Pershing's right-hand man—From the center of power to the field—Radical measures for the Services of Supply—Our own Goethals—Varied personnel united in discontent—Regulars and experts—Harbord's two problems of construction and morale.
Pershing's right-hand man—From the center of power to the field—Radical measures for the Services of Supply—Our own Goethals—Varied personnel united in discontent—Regulars and experts—Harbord's two problems of construction and morale.
As President, Theodore Roosevelt had made Pershing a brigadier over the heads of a small host of senior officers, and had likewise singled out Sims, who was to command in European waters. When he was forming his division, which destiny was not to allow him to lead in France, he chose for one of his brigade commanders James G. Harbord, then a major of regulars. Harbord was not a West Pointer; having begun his army career as a private, his rank was not high for his years when we entered the war. Had the competition of civil professions applied in the army, it is safe to say that he would have been a major-general already, and that some of the colonels who were his seniors would still have been lieutenants. It is only instruction that one receives at West Point or at any college; education is for the graduate to receive in after life, a detailhe sometimes neglects. Harbord educated himself by study and observation in the leisure hours which army officers have for the purpose.
One's first thought upon meeting him was to wonder why he should have enlisted in the regulars. He seemed to be the type that would have become in another environment a judge of the Supreme Court or the president of a university. After one came to know him, it was evident that he was in the army because he was naturally a soldier. He was also to prove to be the kind of organizer who in civil life is a good mayor of a great city or the efficient head of a large corporation.
As Chief of Staff of the A. E. F., he was Pershing's right-hand man for our first ten months in France.
It was not long before observers began to appreciate that he was one of the officers capable of "growing" with the growth of his task. One of the acquirements of his self-education was lucid and concise English, whether dictated to a stenographer or written on his little folding typewriter. When you brought a question before him, there was action, unfettered by qualifying verbiage. He did not "pass the buck" to the other fellow, according to the habit which army regulations and restrictions readily develop. When he went into Pershing's room, adjoining his, with a bundle of papers, andreturned with them signed, there was finality. He could be tart as well as brief, in the face of prolix and meandering reports or memoranda. "If this man really had something to say," he remarked one day after he had read ten typewritten pages, "I wonder how many more pages he would require."
MAP NO. 10SERVICES OF SUPPLY. SHOWING PORTS AND RAILROAD COMMUNICATIONS.
MAP NO. 10SERVICES OF SUPPLY. SHOWING PORTS AND RAILROAD COMMUNICATIONS.
MAP NO. 10SERVICES OF SUPPLY. SHOWING PORTS AND RAILROAD COMMUNICATIONS.
Next to Pershing himself, Harbord was most familiar with the planning and forming of an organization which would be equal to handling an unprecedented problem, three thousand miles from home. That story about the old quartermaster, who said that everything was going beautifully until a war came along and ruined his organization, had a most palpable application when a department which had carried on the routine of supplying our small regular army had to design a service equal to our demands in France. It was unequal to the task. A new and comprehensive system which experience had demonstrated to be suited to our needs divided the activities of the army into two territorial departments. One, that of the zone of advance, running from the outskirts of our training area in Lorraine to the front, was to have charge of the fighting. The other was to see that the fighters reached the front and were supplied when they arrived. His headquarters at Tours, the Commanding General of the new Services of Supply—the "S. O. S.," as the army knew it—was to be the head of a principality, of almost the breadth of France itself, under thekingdom of Pershing.
One day, when at last our long period of drill and preparation was having the substantial result of making our pressure at the front felt in earnest, Pershing said: "I'm going to send Harbord to troops, but I shall have him back——" the plan being to have him back as Chief of Staff, I understood. Harbord had his desire, the desire of every soldier, for field service. A brigadier-general now, he was given the brigade of Marines in place of Brigadier-General Doyen, who had been invalided home, where he died, as the result of his hard service in France. One week I saw him in the barracks building at Chaumont, surrounded by hundreds of adjutants, in the direction of the whole, and the next week I found him in charge of one part—but that a very combatant part—of the whole: with no stenographer, but writing his reports and orders on the little folding typewriter.
His new command required the tact of a man of the world as well as of a soldier among soldiers. There are no better fighters than the Marines; none prouder in their spirit of corps. The only Marine brigade in France was not pleased at the thought of having a regular in command. It wanted one of its own corps. Harbord had not been about among the officers and men many times before the Marineswere saying, "Well, if we had to have an army man, we're glad we've got Harbord." By the time they were fighting in Belleau Wood, they had put their globe insignia on his collar, which he was proud to wear. He was adopted into the Marines, while regular officers were saying that he had better make his transfer official.
His record of the battle was a model of military reports, which did not hesitate to acknowledge mistakes in detail, the point being that the Marines won the wood. Promoted to be a major-general and to command the 2nd Division (which included the Marines), he led the race-horse 2nd in the counter-offensive in the Château-Thierry operations, which was the turn of the tide against the Germans. After this success the next step for him seemed to be a corps command, and possibly the command of an army, in the course of the rapid promotions that were due to care for the immense forces now arriving in France. His division had only just been relieved, when he received a hurry call to go to Chaumont. When he arrived, Pershing looked him over to see how he had been standing the strain of two months of severe fighting, after his ten months of harassing strain as Chief of Staff. Harbord appeared fresh, and ready for another year's hard work.
"Harbord, I'm going to send you down tostraighten out things in the S. O. S.," Pershing then told him....
"Well, you see what my general has done to me," Harbord remarked a few hours later in an outburst to a friendly ear. "He's taken me away from my division,—but," he added, "he's my general. He knows what he wants me to do——" Then a toss of the head, and from that moment his thought was concentrated on his new duties.
Things had been going badly in the Services of Supply. There was congestion at the ports; construction work was not proceeding. In view of the enormous demands which would arise when we should have two million men, instead of the million we had planned, in the autumn, the situation had suddenly become most serious. Washington, with our own ports sensitive to delays at those on the other side of the Atlantic, had about decided to send General Goethals to France to take charge of the Services of Supply as a co-ordinate commander with General Pershing. This was a radical departure. It meant two commanders in France instead of one, directly responsible to Washington. Such divided authority in such a crisis stirred the apprehension of every soldier lest in a great crisis the fighting branch should not be supreme over every other branch which served its will and necessities. The simplest of military principles required thatthe commander of the forces at the front must command the whole, or his fearful responsibility for needless loss of life rested on inadequate authority.
