours the democratic blood of his soldiers. The fusion of Europe and America is an enormous fact to note." A more powerful speech was that of Clemen- 24 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT ceau, now Premier of France, but then an ear- nest private citizen, writing for his paper. "Paris has given its finest welcome to General Pershing," he wrote. "We are justified. We are justified in hoping that the acclamation of our fellow citizens, with whom are mingled crowds of soldiers home on leave, have shown him clearly, right at the start, in what spirit we are waging the bloodiest of wars; with what in- vincible determination, never to falter in any fibre of our nerves or muscles. Unless I mis- judge America, General Pershing, fully conscious of the importance of his mission, has received from the cordial and joyous enthusiasm of the Parisians that kind of fraternal encouragement which is never superfluous, even when one needs it not. "Let him have no doubt that he, too, has brought encouragement to us, the whole of France, that followed with its eyes the whole of his passage along the boulevards; to all our hearts that salute his coming with joy at the supreme grandeur of America's might enrolled under the standard of right. "This idea M. Viviani, just back from Amer- "VIVE PAIR-SHANG!" 25 ica, splendidly developed in his eloquent speech to the Chamber of Deputies in the presence of General Pershing. "General Pershing himself, less dramatic, has given us, in three phrases devoid of artificiality, an impression of exceptionally virile force. It was no rhetoric but the pure simplicity of the soldier who is here to act, and who fears to promise more than he can perform. No bad sign, this, for those of us who have grown weary of pompous words, when we must pay so dearly for each failure of performance. "Not long ago the Germans laughed at the * contemptible English Army,' and we hear now that they regard the American Army as 'too ridiculous for words.' Well, the British have taught even Hindenburg himself what virile force can do toward filling gaps in organization. Now the arrival of Pershing brings Hindenburg news that the Americans are setting to work in their turn those Americans w r hose performance in the War of Secession showed them capable of such 'improvisation of war' as the world had never seen and I think the Kaiser must be beginning to wonder whether he has not trusted 26 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT rather blindly in his 'German tribal God.' He has loosed the lion from its cage, and now he finds that the lion has teeth and claws to rend him. "The Kaiser had given us but a few weeks in which to realize that the success of his sub- marine campaign would impose the silence of terror on the human conscience throughout the world. Well, painful as he must find it, Pershing's arrival, with its consequent military action, cannot fail to prove to him that, after all, the moral forces he ignored must always be taken into account in forecasting human prob- abilities. Those learned Boches have yet to understand that in the course of his intellectual evolution, man has achieved the setting of moral right above brute force; that might is taking its stand beside right, to accomplish the greatest revolution in the history of mankind. That is the lesson which Pershing's coming has taught us, and that is why we rejoice." But even while the commentators were at their task General Pershing had left off cele- brating and got to work. The First Division was on the seas. "VIVE PAIR-SHANG!" 27 A few very important persons in France and America knew where they were to land, and when, but nobody in the world knew just what was to be done for and with them once they landed, for the plans did not even exist. It was the business of the general and his staff to create them. And they say that the amount of work done in those first days in France was incredible even to them when they looked back on it. As a first step American headquarters were installed in 31 Rue Constantine, a broad, shaded street near the Hotel des Invalides, overlook- ing the Champs de Mars. The house had belonged once to a prodigiously popular Paris actress, and it was correspondingly magnificent. But the magnificence, except that which was inalienably in space and structure, was banished by the busy Americans. In the hallway they stretched a plank railing, behind which Ameri- can private soldiers asked and answered ques- tions. Under the once sumptuous stairway there were stacks of army cots. The walls were bulletined and covered with directions carefully done in two languages. The chief of 28 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT the Intelligence Section had the ex-dining-room, and the adjutant-general had the ballroom on the second floor. Even so, it was not long be- fore this spaciousness was insufficient, and the headquarters brimmed over into No. 27 as well. It was in these two houses that the whole army organization was plotted out, and General Pershing made good his prediction that the Americans would not merely seem, but would be, businesslike. After ten days or so of beaver-like absorption in their jobs the American headquarters an- nounced to the war correspondents that they must take a certain train at a certain hour, under the guidance of Major Frederick Palmer, press officer and censor, to a certain port in France. There, at a certain moment, they would see what they would see. CHAPTER THE FIRST DIVISION LANDS saw the gray troop-ships steaming -- majestically into the middle distance from the gray of the open sea, with the little con- voy fleet alongside. It was a gray morning, and at first the ships were hardly more than nebulous patches of a deeper tone than sea and sky. As they neared the port, and took on outline, the watchers increased, and took on internationalism. The Americans, who had come to see this consequential landing, some in uniform and some civilians, had arrived in the very early morning, before the inhabitants of the little seaport town were up and about, let alone aware of what an event was that day to put them into the history books. But it never takes a French civilian long to discover that something is afoot what with three years of big happenings to sharpen his wits and keep him on the lookout. 29 30 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT At the front of the quay were Americans two deep, straining to make out the incoming ships, on tiptoe to count their number, breath- less to shout a welcome to the first "Old Glory" to be let loose to the harbor winds. Forming rapidly behind the Americans were French men, French women, and French children, in- different to affairs, kitchens, or schools, chatter- ing that "Mais surement, c' sont les Americains regardez, regardez ! . . ." Ignominiously in the rear, but watching too, were the German prisoners who worked, in theory at least, at transferring rails from in- convenient places to convenient ones for the loading of coaster steamers. They said little enough, having learned that a respectful hear- ing was not to be their lot for a while. But they moved fewer rails than ever, and nobody bothered to speed them up. The great ships came in slowly. Before long, the watchers could see lines of dull yellow banding the gray hulks, and then the yellow lines took on form and separateness, and were visible one soldier at a time. Last, one ship steamed apart from the others 31 and made direct for the quay, and the solemn business of landing American troops on French soil was about to begin. There was to be a certain ceremony for the landing, but, like all the ceremonies conceded to these great occasions by the American Army, it was to be of extreme simplicity. When they were near enough to the quay to be heard, the transport band played "The Star-Spangled Banner," while all the soldiers stood at salute, and then they played the "Marseillaise," while everybody on ship and shore stood at salute. With that, they called it a morning, as far as celebration was concerned, and to the accom- paniment of a great deal of talk and a volley of light-hearted questions, they began to dis- embark. The first question, called from some distance away, was: "What place is this?" The next was, "Do they let the enlisted men drink in the saloons over here?" and there was a mis- cellany about apple pie and doughnuts, ciga- rettes, etc. And very briefly after the first soldiers were ashore nothing could be heard but "Don't they speak any English at all?" 32 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT The outstanding impression of that morning may be what it will to the French civilians, to the American newspaper correspondents, and to the officers both ashore and on board. To the privates of the First Division it will always be the incomprehensible nonsense that goes by the name of the French language, spoken with perfect assurance by people old enough to know better, who refuse to make one syllable of in- telligible sound in answer to even the simplest requests. The privates were prepared to hear the French speak their own language at mention of Alsace- Lorraine and war aims, or to propound their private philosophies that way. They granted the right of the French to talk how they pleased of their emotional pleasure at seeing the troops, or of any other subject above the timber-line. What staggered them was the insane top- loftiness of using French to ask for ham and eggs, and beer, or the way to camp. For nothing, not volumes of warning before they left home, nor interminable hours of French-grammar in- struction on board the troop-ships, had really got it deep inside the American private's head THE FIRST DIVISION LANDS 33 that French was not an accomplishment to be used as evidence of cosmopolitan culture, but a mere prosy necessity, without which daily existence was a nightmare and a frustration. The French, on their side, were helpless enough, but not so bewildered. They had lived too long, in peace as well as war, across a narrow channel from that stanch English- speaking race who brought both their tea and their language with them to France and every- where else, to be dumfounded that strangers should balk at their foreign tongue. The inevitable result was that here, in their first contact with the French, as later, through- out the fighting areas, the American soldiers learned to understand French-English long be- fore they could speak a decent word of French. Fortunately for the First Division, it had had some able bilingual forerunners at the sea- port town where they landed. The camps had been built by the French, a few miles back from the town, but a few of the housekeeping necessities had been installed by General Persh- ing's staff-officers, and signs in good, plain Eng- lish showed the proper roads. And as the single 34 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT files of soldiers began to descend the gang- plank of the first transport, and to form for marching to camp, their own officers were hav- ing some compact instruction from the staff- officers on how to get to camp and what to do when they got there. There was no waste motion about getting the troops under way. The first companies w T ere tramp-tramping up the streets before the last companies were overside, and the first transport was free to go back and give place to the next one before the mayor had got his red sash and gilt chains in place and arrived to do them suit- able honor. So, while the shore watchers fell back into safe observation-posts, the soldiers clattered down through the quay -sheds to the little street, formed and swung away, and one ship after another disgorged its passengers, and presently the sheds were overrun with the blue-clad sailors from the convoys. All that day, the soldiers marched through the town. Their camps lay at the end of a long white shore road, and jobs were not wanting when they got there. Their pace was easy, THE FIRST DIVISION LANDS 35 because of these things, and they probably would not have put out any French eye with their flawless marching, even under less in- dulgent circumstances. For this First Division was recruited in a hurry, and most of their real training lay ahead of them. Where they were impressive was in their composite build. There were little fellows among them, but they straggled at the back. The major part of the soldiers were tall, thin, rangy-looking, with a march that was more lope than anything else and a look of heaving their packs along without much effort. They fell about midway between the thin, breedy look of the first English troops in France and the stocky, thick-necked sort that came later. The marines were the pick of the lot, for size and behavior too. The sense of being some- thing special was with the marines from the first. They marched that way. And, set apart by their olive drab as well as by their size and comportment, they gave that First Division's first march hi France a quality of real distinction. And when the army got to its first French camps, the welcome sight its eyes first fell 36 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT upon was that of already arrived marines carrying water down the hill. The camps were long wooden buildings, rather above the average, as became the status of the visitors, built almost at the top of a hill, looking down over green fields and round trees to the three or four villages within range of vision, and beyond them to the sea. Some supplies were there already, but the soldiers had had to bring most of their first supper, and the camp-cooks had then* own troubles getting things just so. Major-General Sibert, field commander of the First Division, had quarters at camp, so that excuses were not in order. Even for that first supper, the marines and all others they could commandeer to help them were rushing about preparing things to the very top of their bent. Nobody had town-leave for the first day or two, till things were in apple-pie order, and the camp was in line to shelter and feed its soldiers for as long as it should be necessary to stay there. If camp life was busy these days, the town life was no less so. The chief hotel, wherein THE FIRST DIVISION LANDS 37 much red plush met the eye from the very en- trance, was swarming with officers of both na- tions and all degrees of rank. General Persh- ing was there, with his aides and most of his staff. Admirals were there, changing uniforms from blue to white and back again as the erratic French weather dictated. There were half a dozen high officers from the French Army, making both formal and informal welcomes, and there were more busy majors and captains and more interpreters than you could count in half a day's tune. The little Frenchwoman who sat behind the desk was amiable to the best of her very con- siderable ability, but the questions she had to answer, whether she understood them or not, would have addled an older head than hers. She could run her hotel with the best of them, but when perfectly sane-looking young officers asked her where to buy five thousand cups and saucers, and paper napkins by the ton, she said in so many words that an American invasion was worse than bedlam. The hotel's second floor was the favored place for conferences. There a fair welter of 38 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT red plush was drawn up around a big table in the hallway, and livid red wall-paper added its warmth to a scene which against a plank wall would not have lacked color. At this table General Pershing could have been found much of the time. The whole practical liaison of French and American Armies was contrived here, though the first rule for this consolidation laid down by a grizzled French general with but one arm left, was that "there was no longer anything that was French, or anything that was American, but merely all we had that was 'ours,'" so that the task was one of detail only. Though the daytimes were packed with work, most of the officers called it a day at sunset. Then the little hotel took on its most engaging color. The little French piano tinkled out in the warm air with an accompaniment of many voices. Once a very blue young second lieu- tenant chose to express his mood by repetitions without number of the melancholy "Warum?" probably the first German music that had been heard from that piano for many a moon. Possi- bly those of the French who knew what the tune THE FIRST DIVISION LANDS 39 recognized also that America had turned a point in more ways than one in coming to France, not least among them being making good American soldiers out of erstwhile good Germans. Nobody seemed much astonished or put out when within the day a goodly number of American soldiers were speaking to German prisoners in their own language, though talking to the German prisoners, aside from the fact that it was not encouraged by the French, turned out to be indifferent fun, since the American soldiers had had their fill of German propaganda before they left home, and none of the prisoners was overmodest as to what Germany was or would do. The cafes out-of-doors were overflowing with Americans, too. It was plenty of fun to hear the sailors scolding the French waitresses for calling lemons "limons," and trying to over- haul the French pronunciation of "biere" to something approaching a compromise. An officer came along and broke up a crap- game. The soldiers forgave him, but the civil- ians did not. It was their first go at the game, and they wanted a lot of teaching. 