"When I saw them piling off the train," said one regular officer, "the undisciplined sons of an undisciplined people, I wondered what they would do to us. They had not been in camp a day before I knew that they were going to play the game." It had never occurred to him, his horizon restricted from his juvenile days at the Academy, that there was discipline in the running of our railroads, our industries, our labor unions, our societies, our lodges, and in all the team-play of our sports; that we were all used to obeying orders in the process of earninga living or winning a baseball game. Those boys among the volunteers and in the draft were of the same kind as the boys who went to the Point to become members of the officer class. There had been no such military marvel in all history as the willingness of our people to yield authority which the British had granted only after painful stages of inveterate resistance. It was all inexpressibly magnificent; a better proof of strength and character than any form of routine military preparedness. Given such a spirit—a spirit the stronger for the dislike of military forms and the aversion to war—and we could no more fail of victory in the end than you can exterminate the Jewish race. Without that spirit nations decay and fail, for war does not form character: war only expresses the character formed in peace.
Every volunteer and draft private, every would-be officer, realized his ignorance, as a neophyte about to be initiated into professional mystery. He had the willingness to conform, the eagerness to learn, of the neophyte. No teachers were ever safer from scepticism on the part of their pupils. The West Point discipline was applied. It taught the drillmaster's fundamentals of forming good physique and habits of strict routine. For this, great credit is due. This host of recruits, American in intelligence and adaptability, "playing the game," neverable to answer back, rigid at salute, imbibing the instruction of class A or enduring the outbursts of temper in good army "bawling out" language from class C, formed a silent body of criticism which became increasingly discriminate with growth of knowledge. The instructors did not forget that the course at West Point was four years, though they did forget that three-fourths of the curriculum consisted of elementals learned at a civil school. They did forget their association with the "rookies" who became privates of regulars in time of peace. Holding fast to these criteria, they overlooked how fast the average youth of America could learn when he put his heart and mind into intensive study and drill.
Developing "staff work" in France—The younger men from Leavenworth schools in the saddle—The inner ring of the expert—Building the "best staff" at Langres—The obsession of promotion.
Developing "staff work" in France—The younger men from Leavenworth schools in the saddle—The inner ring of the expert—Building the "best staff" at Langres—The obsession of promotion.
So it happened that the little band of regulars did not go out to sacrifice in a body. They were scattered through the training camps as instructors, and they directed the expansion of our army organization. The officers of our General Staff in Washington had followed the strategy of the war on the maps, and studied its larger tactical problems in the light of such reports as were received. Their own precepts and training led them to admire the German rather than the French army system; a majority, thinking at first that Germany would win, were accordingly impressed with the seriousness of our undertaking when we entered the war. They hardly realized that the Canadians and Australians, who were people of something the same character as ourselves, had developed from raw recruits divisions and corps which were without superiors. We had formed no plan for operating an army in Europe.We seemed to be unfamiliar with the static details of trench warfare, with the clothing and equipment required; otherwise all this information would not have had to be sent back by the officers of our pioneer force in France three months after our entry into the war.
The training camps being established, and munition plants under way at home, we must prepare to command our forces when they were ready to take the field. "Staff work" was supposed the most expert of all the branches. In my first book I have already gone into the organization of our staff in France, formed on the plan of European staffs. What I have to add now comes in the light of later events, after the staff had been tried in battle, and in the light of the days of peace, when discrimination will not be misunderstood. In the early days in France a progressive officer said to me: "We must not go too fast in elimination of the unfit and promotion of the fit. It will upset the equilibrium. We must wait on evolution." It was General Pershing who had to maintain the equilibrium. He was a regular; and regulars regarded him as their general. He had to depend upon the men who had rank; and upon trained soldiers who knew the army system, in order to start his machine. One day, someone remarked to him, "But this officer is in a rut, and a winding rut, that does not permit him tosee ahead, let alone over the walls." The General replied: "But he's one of my broad-minded ones. What do you think I do with my narrow-minded ones?"
Possibly the tests, ever so swift in war, were swifter in France than at home. It was soon evident that some regular officers could rise to their tasks, and that some could not. Some of them had fallen into habits that did not permit long concentration of mind. They had not the physical vitality to endure long hours of labor. They were obsessed by small details, when they were suddenly given charge of a department store instead of a little store with one clerk for an assistant. Some were simply overwhelmed by their new burdens, or more possessed with the pride of authority than its efficient exertion. They were the ones who would show reserve officers that building a bridge or baking a loaf of bread or putting up a crane or organizing a laboratory was a different matter when you did it for the army. Some who had vitality and concentration were hopelessly lacking in capacity for organization. They were particularly impressed with their awful responsibility in having to train reserve officers not only in combat but in the Services of Supply. They would not admit that there was anything about the army which a reserve officer could do as well as a regular. The capacity of many for prolonged controversyover theory and for writing memoranda was astounding; a result of the days of talking "shop" and speculative discussion at the posts. Where naval officers have always a fleet in being, and are always on a war footing—which means a successful secretary of the navy if he will only sign the papers placed on his desk—army officers had only an army in imagination, which meant that a "successful" secretary of war must indeed be a great man.
From the first there was a struggle in France between two elements: between the ruthlessly progressive and the reactionaries who were set in traditions; between the able, energetic, ambitious, enduring, and others who might have finer but not as aggressive qualities; between the men who were sure of themselves and those who were not. For his immediate advisers Pershing had to turn to the Leavenworth men, who had been trained in the theory of a large organization and who had used it as the basis of intelligent observation of the operations of the French and British armies. A Leavenworth man believed in Leavenworth men. He had enormous capacity for desk work which he had developed as a student at Leavenworth. A scholastic preparation thus became the criterion for practice in organization. Leavenworth men believed in the gospel of driving hard work; of rewards for success, andmerciless elimination for failure—which is the basic theory of successful war.