Harbord, Pershing's right-hand man, was the counter to Washington's suggestion; that major of cavalry, whom nobody knew in the days when Goethals was building the Panama Canal, would prove that we already had a Goethals of our own in France. Without going over the ground of the pioneer stages of the Services of Supply, covered in my first book, the requirement upon which all transport depended was construction. We must enlarge the plant which France offered us for our needs. This meant building new docks to accommodate the requisite shipping, webs of spur tracks, immense areas of warehouses at the ports and others inland to accommodate our supplies; plants for assembling our railroad locomotives and cars brought from home; repair shops for them, and for guns and gun carriages, ambulances and aeroplanes and automobiles, motor trucks, and all other vehicular transport. More important still, there must be repair shops for human beings—enormous hospitals for caring for the sick and wounded, who might come by the hundreds of thousands in a single month. Hospital trains must be ready for their transport from the front. Enormous bakeries must provide hundreds of thousands of loaves every day. Theremust be barracks for the nurses and all the workers; barracks for the aviators and helpers who were drilling; lighters for disembarking troops when they arrived; camps, where they could spend the night ashore. Railroad sidings must enlarge railroad capacity; more spur tracks must be built wherever we had railheads at the front, and regulating stations which should dispatch the trains to the railheads. Around quiet villages must arise temporary cities of our building, connected with all the other activities in a system which was punctual and dependable.
The S. O. S. had been arranged to meet the demands of an army in our own sector. Its plan was disrupted by the switching of our troops to Château-Thierry and Picardy to meet the German offensives. The mobilization for Saint-Mihiel brought us back to our own sector. After Saint-Mihiel came the Argonne concentration, called into being by the hope of a speedy end of the war through one supreme effort by all the Allies. Should our new troops, thrown in action without sufficient preparation, and the veteran troops, thrown in without time for recuperation after Château-Thierry and Saint-Mihiel, go without food and ammunition, we might have a disaster. The wisdom of our insistence that we could form and supply and fight an integral army, instead of infiltrating our men into the British andFrench armies, was on trial. Victory and our soldiers' lives were at stake.
The battle was to be fought not only against machine-gun nests, but in the sweating effort of stevedores, of mechanics, and laborers, in the roar of foundries, in the rattle of trains far from the sound of the guns. For officer personnel in the S. O. S. we had first, of course, the regulars, those of the old quartermaster department and of the engineers, who would not ordinarily command troops, and those who could be spared from the zone of advance where every able fighting officer was required. These must be few, compared to the numbers of the whole. Second, we had all the men in the thirties, forties, and fifties, experts in every calling, who had come to France in their enthusiasm, in answer to the summons, in the days when the thing was for every man to serve in uniform in France. These were too old for combat, even if they thought they were not. They could not stand the physical hardship of the front, however brave their spirit. The S. O. S. was the place for them. There, or in building the organization of supply at home—which was primarily important—the nation could make the best use of their training in civil life. Third were younger officers, from the Guard or a training-camp, caught by the card-index system classifying occupations, and separated from their regiments becausethey were experts in some line of activity which was short of personnel in the S. O. S. They knew how to fight; but their knowledge of something else, their superiors thought, not they, was more useful to the nation.
For mechanics we had all the men skilled in trades at home who were as ready to give up high wages for a soldier's pay, and to work double union hours, as they would have been to stick tight in a fox-hole against a counter-attack, if they had had the chance. These came in their thousands, living under conditions far more miserable, in contrast to their habits, than their officers—from railroad trains and shops, bakeries, cement factories, contractors' firms, and every industry on the list—the typical American army, which has made industrial America.
For labor we had all we could pick up abroad: able-bodied German prisoners, middle-aged and invalided French territorials, Senegambians, Turcos, Belgians, Spaniards, Chinese, Annamites. From home we had, aside from expert labor, chiefly the colored men, who had no rivals in "rustling" cargo. At the docks their giant strength and their good-natured team-play were supreme; but they were in evidence all the way forward to the shelled roads which they were repairing back of the front where their kinsmen had their place in line.
The feeling between the regulars and reserves, which I shall describe in general terms elsewhere, was bound to be most acute in the S. O. S. Suffice it to say for the present that it was a gospel with the regulars that they should hold all the high commands in the S. O. S. as well as at the front. It was granted that the regulars must be absolute in the zone of advance, and all reserves their pupils or "plebes"; but how was the manager of a great railroad, of a bakery, of a contracting firm, a chemist, a civil engineer who had built tunnels and bridges, or a business organizer, to feel that a regular officer was his superior in his own line? The answer of the regular was that only he understood how to coördinate all policy for military end,—the old, old answer of the inner temple of mystery, from the days of the Egyptian priests to the present. The regulars said, too: "How can we tell who is the real expert? These big men from civil life are jealous of one another. To appoint one over the heads of others would bring friction. We know war. Supply is a part of war. And we shall keep matters in our own hands——" and promotions, too, as the reserves might whisper.
A point which the regulars dwelt upon even more emphatically was that the reserve officers did not know discipline and army forms. Some of these reservists had directed thousands of men in organizationsat home, without knowing how to drill a company. In their experience, building railroad yards and warehouses did not require military etiquette. The men under them held even stronger convictions on the subject. They were doing the same kind of work that they did at home, and amid peaceful surroundings. If they were workmen and not soldiers, why should they have to submit to all the distinctions between rank and file? Must they salute every man with a gold bar who happened to pass along, when he was no nearer the front than they? He was not their boss. What mattered, except that they were "on the job"? Why did not these officers pay more attention to getting the tools and material whose lack hampered progress? The officers could only turn to their seniors, who turned to other seniors, on through the channels of authority, to the lack of shipping, and to the plants at home, where the workmen were being driven equally hard, but did not have to wear uniforms and crook elbows in salute. As for army forms, the reserve officers were ready to comply with them if they could find that there was any settled system; but army forms seemed to change to meet the requirements, as the reservists sometimes thought, of delaying action, when that suited a commanding officer's idea.
Meanwhile, why should the assistant to the chiefbaker be an infantryman? Not that he wanted to be in the S. O. S.: he wanted to be at the front. Was the baking of bread taught only in the army? For the army, yes, thought the regulars. The complaints of the soldiers about the quality of the bread, which were warrantable, seemed to indicate that the regulars might have escaped blame by giving the responsibility to a civilian baker. A reserve officer whose business was automobile manufacture, serving in a repair shop under a cavalryman, did not deny that the cavalryman knew how to lead a squadron in a charge, but did he know about mending broken motor trucks? The civil engineer, who had once executed a contract for five millions, as he reported to a young West Point engineer who had been a lieutenant when we entered the war, might ponder the difference between theory and practice. A regular engineer lieutenant-colonel of twenty-nine said: "From what I have seen of the eminent civil engineers, I should think that they ought to be my subordinates." He was young; so was Napoleon at Marengo and Austerlitz. Both were soldiers.
When reserve officers, because of their expertness, were given authority, it did not mean that they were always able to exercise it. One who came to France under the express condition that he was to be supreme in his branch found that he was made a subordinate. What could he do? Resign? Resignin time of war? There was another to whom General Pershing said: "You go ahead. I give you carte blanche in your work." One day he was called on the carpet by his regular senior for acting on his own authority. "Who told you to do this?" asked the superior.
"General Pershing!"
"Well, then you better report to him. You go tell him you have been insubordinate, you haven't been doing things through channels, and see what he says."
This was putting the Commander-in-Chief himself to the test of regular loyalty.