40 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT The lone bookstore of the town made the only known effort to get the Americans what they asked for, instead of trying to prevail on them to adopt something French. They sent, perhaps to Paris, to get English books, and they piled their windows high with Ma- caulay's "History of England" and Bacon's "Essays." The paper-buying habit is ingrown in the American male. He has three newspapers under his arm before any afternoon is what it should be. And so the soldiers bought the French papers, two and three at a time, and carried them around. Any time of day or night, a look out into the town's main street descried a company or two of soldiers, on their way from camp for town- leave, or on their way back. They marched continually. The motor-cycle with the side- seat, which was later to be the distinguishing mark of the American Army hi Paris, made its appearance in the seaport within a day or two of the first transport's landing, and eased the burdens of the French motor-lorries with which the American supplies had been taken to camp, THE FIRST DIVISION LANDS 41 owing to a delay of the First Division's own lorries, on a slow ship. And most successful sensation of all, the army mule. The French knew him slightly, because their own army used him on occasion. But no Frenchman could speak to a mule in his own language as these big mule-tenders did. It was exalting to watch the army on the march, to see the marines and the profusion of slim sailors. But the real crowd always gathered around the big negro stevedores in long navy-blue coats, scarlet-lined, with brass buttons all the way up the front, over and down the back likely a thrifty hand-me-down from pre-khaki days who marched with perfect knowledge of their magnificence. The stevedores, for their part, were as amazed as the French, though on a different score. They accepted with due resignation the fact that the French spoke French. It was when they first saw a Senegalese in French uniform, triple-black with tropic suns, but to them a mere one of themselves, and when they hailed him gladly in their English tongue, to ask which road to take, that his indecipherable 42 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT French answer broke them, heart and spirit alike. "Dat one blame stuck-up nigger," said the spokesman, as they trudged their way onward, none the wiser if the Senegalese, in his turn, had been rebuking them in French for showing off then* English. So, in its several aspects, the First Division made its impact upon France, jostled itself a little and the French more, and finally settled down to its short wait at the coast before going inland, "within sound of the guns," to get its training. And because the camps were to be used many times again by other divisions to come on the "bridge of ships," the first had to put in some extra licks to make their camp conveniences permanent. They played a few baseball-games, and they were encouraged to do a lot of swimming, in the off afternoon hours. After a bit town-leave was heavily curtailed, but there was a dispen- sation now and then for a "movie." In the main they kept their noses to the grindstone. After a little while the men who were to THE FIRST DIVISION LANDS 43 march in Paris on the Fourth of July were selected, and, preceded by a few sailors with fewer duties and longer indulgences, they en- trained on the late afternoon of July 2. There was no measuring the disappointment of the ones who were left behind, for the prediction that there would be doings in Paris on the first French Fourth of July was to be fulfilled to the letter. But the housekeepers of the army could not be spared for celebrations. As soon as the marines could be despatched from the seaport they were sent direct across France to the points behind the lines where their training- camps were in waiting, and there, within a few weeks, the First Division reassembled and fell to work. Meanwhile, of the doings in Paris CHAPTER IV THE FOURTH OF JULY ^ I^HE first they knew of it in Paris barring vague promises of "something to remem- ber" on the American fete that had appeared in modest items in the newspapers was when a motor-bus, jammed to the guards with Ameri- can soldiers, suddenly rolled into the Avenue de 1'Opera from the Tuileries Gardens, and pa- raded up that august thoroughfare to the tune of incredible yelling from everybody on board. It was the afternoon of July 3. A few picked Americans had known about it. A sufficient number of American and French officers and the newspaper correspondents had been told to appear at Austerlitz Station in the early morning of the 3d, and there they had seen the soldiers not merely arrive but tackle their first continental breakfast. Neither was a sensation to be sneezed at. The soldiers were of the very finest, and in 44 THE FOURTH OF JULY 45 spite of their overnight journey they were all looking fit. They were anxious to fall right out of the train into the middle of Paris. To most of them it was a city of gallant and de- lightful scandal, filled even in war-time with that twinkle of gayety plus wickedness that is so intriguing when told about in Oscaloosa, be- hind the hand or the door. They said outright that they expected to see the post-cards all come to life when they set eyes first on Paris streets. But even if Paris had had these fascinations in store, they were not for the soldiers that morning. Instead military precision, discipline, an orderly march to near-by barracks, and a French breakfast: coffee and war-bread. Not even the French had a kind word for the war- bread, and no American ever spoke well of the coffee. But there it was chronologically in order, and haply the worst of a Paris visit all over at once. And most of the soldiers stayed right in bar- racks till it was time for the great processional the next day. It was a picked bunch that had the motor ride and informed Paris that they 46 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT had come for a party. And if they didn't see the ladies with the unbehaving eyes, they did see the Louvre and the Tuileries, the Opera, the boulevards, and the Madeleine. And Paris saw the soldiers. There was no end of cheering and handclap- ping. The American flags that had been flying for Pershing were brought out again, and ven- ders appeared on the streets with all manner of emblems to sell. It was one of those cheerful afternoons when good feeling expresses itself gently, reserving its hurrahs for the coming event. The soldiers were kept on the cars, but now and then a good Parisian threw them a package of cigarettes or a flower. All told, they touched off the fuse timed to explode on the morrow, and, having done that, went back to barracks. The first "Fourth" in Paris was a thoroughly whole-souled celebration. The French began it, civilians and soldiers, by taking a band around to serenade General Pershing the first thing in the morning. His house was on the left bank of the Seine, not far from American headquar- ters in the Rue Constantine, an historic old THE FOURTH OF JULY 47 place with little stone balconies outside the upper windows. On one of these General Pershing appeared, with the first notes of the band. He was cheered and cheered again. A little boy who had some- how climbed to the top of a gas street-lamp squealed boastfully to Pershing: "See, I am an American, too, for I have a sky-scraper ! " (J'ai un gratte-ciel !) And with a wave of his hand General Pershing acknowledged his compatriot. It was in this crowd around Pershing's house that a riot started, because a man who was being unpleasantly jostled said: "Oh, do leave me in peace." Those nearest him good-na- turedly tried to give him elbow-room, but those a little distance away caught merely the "peace" of his ejaculation and, with sudden loud cries of "kill the pacifist," made for the unfortunate, and pommelled him roundly before the matter could be explained. After the serenade and General Pershing's little speech of thanks the band, with most of the crowd following, marched over to des In- valides, the appointed place for the formal ceremony. 48 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT Around the ancient hotel, overflowing into the broad boulevards that radiate from it, and packing to suffocation the Champs de Mars in front of it, there were just as many Frenchmen as could stand shoulder to shoulder and chin to back. Inside, where there were speeches and exchanges of national emblems, the crowd was equally dense, in spite of the fact that only the very important or the very cunning had cards of admission. The real Fourth celebration was in the streets. The waiting crowds yelled thunderously when the first band appeared, heralding the parade. Then came the Territorials, the escort troops, in their familiar horizon-blue. Then more bands, then officers, mounted and in motor-cars, and, finally, the Americans, manifestly having the proudest moment of their lives. They were to march from des Invalides to Picpus Cemetery, the little private cemetery outside of Paris, where the Marquis de Lafay- ette is buried. They crossed Solferino bridge, and made their way through a terrific crowd in the broad Place de la Concorde. The Paris newspapers, boast- THE FOURTH OF JULY 49 ing of their conservatism, said there were easily one million Parisians that day within sight of des Invalides when the American soldiers left the building and started on their march. To hear the soldiers tell it, there were easily one million Parisians, all under the age of ten, immediately under their feet before they had marched a mile. From a balcony of the Hotel Crillon, on the north side of the Place de la Concorde, the marching Americans were wholly lost to view from the waist down. Nobody could ever complain of the French birth-rate after seeing that parade. Nobody ever saw that many children before in any one assemblage in France. It was prodigious. And the French youngsters had their own notions of how they were to take part in that French Fourth of July. The main notion was to walk between the soldiers' legs. They were massed thick beside the soldiers, thick between them, impeding their knee action, terrorizing their steps. At a little distance, they looked like batter in a waffle-pan. But they did what they could to make the American 50 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT soldiers feel among friends that day, and no- body could say they failed. The parade turned along the picturesque old Rue de Rivoli on leaving the Place de la Con- corde, and filed along the river, almost the length of the city. They had not gone far before the Frenchwomen had thrown them enough roses to decorate bayonets and hats and a few lapels. They made a brave sight, brave to nobility. And though they were harassed by the eager children, abashed by the women, and touched to genuine emotion by the whole city, they wouldn't have grudged five years of their lives for the privilege of being there. At Picpus, the scene made up in intensive- ness what it lacked in breadth, for the cemetery is far too small to permit of a crowd of size. A home for aged gentlewomen overlooks one wall ... its windows were filled, and their occupants proved that Frenchwomen are never too old or too gentle to throw roses. A military hospital overlooks another side, and balconies and windows were crowded with "blesses." The few officers and civilians who had access to the cemetery-grounds made their com- THE FOURTH OF JULY 51 memoration brief and simple. It was there that Colonel Stanton made the little speech which buzzed around the Allied world within the day: "Lafayette, nous voil !" "Lafayette, we're here!" Its felicity of phrase moved the French scribes to columns of congratulation. Its compactness won the Americans. Every- body said it was the best war speech made in France, and it was. After Picpus, the officers came back to the city for work, and the soldiers went to barracks. The sailors were allowed to saunter about the city, in vain search for the post-card ladies and the flying champagne corks. The soldiers were on a sterner regime. Early on the morning of the 5th, they were eastward bound, to join the rest of the First Division for training, and Paris saw the last of the American soldiers. A few had leave, within the next few months, from engineering corps and base hospitals. But the infantrymen and the marines were over learning lessons in the war of trench and bayonet, and by Christmas even the scatter- ing leaves from behind the lines were discon- 52 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT tinued, and Americans on holiday bent were sent to Aix-les-Bains. Even officers had little or no Paris leave, and those who had been quartered in Paris, in the Rue Constantine and the Rue Sainte-Anne, were collected at the new American headquarters, southeast of Paris. The American uniform all but vanished off the Paris streets. The French national holiday, ten days after the American, had no American contingent. So Paris and the American Army had a quick acquaintance, a brilliant one and a brief one. It was mainly between the beginning and the end of that Fourth of July. It will quite probably not be renewed till the end of the war. Lucky the onlooker who sees the reunion. For then it may be wagered that there will be gayety enough to answer the needs of even the most post-card-haunted soldier. But to get on to the training-camps CHAPTER V WHAT THEY LIVED IN THE American training-camp area spread over many miles and through many vil- lages. It had boundaries only in theory, be- cause all its sides were ready to swing farther north, east, south, and west at a day's notice, whenever the Expeditionary Force should be- come army enough to require it. But its focus was in the Vosges, in the six or seven villages set apart from the beginning for the Americans, and as such, overhauled by those first marines and quartermaster's assistants who left the coast in early July and moved camp- ward. This overhauling brought the end of the Franco- American honeymoon. Later, amity was to be re-established, but when the first marine ordered the first manure-pile out of the first front yard, a breach began which it took long months to heal. 18 54 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT There were few barracks in the Vosges. The soldiers were to be billeted with the peasants. And the marines said the peasants had to clean up and air, and the peasants said the marines were insane. Those first days at training-camp, before the body of the troops arrived, were circus enough for anybody. Six villages were to be got ready, the officers to have the pick of places, and the privates to have next best. And the choice of assignments for officers was still so far from ideal as to make the house-cleaning a thorough job all around. The marines had a village to themselves, the farthest from the inspection-grounds. The correspondents had a village to themselves, too, though it wasn't because there was any excess of regard for the importance of the cor- respondents among the men who laid out the grounds. They were put where they could do the least harm, and where their confusing ap- pearance, in Sam Brown belts and other officer- like insignia, would not exact too many wasted salutes. General Headquarters was still in Paris at WHAT THEY LIVED IN 55 this time, but General Sibert had Field Head- quarters at camp, and though his assignment was relatively stylish, it could not have been said to offend him with its luxury. He lived and worked in a little frame build- ing in the main street of the central village, which had probably once been a hotel. It was to be recognized by the four soldiers always at attention outside it, whenever motors or pedestrians passed that way. Two of the soldiers were American and two were French. Although all the American training-camp area became America as to jurisdiction, as soon as the troops moved there, the French soldiers were always present around headquarters, partly to help and partly to register politeness. Inside Field Headquarters, the little bare wooden rooms were stripped of their few bat- tered vases and old chromos, and plain wooden tables and chairs were set about. The marines opened the windows, and scrubbed up the floors, and hung out the sign of "Business as usual," and General Sibert moved in. The rest was not so easy. The various kitch- ens came in first for attention. For many 56 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT days French and American motor-lorries had been trundling across France, storing the ware- houses with heaping piles of food-supplies. The procession practically never stopped. Trains brought what could be put aboard them, but it was to motors that most of the real work fell. So the thin, long line of loaded cars stretched endlessly from coast to camp, and finally everything was attended to but where to put the food and where to cook it. The houses with the good back sheds were picked for kitchens, and the big army soup- kettles were bricked into place, and what passed for ovens were provided for the bakers. For bathing facilities, there were neat paths marked to the river. That is, the French called it a river. Every American who rides through France for the first time has the same experience: he looks out of his train-window and remarks to his companion, who knows France well: "Isn't that a pretty little creek? Are there many springs about here?" And the companion replies scornfully: "That isn't a creek that's the Marne River," or "That's the Aisne," or "That's the Meuse." The WHAT THEY LIVED IN 57 American always wonders what the French would call the Hudson. It was one of these storied streams that ran through the American training-camp, in which the Americans did their bathing. Whenever a soldier wanted to get his head wet he waded across. Later, when the camps were filled, these river- banks were to offer a remarkable sight to the French peasants, who thought all Americans were bathing-mad anyway. Hundreds of sol' diers, in the assorted postures of men scrubbing backs and knees and elbows, disported with soap and wash-cloth along the banks. Hun- dreds of others, swimming their suds off, flashed here an arm and there a leg in the stream itself. It did not take much distance to make them look like figures on a frieze, a new Olympic group. Modesty knew them not, but there were not supposed to be women about, and the peas- ants had a nice Japanese point of view in the matter. At any rate, there was the training- camp bathtub, and they used it at least once a day, to the unending stupefaction of the French. 