All armies are looking either back at the last war or ahead to the next. One element, leaning back on its oars, considers the lessons of the last war, if it were won, as setting all precedents for present policy. Another, usually the men who were not in the last war except as captains and lieutenants, considers that new conditions will again set new precedents in the next war. The officers in the forties in the days of the war with Spain and the Philippine rebellion, who chafed at the Civil War traditions of their seniors, now had command of divisions, while in the Great War the Leavenworth men who were in the thirties and forties were pushing up from below. If the later generation lacked rank on this occasion, it had power in France as the result of Leavenworth and the new staff system, while promotion by selection called its ambition.
Leavenworth graduates sat in the seats of the mighty on the right and left hand of the Commander-in-Chief; the tables of organization were of their devising; the orders signed by the Chief of Staff, which the divisional and the corps generals and all the generals of the Services of Supply had to obey, originated from this inner circle in the barracks buildings at Chaumont, which was surrounded with professional mystery. Divisional and corps chiefsof staff were Leavenworth men in touch with the inner circle. The disrespectful thought of these officers as the Leavenworth "clique"; but it was not the fashion to do much thinking aloud about them, such was their power. They did not think of themselves as a clique; not even the members of a secret society think of themselves in that way. They were a group of veterans, who if they had not the scars won in battle—we had had no great battles since the Civil War—had burned the midnight oil and played the war game together. They had, as volunteers, in order to learn their profession, when the people of the country knew no more of their existence than if they had been in a monastery, gone through a post-graduate course as rigorous as West Point itself. They thought of themselves as apostles, their voices unheard in a land saturated with pacifism and indifference, who, in fasting, prayer, and industry, had studied the true gospel in their holy of holies. They alone had conned the pages of the sacred books behind the altar where the regular army kept the sacred fires burning.
"War is the greatest game on earth," as one of them said. In this thought they had the same reason for enthusiasm in study as a chemist in his experiments or an architect in his building. In their school in the wheat fields of Kansas they were manipulating in theory forces which made a hundred milliondollar corporation an incidental pawn. But they were dealing with the imaginary, and the managers of the corporation with the real. When the war came all their forces of imagination became real.
To be a "Leavenworth man" meant a title to staff position, which you must take whether you wanted it or not. There were many excellent officers who never went to Leavenworth; officers who were masterly company, battalion, and regimental commanders, and who had the quality of natural leaders. They did not want to train for the staff. They preferred the line. Their ambition, nursed through the years of service, with never an assignment to Washington, was to make sure of a command in the field if war came.
"I had rather lead a battalion of infantry than be chief of staff of an army," as one of them said. Another said, early in the war, "I'm all for the Leavenworth men to do the chessboard work, but we'll find that they have studied so much that some of them don't know how to make decisions when they are dealing with a real instead of a paper army. I don't envy them. I obey their orders. I'll make a good regiment; that is all I ask—let me be with troops." He was right in saying that the men who stood high at Leavenworth ran the danger of being too academic for practical war, as surely as the best students at college are unfitted for practicalbusiness life. Yet all criticism of the Leavenworth coterie runs foul of the question: "What should we have done without them in France?" If you have to build a great bridge and there is no engineer who has ever erected one, why, it would be better to choose a man who had been through a first-class engineering school to make the plans, than to choose the contractors who got out the stone or sunk the caissons, or the financiers who furnished the funds. Every Leavenworth man had pet ideas of his own, as the result of his study, which he sought to apply when authority came to him, with inevitable interference with team-play. He had all the enthusiasm of a graduate of the Beaux-Arts who is given a million-dollar appropriation to build a state capitol as his first assignment.
In relation to our little army with its scattered posts, their problem in making a great army organization was much the same as the transformation of Japan from medievalism to modernism, or amalgamating and improving all the small plants of individual business of fifty years ago in a year's time into a modern trust. The thing required broad vision. Some of them possessed it, but not all, even if they were Americans. Such was the loyalty of graduates to Leavenworth that I have heard them say that it was the best staff school in the world. A French officer might respond: "Perhaps, but wehave had more opportunities for practice in handling large bodies of troops." The British and French staffs thought that our men were worthy of the highest praise; but they thought that our staff was inexperienced and sophomoric. They would not have been averse, as we know, to taking over the staff direction of our army, which, considering the feeling of the line toward the staff on all occasions, would have led to additional inter-allied friction. Relations would be smoother by having the resentment of the men who bore the brunt of casualties directed into home channels.
The Leavenworth men, thinking as army officers and for the army, did not wish to yield power. They wanted to establish a staff system and a tradition for a large American force, in the hope that universal service would be accepted and continued, making the system permanent. Where were they to get the host of additional staff officers required for the armies, the corps, and the divisions in battle? A few student observers could be sent to the British and French staffs; but not a sufficiently large number when any outsider was in the way in the crowded quarters of a series of dugouts, or the ruined houses of a village. Moreover, Leavenworth wanted no system half British and half French, but one suited to our own army for all time. Leavenworth was always thinking of our military future. Followingour national bent for excellence and this thought of the future, which led us to aim for the best gas mask, the best aeroplane motor, the best machine-gun, the best gas, the best of everything, Leavenworth proposed to make the best staff. To this tendency of ours to seek perfection the Allies might reply: "Perfection is all very well; but we have tested equipment, and a staff system the result of three years' trial, and time is valuable against the German."