"You tell that narrow-minded regular for me," said Pershing, "to leave you alone."
This did not mean that the reserve officer was left alone. He could not carry all his troubles to the busy Commander-in-Chief, as he struggled against the system.
The reservists, both officers and the whole force of workers, were not meeting as a rule the best class of regulars. A brigadier or a colonel in the zone of advance, who was wearing himself out physically and mentally, or who for less temporary reasons was not efficient, was relegated to the rear, with the idea that he might be good enough for the S. O. S. Yes, anything was good enough for the S. O. S., thought its pestered, nerve-racked workers. Was that colonel or brigadier, who had served his country fortwenty or thirty years, to be made subordinate to some railroad man, civil engineer, or manufacturer, who had been in uniform only a few months? He might be sent home; but surely not on the invitation of General Peyton C. March, Chief of Staff in Washington, who had his own domestic problem in derelicts without the further annoyance of importations. So the colonel or the brigadier was cared for in the S. O. S., all the while feeling keenly his humiliation at not having command of a regiment or brigade in combat operations. If he were wise enough to serve his country and keep his health, he only signed the papers turned in by an energetic subordinate, be he regular or reserve; but if he were mischievous in his insistence upon authority, he clogged the wheels of organization,—which is not saying that he was not a worthy, honorable, and agreeable gentleman, even if he were not of much service in building a bridge or a warehouse in a hurry, or in forcing five days' rations through to a division at the front. Considering these things, and considering that every man tied to some humdrum task in the S. O. S. wanted to be up under fire instead of one, two, or three hundred miles away from the guns, it is not surprising that the spirit of corps of the S. O. S. was not good. It was well that Harbord arrived in July; or he might have been too late.
Depending on Tours—The "front-sick" S. O. S.—Harbord not "Bloisé"—Getting his men together—Building morale—Troops as freight—Brest to the front—Construction figures—Atterybury's job—Sorting supplies at Gièvres—Hospitals and the product of war—Feeding the front from Is-sur-Tille—The point of the wedge at the railheads.
Depending on Tours—The "front-sick" S. O. S.—Harbord not "Bloisé"—Getting his men together—Building morale—Troops as freight—Brest to the front—Construction figures—Atterybury's job—Sorting supplies at Gièvres—Hospitals and the product of war—Feeding the front from Is-sur-Tille—The point of the wedge at the railheads.
If one division at the front knew little of what another division was doing, how much less its men knew of what was doing in the capital of the Services of Supply at Tours, that ancient city in the center of France. Grand Headquarters in the town of Chaumont, and Army Headquarters in the village of Souilly, were relatively small office affairs, compared to Tours.
In place of tables of barrages, maps of trench sectors, photographs of combat areas, reports of hills and villages and lines of resistance taken, and the examination of prisoners, which formed the staple routine of a combat headquarters, there were tables of the daily amount of tonnage and the number of troops disembarked, maps of transportation systems and railroad yards, photographs of half-finished quays and vast piles of cargo, blue prints of the plans of a network of tracks running up tothe doors of hospitals and warehouses, and reports from foresters getting out timber, from commanders of base sections and regulating stations.
One thing, however, Tours, Chaumont, and Souilly, and every other headquarters had in common. That was the call for more guns, rifles, clothing, shoes, machine-guns, ammunition, engineering tools, balloons, aeroplanes, ambulances, automobiles, motor-trucks, and other material, which was passed on from Souilly to Chaumont, from Chaumont to Tours, and then home. "We are sending them," home responded.
"But hurry!" Tours cried.
"Clear your ports," home replied.
"Stop wasting space! Fully load your ships," said Tours. "Equip the troops in the way we ask! Send things in the order we ask! Put them aboard with some kind of classification. Don't throw steel beams on top of automobile parts and chemical apparatus! Pack your sugar and flour in bags that don't tear open."
If there had been a long-distance telephone across the Atlantic, steam might have risen to the surface from the scorching messages; but the wires we had stretched from Paris to Chaumont and to Tours and to the coast were used with a prodigality which was an evidence of the distrust of our own postal system.
The barracks that had been turned into offices atTours had office space equivalent to that of a New York "sky-scraper" or of the Army and Navy Building in Washington. A private was as distinguished a person in the streets of Tours as in the streets of Washington. Nowhere, not even in the ordnance department at home, were more leather puttees and boots with spurs circulating between offices to maintainliaisonbetween the combat units and the business end of war than at the general offices of that huge corporation at Tours. The officers worked hard all day without feeling that they had accomplished anything like as much as they would have in their own occupation at home. They wondered sometimes why so many of them were there. Everyone was thinking how to secure material and labor, and everyone had a sense of struggling with his hands tied behind his back against walls of cotton wool. There was a pitiful look in their eyes as they stood before their senior officers, pleading for a chance to go to the front and fight. Was this sitting at your desk in your spurs going to war in France?
"Mother, take down your service flag, your son's in the S. O. S.," was the subject of a popular army song in France.
Not far from Tours was Blois—we shall have more to say about it—where officers whose seniors reported them unsatisfactory were re-classified andre-assigned. It was the channel of passage from the front to the S. O. S., and for officers in one branch of the S. O. S. who might do better in another. The danger of being sent to Blois was a shadow over every mind.
Where the fighters were "homesick," the able-bodied workers in the S. O. S. were "front-sick" and "heart sick." All their selfish interest centered in escaping the misfortune of having to return home without having heard a shot fired. If they did not do well, there was no chance of their reaching the front; if they did well, they became invaluable to a senior who refused to let them go. Their restlessness and their feeling of general helplessness in fits of despondency led to a few cases of suicide.
When Harbord came to Tours, it was not by the way of Blois. He was no major-general of engineers or of the Q. M. C. who, however specially capable for his task, had not been in combat service. Here was Pershing's favorite adjutant, fresh from victories in the field, come back from the limelight at the front to help "count the beans and rustle freight." This of itself gave him a prestige that affected the state of mind of the whole organization. He must be a man of action; and the S. O. S. wanted action. He knew his regulars and his reserves, and Headquarters at Chaumont, and the needs of the army from ship's hold to the fox-holes. The businessmen in uniform, with U. S. R. on their collars, did not care whether or not their chief was a Catholic or a Presbyterian. A regular or a reserve? Was he the man?
He found the S. O. S. working in a series of compartments rather than departments. Though each was most conscientiously striving for coördination, different chiefs were in a mood that meant friction. Projects whose immediate completion was vital were not as far along as those whose completion could wait. Many were being constructed on too elaborate and lavish a scale by chiefs who had won a disproportionate amount of authority to carry out their ideas. They were enjoying the building of a plant that would last for twenty years, when the war might be won in another six months. Harbord did what Pershing would have done if the C.-in-C. had come to Tours; he was Pershing's man, as he had said. He grasped his problem, made his plan, and then set his adjutants to driving.