58 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT Where they slept was another matter, sug- gesting neither Corot nor Phidias. The privates had houses first, then barns. The barns were freed of the live stock, which was turned into meadows to graze, and the floors were dug down to clean earth, and vast quantities of formaldehyde were sprayed around. Then the cots were carried up to the second floors of the barns and put along in tidy rows. At the foot of each soldier's bed was whatever manner of small wooden box he could corral from the quartermaster, and there he kept all he owned. His pack unfolded its contents into the box, and his comfort-kit perched on the top. And there he kept the little mess of treasures he bought from the gypsy wagons that rode all day around the outskirts of the camp. Windows were knocked out, just under the eaves, for the fresh air that seemed, so inexpli- cably to the French, so essential to the Ameri- cans. Even with the First Division, acknowledged to be about the smallest expeditionary force known to the Great War, the soldiers averaged a little over two thousand to the village, and WHAT THEY LIVED IN 59 since not one of the villages had more than four or five hundred population in peace-times, the troubles of the man who arranged the billets were far from light. Fortunately, the First Division did not ask for luxuries. Even the officers spent more time in simplifying their quarters than in trimming them up. The colonel of one regiment one of those who became major-generals soon after the arrival in France had his quarters in an aristocratic old house, set back in a long yard, where plum-trees dropped their red fruit in the vivid green grass and roses overgrew their con- fines it was the sort of house before which the pre-war motor tourists used to stop and breathe long "ohs" of satisfaction. The entrance was by a low, arched doorway. The hall was built of beautifully grained woods, old and mellow of tone. The stairway was broad and easy to climb. The colonel had the second floor front, just level with the tree-tops. In the room there were rich woods and tapes- tried walls, and at the back was a four-poster mahogany bed with heavy satin hangings, bro- caded with fleur-de-lis. The Pompadour would 60 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT have been entirely nappy there. But the American colonel had done things to it things that would have popped the eyes out of the Pompadour's head. He pinned up the four- poster hangings with a safety-pin, that being the only way he could convey to his amiable little French servant-girl that he didn't want that bed turned down for him of nights. And he had taken all the satin hangings down from the windows. Under these windows he had drawn up a little board table and an army cot. Beside the table was his little army trunk. The space he used did not measure more than ten feet in any direction, and his luxuries waited unmolested for some more sybaritic soul than he. A major in that same village who had had a cavalry command before the cavalry, as he put it, became "mere messengers," picked his quar- ters out himself, on the strength of all he had heard about "Sunny France." His house was nothing much, but behind it was a garden a long garden, filled with vegetables, decorated with roses, shaded by fruit-trees. At the far end of the garden was a summer-house, in a circle of trees. Here the major took his first WHAT THEY LIVED IN 61 guests and showed how he intended to do his work in the open air, while the famous French sunshine flooded his garden and warmed his little refuge. The one thing it will never be safe to say to any veteran of the First Division is "Sunny France." The summer of 1917, after a blazing start in June, settled down to drizzle and mist, cold and fog, rain that soaked to the marrow. The major with the garden sloshed around the whole summer, visiting men who had set- tled indoors and had fireplaces. By the time the warmth had come back to his summer-house it was time for him to go up to the battle-line, and the man who writes a history of the billets in France will get a lot of help from him. Some of the makeshifts of this first invasion were excusable and inevitable. Some were not. After the first two or three weeks of settling in, General Pershing made a tour of inspection, and some of the things he said about what he saw didn't make good listening. But after that visit all possible defects were overcome, and the men slept well, ate well, were as well clothed as possible, and were admirably sanitated. 62 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT The drinking-water was a matter for the greatest strictness. The French never drink water on any provocation, so that water provi- sions began from the ground up. It was drawn into great skins and hung on tripods in the shaded parts of the billets, and it was then treated with a germicide, tasteless fortunately, carried in little glass capsules. This was a legacy from experiences hi Panama. Each man had his own tin cup, and when he got thirsty he went down and turned the faucet in the hanging skin tank. If he drank any other water he repented in the guard-house. So, though the billets were rude and some- times uncomfortable, the soldiers did stay in them and out of the hospitals. And there were compensations. Half of these were in play-times, and half in work-tunes. The training, slow at first, speeded up afterward and, with the help of the "Blue Devils" who trained with the Americans, took on all the exhilaration of war with none of its dangers. But how they trained doesn't belong in a chapter on billets. How they played is more suitable. WHAT THEY LIVED IN 63 Three-fourths of their playing they did with the French children. The insurmountable French language, which kept doughboys and poilus at arm's length in spite of their best in- dentions, broke down with the youngsters. It was one of the finest sights around the camp to see the big soldiers collecting around the mess-tent after supper, in the daylight- saving long twilight, to hear the band and play in pantomime with the hundreds of children who tagged constantly after them. The band concerts were a regular evening affair, though musically they didn't come to much. Those were the days before anybody had thought to supply the army bands with new music, so "She's My Daisy" and "The Washington Post" made a daily appearance. But the concerts did not want for atten- dance. The soldiers stood around by the hun- dreds, and listened and looked off over the hills to where the guns were rumbling, when- ever the children were not exacting too much attention. This child-soldier combination had just two words. The child said "Hello," which was all 64 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT his English, and the party lasted till the soldier, billet-bound, said "Fee-neesh," which was all his French. But nobody could deny that both of them had a good time. Letter-writing was another favorite sport with the First Division, to the great dole of the censors. Of course the men were homesick. That was one reason. The other was that they had left home as heroes, and they didn't intend to let the glory lapse merely because they had come across to France and been slapped into school. The censors were astounded by what they read . . . gory battles of the day before, terrific air-raids, bombardments of camp, etc. Some of the men told how they had slaughtered Germans with their bare hands. Most of the letters were adjudged harmless, and of little aid or comfort to the enemy, so they were passed through. But some of the families of the First Division must have thought that the War Department was holding out an awful lot on the American public. Mid-July saw the camp in fair working order. The First Division had word that it was pres- ently to be joined by the New England Division WHAT THEY LIVED IN 65 and the Rainbow Division, both National Guardsmen, and representative of every State. American participation began to take shape as a real factor, a stern and sombre business, and all the lighter, easier sides of the expedi- tion began to fall back, and work and grimness came on together. The French Alpine Chasseurs whom the Americans promptly called "chasers" had a party with the Americans on July 14, when the whole day was given over to a picnic, with boxing, wrestling, track sports, and a lot of food. That was the last party in the training-camp till Christmas. The work that began then had no let-up till the first three battalions went into the trenches late in October. The steadily increasing num- ber of men widened the area of the training- camp, but they made no difference in the con- tents of the working-day, nor in the system by which it proceeded. Within the three weeks after the First Division had landed, the work of army-building began. CHAPTER VI GETTING THEIR STRIDE THAT part of France which became America in July, 1917, was of about the shape of a long-handled tennis-racket. The broad oval was lying just behind the fighting-lines. The handle reached back to the sea. Then, to the ruin of the simile, the artillery-schools, the avi- ation-fields, and the base hospitals made excres- cences on the handle, so that an apter symbol would be a large and unshapely string of beads. But France lends itself to pretty exact plotting out. There are no lakes or mountains to dodge, nor particularly big cities to edge over to. In the main, the organizing staffs of the two na- tions could draw lines from the coast to the battle-fields, and say: "Between these two shall America have her habitation and her name." The infantry trained in the Vosges. The artillery -ranges were next behind, and then the 66 GETTING THEIR STRIDE 67 aviation-grounds. The hospitals were placed everywhere along the lines, from field-bases to those far in the rear. And because neither French train service nor Franco-American motor service could bear the giant burden of man-and- supply transportation, the first job to which the engineer and labor units were assigned was laying road-beds across France for a four-track railroad within the American lines. In those days America did not look forward to the emergency which was to brigade her troops with French or British, under Allied Generalissimo Foch. Her plans were to put in a force which should be, as the English say of their flats, "self-contained." If this arrange- ment had a fault, it was that it was too leisurely. It was certainly not lacking on the side of mag- nificence, either in concept or carrying-out. The scheme of bringing not only army but base of supplies, both proportionate to a nation of a hundred million people, was necessarily be- gun from the ground up. The American Army built railroads and warehouses as a matter of course. It laid out training-camps for the various arms of the service on an unheard-of 68 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT scale. As it happens, the original American plan was changed by the force of circumstances. Much of the American man -power eventually was brigaded with the British and French and went through the British and French soldier- making mills. But the territory marked Amer- ica still remains America and the excellent showing made by the War Department in ship- ping men during the spring and early summer of 1918 furnished a supply of soldiers sufficient to make allotments to the Allies directly and at the same time preserve a considerable force as a distinctly American Army. It is possible that the fastest method of preparation possible might have been to brigade with the Allies from the beginning. But it would have been difficult to induce America to accept such a plan if it had not been for the emergency created by the great German drive of the spring of 1918. American engineers were both building rail- roads and running them from July on. The hospital units were installed even earlier. The first work of an army comes behind the lines and a large proportion of the early arrivals of the A. E. F. were non-fighting units. At that GETTING THEIR STRIDE 69 there was no satisfying the early demands for labor. As late as mid-August General Persh- ing was still doing the military equivalent of tearing his hair for more labor units and steve- dores. A small number of negroes employed as civilian stevedores came with the First Division, but they could not begin to fill the needs. Later all the stevedores sent were regularly enlisted members of the army. While the great undertaking was still on paper and the tips of tongues, the infantry was beginning its hard lessons in the Vosges. The First Division was made up of something less than 50 per cent of experienced soldiers, although it was a regular army division. The leaven of learning was too scant. The rookies were all potentiality. The training was done with French soldiers and for the first little while under French officers. A division of Chasseurs Alpines was withdrawn from the line to act as instructors for the Americans, and for two months the armies worked side by side. "You will have the honor," so the French order read, "of spending your permission in training the American troops." This might not seem like 70 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT the pleasantest of all possible vacations for men from the line, but the chasseurs seemed to take to it readily enough. These Chasseurs Alpines the Blue Devils were the finest troops the French had. And if they were to give their American guests some sound instruction later on, they were to give them the surprise of their lives first. The French officer is the most dazzling sight alive, but the French soldier is not. Five feet of height is regarded as an abundance. He got his name of "poilu" not so much from his beard as from his perpetual little black mus- tache. The doughboys called him "Froggy" with ever so definite a sense of condescension. : 'Yes, they look like nothing but you try following them for half a day," said an Ameri- can officer of the "poilus." They have a short, choppy stride, far differ- ent to the gangling gait of the American soldier. The observer who looks them over and decides they would be piffling on the march, forgets to see that they have the width of an opera-singer under the arms, and that they no more get GETTING THEIR STRIDE 71 winded on their terrific sprints than Caruso does on his high C's. And after they had done some stunts with lifting guns by the bayonet tip, and had heaved bombs by the afternoon, the doughboys called in their old opinions and got some new ones. All sorts of things were helping along the in- ternational liking and respect. The prowess of the French soldiers was one of the most im- portant. But the soldiers' interpretation of Pershing's first general order to the troops was another. This order ran: "For the first time in history an American Army finds itself in European territory. The good name of the United States of America and the maintenance of cordial relations require the perfect deportment of each member of this command. It is of the gravest importance that the soldiers of the American Army shall at all times treat the French people, and especially the women, with the greatest courtesy and con- sideration. The valiant deeds of the French Army and the Allies, by which together they have successfully maintained the common cause for three years, and the sacrifices of the civil 72 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT population of France in support of their armies, command our profound respect. This can best be expressed on the part of our forces by uni- form courtesies to all the French people, and by the faithful observance of their laws and customs. The intense cultivation of the soil in France, under conditions caused by the war, makes it necessary that extreme care should be taken to do no damage to private property. The entire French manhood capable of bearing arms is in the field fighting the enemy, and it should, therefore, be a point of honor to each member of the American Army to avoid doing the least damage to any property in France." Veteran soldiers take a general order as a general order, following it literally. Recruits on a mission such as the First Division's took that first general order as a sort of intimation, on which they were to build their own concep- tions of gallantry and good-will. Not only did they avoid doing damage to French property, they minded the babies, drew the well-water, carried faggots, peeled potatoes did anything