Just as the West Point system, which takes the "plebes" in hand, was being applied in our training camps, so Leavenworth staff college was reproduced in France in the ancient city of Langres, near Chaumont, which had been a fortress in many wars. Here regulars worked beside reserves, while the regulars had no special privileges except the first choice of horses to ride. Here they were to learn how to solve the tactical management of troops in action, the technique of all the different G's of the staff: G-1 and G-4, which had to do with transport and supply; G-2, which had to do with intelligence; G-3, with operations, and G-5, with training.
There was much to teach in that three months' course. How long will it take to reach all the units of a division, billeted in ten villages in an area of ten square miles, with an order for movement? How will it be sent? How will it be written after consultation with G-1, who knows the transport available?Which units will march out first? How long will it take to entrain those going by train? If the motor transport, and the horse-drawn transport, too, have to go overland, what roads will they take to reach their destination? Have the drivers their maps? In making a relief in the trenches, how long will it take to march up and complete the task?
Four German prisoners say one thing, four another, and three another. Take their reports in connection with aeroplane reports and general observation. What is your decision as to the enemy's strength on your front? Two additional divisions are suddenly brought into your sector. How are you to feed them? An attack is planned to pinch out a salient. How long is to be your artillery preparation? What its character? What points will you cover with the corps artillery fire? What with the divisional howitzers? There is your map with the information in G-2's possession for G-3 to consider in working out details. The infantry must be preceded by a barrage worked out with a mathematical accuracy, that will be practicable for the gunners and the infantry. All the fundamentals of technical knowledge were what arithmetic, algebra and geometry, and the strength of materials are to a bridge builder, in solving the problems presented to civilians, lawyers, engineers, and scholars of ages from twenty-five to forty-five, who worked them outand went to recitation in a school-room where they sat at little desks, as they did in boyhood days.
The number of hours of study a student put in at Leavenworth had been a test of capacity—the reason for Leavenworth's existence. While officers who did not take the course were regarded somewhat in the light of outsiders, "We'll show these cits what it is to work," as one regular said. Langres was a very sweatshop in scholastic industry. It was a combination of learning and an infinite amount of clerical detail for men many of whom were used to having their details looked after by clerks. British and French officers, acting as instructors and lecturers, elucidated the problems on the blackboard. As one saturated with war on the Western Front listened to preachment of fundamentals, I was impressed with how much the average man who has not seen war, and has taken his conception of it from a soldier charging or firing a gun, had to learn before he had the a b c's of modern war.
One also wondered if all the hard work were always to the purpose. Practical Allied officers, who were always polite, thought that the students did so much grinding that they became dull and stale; we were trying to teach them too many generalities. A knowing regular said one day to a reservist: "You are too serious. The thing in the army is to make a show at this sort of gymnastics,—thenuse your common sense when you reach the front." This was in kind with a remark of one regular officer about another, whose information had led us astray: "I know him—a regular West Point trick. You must pretend you know, and be very definite in the pretense. That often gets over." It seemed to me one of the faults of the West Point system.
The regulars had the advantage at Langres in that they had been ingrained in the military instinct, which is what is called the mathematical sense in a schoolboy who finds mathematics easy; but if the instinct were only that of cadet days and of company drill, and their minds had not grown, they suffered from the little learning which is a dangerous thing. Though the average Leavenworth man—not in all cases a class A man—did not see, despite the Canadian example, how anyone could become a staff officer in a few months when you had to study at Leavenworth for years, it soon became evident that some of these reserve officers with finely trained minds, used to the application and competition of civil life, were showing themselves the superior of the regulars. This in the scholastic sense, without considering practice in action. There was one Leavenworth man I knew who, though a master at solving problems in the classroom, seemed unable to solve any problem in action. Beside the Langres schoolwe had a school of the line, and a candidates' school where men who had shown their leadership as privates in combat might be educated in theory for commissions. The reserve graduates of Langres were being sent out in the spring and summer of 1918 to be assistants in the G sections of army and corps and divisions. In a few instances they even became chiefs of section of division staffs. They were promised that one day they might wear the black stripe of the General Staff on their sleeves as the reward of efficient service. "Doping the black stripe" was the slang phrase for the grind at Langres. One day the reserve graduates might also have promotion, and one day, too, the reserve officers, captains and lieutenants and a few majors of the line, arriving with the divisions from the training camps—as our organization grew and was knit together—might also have promotion.
About this time promotion was becoming a form of intoxication with the regulars. They must be cared for first; in due course, after the reservists became soldiers, the reservists would have their turn. New tables of organization were being devised which called for more high-ranking officers. Without rank the work could not be done, said his chiefs to the Commander-in-Chief, who once greeted one of them with the remark: "How many lieutenant-colonels must become colonels in order to do thisjob?" The regulars kept apart from the reserves, forming a group in their own world. In their messes the talk ran on promotions: each new list brought its tragedies for men who found themselves jumped, and its triumphs for those who had jumped them. If you were not frequently promoted, it was taken as a sign that you were not "making good." Promotion depended upon the good will of your superior, and sometimes, naturally and humanly, upon the fact that you might have served with him at an army post. Promotion became unconsciously corrupting. Some younger men who received their stars after swift passage through the lower grades hardly bore their honors with the equanimity of their elders. One chief of staff I knew had a Napoleonic grandeur. He hedged himself about with the etiquette of royalty. If he had been presented with a three-cornered hat of the kind that Napoleon wore, he would have accepted it in all seriousness. Unhappily his work was not of the Napoleonic standard. There was another chief of staff who was just the same man as a brigadier-general that he had been as a major. He never seemed busy; his work was always in order; his tactics were successful. He knew how to win men to his service, how to delegate authority. Had he been given command of an army he would have carried on in the same imperturbable fashion.