"The first time I went in to see Harbord," said one of them, "I knew that he knew his own mind, and that he was going to tell me what to do; and that I was going out to do it with the confidence that he would back me up. His 'no' to my suggestions was as convincing as his 'yes' that we were to have team-play—and that he was master."
His faculty of drawing men together was put infull play in some of the obvious methods of leadership which had been somewhat neglected in the S. O. S., where there had evidently been a policy that if you honestly follow the regulations all will come out well in the end. All the chiefs gathered at his house once a week for luncheon, where they found one another to be human. Instead of remaining at Tours, he left routine to his Chief of Staff, and spent three nights out of four on his railroad car in going and coming, with his office on board always in touch with Tours, while his inspections kept him informed of progress and aroused the enthusiasm of subordinates. The feeling passed that you were derelict if fate sent you to work in the S. O. S. The S. O. S. began to have the fighting spirit of corps of the front—that of an ambitious business concern. Harbord had not been a week in command before the S. O. S. was feeling a new force emanating from headquarters. They were calling to the fighters: "We're with you. Take more prisoners, so that we can set them to work. It means more supplies for you." That new commander who now had under him more than four hundred thousand men, and activities exceeding those of the largest of our trusts, would make every worker feel that he was contributing his part, not for his wage envelope, but for winning the war which had brought him to France.
Our cargo was now flowing into every one of the ports of France south of Cherbourg, and overflowing into Marseilles in the Mediterranean too. The less that had to go to Marseilles, the more shipping time would be saved from the longer trip through the Strait of Gibraltar. We Americans like competition. The different Atlantic ports were started on a "race to Berlin" unloading contest; the stevedores of the port which won would be the first to go home. No Americans in France were more homesick than our colored men. When one was asked whether he would rather work at Bordeaux than at Saint-Nazaire, he replied: "Is Bordeaux any nearer home?" The "rustling" of cargo now became a game in which joyous calls were heard in common urging against any shirking which might delay the return of the workers to the levees and the cotton fields of their own southland. In tune with the Herculean mechanical effort of the giant American cranes, their Herculean muscular effort in its impetuosity was in imminent danger of removing the stanchions from the ships as well as the cargo. A British skipper who thought that he would be two days in unloading, and found that only one day was required, returned home to say that he was lucky to escape without having his ship's plates torn off and started toward the front. When bags of sugar were piled so high on one dock that severaltons went through the floor into the water, it was a tragedy to people on sugar rations at home and to the sugar-hungry men at the front, but in the fever of effort to win the war by supplying two million men with their requirements for battle it was only an incident of the wicked extravagance of war, which led one of the stevedores to say that the sugar must count in the record as cargo discharged, while he did not think that it would make that old sea that had made him seasick so much sweeter that you would notice it.
The impetus which the coming of Harbord gave to the S. O. S. implies no criticism of past accomplishment. His business was to "go through," as it had been at Belleau Wood and in the counter-offensive. An unfinished plant, preparing for an offensive in the spring of 1919, must be made equal to one in the fall of 1918. There had never been any lack of energy in the S. O. S. This was guaranteed by our national character, under the whip of war. All the while we had been making progress. The feeling of helplessness on the part of the workers had been due to ambition thwarted in gaining the full results of the supreme efforts which they were eager to exert. There had been no cessation of building; no cessation in striving to find in Europe every available article which would save transport, without reference to the cost—cost beingthe one thing that never made us hesitate. Every man accepted the idea that all the money in the world was ours.
There was already an end to the confusion of the early days when the parts of a piece of machinery arrived on different ships. Tables of priority for each month were sent ahead to Washington, which might well think that the A. E. F. considered that the War Department had the magical power of pulling anything that it required out of a hat. Instead of sending his requisitions for material through Chaumont, Harbord now sent them direct to the War Department; he was the great administrative agent for the chief of G-4 at Chaumont, who coördinated combat and supply, holding the balance between the demands of the front and the wherewithal to meet them. There was increasing coördination at home, too, under the indomitable authority of General March.
The wedges which our divisions were driving down the walls of the Aire and the Meuse rivers and against the Kriemhilde Stellung were only a part of the giant wedge of the supply system, with its bases as broad as the United States, which narrowed to the breadth of the Atlantic Coast of France from Brest to Bordeaux. Most of our troops arrived at Brest, where the harbor was deep enough for the draught of the mighty German linerswhich had been transformed into transports. Navy blue and army khaki swarmed on the docks where our sea and land forces met. Our destroyers sped out of the harbor to disappear on the horizon, and reappear as the protective scurrying guards of the transports which they brought safe into port before they slipped out to sea again, to see more freighters safe through the submarine zone under their agile husbanding.
During the height of that transatlantic excursion season of ours the men on board slept in three shifts of eight hours each; they had two meals a day. Their warm bodies were close-packed, breathing into one another's faces, in tiers of low-ceilinged rooms, for from seven to ten days, after the healthy life of the training camps which had accustomed their lungs to fresh air. When the transport passed into the harbor mouth, and the submarine danger was over, as ants might swarm out of their runways to the top of a hill they swarmed on deck, where first- and second-class passengers had sauntered and promenaded, in solid masses of khaki, who formed the most valuable and superior first-class passengers America had ever sent to Europe. They had arrived. They made the harbor echo with calls and hurrahs. Theirs had been a passage which money could not buy or would want to buy for more than one experience; a passage not for pay or adventure,whose glamour was a sight of the sea and of France and of all they had read about the war. They were man-power, man-power by its thousands and millions, formed in a common mold no less than egg-grenades, their clothes cut according to the same pattern no less than their gas masks, the man-power which we had to give if we did lack artillery and aeroplanes, automata who were sentient parts of a machine responding to the mechanism of orders rather than of levers. Equipped, disciplined, trained, hardened, the preparatory processes of the training camps sent them to us for the final processes in France.
Mighty lighters hurried alongside the transport, whose time must not be wasted while the hundreds of thousands of other passengers waited three thousand miles away. Swiftly, more swiftly than any but human cargo could be unloaded, they were disembarked, the decks and the hold becoming strangely empty with the resounding footsteps of the officers and crew in place of the hum of conversation and the atmosphere of human bodies crowded together.
Their confinement normally and charitably required that stiffened bodies and minds and suffocated lungs should have a period of relaxation and exercise. This indeed was a part of the original plans; but now when original plans had gone by the board in feeding in men to make the present the decisiveoffensive, though horses must be given rest, it was found that men who had been through a régime to toughen their human adaptability for what four-legged animals could not endure, could do without such consideration when they were needed as the minute men of the Meuse-Argonne battle. Shipped as freight from camp to pier, from pier on to transport, and then from Brest across France, which they saw only through the doors of box cars where they were packed as close as on board the transports, the one idea at every point was to hurry them along until they were delivered f. o. b. at the front. There, after coming from comfortable barracks, after the devitalizing closeness of transport and train, in a merciless climatic change, they could remain in the fox-holes in the chill penetrating mists and rains as they were still being hurried against the enemy, until death or wounds or "flu" or pneumonia or the dizziness of fatigue reported them as "expended."