and everything they found a Frenchwoman doing, if they had some off time. GETTING THEIR STRIDE 73 They fed the children from their own mess,, kept them behind the lines at grenade practice, mended their toys and made them new ones. These things cemented the international friendliness that the statesmen of the two coun- tries had made so much talk of. And by the time the war training was to begin, doughboys and Blue Devils tramped over the long white roads together with nothing more unfriendly left between them than rivalry. The first thing they were set to do was. trench-digging. The Vosges boast splendid meadows. The Americans were told to dig themselves in. The method of training with the French was to mark a line where the trench should be, put the French at one end and the Americans at the other. Then they were to dig toward each other as if the devil was after them, and compare progress when they met. Trench-digging is every army's prize abomi- nation. A good hate for the trenches was the first step of the Americans toward becoming professional. It was said of the Canadians early in the war that though they would die in the last ditch they wouldn't dig it. 74 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT No army but the German ever attempted to make its trenches neat and cosey homes, but even the hasty gully required by the French seemed an obnoxious burden to the doughboy. The first marines who dug a trench with the Blue Devils found that their picks struck a stone at every other blow, and that by the time they had dug deep enough to conceal their length they were almost too exhausted to climb out again. The ten days given over to trench-digging was not so much because the technic was in- tricate or the method difficult to learn. They were to break the spirit of the soldiers and ham- mer down their conviction that they would rather be shot in the open than dig a trench to hide in. They were also to keep the ach- ing backs and weary shoulders from getting overstiff. Toward the end of July the first batch of infantrymen were called off their trenches and were started at bomb practice. At first they used dummy bombs. The little line of Blue Devils who were to start the party picked up their bombs, swung their arms slowly overhead, held them straight from wrist GETTING THEIR STRIDE 75 to shoulder, and let their bombs sail easily up on a long, gentle arc, which presently landed them in the practice trenches. "One two three four," they counted, and away went the bombs. The doughboys laughed. It seemed to them a throw fit only for a woman or a substitute third baseman in the Texas League. When their turn came, the doughboys showed the Blue Devils the right way to throw a bomb. They lined them out with a ton of energy behind each throw, and the bombs went shooting straight through the air, level above the trench-lines, and a distance possibly twice as far as that attained by the Frenchmen. They stood back waiting for the applause that did not come. "The objects are two in bomb-throwing, and you did not make either," said the French in- structor. 'You must land your bomb in the trenches they do no more harm than wind when they fly straight and you must save your arm so that you can throw all afternoon." So the baseball throw was frowned out, and the half -womanish, half-cricket throw was brought in. 76 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT After the doughboys had mastered their method they were put to getting somewhere with it. They were given trenches first at ten metres' distance, and then at twenty. Then there were competitions, and war training bor- rowed some of the fun of a track meet. The French had odds on. No army has ever equalled them for accuracy of bomb-throwing, and the doughboys, once pried loose from their base- ball advantage, were not in a position to push the French for their laurels. The American Army's respect for the French began to have growing-pains. But what with driving hard work, the doughboys learned finally to land a dummy bomb so that it didn't disgrace them. With early August came the live grenades, and the first serious defect in the American's natural aptitude for war-making was turned up. This defect had the pleasant quality of being sentimentally correct, even if sharply reprehensible from the French point of view. It was, in brief, that the soldiers had no sense of danger, and resisted all efforts to implant one, partly from sheer lack of imagination in train- ing, and partly from a scorn of taking to cover. GETTING THEIR STRIDE 77 The live bombs were hurled from deep trenches, aimed not at a point, but at a distance any distance, so it was safe. But once the bombs were thrown, every other doughboy would straighten up in his trench to see what he had hit. Faces were nipped time and again by the fragments of flying steel, and the French heaped admonitions on admonitions, but it was long before the American soldiers would take their war-game seriously. Later, in the mass attacks on "enemy trenches," when they were ordered to duck on the grass to avoid the bullets, the doughboys ducked as they were told, then popped up at once on one elbow to see what they could see. The Blue Devils training with them lay like prone statues. The doughboys looked at them in astonishment, and said, openly and frequently: "But there ain't any bullets." It was finally from the British, who came later as instructors, that the doughboys accepted it as gospel that they must be pragmatic about the dangers, and "act as if . . ." Then some of the wiseacres at the camp pronounced the conviction that the Americans thought the 78 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT French were melodramatic, and by no means to be copied, until they found their British first cousins, surely above reproach for needless emotionalism, were doing the same strange things. The state of mind into which Allied instruc- tors sought to drive or coax the Americans was pinned into a sharp phrase by a Far Western enlisted man before he left his own country. A melancholy relative had said, as he departed : "Are you ready to give your life to your coun- try?" To which the soldier answered: "You bet your neck I'm not Fm going to make some German give his life for his." This was representative enough of the senti- ments of the doughboys, but the instructors ran afoul of their deepest convictions when they insisted that this was an art to be learned, not a mere preference to be favored. After the live bombs came the first lessons in machine-gun fire, using the French machine- gun and automatic rule. The soldiers were taught to take both weapons apart and put them together again, and then they were ordered to fire them. GETTING THEIR STRIDE 79 The first trooper to tackle an automatic rifle aimed the little monster from the trenches, and opened h.-e, but he found to his discom- fiture that he had sprayed the hilltops instead of the range, and one of the officers of the Blue Devils told him he would better be careful or he would be transferred to the anti-aircraft service. The veterans of the army, however, had little trouble with the automatic rifle or the machine- guns, even at first. The target was 200 metres away, at the foot of a hill, and the first of the sergeants to tackle it made 30 hits out of a possible 34. The average for the army fell short of this, but the men were kept at it till they were thor- oughly proficient. One characteristic of all the training of the early days at camp was that both officers and men were being prepared to train later troops in their turn, so that many lectures in war theory and science, a^id many demonstrations of both, were included there. This accounted for much of the additional time required to train the First Division. But while their own training was unusually 80 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT long drawn out, they were being schooled in the most intensive methods in use in either French or British Army. It was an unending matter for disgust to the doughboy that it took him so long to learn to hurry. CHAPTER VII SPEEDING UP WHILE the soldiers were still, figuratively speaking, in their own trenches and learn- ing the several arts of getting out, the officers of the infantry camp were having some special instructions in instructing. Young captains and lieutenants were placed in command of companies of the Blue Devils, and told to put them through their paces in French. It was, of course, a point of honor with the officers not to fall back into English, even in an emergency. One particularly nervous young man, who had ordered his French platoon to march to a cliff some distance away, forgot the word for "Halt*' or "Turn around" as the dis- ciplined Blue Devils, eyes straight ahead, marched firmly down upon their doom. At the very edge, while the American clinched his sticky palms and wondered what miracle would 81 82 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT save him, a helpful French officer called "Halte," and the American suddenly remembered that the word was the same m both languages an experience revoltingly frequent with Americans in distress with their French. But disasters such as this were not numerous. / The officers worked excellently, at French as well as soldiering, and little precious time was needed for them. Three battalions were at work at this first training two American and one French. As these learned their lessons, they were put for- ward to the next ones, and new troops began at the beginning. This plan was thoroughly or- ganized at the very beginning, so that the later enormous influx of troops did not disrupt it, and as the first Americans came nearer to the perfection they were after, they were put back to leaven the raw troops as the French Blue Devils had done for the first of them. The plan further meant that after the first few weeks, what with beginners in the First Division and newly arriving troops, the Vosges fields offered instruction at almost anything along the programme on any given day. SPEEDING UP 83 Over the whole camp, the aim of the French officers was to reproduce actual battle conditions as absolutely as possible, and to eliminate, within reason, any advantage that surprise might give to the Germans. By the end of the first week in August, the best scholars among the trench-diggers and bombers were being shown how to clean out trenches with live grenades, and the machine- gunners and marksmen were getting good enough to be willing to bet their own money on their performances. Then came the battalion problems, the proper use of grenades by men advancing in formations against a mythical enemy in intrenched posi- tions. From the beginning, the American Army re- fused to accept the theory that the war would never again get into the open. They trained in open warfare, and with a far greater zest partly, of course, because it was the thing they knew a^eady, though they found they had some things to unlearn. Then the war brought about a reorganization of American army units, and it was necessary 84 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT for the officers to familiarize themselves with new conditions. The reorganization was or- dered early in August, and put into effect shortly afterward. The request from General Pershing that the administrative units of the infantry be altered to conform with European systems had in its favor the fact that it econ- omized higher officers and regimental staffs, for at the same time that divisions were made smaller, regiments were made larger. The new arrangement of the infantry called for a company of 250 enlisted men and 6 com- missioned officers, instead of 100 men and 3 officers. Each company was then divided into 4 platoons, with a lieutenant in command. Each regiment was made up of 3 battalions of 4 companies each, supplemented by regimental headquarters and the supply and machine- gun organizations. This made it possible to have 1 colonel and 3 battalion commanders officer 3,600 men, as against 2,000 of the old order. This army in the making was not called on to show itself in the mass till August 16, just a month after its hard work had begun. Then SPEEDING UP 85 Major-General Sibert, field -commander of the First Division and best-loved man in France, held a review of all the troops. The manoeu- vres were held in a great open plain. The marching was done to spirited bands, who had to offset a driving rain-storm to keep the men perked up. The physical exercise of the first month showed in the carriage of the men, infi- nitely improved, and they marched admirably, in spite of the fact that their first training had been a specialization in technical trench war- fare. General Sibert made them a short ad- dress of undiluted praise, and they went back to work again. A few days later the army had its first intelli- gence drill, with the result that some erstwhile soldiers were told off to cook and tend mules. The test consisted in delivering oral mes- sages. One message was: "M.ajor Blank sends his compliments to Captain Nameless, and or- ders him to move L Company one-half mile to the east, and support K Company in the at- tack." The officer who gave the message then moved up the hill and prepared to receive it. The third man up came in panting excite- 86 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT aient, full of earnest desire to do well. "Cap- tain, the major says that you're to move your men a mile to the east," he said, "and attack K Company." He peeled the potatoes for supper. The gas tests came late in August. The officers, believing that fear of gas could not be excessive, had done some tall talking before the masks were given out, and in the first test, when the men were to enter a gas-filled cham- ber with their masks on, they had all been as- sured that one whiff would be fatal. The gas in the chamber was of the tear-compelling kind, only temporarily harmful, even on exposure to it. But that was a secret. The men were drilled in putting their masks on, till the worst of them could do it in from three to five seconds. Both the French and the British masks were used, the one much lighter but comparatively riskier than the other. Officers required the men to have their masks constantly within reach, and gas alarms used to be called at meal-times, or whenever it seemed thoroughly inconvenient to have them. The soldiers were required to drop everything SPEEDING UP 87 and don the cumbersome contrivances, no mat- ter how well they knew that there wasn't any gas. There is no question that this thorough- ness saved many lives when the men went into the trenches. When they masked and went into the gas- chamber the care they took with straps and buckles could not have been bettered. One or two of the men fainted from heat and ner- vousness, but nobody caught the temporary blindness that would have been their lot if the gas had not been held off. And after the first few entrants had returned none the worse, the rest made a lark of it, and the whole experience stamped on their minds the uselessness of gas as a weapon if you're handy with the mask. The first insistence on rifle use and marks- manship, which General Pershing was to stress later with all the eloquence he had, was heard in late August. The French said frankly they had neglected the power of the rifle, and the Americans were put to work to avoid the same mistake. In target-shooting with rifles the Americans got their first taste of supremacy. They ceased being novitiates for as long as they 88 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT held their rifles, and became respected and ad- mired experts. The first English Army, "the Old Contemptibles," had all been expert rifle- shots, and, after a period when rifle fire was almost entirely absent from the battle-fields, tacticians began to recall this fact, and the cost it had entailed upon the Germans. So the doughboys added rifle fire to their other jobs. About this time the day of the doughboy was a pattern of compactness, though he called it a harsher name. It began in the training area at five o'clock in the morning. One regiment had a story that some of the farm lads used to beat the buglers up every day and wander about disconsolate, wondering why the morning was being wasted. This was probably fictional. As a rule, five o'clock came all too early. There was little opportunity to roll over and have another wink, for roll-call came at five-thirty, and this was followed by brief setting-up exercises, designed to give the men an ambition for breakfast. At this meal French customs were not popular. The poilu, who begins his day with black coffee SPEEDING UP 89 and a little bread, was always amazed to see the American soldier engaged with griddle-cakes and corned-beef hash, and such other substantial things as he could get at daybreak. Just after breakfast sick-call was sounded. It was up to the ailing man to report at that time as a suf- ferer or forever after hold his peace. While the sick were engaged in reporting themselves the healthy men tidied up. Work proper began at seven. As a rule, bombing, machine-gun, and auto- matic-rifle fire practice came in the mornings. Time was called at eleven and the soldiers marched back to billets for the midday meal. Later, when the work piled up even more, the meals were prepared on the training-grounds. Rifle and bayonet practice came in the after- noon. Four o'clock marked the end of the working-day for all except captains and lieu- tenants, who never found any free time in waking hours. In fact, most of the excited