"It will be hard on some of us regulars," he remarked, "when we wake up the 'morning after' and find ourselves majors back in the good old Philippines."
Naturally, in this environment, the reservists caught the contagion of promotion. If promotion were the criterion of having done your "bit," well, then, what would your friends think of you if you returned with the same rank you had when you left home? When you did return, you found that your friends could not remember whether you had been a major or a colonel. They were relieved if they might call you "mister" or Tom or George. It didn't matter to them what kind of insignia you had as long as you had been "over there," doing your bit. They had perspective which was hard to preserve in France.
Misfit and unfit sorted at Blois—Clan again—What to do with the "dodo"—Making good after Blois—Its significance to the regular—The fear of Blois in its effect on the reservist—Faults of reserve officers—Feeling of the medicos—Staff propaganda—Getting to troops—Staff and line—Slow weeding out.
Misfit and unfit sorted at Blois—Clan again—What to do with the "dodo"—Making good after Blois—Its significance to the regular—The fear of Blois in its effect on the reservist—Faults of reserve officers—Feeling of the medicos—Staff propaganda—Getting to troops—Staff and line—Slow weeding out.
When the promotion disease was most acute, however, the word promotion never exercised over the army the spell of the word Blois. Though Blois was not mentioned in the press, it was as familiar in the secrecy of the army world as Verdun, Ypres, Paris, or Château-Thierry. Every officer who was uncertain whether or not he was pleasing his superior stood in fear of Blois, which was the synonym of failure. Downcast generals and lieutenants traveled together from the front to Blois.
What was to be done with officers who broke down in health, or who did not come up to the standards required in their work? They might be sent home; but white-haired generals and colonels who had reputations as able officers in time of peace were not wanted airing their grievances on the steps of the Army and Navy Building in Washington.There was an injustice, too, in placing on any officer the stigma of having been sent back from France, which would react on the many capable officers who were recalled from France in order to apply their experience abroad in furthering our preparations at home. Then, too, we needed the service of any officer who could do any kind of work in France. In the majority of instances it was not so much a question of being unfit as being "misfit." The thing was to put round pegs in round holes.
The town of Blois near Tours became a depot for classification and reassignment of officers who had been relieved by their superiors. A Leavenworth man who was in charge had the power to reduce an officer in rank if he thought this were warranted. He secretly interrogated the arriving officer, who was told that his record would not be considered against him; his superiors might have been unjust to him; if he had "stubbed his toe," this did not mean that he would do it again. Though the plan was as logical as the transfer of an employee of a business from the manufacturing to the selling branch, the object of the attention felt the humiliation none the less. Despite all propaganda to alleviate its association in the minds of fellow-officers, "being sent to Blois" had only one generally accepted significance, which was wickedly unfair to many a victim. There were superiorswho followed their subordinates to Blois; while the subordinates were later promoted, they sank into the desuetude of a routine position. Indigestion, a burst of temper, a case of nerves, of prejudice, of finding a scapegoat for a senior's mistakes, might start an officer away from the front with his unhappy travel order. I knew of instances where it was a tribute to the officer that he had been sent: a tribute to his honest effort, his initiative, his unselfish spirit in trying to do his duty under an incompetent, irascible superior, who himself should not have received the consideration of Blois but been sent to a labor battalion, in the hope that by a few hours of physical effort a day he might have earned a part of the pay and the pains his country had wasted on him.
Considering how valuable was the regular's professional training for combat, and considering too that only half of the regular officers ever reached France, it was surprising how many regular officers were sent from the front to Blois. The percentage of regulars who failed in action was said to be as large as the percentage of reserves. The Leavenworth group, aiming to be impartial in the ruthlessness which they thought their duty, declared that when a man failed to make good he went, whether regular or reserve.
"If there's a reserve officer who can do my jobbetter than I can, I want him to have it," said a regular colonel of thirty-five. "I'll give all I have and do my best wherever I am sent. That's service and duty. My country thought I was fit to be an officer. It paid me to serve where I could serve best. What is the use of holding to the clannish idea that any regular is better than a reserve? That isn't the idea of efficiency. If a man who has served only six months is better than a man who has served thirty years, the old regular ought not to growl. He ought to feel ashamed. He is beholden to his country for having given him a livelihood for thirty years. He could not have earned as good a one in any other occupation."
He was the same officer who had spoken his convictions after my remarks at the maneuver at Leavenworth. Of humble origin, proving the democratic test by his conduct, he was an honor to the profession of arms,—as he would have been to any profession. The whole army recognized his ability. Of course no reserve officer or National Guard officer could be better than he; his subordinates were proud to serve under him. If his reward could have been judged by a monetary standard, he earned all the pay he had ever received from the government by one month's service in France. He would return to a major's rank under mediocre officers, whose work he now directed from the staff.
Had he made the remarks which I have just quoted to reserve officers when any regulars were present, even his ability would not have saved him from the charge of disloyalty to the clan. So the strain on class A men in the staff or in the line was heavy. As Leavenworth men, the Leavenworth men stood together, thought the observing reserves—and with them, of course, I include National Guard officers—while the regulars, forming up against the magic inner circle, stood together as regulars in the magic outer circle.