Caring for the passage of this human stream from the ports to the front was the first duty of the S. O. S. The next was to follow it up with supplies. Wherever men were they must be fed. La Pallice and La Rochelle were also being used; but the main Atlantic cargo ports were Saint-Nazaire and Bordeaux. Ships moved with a processional regularity to their places alongside the docks we had built. Our warehouses stretched out over the sandy reacheswhere an occasional vine appeared between spur tracks on the site of the vineyards for which we were paying, and which hardly brought as much wealth to Bordeaux as the money we were spending. Broken bags of flour, and broken crates of canned goods, were piled in separate warehouses; as they could not stand the journey to the front, they were used to feed the legions of the S. O. S. For there was an army larger than Grant had in the Appomattox campaign to be supplied between the ports and the front. Fields were filled with the parts of automobiles and trucks. Assembled, they started in long convoys across France to Saint-Mihiel or the Argonne, their drivers having a tour of the château country before passing over the Côte d'Or of Burgundy. All the parts of the railroad locomotives and cars arriving were assembled in the vast shops which we had built and fitted out with machinery according to the latest American models.
We were supposed to have, but never had, ninety days' routine supplies in France for all our forces in France. Of these forty-five days were to be in the warehouses at the base ports. Sometimes trains were loaded at the ports and run straight through to the front. Normally, there were three changes in transit. At our service were all the arterial railroads of central France, and all the locomotives and cars that the French could spare, and all the broken-downFrench rolling stock which our mechanics could repair. Possibly no denial can ever overtake the report that we built a railroad clear across France; but we did nothing of the kind, and contemplated nothing of the kind. We built spur tracks and sidings and cut-offs; if all the track we laid, figured a statistician in G-4 at Chaumont, had been in line, it would have reached from Saint-Nazaire across France and Germany to the Russian frontier.
All our building construction, if it had been concentrated in one standard barrack building, would extend from Saint-Nazaire as far as the Elbe river in Germany. We erected and put in operation 18,543 American railroad cars, and 1,496 American locomotives. Besides producing enough firewood to form an unbroken wall around three sides of France, one meter high and one meter broad, we sawed 189,564,000 feet of lumber, 2,728,000 standard gauge ties, 923,560 narrow gauge ties, and 1,739,000 poles and pit props. If all the motor vehicles we brought to France were put end to end, they would form a convoy two hundred and ninety miles in length. On the day that the armistice was signed we were operating 1,400 miles of light railway, of which 1,090 miles had been captured from the Germans. They handled 860,652 tons of material.
These figures, put together in a paragraph in passing, give an idea of the magnitude of the businesswhich the army of the S. O. S. was conducting. It was an army which knew no excitement in war except work. The problem of sea transport which faced our ports at home was no more trying than the problem of railroad transport from our ports in France;liaisonbetween combat units in action no more trying than theliaisonbetween our American railroad men with their American training and the French railroad system. We were used to long distances and long hauls; the French, in a country no larger than some of our states, were used to short distances and short hauls. Impatient at first with their methods, we saw how they had come to be applied in France. Amazed at first at ours, the French came to appreciate how well our long heavy trains suited the wholesale business of war. The French seemed unsystematic, yet their worn locomotives and rickety cars managed to carry on an enormous traffic. When we applied our home tracer system for the first time on the railroads of France, the central offices might know the location of every car under their authority.
Our railroad men, under Brigadier-General W. W. Atterbury, our railroad general, used to having at home all the supplies they needed, made victory possible by the way in which they patched and contrived in their energy and resource to meet the demands of the months of September and October,which were far beyond their calculations. They share the honors due to our pioneer railroad builders in the early days of the west, while they exemplified the type of men who operate our great systems of today, whether the engineer, the fireman or shop mechanic, the veteran superintendent, or the young fellow just out of a technical school. I wonder no less how they were able, with the rolling stock at their command, to forward all the tonnage we required at the front, than I wonder how we were able to take some of the positions of the whale-back.
In his office at Tours, surrounded by his adjutants, who, though in khaki, were railroad men in every word and thought, and in the discipline which our home systems have established in webbing our country, Brigadier-General Atterbury had a command which in numbers belonged to a major-general. His discipline was that of a leadership which won loyalty. In all his perplexing situations, when he was striving for authority and material for an undertaking so strictly technical, he never passed on any animus to a subordinate. It is something for an officer to return from France with the respect which he had from his subordinates.
The train that started on the steel trail across France, leaving behind the hectic labor and the piles of cargo and the warehouses built and building, when it passed out of the region of the base sectionscame to the intermediate zone. In the regular routine it lost its entity when it ascended the "hump" which we had built at Gièvres,—that American hump, singularly characteristic of our system of labor-saving organization. Every car was loaded with material belonging to some branch of the army. One by one they were "dropped" down the incline, each being switched to a track, as its downgrade momentum, subject to the brakes, sent it—with the facility of letters tossed into mail bags by a railway mail clerk—where its contents belonged, whether to the door of an engineer, an ordnance, a signal corps, a medical corps, or a Y. M. C. A. or Red Cross warehouse, while the meat trains or others with perishable cargo went to our vast cold-storage plant. From the "hump" you looked out over a city of warehouses, of barracks, and other structures, with its guardhouse, its clubs, its motion-picture theaters, its military policemen, under a colonel who was mayor, common council, and king—all having been built in the open fields as a way station from the New York docks to the front.
Here at Gièvres other trains were made up to continue the journey forward in answer to the daily requisitions of the regulating stations upon the intermediate reserves. War being a one-way business, all expenditure and no income, all loaded cars were going one way except those bringing lumber and tiesthat we were cutting from the forests for construction, salvage from the battlefield, broken trucks, and vehicles—and the hospital trains. Here prevision must be most sure. Man was the most valuable piece of machinery; his repair the most important of all repairs. We had enormous hospitals in the intermediate zone as well as at the base ports; and indeed all over central and southern France. The medical corps used great hotels and other buildings to care for the hosts of broken, gassed, exhausted, sick men from the Meuse-Argonne battle; but when we had to build we ran out spur tracks—deep was our faith in spur tracks—into open fields upon which rose cities of standardized unit hospital buildings, all of a color, all of a pattern, and also operating rooms and Y. M. C. A. clubs and theaters, under the autocracy of some regular surgeon who looked up from his desk at the chart on the wall showing the number of his patients and the number of vacant beds. The hospital trains ran up on the spur tracks, and hobbling wounded descended, and wounded who could not hobble were carried on stretchers to their beds—each a card-indexed automaton, no less than when he entered the training camp, as he would remain until he was demobilized or buried in France.