youngsters almost all under thirty let their problems perturb their dreams. The dough- boys amused themselves with swims, walks, concerts, supper, and French children till nine 90 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT o'clock, when they were always amiable toward going to bed. With September came the British to supple- ment the French and, after a little, to go far toward replacing them. For the Blue Devils had still work to do on the Germans, and their "vacation" could not last too long. A fine and spectacular sham battle put a cli- max to the stay of the French, when, after artillery preparation, the Blue Devils took the newly made American trenches, advanc- ing under heavy barrage. The three objectives were named Mackensen, Von Kluck, and Lu- dendorff. The artillery turned everything it had into the slow-moving screen, under which the "chasers" crept toward the foe. All the watching doughboys had been instructed to put on their shrapnel helmets. At the pitch of the battle some officers found their men using their helmets as good front seats for the show, but fortunately there were no casualties. Words do not kill. The departure of the Blue Devils was at- tended by a good deal of home-made ceremony and a universal deep regret. A genuine liking SPEEDING UP 91 had sprung up between the Americans and their French preceptors, and when they marched away from camp the soldiers flung over them what detachable trophies they had, the strains of all their bands, the unified good wishes of the whole First Division, and unnumbered promises to be a credit to their teachers when they got into the line. It was the bayonet which proved the first connecting-link between the Americans and the British. American observers had decided after a lew weeks that the bayonet was a peculiarly British weapon, and hi consequence it was de- cided that for this phase of the training, the army should rely on the British rather than the French. The British General Staff obligingly supplied the chief bayonet instructor of their army with a number of assisting sergeants, and the squad was sent down to camp. The British brought two important things, in addition to expert bayoneting. They were, first, a familiar bluntness of criticism, w r hich the Americans had rather missed with the polite French, and a competitive spirit, stirred up 92 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT wherever possible between rival units of the A. E. F. Their willingness to "act" their practice was another factor, though in that they did not ex- cel the French except in that they could impart it to the Americans. The British theory of bayonet work proved to be almost wholly offensive. They went at their instruction of it with undimmed fire. At the end of the first week, they gave a demon- stration to some visiting officers. Three short trenches had been constructed in a little dip of land, and the spectators stood on the hill above them. On the opposite slope tin cans shone brightly, hoisted on sticks. "Ready, gentlemen," said the drill-sergeant. "Prepare for trench bayonet practice by half sections. You're to take these three lines of trenches, lay out every Boche in the lot, and then get to cover and fire six rounds at them 'ere tin hats. Don't waste a shot, gentlemen, every bullet a Boche. Now, then, ready over the top, and give 'em 'ell, right in the stomach." Over the top they went and did as they were told. But the excitement was not great enough SPEEDING UP 93 to please the drill-sergeant. He turned to the second section, and put them through at a rounder pace. Then he took over some young officers, who were being instructed to train later troops, at cleaning out trenches. Sacks representing Germans were placed in a com- municating trench. "Now, remember, gentlemen," said the ser- geant, "there's a Fritz in each one of these 'ere cubby-'oles, and 'e's no dub, is Fritz. 'E's got ears all down 'is back. Make your feet pneumatic. For 'eaven's sake, don't sneeze, or 'is nibs will sling you a bomb like winkin', and there'll be a narsty mess. Ready, Number One ! 'Ead down, bayonet up ... it's no use stickin' out your neck to get a sight of Fritzie in 'is 'ole. Why, if old Fritz was there, Vd just down your point, and then where'd you be ? Why, just a blinkin' casualty, and don't you forget it. Ready again, bayonet up. Now you see 'em. Quick, down with your point and at 'im. Tickle 'is gizzard. Not so bad, but I bet you waked 'is nibs in the next 'ole. Keep in mind you're fightin' for your life. . . ." By the time the officers were into the trench, the excitement was terrific. 94 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT It was such measures as these that made the bayonet work go like lightning, and cut down the time required at it by more than one- half. The organized recreation and the competi- tions, two sturdy British expedients for morale, always came just after these grimmest of all of war's practices. The more foolish the game, the more rapturously the British joined in it. Red Rover and prisoner's base were two prime favorites. A British major said the British Army had discovered that when the men came out of the trenches, fagged and horror-struck, the surest way to bring them back was to set them hard at playing some game remembered from their childhood. The British had even harder work, at first, to make the men fall in with the games than they had with war practice. But the friendly spirit existing basically between English and Americans, however spatty their exterior re- lationships may sometimes be, finally got every- body in together. The Americans found that a British instructor would as lief call them "rot- ten" if he thought they deserved it, but that SPEEDING UP 95 he did it so simply and inoffensively that it was, on the whole, very welcome. So the Americans learned all they could from French and British, and began the scheme of ' turning back on themselves, and doing their own instructing. The infantry camp was destined to have some offshoots, as the number of men grew larger, and the specialists required intensive work. Officers* schools sprang up all over France, and all the supplemental forces, which had in- fantry training at first, scattered off to their special training, notably the men trained to throw gas and liquid fire. But, for the most part, the camp in the Vosges remained the big central mill it was designed to be, and in late October, when three battalions put on their finishing touches in the very battle- line, the cycle was complete. Before the time when General Pershing offered the Expedition- ary Force to Generalissimo Foch, to put where he chose, the giant treadway from sea to camp and from camp to battle was grinding in mon- ster rhythms. It never thereafter feared any influx of its raw material. CHAPTER VIII BACK WITH THE BIG GUNS American Expeditionary Force which went into the great training-schools of France and England was like nothing so much as a child who, having long been tutored in a programme of his own make, an abundance of what he liked and nothing of what he didn't, should be thrust into some grade of a public school. He would be ridiculously advanced in mathematics and a dunce at grammar, or his- torian to his finger-tips and ignorant that two and two make four. He would amaze his fellow pupils in each respect equally. And that was the lot of the Expeditionary Force. The French found them backward in trench work and bombing, and naturally enough expected that backwardness to follow through. They conceded the natural quickness of the pupils, but saw a long road ahead before they could become an army. Then the Americans tackled artillery, hardest and deepest of the 96 BACK WITH THE BIG GUNS 97 war problems, and suddenly blossomed out as experts. Of course, the analogy is not to be leaned on too heavily. The Americans were not, on the instant, the arch-exponents of artillery in all Europe. But it is true that in comparison to the size of their army, and to the extent to which they had prepared nationally for war, their artillery was stronger than that of any other country on the Allied side at the begin- ning of the war, notwithstanding that it was the point where they might legitimately have been expected to be the weakest. Hilaire Belloc called the American artillery preparation one of the most dramatic and wel- come surprises of the war. It must be understood that all this applies only to men and not in the least to guns. For big guns, the American reliance was wholly upon France and England, upon the invitation of those two countries when America entered the war. And the readiness of America's men was not due to a large preparation in artillery as such. The blessing arose from the fact that the coast 98 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT defense could be diverted, within the first year of war, to the handling of the big guns for land armies, and thus strengthen the artillery arm sent to France for final training. Artillery was every country's problem, even in peace-times. It was the service which re- quired the greatest wealth and the most pro- found training. There was no such thing as a citizenry trained to artillery. Mathematics was its stronghold, and no smattering could be made to do. Even more than mathematics was the facility of handling the big guns when mathematics went askew from special condi- tions. These things the coast defense had, if not in final perfection, at least in creditable degree. And the diversion of it to the artillery in France stiffened the backbone of the Expeditionary Force to the pride of the force and the glad amazement of its preceptors. One other thing the coast defense had done: it had pre-empted the greater part of America's attention in times of peace and unprepared- ness, so that big-gun problems had received a disproportionate amount of study. The Ameri- BACK WITH THE BIG GUNS 99 can technical journals on artillery were always of the finest. The war services were honey- combed with men who were big-gun experts. So when the first artillery training-school opened in France, in mid-August of 1917, the problems to be faced were all of a more or less external character. The first of these, of course, was airplane work. The second was in mastering gun differ- ences between American and French types, and in learning about the enormous numbers of new weapons which had sprung from battle almost day by day. The camp, when the Americans moved in, had much to recommend it to its new inhabi- tants. There need be no attempt to conceal the fact that first satisfaction came with the barracks, second with the weather, and only third with the guns and planes. Some of the artillerymen had come from the infantry camps, and some direct from the coast. Those from the Vosges camp were bois- terous in their praise of their quarters. They had brick barracks, with floors, and where they were billeted v/ith the French they found excel- 100 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT lent quarters in the old, low-lying stone and brick houses. The weather would not have been admired by any outsider. But to the men from the Vosges it owed a reputation, be- cause they extolled it both day and night. The artillery camp was in open country, to permit of the long ranges, and if it sunned little enough, neither did it rain. The guns and airplanes supplied by the French were simple at first, becoming, as to guns at least, steadily more numerous and complicated as the training went on. The men began on the seventy-fives, approxi- mately the American three-inch gun, and on the howitzers of twice that size. The airplane service was the only part of the work wholly new to the men, and, naturally enough, it was the most attractive. Although the officers and instructors warned that air observation and range-finding was by far the most dangerous of all artillery service, seventy-five per cent of the young officers who were eligible for the work volunteered for it. This required a two-thirds weeding out, and in- sured the very pick of men for the air crews. BACK WITH THE BIG GUNS 101 The air service with artillery was made over almost entirely by the French between the time of the war's beginning and America's en- trance. All the old visual aids were abolished, such as smoke-pointers and rockets, and the telephone and wireless were installed in their stead. The observation -balloons had the tele- phone service, and the planes had wireless. By these means the guns were first fired and then reported on. The general system of range- finding was: "First fire long, then fire short, then split the bracket." This was the joint job of planes and gunners one not to be de- spised as a feat. In fact, artillery is, of all services, 'the one most dependent on co-operation. It is always a joint job, but the joining must be done among many factors. Its effectiveness depends first upon the pre- cision of the mathematical calculation which goes before the pull of the lanyard. This calcu- lation is complicated by the variety of types of guns and shells, and, in the case of howitzers, by the variable behavior of charges of different size and power. But these are things that can 102 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT be learned with patience, and require knowledge rather than inspiration. It is when the air service enters that inspira- tion enters with it. Observation must be ac- curate, in spite of weather, visibility, enemy camouflage, and everything else. More than that, the observer in the plane must keep him- self safe often a matter of sheer genius. The map-maker must do his part, so that targets not so elusive as field-guns and motor- emplacements can be found without much help from the air. Finally, the artillery depends, even more than any other branch of the service, on the rapidity with which its wants can be filled from the rear. The mobility of the big pieces, and their con- stant connections with ammunition-stores, are matters depending directly on the training of the artillerymen. These, then, were the things in which the Americans were either tested or trained. Their mathematics were Al, as has been noted, and their familiarity with existing models of big guns sufficient to enable them to pick up the new types without long effort. BACK WITH THE BIG GUNS 103 They had a few weeks of heavy going with pad and pencil, then they were led to the giant stores of French ammunition more than any of them had ever seen before and told to open fire. One dramatic touch exacted by the French instructors was that the guns should be pointed toward Germany, no matter how impotent their distance made them. Long lanes, up to 12,000 metres, were told off for the ranges. The training was intensive, because at that time there was a half-plan to put the artillery first into the battle-line. In any case it is easier to make time on secondary problems than on primary. Throughout September, while the artillery- men grew in numbers as well as proficiency, the mastering of gun types was perfected, and the theory of aim was worked out on paper. Late in the month the French added more guns, chief among them being a monster mounted on railway-trucks whose projectile weighed 1,800 pounds. The artillerymen named her "Mosquito," "because she had a sting," al- though she had served for 300 charges at Verdun. It was not long before every type of gun in 104 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT the French Army, and many from the British, were lined up in the artillery camp, being ex- pertly pulled apart and reassembled. By the time the artillery went into battle with the infantry, failing in their intention to go first alone, but nevertheless first in actual fighting, they were able to give a fine account of themselves. By the time they had got back to camp and were training new troops from then* own experience, they were the centre of an extraordinary organization. The rolling of men from camp to battle and back again, training, retraining, and fighting in the circle, with an increasing number of men able to remain in the line, and a constantly increasing number of new men permitted to come in at the beginning, ground out an ad- mirable system before the old year was out. The fact that the artillery-school could not take its material raw did not make the hitches it otherwise would, chiefly, of course, because of the coast defense, and somewhat because Ameri- can college men were found to have a fine sub- stratum of technical knowledge which artillery could turn to account. BACK WITH THE BIG GUNS 105 After all the routine was fairly learned, and there had been a helpful interim in the line, the artillery practised on some specialties, partly of their own contribution, and partly those suggested by the other armies. One of these, the most picturesque, was the shattering of the "pill-boxes," German inven- tions for staying in No Man's Land without being hit. A "pill-box" is a tiny concrete fortress, set up in front of the trenches, usually in groups of fifteen to twenty. They have slot-like aper- tures, through which Germans do their sniping. They are supposed to be immune from any- thing except direct hit by a huge shell. But the American artillery camp worked out a way of getting them with luck. Each aperture, through which the German inmates sighted and shot, was put under fire from automatic rifles, coming from several directions at once, so that it was indiscreet for the Boche to stay near his windows, on any slant he could devise. Under cover of this rifle barrage, bombers crept for- ward, and