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.
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 unmoved 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 follow 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 thereafter 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 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 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 specialization 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 purchasing, 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 commander-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. 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 equipment, 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 authorities.
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 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 difficulties must not be told till later, but surmises are free. And the praise for overcoming them which poured from British and French onlookers had the value and authority of coming from men who had themselves been through 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 expansiveness as to what was finally done.
Within a year American engineers and laborers 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 railway-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 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 factory 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 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-distribution centres for all the Allies. Small arms and ammunition are stored and dispensed there, while big guns go direct from French factories.
Regiments of mechanical and technical experts were constantly being recruited in America for this work, and they were sent by the thousands every month of the first year. Maintenance 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 equipment, and a reloading-plant, capable of reloading 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 locomotives 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 number of roundhouses, and the like, to complete the organization of the self-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 factories, 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 Switzerland, 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. Nothing 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, containing 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 indiscreet informing of his presence near the battle-lines. So the mule-hospital was one of the busiest spots in the port.
A short distance from the port, the engineers built a 20,000-bed hospital, the largest in existence, 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 beyond 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 commanders 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 repair shops, tank-assembling plants, ordnance-dumps and repair-shops, the chief storage for "spare parts," all machinery used in the army, cold-storage plants, oil and petrol depots, the army bakeries, the camouflage centre, and the forestry departments, busy with fuel for the army and timber for the engineers.
The achievement of the first year was literally worthy of the unstinted praise it received. And perhaps its finest attribute was that most of it was permanent, and will remain, while France remains, as America's supreme gift toward her post-war recovery.