So the trains of munitions passed the trains laden with the products of war, the knowledge of whose sacrifice is the only value of war. Right and leftthrough the intermediate zone, from Orléans to the Mediterranean, were more repair shops, remount depots, training camps for aviators, tank crews, machine-gunners and carrier pigeons, each worker striving for the same purpose that shoveled the coal into the locomotive firebox or slipped a shell into a gun or a cartridge into a rifle. At Is-sur-Tille, near Dijon, was another "hump," which looked down on what seemed a training camp in its streets of mud: for there was mud in the S. O. S. as well as at the front—mud kept soft by the damp atmosphere when autumn rain was not falling, and deep by the trampling of many feet. Here, as at Gièvres, the train sent its cars on their way to the warehouses to which their contents belonged; here you felt at first hand the breath of the front in all its hot and pressing demands; here was the largest bakery, with cement floors and all up-to-date apparatus, directed by the head of one of our large bakeries at home, rolling out the round loaves with the ease of peas shelled from a pod. All night long, as at Gièvres and at the base ports, the switch engines coughed forth their growls as they shunted cars, and the laborers worked at loading and unloading. The officer in charge in his little office was directing as insistent an excursion business as ever fell to the lot of man. His nightmare, and the nightmare of all the regulating officers of the S. O. S., was movingcars. Every hour a car was needlessly idle was waste. This called for labor, and more labor—for more warehouse space, for more locomotives, for more sidings; but as they were not forthcoming, why, man and machine must be made to do more work. The excess strain on either was not considered. The pressure was the same as that for the relief of a city stricken by fire or earthquake.
Beyond Is-sur-Tille at Saint-Dizier was another, a supplementary, regulating station for the Meuse-Argonne battle, which during the battle fed, apart from the troops in the Saint-Mihiel and other sectors, 645,000 men and 115,000 animals. Regulating stations did the detail, while Gièvres and the base ports did the wholesale. They saw that each division received its daily rations of food and ammunition. Each division had its "cut in" of cars, with all its daily supplies, which was made up a day in advance and sent to the divisional railhead. Knowing the needs of the divisions, a regulating station sent its requisition back to the big warehouse centers, while it always tried to keep on hand a small amount of all articles likely to be needed in haste. When we were swinging our divisions around for the Château-Thierry emergency, one division had seven railheads in eight days; its trains were on hand on each occasion. They must be; otherwise the divisions went hungry. All other demands must yieldto the routine which brings the morning milk and the grocer's boy to the kitchen door.
At the railhead you felt not only the breath of battle but that throbbing suspense and intensity of purpose which is associated with men in action. Here came the empty trucks and wagons from the front, and the ambulances traveling in their convoys on the crowded roads up to the zone of fire, while men worked in darkness. Here the wedge from home was narrowing under the hammer strokes, until you could feel it splitting the oak—the hammer strokes of the hundred millions, their energy, their prayers and thoughts.
Those empty trucks seemed ever hungry, open mouths, the mute expression of the call for more, and still more, of everything with which to keep up the driving—more replacements as well as material.
When the front wanted anything, it was wanted immediately. Improvise it, purloin it, beg for it, but send it, was the command that admitted of no refusal. If this officer could not get it, put another in his place who could. Officers when they lay down for a few hours' sleep had their telephones at their elbow, ready as firemen to answer the call. Men worked until the doctors ordered them to the hospital—that they must do. They could do no more. The S. O. S. could not send guns or tanks when ithad none from home; but American resourcefulness surpassed its own dreams of probabilities. Harbord could well say to Pershing: "I've straightened out things in the S. O. S."
Isolation of West Pointers—College graduates not dissociated from the community—The monastic ideal of the founder of West Point—And the caste ideal—The officer a cleat on the escalator of promotion—Out of contact with America—Five years to make a soldier—A clan tradition—A blank check to the regulars.
Isolation of West Pointers—College graduates not dissociated from the community—The monastic ideal of the founder of West Point—And the caste ideal—The officer a cleat on the escalator of promotion—Out of contact with America—Five years to make a soldier—A clan tradition—A blank check to the regulars.
Before our entry into the war our busy people had occasional reminders that we had a United States Military Academy for training army officers. Its gray walls on the bluffs at West Point were one of the sights of the Hudson valley to passengers on river steamers. There was an annual football game between the West Point and Annapolis cadets. As every schoolboy knew, both teams were better than those of the small eastern colleges, but not so good as those of the large eastern colleges. The cadets were in the inaugural parade. Their marching thrilled observers with an excellence which, however, is always expected from professionals, whether ballplayers, billiardists, actors, pugilists, circus performers, opera singers, or poets. It was the cadets' business to march well. Of course they were superior to amateurs in their own line. Investigationsof "hazing" had also at one time attracted wide attention to the Academy. Some of us were horrified, and others of us amused—still others disinterested as long as they did not have to take the dose themselves—at reports of first-class men having to swallow large draughts of tabasco sauce in order to toughen their stomachs for the horrors of war.
A community which sent only an occasional boy to West Point sent many boys to civil colleges. I was one of the boys who went to a civil college, and knew how we felt in our time. We returned at the end of our freshman year with the attitude of "How little they know!" as we looked around our native town. During our college career we spent our holidays in home surroundings, which formed a break in college influences. At the end of our senior year we had the "rah! rah!" spirit of class, alma mater, and college fraternity, and a feeling that the men who went to the principal collegiate football rival were of a low caste. We were graduated full of theories and wisdom, and set out to earn a living and incidentally to demonstrate how little "they" really knew. By the time we were able to earn a living we concluded that "they" had known more than we thought.
In fact, we ourselves now belonged to the "theys" struggling in the great competition of professional and industrial life. We met men who hadnot been to college, who were the betters of college men. Having left college sworn to keep the fraternity first in our hearts and to write frequently to our friends, other interests and other acquaintances took our time. Meeting men from the deadly football rival, we found that they were the same kind of men as ourselves. We went to the annual football game and to class reunions where the old spirit revived transiently, and old memories were recalled as we met our old mates; but we found that we had not as much in common with them, beyond memories, as we had had in our youth. They had gone into different occupations, developed different tastes, and enjoyed varying measures of success. Some had become rich and famous; some had gone into politics; some had achieved respectable citizenship and some had failed. Jones at the head of the class had not done well; Smith at the foot had become a power in the world. Robinson, who had not been a remarkable scholar in his youth, was now a great professor. Brown, who had been a most serious student, was interested only in his golf score; Higgins, who had barely escaped expulsion for frivolity, was a serious judge. Larkin, who had been pointed out as a born leader of men at twenty-one, was a follower of meager influence. All this proved that college was only a curriculum in studies and basic character-building, while development came inafter life from inherent vitality, persistence, latent talent, health, environment, and innumerable influences.
The occasional West Pointer who returned home at the end of his second year with squared shoulders and chin drawn in had become far more dissociated from his surroundings than the freshman of a civil college. He too was thinking, "How little they know!" After his graduation, except for a rare visit to his parents, he had ceased to be a part of the home community. He was here and there at army posts, and serving in the Philippines. It was not unlikely that he had been a poor boy. I have known instances where boys had to borrow the money to travel to West Point. Many of the appointees had no particular call to the profession of arms; but they knew and their parents knew that from the day he entered the academy a cadet would not require a cent from home or have to "work his way," or win a scholarship. The nation took him under its wing. In order to receive an appointment it was well to know the local Congressman or a Senator, even in these days of competitive examinations.