The human equation and friendships were bound to enter into the honest effort at impartiality. Here was a brigadier-general of fifty-five or sixty who had been your commanding officer at a post. He was hopelessly superannuated. There was no place of responsibility in keeping with his rank where his services would not be fatal to efficiency. No one desired to hurt his feelings. Diplomacy must arrange cushions for him. He was given a car, and aides, and sent about on inspections, to make reports which were received with serious attention, or he was given a first-class officer as chief of staff. One of these amiable "dodos," as the regulars called them among themselves—never in the presence of a reserve officer—complained, so the story ran, that "another general had a cut-glass vase for flowers in his limousine, and he had none."The strife for cars befitting rank was almost as vigorous as for promotion, while some regimental commanders rode in side-cars or cars of a "low rank"; but they, who passed through shell-fire and bumped over shell-craters, would not have exchanged their commands for the most luxurious of limousines flying along good roads out of sound of the guns. It was hard, indeed, that upstarts from Leavenworth in the name of John J. Pershing should consign to Blois, and from Blois to a base section of the S. O. S., veterans of thirty and forty years' service in the regulars. There was another method applied on one occasion, when a division commander told a brigadier who had mismanaged his command that his brigade would be cared for in the morrow's attack, and that he would have his chance to redeem himself in the manner of a brave man, by going "over the top." He went, of course, winning that respect which is given every man, regardless of age or ability, for unflinching courage. Others might have been given the same opportunity to win gold letters in the memorial hall at West Point as an enduring epitaph; but there were strong arguments against this. The incompetent were not fit for the serious business of combat organizations; men's lives could not be trusted to their direction. In case of death, the officer's widow would receive a small pension, while if he survived and was retired,he would receive retired pay enough to assure comfort to his family.
The human equation reappears. A reservist was a stranger, a regular might be an old comrade, calling on a senior's affection and the loyalty to clan, when the latter considered sending an officer to Blois. Still other influences might make a regular's shortcomings more easily forgiven than a reservist's. If a regular did not succeed in carrying out orders, as he was a professional, failure must be accepted as unavoidable. In a word, if Ed or John with whom you had served could not put the trains through or take a machine-gun nest, then it was impossible.
There was no such personal standard of professionalism to apply to a reservist. Success must be the only standard for him. On the other hand, I did not envy some Leavenworth men, who leaned over backward in being resolute to comrades, when they should revert to their original rank and be once more serving under officers whom they had commanded from the staff. "He's got it in for me," was an expression sometimes heard, as you will hear it in different forms in any class community. It was an excuse for having been sent to Blois. Meanwhile, new grudges were being formed. It was dramatic when a regular officer, who had been sent to Blois, upon reassignment to the front won his brigadiership in a brilliant action; but not so dramaticas when a National Guard brigadier, who had had his stars removed at Blois, refused a colonelcy in the rear, received a majority in the line, returned as a major to his own brigade, and was killed in leading his battalion gallantly in a charge.
The heartbreaks among the regulars must be more lasting than among the reservists. War was the regular's profession. He returned to live with his reputation in the army world. The reservists returned to the civil world, where the war would soon be forgotten. This accounted for the greediness for promotion, which throughout the lives of regular officers would be the mark of their careers, while the guerdon of the future for the reservist was success in another occupation.
"Do these reservists want to jump in and take everything away from us, when they are in the army only for the war?" as a veteran regular complained when he was not receiving the promotion which he thought was his due.
The more subordinates you had, the more chance of promotion.
"Get a lot of young officers around you, form a bureau, and you will get a colonelcy in the new tables of organization," said one regular officer to another, both efficient, upstanding men.
Toward the end we did not lack officers in numbers for service in the rear. Our problem was toprevent unnecessary expansion in superfluities. Our American energy was under pressure. The thing for regular or reserve was to show that he was as busy as any Leavenworth man. Both the British and French said we had too many typewriters, and were prone to excess motion, despite our wonderful accomplishment. It was an obvious criticism, by officers in an established organization, of an organization which was in the throes of creation. Big men might work with a purpose; but little men might be flailing out their vitality on old straw, in order to make a "show" before the senior who might either promote them or send them to Blois.
One day a reserve officer suggested to a regular senior, who had been laboring long and hard over a problem, a solution which could be expressed in half a dozen lines, leaving the execution of the policy stated to subordinates. That conscientious regular trained in Leavenworth industry shook his head. He sent in ten pages, after burning the midnight oil, which finally went up to Harbord himself. Harbord dictated a few sentences which duplicated the reservist's suggestion. "In line with my idea!" said the regular. There was no reason why the reservist should expect credit. He was in service to help in any way he could to hasten the end of the war.
I have in mind one regular staff chief, who wonpromotion and great credit because of his able subordinates. "He never knew," as one of the subordinates said. I am not sure that he was entirely unconscious, for he said: "These reservists have a lot of ideas. Of course they don't know anything about war." By the time the serious fighting began, they knew more than he knew. They were shrewd enough to let him think that their knowledge was his.
Of course, he always held over them the fear of Blois and the promise of promotion. That fear of Blois killed many an officer's initiative. It made independent men into courtiers for favor from men for whom in their hearts they had no respect. The weak tried to play safe, as they studied a senior's characteristics. Lack of psychologic contact between the army post world and the world of the nation as a whole, and overwork, overworry, and lack of appreciation of their efforts sent many officers to Blois. It was one sure way of having a brief holiday. Young reservists especially became discouraged and fatalistic when they found that they were incapable of ever pleasing an irascible senior. Others who had the right kind of superior developed under his encouraging and understanding direction. All was a gamble in how commanding officers themselves developed under the test of war.
