Our Army at the Front

CHAPTER XI

SOME DISTINGUISHED VISITORS

SO satisfactory to itself was the progress of the American Expeditionary Force in becoming 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 American troops, he recommended their training and their physique equally, and said: "I think the American Army will be an admirable fighting 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. Graciously 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 statesman 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.

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, complete command of the English language, in which he made the two or three addresses interspersed 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 barbarians. My mind compares this event to the Pilgrim Fathers, who landed on Plymouth Rock, seeking liberty and finding it. Now their children's children are returning to fight for the liberty of France and the world.

"You men have come to France with disinterested motives. You came not because you were compelled to come, but because you wished 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 henceforth 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 Raymond Poincaré, President of the French Republic, the leader of the French "bitter-enders," and sometimes called the stoutest-hearted soldier France has ever had.

President Poincaré made a thorough inspection. He, too, began with the billets, but he was not content to see them from the outside. 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 Poincaré made cheering speeches to the men, for the force of which they were obliged to rely upon his gestures and his intonations, 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 soaring flights those who understood French interrupted 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.

A detachment of French buglers – buglers whom 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 bayonets, the marshal made a short speech to them, telling them of how his visit to America had 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 finest sight he saw was the American rifle practice, in which the United States troops did exceptionally 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 to America on a special war mission, went to camp in early December to see how the doughboys 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 soldiers as any man might wish to see. They have a wonderfully springy step, much 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 extremely 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, secretary of the General Federation of Trades Unions in England, made a visit to France, and described the American camps for his own public through the Federation organ.

"I see everywhere," he wrote, "samples of the American 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 apparently 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."

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 Président 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 stagers.

CHAPTER XII

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 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 engineers 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 infantrymen and artillerymen in late October.

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 engineers which are destined to proceed to France at the earliest possible moment, for work on the lines of communication… All details regarding the force will be given out as fast as compatible with the best public interests."

The recruiting-points were New York, Chicago, 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 result was, of course, that the 9 regiments were men of magnificent physique and sterling equipment. One regiment boasted 125 members 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 railways which were to connect the American seaport 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 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 correspondent, 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 'Tom' 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 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 toward their incidental job as soldiers, there was no mistaking their zest for their regular job of railroading.

They found the railways of France in amazingly 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 trains, 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 character till after the December British thrust at Cambrai, when half a hundred of them, working 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 rifles 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 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 equipment 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 equipment along, and the cost of the "railroad engineers" 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 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 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 barracks, too, in spare time, and they laid waterways, 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 peculiar 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 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 XIII

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 finished. The end of the first year saw huge things done, but huger ones still in the doing, 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 foundations were down and the corner-stones named, and though much necessary secrecy still envelops 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 intermediate stopping-point, in both cases, that her troubles lay. It was, as Belloc put it, the problem of the hour-glass. Plenty of room at both ends and plenty of material were invalidated by the little strait between.