The appointment of poor boys to be officers had the appeal of democracy. It was a system devised in the days following the Revolution, when in England commissions in the red-coats were bought and sold, and only the sons of the gentry became officers.West Point, now well over a hundred years old, was at first an engineering school, but the real founder of the academy of today was Sylvanus Thayer, who had Prussian ideas of the same kind as von Steuben, drillmaster of the Revolutionary armies. He was of the old school of martinets, who proposed to establish in the midst of this pioneering, lawless, new country an institution where pupils could be caught young and so disciplined and formed that they would be worthy of the strictest European military tradition. In return for this privilege, the Congressman was to have the power of appointment. Congress accepted the idea. It did not interfere with the militia organizations, or any group of amateurs, or the conviction that any man in his shirt-sleeves and with a squirrel rifle was the equal of any European regular. At the same time it trained some really professional officers, who might become generals in time of war. Moreover, it was democratic; this was the compelling argument. America was opportunity; a poor boy might become a general; the Congressman might select the poor boy who was to be a general.
The founder was a wise man and a stern one. He set the tradition which endured; he put the cadets into the uniform which we see in the cuts of Wellington's veterans who fought at Waterloo, and which they were to wear for a hundred years. He put astigma upon being "dropped" from the Academy, which was a counter to family and political influence for a softer course. Doubtless he foresaw that when the graduates were through with these hard four years, they would be a unit for its continuance, particularly as they had not to go through it again. He had no illusions about democracy; he knew that democracy was the curse of military discipline. He believed in an officer caste; there could not be a good army without caste. If he could not have students from families belonging to the officer caste according to European traditions, he would make them gentlemen. They would be taught to dance, and initiated into a code of officer ethics and etiquette. In later times the Point had its polo team, a luxury which only rich youth could afford.
This did not imply any relaxation of that severe régime in which theoretically only the fittest were to survive. The cadets might not smoke cigarettes or drink; they might not go skylarking to neighboring towns. Their every hour of drill, study, and recreation was counted. Far from the freedom of the elective course, every mind and body was filled into a mold a century old. Three-fourths of the study was scholastic; only a fourth, outside the drill, could be classed as strictly military: for the cadets were supposed to receive the equivalent of a collegiate education at the same time that they were beingtrained to be officers. With few exceptions their instructors were former graduates, called in from service with the army. Some of these might be rusty, compared to the experts of civil colleges, who gave their lives to specializing in one branch; but civilian teachers could not supply military discipline and atmosphere.
The boy who went to West Point was an average boy. At an impressionable age he entered a world as isolated and self-centered as that of a monastery. The effects of college and fraternity spirit were many times intensified. He had almost no opportunities of renewing the associations of civil life; all was of the army, for the army, and by the army. Though he served in the ranks as a cadet, he never served in the ranks as a soldier. His "How little they know!" was not to suffer the shock of competitive strife with the millions of other boys whom he was to lead as a general. His quality of leadership had been tested only in marks on drill and scholarship.
When he was graduated, he became an officer, his position assured for life. The fellows of his school days who went into professions had to have their way paid, or to work their way, through college and professional school, and then slowly build up a practice. All this the West Pointer had free, as the gift of his country, in the name of democracy.His income would be more than equal to that of the average graduate of our leading law and medical schools, with the certainty of sufficient pay to care for his old age when he was retired. Once an officer, he could lean back on his oars if he chose,—the hardest work of his career having been finished when other boys are beginning theirs. He became a cleat on the slow-moving escalator of promotion, waiting on the death and retirement of seniors or the expansion of the army. There were other cleats than those with the West Point marking, those of officers who had worked their way up from the ranks, and a larger class which had come in through examination; but the West Point spirit was dominant. The West Pointer was a West Pointer; his tradition the tradition of the army.
Superb of health, and hardened of physique, the graduate, I should add, need not continue the West Point régime after his graduation. He might neglect exercise to the point that led President Roosevelt to issue his order compelling tests of physical endurance, which led to such an uproar in army circles. Roosevelt proceeded on the sound principle that capacity for enormous and sudden physical strain is a prime requisite—as the Great War so abundantly proved—for leading infantry on marches and in battle, and for sleeping on the ground.
Occasionally a West Pointer may have had someof his illusions about "they" amended by his colonel; but anything like a full revelation was out of the question. The young lieutenant, when he went to an army post at home or in the Philippines, found himself in the same isolated world of army thought and associations. The troops he commanded hardly put him in touch with the average of citizens. They were men who, in a country which did not feel the call to military service, enlisted for $17.50 a month and the security of army life, oftener than for adventure or ambition. Between them and their officers there was as broad a gulf as between any officer class in Europe and their soldiers. All standards were set on the time required to drill these recruits and form them in the regular army mould.
When officers met, ten or twenty years after graduation or receiving their commissions, they found none of the changes of fortune which alumni of civil colleges found. Everyone was in the same relative rank as when he became a second lieutenant. The army opposed promotion by selection, as that meant "political" influence and favoritism. Promotion by selection was against the law, except that the President might, if he chose, make a second lieutenant a brigadier or major-general with the consent of the Senate. The promotion of Wood, Bell, Funston, and Pershing to be brigadiers overthe heads of many seniors led to no end of ill-feeling in the army, which made these ambitious and able officers the victims of an unpopularity which only time and the retirement of older officers could overcome.
They had all distinguished themselves in the Spanish War, which had awakened us to a realization that though we had excellent regiments, which exhibited all the sturdy and dependable qualities of the regulars, we had no army organization. Under Secretary Root we developed the staff school and the school of the line at Leavenworth, and the War College at Washington, as a series of schools where ambitious officers could study tactics, specialize in different branches, form paper armies, and direct them in the field. The Staff College applied West Point industry. Its students worked long hours in the enthusiasm of mastering their profession. It was necessarily scholastic. I remember seeing, soon after the Russo-Japanese War, a combat maneuver of a few companies in the fields at Leavenworth. It was carried out in a manner that would have mortified a young reserve officer in France. Some of the soldiers participating had had two and three years' service. In wonted freedom of speech I suggested that with three months' training companies of college men, farm-hands, elevator boys, brakemen, firemen, clerks, and managers, drawnfrom civil life, could be taught to perform this maneuver better than we had just seen it performed. There was a chorus of protest, particularly from the older officers, who were saying that the trouble was that these men had not had enough drill: it took five years to make a soldier. Not all the younger officers joined in this view. One had the courage to express his opinion: "You're right—provided those citizens you mention put their hearts and intelligence into the job. Give them six months, with enough experts to train them, and plenty of war material to back them; shoot over them a few times—and I'd ask nothing better than to lead them." He was to live to see his heresy become orthodoxy; to see West Point receiving lessons in democracy from American soldiery.