A certain suspicion of civilians of whom theyknew so little had its inevitable influence in keeping regulars in all the important positions, even in the S. O. S. The army had to take the responsibility, and the army must therefore keep authority in its own hands. Was it surprising, considering the life they had led, that the regulars should think that civilians could not understand the honor and the ethics of the service which they had so jealously guarded against politicians and a misinformed public? Civilians were shrewd in worldly ways; they might use their positions for profit; they might inculcate bad gospel. I heard of no peculation in that enormous and scattered organization, buying such gigantic quantities of supplies. We may have been extravagant, but we were clean—very clean, compared to the political contracts of Civil War times. The regulars kept to the honest traditions, even if some of their officers had become "dead from the chin up," to use a regular army expression. As an observer I dare indulge in only a few of the regulars' tart sayings about one another, sayings which of themselves were symptomatic of our restless energy for achievement, and of standards which were formed on achievement rather than pretension. If there were any graft, it was that of desire for power, of travel orders to see the front and France, and of other human weaknesses which were an inevitable accompaniment of active ambition.
It was my fortune to see the staff and the supply systems, to go in and out of the different headquarters, and on up to the front itself. I had the keys to the doors of all the many compartments, each immured by the nerve-racking pressure of its industry and exposure to death. I also saw the other armies at work. I knew the faults of reserves as well as of regulars. There were young officers of the line, good in scholarship and drill at the training camps, who, not from any want of courage but from inability, failed under fire. Floating in on the wave of the quartermaster and ordnance corps in the hasty granting of commissions was many a major and captain who was worthless. Some had never earned in their occupations in civil life the pay they were receiving as officers. These were most ambitious for promotion. They were always grumbling that their organizing capacity was not recognized. To the regular they were examples in point, proving the wisdom of expert control to the last degree.
Other reserve officers who were specialists in a business or profession, now that they were at war, considered it a hardship to have to do the same work that they had been doing in civil life. Others by their propensities for unbridled talk offended the regular ethics of secretiveness. Others who had been regarded as men of ability in their occupations were living on their reputations no less than someof the older regulars. Under army conditions, in poor quarters on foreign soil, they seem to have had a further relapse. Men of reputation in civil life, who were used to having their work known through the press, once they were in uniform felt their helpless anonymity. Leavenworth, in its unfamiliarity with civil life, sticking fast to its prerogatives and its theory of war, said that all reserves, line and staff, should be given a hell's trial, and that those who survived would one day receive their reward—after all the regulars had been looked after, as the reservists remarked.
Among the reserve officers were the physicians and surgeons, the most notable we had, in one of the most progressive of professions, who came to the aid of the army medical corps, which had to expand its organization with all the suddenness of the quartermaster corps. The standards of admittance to the army medical corps had been high; it had expanded its vision in sanitation in the Philippines, Cuba, and the Canal Zone; its practice was with soldiers in time of peace. The reserve medico, whether a great surgeon, a laboratory expert, or head of a hospital, was subject to a regular senior, often much younger than he, whose capacities might be first-class, or as inferior as his prejudices were numerous. No experts from civil life, in their sacred desire for efficiency, could feel the restrictionson their initiative more than the reserve medical officers; but be it said that we did build hospitals, we did equip them well, and, with General Pershing's resolute support, the exacting health discipline included precautions against that disease which has ever been the curse of armies.
Leavenworth would have no advertising. Not only for reasons of military secrecy would censorship have no names mentioned, but also in keeping with the ethics of regular officers that publicity was unbecoming—a theory that was fine in the abstract, but in the application had to deal with human nature. The names of the Leavenworth men themselves, holding the fates of division generals in their hands, were unknown to the public and to the mass of the army. Not reports in the press, glorifying a unit or its commander, but the military judgment of superiors was to form the criterion of praise. Never, indeed, had such power come to a group of men as to the graduates of that sequestered school in the wheat fields of Kansas, in charge of two million men. It was interesting to watch how rapidly some of them grew under responsibility, how used they became to accepting power as a matter of course; and equally interesting how others remained scholars of Leavenworth, their vision still shut within its walls.
They directed policy to keep up morale. Theirpropaganda never forgot the army; and finally included, to my regret, that of hate and of atrocities accepted on hearsay. The Stars and Stripes, the A. E. F. newspaper, brought to France all the headlines, the snappy paragraphs, the cartoons, the slang, which knit California to Maine, to arouse our enthusiasm for the war. Our communiqués, much studied and revised, had facility in concealment in place of outright prevarication, which was the prevailing fashion to keep up the spirits of the public behind the army by assurances that it was the enemy who was making the mistakes and suffering the heavier casualties. Fashions in uniform received much attention, too, from those with that inclination of mind. The overseas cap, without a visor to keep sun or rain out of the eyes, was none the less distinctive. We might have designed a better one the day we started troops to Europe, if our staff at home had had information about European climatic conditions; but the number of things in which we might have shown prevision are too numerous to mention. They do not count now; for the war was won. The Allied communiqués were right. Our victory proves that the enemy made all the mistakes.
Considering the many regulars used in organization and instruction in France, the number of regular officers who served at the front must be, if exception is made of the youngsters from West Point and theprovisional regular officers, relatively small. Reacting to a "million men rising to arms in their shirt-sleeves," and to the popular conception of leadership as an officer rushing at the head of his men in a charge, Leavenworth held strictly to the idea of the chessboard system, which kept commanders, including regimental, in touch with their communications, instead of leading charges, the better to direct the tactical movements of their units. In the National Guard and National Army, the majority of the majors as well as the captains and lieutenants were from civil life; so, too, were the captains and lieutenants in the regular divisions, always excepting the regular officers, who did not average one out of six in the average regular battalion.