at a signal the rifle fire stopped, and the bombers threw their destruction in. 106 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT All these accomplishments, which did not take overlong to learn, enhanced the natural value of the American artilleryman. He be- came, in a short time, the pride of the army and a warmly welcomed mainstay to the Allies. Major-General Peyton C. March, who took the artillery to France and commanded them in their days of organization, before he was called back to be Chief of Staff at Washington, was always credited, by his men, with being three-fourths of the reason why they made such a showing. General March always cred- ited the matter to his men. At any rate, be- tween them they put their country's best foot foremost for the first year of America in France, and they served as optimism centres even when distress over other delays threatened the stout- est hearts. CHAPTER IX THE EYES OF THE ARMY ,4 MERICA'S beginnings in the air service jT\ were pretty closely kin to her other be- ginnings she furnished the men and took over the apparatus. And although by September 1, 1917, she had large numbers of aviators in the making in France, they were flying or aspiring to in French schools, under American supervision, with French machines and French instructors. There existed, in prospect, and already in detailed design, several enormous flying-fields, to be built and equipped by America, as well as *half a dozen big repair-shops, and one gigantic % * 'combination repair-shop, assembling-shop, and manufacturing plant. But in the autumn, when there were aviators waiting in France to go up that very day, there was no waiting on fields trimmed by America. When the main school, under American super- 107 108 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT vision, had filled to overflowing, the remaining probationers were scattered among the French schools under French supervision. Meanwhile, the engineers and stevedores shared the work of constructing "the largest aviation-field in the world'* in central France. It was once true of complete armies that they could be trained to warfare in then* own home fields, and then sent to whatever part of the world happened to be in dispute, and they required no more additional furbishing up than a short rest from the journey. That is no longer true of anything about an army except the air service, and it isn't literally true of them. But they approach it. So it was practicable to give the American aviators nine-tenths of their training at home, and leave the merest frills to a few spare days in France. This, of course, takes no account of the first weeks at the battle-front, which are only nominally training, since in the course of them a flier may well have to battle for his life, and often does catch a German, if he chances on one as untutored as himself. The French estimate of the necessary time to THE EYES OF THE ARMY 109 make an aviator is about four months before he goes up on the line, and about four months in patrol, on the line, before he is a thoroughly capable handler of a battle-plane. They cap that by saying that an aviator is born, not made, anyway, and that "all generalizations about them are untrue, including this one." The air policy of France, however, was in a state of great fluidity at this time. They were not prepared to lay down the law, because they were in the very act of giving up their own romantic, adventurous system of single-man combat, and were borrowing the German sys- tem of squadron formation. They were re- luctant enough to accept it, let alone acknowl- edge their debt to the Germans. But the old knight-errantry of the air could not hold up against the new mass attacks. And the French are nothing if not practical. Even their early war aviators had prudence dinned into them that prudence which does not mean a niggardliness of fighting spirit, but rather an abstaining from foolhardiness. Each aviator was warned that if he lost his life before he had to, he was not only squander- 110 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT ing his own greatest treasure, but he was leav- ing one man less for France. This was the philosophy of the training- school. If the French were impatient with a flier who lost his life to the Germans through excess of friskiness, they were doubly so at the flier who endangered his life at school through heedlessness. "If you pull the wrong lever," they said, "y u will kill a man and wreck a machine. Your country cannot afford to pay, either, for your fool mistakes." But there their dogma ended. Once the flier had learned to handle his machine, his further behavior was in the hands of American officers solely, and these, he found, were stored with several very definite ideas. The first of these the most marked distinc- tion between the French system and the Ameri- can was that all American aviators should know the theories of flying and most of its mathematics. Concerning these things the French cared not a hang. Neither did the American aviators. But THE EYES OF THE ARMY 111 they toed the mark just the same, and many a youngster gnawed his pencil indoors and cursed the fate that had placed him with a country so finicky about air-currents on paper and so in- different to the joys of learning by ear. The Americans accepted from the beginning the edict on squadron flying. It was as much a part of their training as field-manoeuvres for the infantry. And because they had no golden days of derring-do to look back upon, they did less grumbling. Besides, there was always the chance of getting lost, and patrols offered some good opportunities to the venturesome. The air service had at this time an extra dis- tinction. They were the only arm of America's service that had really impressed the Germans. The German experts, as they spoke through their newspapers, were contemptuous of the army and all its works. They maintained that it would be impossible for American transports to bring more than half a million men to France, if they tried forever, because the submarines would add to the inherent difficulties, and make "American participation" of less actual men- ace than that of Roumania. OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT The Frankfurter Zeitung said: "There is no doubt that the Entente lay great stress on American assistance on this point (air warfare). Nor do we doubt that the technical resources of the enemy will achieve brilliant work in this branch. But all this has its limits ... in this field, superiority in numbers is by no means de- cisive. Quality and the men are what decide." Major Hoffe, of the German General Staff, wrote in the Weser Zeitung: "The only Ameri- can help seriously to be reckoned with is aerial aid." There was a quantity of such talk. Inci- dentally, the same experts who limited Ameri- ca's troops to half a million in France at the most indulgent estimate, said, over and over, that a million were to be feared, just the num- ber announced to be in France by President Wilson one year from the time of the first de- barkation. The aviators worked hard enough to deserve the German honor. In the French school supervised by the Americans the schedule would have furnished Dickens some fine material for pathos. THE EYES OF THE ARMY 113 The day began at 4 A. M., with a little coffee for an eye-opener. The working-day began in the fields at 5 sharp. If the weather permitted there were flights till 11, when the pupil knocked off for a midday meal. He was told to sleep then till 4 in the afternoon, when flying re- commenced, and continued till 8.30. The rest of his time was all his own. He spent it get- ting to bed. There was an average of four months under this regime. The flier began on the ground, and for weeks he was permitted no more than a dummy machine, which wobbled along the ground like a broken-winged duck, and this he used to learn levers and mechanics those things he had toiled over on paper before he was even allowed on the field. After a while he was permitted in the air with an instructor, and finally alone. There were creditably few disasters. For months there was never a casualty. But if a man had an accident it was a perfectly open-and-shut affair. Either he ruined himself or he escaped. It was part of the French system with men who escaped to send them right back into the air, 114 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT as soon as they could breathe, so that the acci- dent would not impair their flying-nerves. After the three or four months of foundation work, if the term is not too inept for flying, the aviator had his final examination, a triangular flight of about ninety miles, with three land- ings. The landings are the great trick of fly- ing. Like the old Irish story, it isn't the fall- ing that hurts you, it's the sudden stop. If the pupil made his landings with accuracy he was passed on to the big school at Pau, where acrobatics are taught. The flight acro- bat was the ace, the armies found. And no man went to battle till he could do spiral, ser- pentine, and hairpin turns, could manage a tail spin, and "go into a vrille" a corkscrew fall which permitted the flier to make great haste from where he was, and yet not lose con- trol of his machine, at the same time that he made a tricky target for a Boche machine-gun . While all this training was going on the ranks of American aviators were filling in at the top. The celebrated Lafayette Escadrille, the Amer- ican aviators who joined the French Army at the beginning of the war, was taken into the THE EYES OF THE ARMY 115 American Army in the late summer. Then all the Americans who were hi the French avia- tion service who had arrived by way of the Foreign Legion were called home. These were put at instructing for a time, then their several members became the veteran core of later American squadrons. This air unit was finally placed at 12 fliers and 250 men, and be- fore Christmas there was a goodly number of them, a number not to be told till the care-free and uncensored days after the war. By the beginning of the new year American aviation-fields were taking shape. The engi- neers had laid a spur of railroad to link the larg- est of them with the main arteries of communi- cation, and the labor units had built the same sort of small wooden city that sprang up all over America as cantonments. There were roomy barracks, a big hall where chapel services alternated with itinerant enter- tainers, a little newspaper building, plenty of office-barracks with typewriters galore and the little models on which aviators learn their pre- liminary lessons. There is one training-field six miles long and 116 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT a mile and a half wide, where all kinds of in- struction is going on, even to acrobatics. And there are several large training-schools just behind the fighting-lines, which have plenty of visiting Germans to practise on. The enormity of the American air programme made it a little unwieldy at first, and it got a late start. But on the anniversary of its be- ginning it had unmeasured praise from official France, and even before that the French news- papers had loudly sung its praises. The American aviator as an individual was a success from the beginning. He has unsur- passed natural equipment for an ace, and his training has been unprecedented^ thorough. And he has dedicated his spirit through and through. He has set out to make the Germans see how wise they were to be afraid. CHAPTER X THE SCHOOLS FOR OFFICERS THE first economy effected after the broad sweep of training was in swing was to segregate the officers for special training, and these officers' schools fell into two types. First, there was the camp for the young com- missioned officers from Plattsburg, and similar camps in America, to give them virtually the same training as the soldiers had, but at a sharper pace, inclusive also of more theory, and to in- crease their executive ability in action; second, there was the school established by General Pershing, late in the year, through which non- commissioned officers could train to take com- missions. Of the first type, there were many, of the second, only one. The camp for the Plattsburg graduates which turned its men first into the fighting was one having about 300 men, situated in the south of 117 118 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT France, where the weather could do its mini- mum of impeding. These youngsters arrived in September, and they were fighting by Thanksgiving. The next batch took appreciably less time to train, partly because the organization had been tried out and perfected on the first contingent, and partly because they were destined for a longer stay in the line before they were hauled back for train- ing others. This process was duplicated in scores of schools throughout France, so that the Expeditionary Force, what with its re- organization to require fewer officers, and its complementary schools, never lacked for able leadership. The first school was under command of Major- General Robert Bullard, a veteran infantry officer with long experience in the Philippines ito draw on, and a conviction that the proper 1 time for men to stop work was when they dropped of exhaustion. His officers began their course with a battalion of French troops to aid them, and they were put into company formation, of about 75 men to the company, just as the humble doughboy was. THE SCHOOLS FOR OFFICERS 119 They were all infantry officers, who were to take command as first and second lieutenants, but they specialized in whatever they chose. They were distinguished by their hat-bands: white for bayonet experts, blue for the liquid- fire throwers, yellow for the machine-gunners, red for the rifle-grenadiers, orange for the hand- grenadiers, and green for the riflemen. These indicated roughly the various things they were taught there, in addition to trench-digging and the so-called battalion problems, recogniza- ble to the civilian as team-work. Their work was not of the fireside or the li- brary. It was the joint opinion of General Pershing, General Sibert, and General Billiard that the way to learn to dig a trench was to dig it, and that nothing could so assist an officer in directing men at work as having first done the very same job himself. They had a permanent barracks which had once housed young French officers, in pre-war days, and they had a generous Saturday-to- Monday town leave. These two benefactions, plus their tidal waves of enthusiasm, carried them through the her- 120 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT culean programme devised by General Bullard and the assisting French officers and troops. They began, of course, with trench-digging, and followed with live grenades, machine-guns, automatic rifles, service-shells, bayonet work, infantry formation for attack, and gas tests. Then they were initiated into light and fire signals, star-shells, gas-bombing, and liquid fire. Last, they came in on the rise of the wave of rifle popularity, and trained at it even more intensively than the first of the doughboys. "The rifle is the American weapon," was Gen- eral Pershing's constant reiteration, "and it has other uses than as a stick for a bayonet." But efficacious as schools of this type were, there was a need they did not meet, a need first practical, then sentimental, and equally valu- able on both counts. This was the training for the man from the ranks. The War College hi America, acting in one of its rare snatches of spare time, had ordered a school for officers in America to which any enlisted man was eligible. General Pershing overhauled this arrange- ment in one particular: he framed his school hi 121 France so that nothing lower than a corporal could enter it. This was on the theory that a man in the ranks who had ability showed it soon enough, and was rewarded by a non-com, rank. That was the tune when the way ahead should rightfully be opened to him. This school commenced its courses just be- fore Christmas, with everything connected with it thoroughly worked out first. The commissions it was entitled to bestow w r ent up to the rank of major. Scholars entered it by recommendation of their superior officers, which were forwarded by the commanders of divisions or other separate units, and by the chiefs of departmental staffs, to the com- mander-in-chief. Before these recommenda- tions could be made, the record of the applicant must be scanned closely, and his efficiency rated if he were a linesman, by fighting quality, and if in training still or behind the lines, by efficiency in all other duties. Then he entered and fared as it might hap- pen. If he succeeded, his place was waiting for him at his graduation, as second lieutenant in a replacement division. 