Upon our entry into the war, our officers might have been divided into three classes: (A), including about ten per cent of the whole, officers who were the best of the Leavenworth graduates: officers who had shown administrative ability and natural leadership; officers who were in touch with the world, alert, vital, with strong constitutions, and the capacity of meeting situations. These men would have done well in any occupation in civil life. (B), average officers, devoted to their duty, consistently efficient. These represented about forty per cent. They would have been moderately successful in civillife. (C), the remaining fifty per cent, of varying degrees of capacity. They included the officers who kept step and escaped courts, those without ambition, those who had not grown since they received their commissions, the fussy sticklers for etiquette without power of initiative, those who avoided any extra work, those who were never meant to lead men in battle. This class, with few exceptions, would not have been successful in civil life; not good lawyers or doctors, railroad men or mechanics. They would never have earned the pay they received anywhere but in the army.
Taken as a whole, the average was about the same as in any group of men; it was high, indeed, considering the absence of incentive and of competition. Then there were the unknown quantities in every class: the officers whose latent powers, hitherto undetected, came into play under the call of emergency; and the officers who disappointed expectations formed in peace when they were put to the test of war.
All of them were fellows in the life of the post, where the feminine element had its influence. Almost without exception they lived modestly on their pay. Everyone knew the other's income. The rank of wives was that of their husbands. The officer commanding was the head of the family. All the jealousies of any isolated community were in play.There was bound to be intrigue for good assignments, not only in Washington and favorite posts at home, but in the Philippines; but there was no such thing as corruption. The army was straight; its code of honor was unimpeachable, except in the influences for good assignments. There were hops and dinners, and visiting back and forth. Inner feelings might be strong, but they must be kept under the mantle of formal politeness; for you did not choose your companions. They were chosen by army orders. Everything was official, and what was not was rank.
Talk at the bachelor messes and at all gatherings was about "shop": which left the outsider as detached as a railroad man attending a convention of chemists. The lack of common themes was one reason for absence of contact with the "they" of the outside world. The army register was the most read of books. It showed where all your friends were serving, and also you could reckon when you would receive your promotion, and when perhaps you might have a separate command, with husband and wife outranking all present and having to follow the views of no senior in matters of routine. Strong and biting criticisms were exchanged of fellow officers, whose nicknames of cadet days remained,—whether "Rusty," or "Poppy," "Wooden-headed Charlie," "Slow Bill," "Pincushion Pete," or"Noisy Tom." Smith had gone to seed. How Jones had ever been able to graduate from the Point was past understanding. Robinson managed more good appointments with less ability than any man in the service. All belonged to the army; in the presence of the outside world there could be no fault in the army. Officers stood together; they stood up for their men, no matter how mercilessly they "bawled them out" at drill. In the background at drill and in the barracks were the sergeants and corporals, the "non-coms," who shaped the "rookies" into soldiers, and who carried on all the routine drills. Old soldiers, they had fallen into the habit of army life. Their position in our democratic country lacked the importance that it enjoyed in European armies. In the offices were the field clerks, who ran the typewriters and carried on office routine.
Among the officers the college spirit backing the football team for victory, and that of the secret society and of the trade-union, were inevitably, as in all officers' corps, united in the common fealty of self-protection. The army was always fighting for its rights against an unappreciative nation. Secretly it was always against each administration. Roosevelt was almost hated at one time. Later he was admired. Congress was regarded as a natural enemy which cut down appropriations. Civilian secretaries of war, who came into office without the slightestknowledge of the character of the military service, fell into the hands of a clique of officers close to the throne. Unless you had a friend among them, you might not count on good assignments, said the pessimistic of class C.
The feeling that the army was underpaid was as common as that it was unappreciated. Officers, thinking only of the men in civil life who succeeded, complained that they could not associate with the outside world because they had not the money to keep up their social end. The dream of every officer was of a great conscript army, like the French or German. This meant promotion, of course, and that the army would count for something in the country, though the thought was not consciously selfish on the part of the best men. It was professional and natural human ambition, based on the conviction of the necessity of military training for every citizen. Without it an officer could not be a good soldier. It was a better spirit than that of the time-servers of class C, who were interested in promotion alone, and in passing the time.
The prospect of Japan taking the Pacific Coast was the main item of propaganda before the Great War began. Then Germany, or the victor in the war, was seen devastating our coasts, his great guns toppling our cities in ruins, and his infantry sweeping across country, perpetrating the horrors of Belgium.Any officer who knew his profession in the large, knew—despite the figures assembled for its proof—that the transport of forces for a successful invasion was out of the question; but such methods of making the flesh creep alone could awaken an indifferent public to the necessity of an adequate army and the value of military drill to our heterogeneous population. The regulars saw us depending against trained hosts upon citizens in shirt-sleeves and the undisciplined National Guard. "They" of the outside world were concerned only with their own prosperity—undisciplined, utterly without the military sense or spirit. War was a biological necessity. There had always been war, and there always would be war. One day we would find ourselves at war. The nation would call for soldiers, and the little band of regulars would go forth to sacrifice. Meanwhile, in the midst of ignorance, they would keep the altar fires burning, and remain true to the traditions of their profession.
Then a miracle happened. The dream of the regulars came true. There were to be no political generals: none were to be rewarded with commissions for raising regiments, as in the Civil War. We were to have the draft; all direction was to be left to the professional. The nation signed a check upon all our resources, human and material, to be filled out by them. Our people offered all they hadin order to save civilization. Their thought was the interest of their souls, their country, humanity, and their future happiness and prosperity.
To the army officers war was their occupation: a viewpoint entirely different. Glorious opportunity had burst the door of their isolation wide open, beckoning them to power. It was the same to them as if overnight the stocks in a land company had jumped a thousand per cent owing to the discovery of oil on its property. Majors and captains of classes B and C were to be colonels of regiments of three thousand men, more than colonels, and many brigadiers, had ever commanded. All the officers of class A might now carry out their theories in practice: they might aim for the command, not of paper, but of real armies in battle. Only a few had been in touch with the psychology of the country. The country was swarming in upon them. Was it surprising that some of class C and class B and even of class A felt, at the prospect of enlightening the ignorance of the manhood of all the United States, a constriction of cap-bands which had formerly been large enough?
For recruit officers of this enormous new army we turned to our colleges and technical schools. This was an educational test, but the only one that could be hurriedly applied. The average of the candidates for the officers' training camps must be asnaturally capable as the average of army officers. They must possess a class A, drawn from men already tested in civil life, which would be equal in brain power to class A on the army list; and it must be relatively larger, considering how few army officers there were and how numerous were the educated, intelligent, and ambitious youth of our country. Among those who were only privates in the swarms of volunteers who enlisted immediately upon our entry into the war were privates to whom nature had given a natural capacity for leadership which no curriculum of a military school or civil college could supply; who were to take the leadership of companies out of the hands of men who had an "A plus" in calculus, surveying, and Latin. After the volunteers, the draft men began arriving at the training camps in excursion parties.