No army staff was more given to the policy of alternating between line and staff than ours. Every officer on the staff felt that he had a right to lead a regiment or brigade before the war was over. Transfers were frequent. The result was gratifying to individual ambition. A line officer who had just learned field command took the place of a staff officer who was just becoming expert in his branch of staff work. The newcomer had to start in learning fundamentals when his predecessor had been under a strain to keep up with the rapid developments; but how could you deny Tom, who was onceyour lieutenant in the Philippines, his desire, after three months' confinement, to be "in it" for a while at the front? When he showed peculiar fitness for office work, the British and French would have kept him in an office. He had his daily exercise, and his periods of leave when he might recuperate from the mental strain, which was all the worse for a man whose heart was with the troops. The Germans, least of all inclined to consider the personal equation, had interchangeable corps staffs. When one became stale, it went into rest in the same manner as a division of infantry, while a fresh staff took its place. Their system was the same as having two office forces, interchanging at intervals, in a business where the offices were open night and day. We had not enough officers to allow holidays. All must serve double the usual office hours in any concern, Sundays included—work as long as there was work to do, snatching intervals of sleep. In this the Leavenworth men, I repeat, set all an industrious example. Their greatest fault first and last was lack of psychologic touch with the people of their country. They were too remote from the troops. "But you forget the men," as the C.-in-C. used to say to the chess-players.
No staff can ever be popular with the line; and no line can ever satisfy the staff which works out its plans of attack on paper. The staff serves at aheadquarters, and the line in the open under fire. The difference of the human equation is that between security and comfort, and death and hardship, which no philosophy can bridge. A staff officer who appeared at the front always looked conspicuously neat and conspicuously wise, as exotic as a man in a morning coat on a cowman's ranch. The line officer in earth-stained uniform, lean from his effort, eyes glistening with the fever of battle dangers shared with his men, as he entered a staff room to report was equally exotic in his surroundings, while he had a personal dignity whose chivalrous appeal no one could resist.
Yet someone must do staff work. Some directing minds must arrange for the movement of the troops and their transport according to a system, and assure the presence of supplies and ammunition; someone must sit near the centering nerves of wire and wireless and telephone and messengers, and maneuver the units in battle. The more comfortable they were, the better they did their work, inasmuch as there was no reason for their sleeping on the ground when they could have shelter.
Everyone familiar with the statics of war on the Western Front knew that you might have a good lunch at a division or corps headquarters, and two or three hours later you might be floundering in the mud, gas mask on, under bombardment. If youspent a day in the trenches, your feelings became those of the men who were there, you knew the nonsense that was written for public consumption in order to keep the public stalwart for the war, and you held visitors and staff officers who came sight-seeing in the kind of humorous contempt that those who "busted bronchos" held the tenderfoot in the days when realities in the wild west resembled the moving-picture shows of contemporary times. The officer relieved from staff duty for the front was subject to the same influence. He was not long in command of troops before he began abusing the staff for its preposterous orders, while the line officer assigned to the staff was soon talking about the incapability of the line to carry out his directions.
Gradually slipping the round pegs into round holes and the square pegs into square holes, floundering and stumbling, but keeping on, the process of organization continued, while the resolute will of the Commander-in-Chief laid down the lines of policy. For him to give an order, as I have said, did not mean that it would be carried out. He himself was the victim of the system: one man dependent upon others for the execution of his plans, and largely dependent too upon inspections by others for reports of progress. His adjutants could form chains of influence of which he was unconscious."Insubordination" is the most glaring of military offenses, next to timidity under fire. It cannot be openly practised; but within the bounds of any closed society the effects of insubordination can be gained. To trace responsibility in time of action is laborious through channels where officers familiar with the craft of "passing the buck" may spin red tape endlessly, though on other occasions they cut it with facility. Yet the phrase, "the C.-in-C. wants it," was the shibboleth of power. In war a democracy is right to confer autocracy. This means efficiency in concentration according as the character of its people is sound and efficient. The C.-in-C. and all progressive officers had to fight the influences inherent in autocracy, which eventually make permanent autocracy effete through formality and intrigue.
The leaven was working; we were passing through the inevitable evolution which had been foreseen. The officers who had come through the schools and training camps, watchful if silent, had learned their fundamentals thoroughly and up to date, without having to unlearn pre-war teachings. They were finding, as the Canadians and Australians found, that, once on the inside, the art of making war was not such a profound technical secret as they had thought. They were now able to judge their seniors by professional as well as human standards. Regulars, of the type who felt their feet slipping,were naturally tenacious in keeping up the mystery, which was the capital of the inefficient. Regulars who were sure of themselves—having learned more of war in six months than in all their service—gladdened at the prospect of the fulfillment of their dream of a great army, which was equal to any in the world. They felt the fewness of their numbers on the top of this tidal wave of the nation's manhood in arms, which they must ride. An army has its public opinion, that of the mass of officers and men. Great leaders realize that this is supreme. Moltke courted it no less than Napoleon; Hindenburg sought to hold it, and lost it. The American army was becoming the country's army—the country as a whole trained to arms. The youth and the brains of the country making war its business had too large resources in leadership, once it had learned the technique of leadership, to submit to class rule. Your old regular sergeant, your old regular colonel must yield to the survival of the fittest in the competition of the millions. At the end of the Meuse-Argonne battle, excluding at the most twenty per cent of the regulars of sufficient rank for battalion and regimental command, I should say that there were five officers from civil life who were better than any regular in leading a battalion, and two or three better than any regular in leading a regiment. With the reservists I include the National Guardofficers, though they had had military experience before the war. Arms was not their regular calling; but they were to prove that they were not amateurs. Our plans, as I have said, until the late summer all looked forward to a spring campaign. In the winter that preceded it there would have been many heartbreaks among the regulars; for the evolution no longer held in check would have had its fruition. The tidal wave would have broken through the barriers; we should have had many colonels and brigadiers from among the young officers from the training camps and the National Guard.