122 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT Enormous numbers of these replacement divi- sions had to be held behind the lines. From them, all vacancies occurring in the combat units in the lines were filled. And rank, within them, proceeded in the same manner as in any other division. Their chief difference was that there was no limit set upon the number of second lieutenants they could include, so that promotions waited mainly for action to earn them. Within the combat units, the vacancies were to be filled two-thirds by men in line of promo- tion within the unit itself, and one-third from the replacement divisions. The replacement division's higher officers were those recovered from wounds, who had lost their place in line, and those who had not yet had any assignments. To keep up a suffi- cient number of replacement divisions, the arriving depot battalions were held to belong with them. This school was located near the fighting-line, and its instructors were preponderantly Amer- ican. It put the " stars of the general into the pri- THE SCHOOLS FOR OFFICERS 123 vate's knapsack," and began the great mill of officer-making that the experiences of other armies had shown to be so tragically necessary. Needless to say, it was packed to overflowing 'from its first day. CHAPTER XI SOME DISTINGUISHED VISITORS SO satisfactory to itself was the progress of the American Expeditionary Force hi be- coming an army that by the end of its first month of training it was ready for important visitors. True, the first to come was one who would be certain to understand the force's initial difficulties, and who would also be able to help as well as inspect. He was General Petain, Commander-in-Chief of the French Army, and he came for inspection of both French and American troops on August 19, three days after General Sibert had had a family field-day to take account of his troops. General Petain came down with General Pershing, and the first inspection was of billets. Then the two generals reviewed the Alpine Chasseurs, and General Petain awarded some medals which had been due since the month before, when the Blue Devils were in the line. After General Petain 's visit with the Ameri- 124 SOME DISTINGUISHED VISITORS 125 can troops, he recommended their training and their physique equally, and said: "I think the American Army will be an admirable fight- ing force within a short time." This was also General Pershing's day for learning his first session with one of his most difficult tasks. He had to follow the example of General Petain, and kiss the children, and accept the bouquets thrust upon both generals by all the little girls of the near-by Vosges towns. General Pershing did better with the kissing as his day wore on, though its foreignness to his experience was plain to the end. But with the bouquets he was an outright failure. Gra- ciously as he might accept them, the holding of them was much as a doughboy might hold his first armful of live grenades. The camp's next distinguished visitor was Georges Clemenceau, the veteran French states- man who was soon to be Premier of France. Clemenceau saw American troops that day for the second time, the first having been when, as a young French senator, he watched General Grant's soldiers march into Richmond. 126 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT He recalled to the sons and grandsons of those dusty warriors how inspired a sight it had been, and he added that he hoped to see the present generation march into Berlin. When Clemenceau talked to the doughboys, however, he had more than old memories with which to stir them. He has a graceful, com- plete command of the English language, in which he made the two or three addresses inter- spersed in the full programme of his stay. In one speech M. Clemenceau said: "I feel highly honored at the privilege of addressing you. I know America well, having lived in your country, which I have always admired, and I am deeply impressed by the presence of an American army on French soil, in defense of liberty, right, and civilization, against the bar- barians. My mind compares this event to the Pilgrim Fathers, who landed on Plymouth Rock, seeking liberty and finding it. Now their chil- dren's children are returning to fight for the liberty of France and the world. "You men have come to France with disin- terested motives. You came not because you were compelled to come, but because you wished SOME DISTINGUISHED VISITORS 127 to come. Your country always had love and friendship for France. Now you are at home here, and every French house is open to you. You are not like the people of other nations, because your motives are devoid of personal interest, and because you are filled with ideals. You have heard of the hardships before you, but the record of your countrymen proves that you will acquit yourselves nobly, earning the gratitude of France and the world." At the end of this speech General Sibert said to the men who had heard it: "You will hence- forth be known as the Clemenceau Battalion." That was the first unit of the American Army to have any designation other than its number. Another civilian visitor was next, though he was civilian only in the sense that he had neither task nor uniform of the army. He was Ray- mond Poincare, President of the French Repub- lic, the leader of the French "bitter-enders," and sometimes called the stoutest-hearted sol- dier France has ever had. President Poincare made a thorough inspec- tion. He, too, began with the billets, but he was not content to see them from the outside. 128 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT In fact, the first that one new major-general saw of him was the half from the waist down, the other half being obscured by the floor of the barn attic he was peering into. President Poincare made cheering speeches to the men, for the force of which they were obliged to rely upon his gestures and his into- nations, since he spoke no English. But his sense was not wholly lost to the doughboys. At the peak of one of the President's most soar- ing flights those who understood French inter- rupted to applaud him. "What did he say?" asked a doughboy. "He said to give 'em hell," said another. Fourth, and last, of the great Frenchmen, and greatest, from the soldier point of view, was Marshal Joffre, Marne hero, who came and spent a night and a day at camp. It was mid-October when he came, and weeks of driving rain had preceded him. In spite of their gloom over the weather, the doughboys were eagerly anticipating the visit of Joffre, and they were wondering if the man of many battles would think them worth standing in the rain to watch. SOME DISTINGUISHED VISITORS 129 A detachment of French buglers buglers A^hom the Americans could never sufficiently admire or imitate, because they could twirl the bugles between beats and take up their blasts with neither pitch nor time lost waited outside the quarters where the marshal was to spend the night. Half an hour before his motor came up the sun broke through the drizzle. "He brings it with him," said a doughboy. Marshal Joffre was accompanied by General Pershing, the Pershing personal staff and Joffre's aide, Lieutenant-Colonel Jean Fabry, who was with the French Mission in America. There were ovations in all the French villages through which they passed, and there were uproarious cheers when the party reached the American officers who were to be addressed by Marshal Joffre. In his short speech he said that America had come to help deliver humanity from the yoke of German insolence, and added: "Let us be united. Victory surely will be ours." Later, after picked men had shown Joffre what they could do with grenades and bayo- nets, the marshal made a short speech to them, telling them of how his visit to America had 130 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT cheered and strengthened him, and how even greater was the stimulation he had had from seeing the Americans train in France. In a statement to the Associated Press he said: "I have been highly gratified by what I have seen to-day. I am confident that when the time comes for American troops to go into the trenches and meet the enemy they will give the same excellent account of themselves in action as they did to-day in practice." Northcliffe came in December, with Colonel House and members of the House Mission. He wrote a long impression of his visit for the English at home, in which he said that the fin- est sight he saw was the American rifle prac- tice, in which the United States troops did ex- ceptionally well. Then he praised them for their mastery of the British type of trench mortar, for their accuracy with grenades and, most significant of all, for their able handling of themselves after the bombs were thrown, so that they should have a maximum of safety in battle. The doughboys had finally learned their hardest lesson. Sir Walter Roper Lawrence, who was coming SOME DISTINGUISHED VISITORS 131 to America on a special war mission, went to camp in early December to see how the dough- boys fared, so that he might report on them at home. He had just inquired of General Sir Julian Byng, who had accidentally had the assistance of some American engineers at Cambrai, what they should be valued at, and Sir Julian had answered: "Very earnest, very modest, and very helpful." "I must say that is my opinion, too.'' said Sir Walter, when he came to camp. "They are fine fellows to look at as good-looking sol- diers as any man might wish to see. They have a wonderfully springy step, m^cn more springy than one sees in other soldiers. They are clean, well set up, and they are always cheerful. They are splendidly fed and well quartered, and they are desperately keen to learn, and as desperately keen to get into the thick of things. If they seem to have any worries it is that they are not getting in as quickly as they would like to. "The American troops have everywhere made a decidedly favorable impression. I am ex- 132 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT tremely proud of my British citizenship, I have been all my life, but if I were an American I would be insufferably proud of my citizenship. In all history there is nothing that approaches her transporting such an enormous army so great a distance oversea to fight for an ideal." After the new year W. A. Appleton, secre- tary of the General Federation of Trades Unions in England, made a visit to France, and de- scribed the American camps for his own pub- lic through the Federation organ. "I see everywhere," he wrote, "samples of the Ajnerican armies that we are expecting will enable the Allies to clear France of the Germans. Most of the men are fine specimens of humanity, and those with whom I spoke showed no signs of braggadocio, too frequently attributed to America. They were quiet, well- spoken fellows, fully alive to the seriousness of the task they have undertaken, and they ap- parently have but one regret that they had not come into the war soon enough. It was pleasant to talk to these men and to derive encouragement from their quiet, unobtrusive strength." SOME DISTINGUISHED VISITORS 133 These were the things which were playing upon public opinion in France and England, reinforcing the good-will with which the first American soldiers were welcomed there. When United States soldiers paraded again in the streets of London, late in the spring of 1918, and when they marched down the new Avenue du President Wilson in Paris, on July 4, 1918, the greetings to them had lost in hysteria and grown in depth, till the magnitude of the demonstrations and the quality of them drew amazement from the oldest of the old stagerg. CHAPTER XH THE MEN WHO DID EVERYTHING IF the American Expeditionary Force had landed in the middle of the Sahara Desert instead of France, it would not have been under greater necessity to do things for itself, and immediately. For even where the gallant French were entirely willing to pull their belts in one more notch and make provision for the newcomers, the moral obligation not to permit their further sacrifice was enormous. And although, as it happened, there were many things, at first, in which the A. E. F. was obliged to ask French aid, this number was speedily cut down and finally obliterated. The men on whom fell the largest burden of making American troops self-sufficing in the first half-year of war, were the nine regiments of engineers recruited in nine chief cities of America before General Pershing sailed. They were officered to a certain extent by Regular Army engineers, but more by railroad officials 134 THE MEN WHO DID EVERYTHING 135 who were recruited at the same time from all the large railroads of America. And they operated what roads they found, and built more, till finally, after a year, during which they had assistance from the army en- gineers and a fair number of labor and special units, they had created in France a railroad equal to any one of the middle-sized roads of long standing in this country, with road-beds, rolling-stock, and equipment equal to the best, and railway terminals which, in the case of one of their number, rivalled the port of Hamburg. These were the men who were first to arrive in Europe after General Pershing, who beat them over by only a few days. They were not fighting units, so that they did not dim the glory of the Regulars, though they had the honor to carry the American army uniform first through the streets of London. They were the first of the army in the battle- line, too, though again their civilian pursuit, though failing to serve to protect them against German attack, deprived them of the flag- flying and jubilation that attended the inf an try- men and artillerymen in late October. 136 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT But though their public honor was so limited, their private honor with the Expeditionary Force was without stint. It was "the engineers here*' and "the engineers there" till it must have seemed to them that they were carrying the burden of the entire world. On May 6, 1917, the War Department issued this statement: "The War Department has sent out orders for the raising, as rapidly as possible, of nine additional regiments of engi- neers which are destined to proceed to France at the earliest possible moment, for work on the lines of communication. . . . All details re- garding the force will be given out as fast as compatible with the best public interests." The recruiting-points were New York, Chi- cago, St. Louis, Boston, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Atlanta, San Francisco, and Philadelphia. It was the job of each city to provide a regiment. And it became the job of the great railway brotherhoods to see that neither the kind nor the number of men accepted would cripple the railways at home. The War Department asked for 12,000 men, and had offers of about four times that many. THE MEN WHO DID EVERYTHING 137 The result was, of course, that the 9 regiments were men of magnificent physique and sterling equipment. One regiment boasted 125 mem- bers who measured more than 6 feet. Their first official task was to help to repair and man the French railways leading up to the lines, carrying food for men and guns. Their next was to build and man the rail- ways which were to connect the American sea- port with the training-camps, and last, with the fighting-line itself. The promise of immediate action in France was fulfilled to the letter. Two months from the day the recruiting began, the "Lucky 13th," the regiment recruited in Chicago, landed in a far-away French town, whose inhabitants leaned out of their windows in the late, still night, to throw them roses and whispers of good cheer anything louder than whispers being under a ban because of the nearness to the front and the day following, with French crews at their elbows, they were running French trains up and down the last line of communications. These were men who had years of railroading behind them. Many of them were officered by 138 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT the same men who had been their directors in civil life. It was no uncommon thing to hear a private address his captain by his first name. One day a private said to his captain. "Bill, you got all the wrong dope on this," to which the captain replied severely: "I told you before about this discipline if you want to quarrel with my orders, you call me mister." But military discipline was never a real love with the engineers. " What's military discipline to us ? We got Rock Island discipline," said a brawny first lieutenant, when, because he was a fellow passenger on a train with a correspon- dent, he felt free to speak his mind. "I won't say it's not all right in its way, but it's not a patch on what we have in a big yard. A man obeys in his sleep, for he knows if he don't somebody's life may have to pay for it not his own, either, which would make it worse. That's Rock Island. But it don't involve any salutin', or 'if-you-pleasin'.' If my fellows say 'Torn' I don't pay any attention, unless there's some officer around." This attitude toward discipline characterizes all the special units to a certain degree, though THE MEN WHO DID EVERYTHING 139 the engineers somewhat more than the rest, for the reason that they had to offer not a mere negation of discipline but a substitute of their own. But, whatever their sentiments tow r ard their incidental job as soldiers, there was no mistaking their zest for their regular job of railroading. They found the railways of France in amaz- ingly fine condition, in spite of the fact that they had, many of them, been built purely for war uses, and under the pressure inevitable in such work. Those behind the British lines were equally fine. As soon as the American engineers appeared in the communication-trains, their troubles with the Germans began. On the second run of the "Lucky 13th" men, a German airplane swept down and flew directly over the engine for twenty minutes, taking strict account. Then they began to bomb the trams, and many a time the crews had to get out and sit under the trains till the raid was over. The engineers kept their non-combatant char- acter till after the December British thrust at Cambrai, when half a hundred of them, work- 140 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT ing with their picks and shovels behind the lines, suddenly found themselves face to face with German counter-attacking troops, and had to fight or run. The engineers snatched up rides and such weapons as they could from fallen soldiers, and with these and their shovels helped the British to hold their line. The incident was one of the most brilliant of the year, partly because it was dramatically unexpected, partly because it permitted the Americans to prove their readiness to fight, in whatever circumstances. The spectacle of fifty peaceful engineers suddenly turned warriors of pick and shovel was used by the journals of many countries to demonstrate what manner of men the Americans were. But the work for British and French, on their strategic railways, was not to continue for long. The great American colony was already on blue-print, and the despatches from Washington were estimating that many millions would have to be spent for the work. The annual report of Major-General William Black, chief of engineers, which was made public in December, stated that almost a billion THE MEN WHO DID EVERYTHING 141 would be needed for engineering work in France in 1919, if the work then in progress were to be concluded satisfactorily. General Black's report showed that equip- ment for 70 divisions, or approximately 1,000,000 men, had been purchased within 350 hours after Congress declared war, including nearly 9,000,- 000 articles, among them 4 miles of pontoon bridges. Every unit sent to France took its full equip- ment along, and the cost of the "railroad en- gineers" alone was more than $12,000,000. Not long after the men were running the French and British trains, they were building their lines in Flanders, in the interims of building the American lines from sea to camp. The building was through, and over, such mud as passes description. The engineers tell a story of having passed a hat on a road, and on picking it up, found that there was a soldier under it. They dug him out. "But I was on horseback," the soldier protested. The tracks were rather floated than built. Where the shell fire was heavy, the men could only work a few hours each day, under barrage 142 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT of artillery or darkness, and they were soon making speed records. "The fight against the morass is as stern and difficult as the fight against the Boche," said an engineer, speaking of the Flanders tracks. One party of men, in an exposed position, laid 180 feet of track in a record time, and left the other half of the job till the following day. When they came back, they found that their work had been riddled with shell-holes, whereat they fell to and finished the other half and repaired the first half in the same time as had starred them on the first day's job. It was not long till they had a European reputation. The tracks they were to lay for America, though they were far enough from the Flanders mud, had a sort of their own to offer. The terminal was built by tremendous preliminaries with the suction-dredge. The long lines of communication between camp and sea were varyingly difficult, some of them offering nothing to speak of, some of them abominable. The little spur railways leading to the hospitals, warehouses, and subsidiary training-camps THE MEN WHO DID EVERYTHING 143 which lay afield from the main line were more quickly done. In addition to all these things, the engineers were the handy men of France. They picked up some of the versatility of the Regular Army engineers, whose accomplishments are never numbered, and they built hospitals and bar- racks, too, in spare time, and they laid water- ways, and helped out in General Pershing's scheme to put the inland waterways of France to work. The canal system was finally used to carry all sorts of stores into the interior of France, and before the engineers were finished the army was getting its goods by rail, by motor, and by boat, though it was not till late in the year that the transportation machinery could avoid great jams at the port. The engineers were, from first to last, the most picturesque Americans in France. They came from the great yards and terminals of East and West, they brought their behavior, their pe- culiar flavor of speech, and their efficiency with them, and they refused to lose any of them, no matter what the outside pressure. "It's a great life," said one of them from the 144 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT Far West, "and I may say it's a blamed sight harder than shooing hoboes off the cars back home. But there's times when I could do with a sight of the missus and the kids and the Ford. If it takes us long to lick 'em, it won't be my fault." CHAPTER BEHIND THE LINES THE difficulty of describing the American organization behind the lines in France lies in the fact that the story is nowhere near fin- ished. The end of the first year saw huge things done, but huger ones still in the do- ing, and the complete and the incomplete so blended that there was almost no point at which a finger could be laid and one might say: "They have done this." But at the end of the first year all the founda- tions were down and the corner-stones named', and though much necessary secrecy still en- velops the actual facts, something at least can be told. America could no more move direct from home to the line in the matter of her supplies than she could in that of her men. And it was at her in- termediate stopping-point, in both cases, that her troubles lay. It was, as Belloc put it, the 145 146 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT problem of the hour-glass. Plenty of room at both ends and plenty of material were invali- dated by the little strait between. It was not a month from the time of the first landing of troops, in June, 1917, before the wharfs of the ports chiefly used by incoming American supplies were stacked high with un- moved cases. The transportation men worked with might and main, but the Shipping Board at home, under the goad of restless and anxious people, was sending and sending the equipment to fol- low the men. And once landed, the supplies found neither roof to cover them nor means to carry them on. This was the point at which General Pershing began to lament to Washington over his scarcity of stevedores, and labor units, and soon there- after was the point at which he got them. On September 14, 1917, W. W. Atterbury, vice-president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, was appointed director-general of transportation of the United States Expeditionary Force in France, and was given the rank of brigadier- general. General Atterbury was already in BEHIND THE LINES 147 France, and had been offering such expert advice and assistance to General Pershing as his civilian capacity would permit. With his appointment came the announcement of others, giving him the assistance of many well-known American railroad men. When the First Division reached France it was discovered that it required four tons of tonnage to provide for each man. That meant 80,000 tons for each division, which, in the figures of the railroad man, meant eighty trains of 1,000 tons capacity for every division. For the first 200,000 men in France, who formed the basis for the first railroad reckoning, 800 trains were necessary. Obviously, these trains could not be taken from the already burdened French. Obviously, they could not tax further the trackage in France, though the trains and engines shipped had essential measurements to conform to the French road-beds, so that interchange was easy. Still more obviously, the trains could not be made in this country and rolled onto the decks of ships for transportation. So that before the first soldier packed his 148 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT first kit on his way to camp the A. E. F. required railway-tracks, enormous reception- wharfs, assembling-plants and factories, and arsenals and warehouses beyond number. The only things which America could buy in France were those which could be grown there, by women and old men and children, and those which were already made. The only continuing surplus product of France was big guns, which resulted from their terrific speciali- zation in munition-plants during the war's first three years. To find out what could legitimately be bought in France, and to buy it, paying no more for it than could be avoided by wise pur- chasing, General Pershing created a General Purchasing Board in Paris late in August. This board had a general purchasing agent at its head, who was the representative of the com- mander-in-chief, and he acted in concert with similar boards of the other Allied armies. His further job was to co-ordinate all the efforts of subordinate purchasing agents throughout the army. The chief of each supply department and of the Red Cross and the Y. M. C. A. BEHIND THE LINES 149 named purchasing agents to act under this board. It was not long till this board was supervising the spending of many millions of dollars a month, which gives a fair estimate of what the total expenditure, both at home and abroad, had to be. As a case in point, a single branch of this board bought in France, the first fortnight of November, 26,000 tons of tools and equip- ment, 4,000 tons of railway-ties, and 160 tons of cars. The cost was something over $3,000,- 000. These purchases alone saved the total cargo space of 20 vessels of 1,600 tons each. The General Purchasing Board adopted the price-fixing policy created at Washington, in which it was aided by the shrewdest business heads among the British and French authori- ties. This board also had power to commandeer ships, when they had to notably in the case of bringing shipments of coal from England, where it was fairly plentiful, to France, where there was almost none. A second scheme for co-ordination put into 150 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT effect by General Pershing was a board at which heads of all army departments could meet and act direct, without the necessity of going through the commander-in-chief. When the quartermaster's department made its budgets, the co-ordination department went over them and revised the estimates downward, or drafted work or supplies from some other department with a surplus, or redistributed within the quartermaster's stores, perhaps even granted the first requests. But there was a vast saving throughout the army zone. The problem of America's "behind the lines," including as it did the creating of every phase of transportation, from trackage to terminals, and then providing the things to transport, not only for an army growing into the millions, but for much of civilian France, was one which, all wise observers said, was the greatest of the war. Just how staggering were these difficul- ties must not be told till later, but surmises are free. And the praise for overcoming them which poured from British and French on- lookers had the value and authority of coming from men who had themselves been through BEHIND THE LINES 151 like crises, and who knew every obstacle in the way of the Americans. But if the preparatory stages must be abridged in the telling, there is no ban on a little expan- siveness as to what was finally done. Within a year American engineers and labor- ers and civilians working behind the lines had made of the waste lands around an old French port a line of modern docks where sixteen heavy cargo-vessels could rest at the same time, being unloaded from both sides at once at high speed, by the help of lighters. These docks were made by a big American pile-driver, which in less than a year had driven 30,000 piles into the marshy ooze, and made a foundation for enormous docks. Just behind the docks is a plexus of rail- way-lines which, what with incoming and outgoing tracks and switches and side-lines, contains 200 miles of trackage in the terminal alone. It is for the present no German's business how many hundred miles of double and triple track lead back to the fighting-line, and it is the censor's rule that one must tell nothing a 152 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT German shouldn't know. But there is plenty of track, figures or no figures. Equal preparation has been made for such supplies as must remain temporarily at the docks. There are 150 warehouses, most of them completed, each 400 by 50 feet, and each with steel walls and top and concrete floors. When the warehouses are finished they will be able to hold supplies for an army of a million men for thirty days. They are supplemented by a giant refrigerating-plant, with an enormous capacity, which is served by an ice-making fac- tory with an output of 500 tons daily, the whole ice department being operated by a special "ice unit" of the army, officially called Ice Plant Company 301. The ice department also has its own refrigerator-cars for delivering its wares frozen to any part of France. To provide for gun appetites as abundantly as for human, an arsenal was begun at the same point, which, when completed, will have cost a hundred million dollars. This arsenal and ordnance-depot is being built by an American firm, at the request of the French Mission in BEHIND THE LINES 153 America, who vetoed the American project to give the work to French contractors, because of the man-shortage in France. It has been built under the direct supervision of the War Department, and was specifically planned so that it might in time, or case of need, become one of the main munition-dis- tribution centres for all the Allies. Small arms and ammunition are stored and dispensed there, while big guns go direct from French fac- tories. Regiments of mechanical and technical ex- perts were constantly being recruited in Amer- ica for this work, and they were sent by the thousands every month of the first year. Main- tenance of the ordnance-base alone requires 450 officers and 16,000 men. Included in the arsenal and ordnance-depot are a gun-repair shop, equipped to reline more than 800 guns a month, a carriage-repair plant of large capacity, a motor-vehicle repair-shop, able to overhaul more than 1,200 cars a month, a small-arms repair-shop, ready to deal with 58,000 small arms and machine-guns a month, a shop for the repair of horse and infantry equip- 154 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT ment, and a reloading-plant, capable of reload- ing 100,000 artillery-cartridges each day. The assembling-shops in connection with the railroad were built on a commensurate scale. Even in an incomplete state one shop was able to turn out twenty-odd freight-cars a day, of three different designs, and at a neighboring point a plant for assembling the all-steel cars was making one full train a day. The locomo- tives were assembled in still a third place. This will have turned out 1,100 locomotives, built and shipped flat from America, at the end of its present contract. Already a third of this work has been done. And there were, of course, the necessary num- ber of roundhouses, and the like, to complete the organization of the seif -sufficient railroad. Not far away was a tremendous assembling and repair plant for airplanes, the operators of which had all been trained in the French fac- tories, so that they knew the planes to the last inner bolthead. The last assembly -plant was far from least in picturesqueness. It was for the construction, from numbered pieces shipped from Switzer- BEHIND THE LINES 155 land, of 3,500 wooden barracks, each about 100 feet long by 20 wide, and of double thickness for protection against French weather. The most amusing of the incidental depots was called the Reclamation Depot, at which the numerous articles collected on the battle- field by special salvage units were overhauled and refurbished, or altered to other uses. Noth- ing was too trifling to be accepted. The "old- clo* man" of No Man's Land was responsible for an amazing amount of good material, made at the Reclamation Depot from old belts, coat sleeves, and the like. Many a good German helmet went back to the "square-heads" as American bullets. In the same American district there was a great artillery camp, with remount stables, con- taining thousands of horses and mules. Under French tutelage, the American veterinarians had learned to extract the bray from the army mule, reducing his far-carrying silvery cry to a mere wheeze, with which he could do no indis- creet informing of his presence near the battle- lines. So the mule-hospital was one of the busi- est spots in the port. 156 OUR ARMY AT THE FRONT A short distance from the port, the engineers built a 20,000-bed hospital, the largest in ex- istence, comprising hundreds of little one-story structures, set in squares over huge grounds, so that every room faced the out-of-doors. Between the port and the hospital, and be- yond the port along the coast, were the rest- camps, the receiving-camps, and a huge separate camp for the negro stevedores. Near enough to be convenient, but not for sociability, were the camps for the German prisoners, who put in plenty of hard licks in the great port-building. Midway between all this activity at the coast and the training and fighting activity at the fighting-line there was what figured on the army charts as "Intermediate Section," whose com- manders were responsible for the daily averaging of supply and demand. In the intermediate section, linked by rail, were the supplementary training-camps, schools, base hospitals, rest-areas, engineering and re- pair shops, tank-assembling plants, ordnance-