Called to the Meuse-Argonne battle, without adequate preparation or equipment, our organization imperfect, remarkable as it was considering the circumstances, the burden of the leadership which meant success, as the account already shows, was with the officers from civil life. They led the combat units against the machine-gun nests. Did promotion matter for the moment to that sergeant who took over the platoon when his lieutenant was mashed by a shell or received a machine-gun bullet in the heart? Did it matter to the second lieutenant who was the only commissioned officer left to lead a company? To the boy captain, who had fought his way up from the ranks, or had not finished his college course before he went to a training-camp,as undaunted he took charge of a battalion and continued the attack? Staffs, sitting beside the telephones, waited on their reports. Did promotion matter to the men? I am weary of writing of staff and officers, who must have their part in the narrative. The men! We have heard much of them. We shall hear more. They won the battle—a soldier's battle. They saved generals and staff. It is their part which sent an old observer of wars home in pride and gratitude.
Visualizing "over there"—Camping out in France—Unimportance of the leaders—Adopting "Jake"—America finding maturity—Playing the game—The coating of propaganda.
Visualizing "over there"—Camping out in France—Unimportance of the leaders—Adopting "Jake"—America finding maturity—Playing the game—The coating of propaganda.
If one by one all the sounds at the front from the thunders of the artillery to the rumble of the columns of motor-trucks were to pass from my recollection, the last to go would be that of the rasping beat of the infantry's hobnails upon the roads in the long stretches of the night, whether in the vigor of a rested division, in rhythmic step going forward into line, or of an exhausted division in dragging steps coming out of line. It was mechanical and yet infinitely human, this throbbing of the pulse of a country's man-power.
Whether or not the draft boards were always impartial, whether or not favoritism provided safe berths for certain sons, I know that the fathers or friends who kept a young man of fighting age out of uniform or away from France did him an ill turn. He had missed something which those who went to training camps or to France were to gain: somethingnot to be judged in terms of medals or bank balances.
When the men returned from overseas, people wondered at their inarticulateness over their experiences. Subscribing to Liberty Loans and War Savings Stamps, eating war bread, making innumerable sacrifices, relatives and friends had been living in their habitual world, traversing the same streets or fields in their daily work, and meeting the same people,—and sleeping in their accustomed beds. The war news that they had read came through the censorship, speaking in the assuring voice of propaganda, which had men cheering and singing in battle. Their sons and brothers had been in another world, whose wonders, agony, and drudgery had become the routine of existence in the face of death, which was also routine. They had seen the realities of war behind the curtain, which had offered the pictures of war as it was designed to be seen by the public. There was so much to say that they found themselves saying nothing to auditors who did not know that the Meuse-Argonne was a greater battle than Château-Thierry, or that the S. O. S. was the Services of Supply, or the difference between rolling kitchens and the ammunition train. Some finally worked up a story which was the kind that friends liked to hear. Only when they had their American Legion gatherings would they be able to find a commonground where all their fundamental references would be understood.
Much was written about the democratic results of millionaire and bootblack, farmer's son and son of the tenements, day laborer and cotton-wool youth, fastidious about his cravats, mixing together in the ranks. At the training camps our soldiers were on the background of home, and they were not facing death together. They knew their own country by railroad journeys and by living with men from different States; but some observers think that one does not really know his own country until he has seen other countries. The training camp had become a kind of home. Its discipline was modest beside that of France; there were no hardships except the hard drill and routine. In France our soldier had no home. He was always changing his boarding place, though never his task as a fighting man.
He did not see France as the tourist saw it, from a car spinning past finished old landscapes, between avenues of trees along roads that linked together red-tile-roofed villages, while his chauffeur asked him, after he had had a good dinner at an inn, at what time he wanted his car in the morning. He marched these roads under his pack, often all night long, while he was under orders not to strike a match to light a cigarette. He was drenched withwinter rain when he was conducted to a barn door and told to crawl up into the hayloft, or conducted to a house door where he stretched himself on the floor in a room that had no heat.
He was billeted in villages where the people had been billeting soldiers for four years. They wanted the privacy of their homes again as surely as he wanted to be back in his own home. The roads over which he marched he had to help repair, in winter rains, when old cathedral spires lacked the impressiveness which they had to the tourists because they looked as cold as everything else, and when picturesque, winding canals merely looked wet when everything was wet.
He knew other roads which were swept by the blasts of hell; he saw the beautiful landscapes through the mud of trenches and from the filthy fox-holes where he waited in hourly expectation of an attack; he knew the beautiful woods which fleck the rolling landscape with their patches of green as the best possible places for being gassed.
The hand of authority was on him even in his holidays—he, the free American. He might not go beyond certain limits when he went for a walk, for otherwise all our soldiers within walking distance of the largest town would spend the day there, to the discomfiture of discipline and French regulations. If he secured leave, it was not to the Paris of whichhe dreamed, but to the area which the army had prescribed. For months and months our men fought and marched, going and coming past Paris, without a glimpse of the city of their desire. That Paris was not good for them all the high authorities agreed; besides, their services were too valuable to be spared for sight-seeing.
From the day of their arrival they were under the whip of a great necessity: first, of keeping the Germans from winning the war, and then of winning the war before Christmas came. In the last stages of the war, they bore more than American soldiers have ever borne—more than the British, in their own limited sector with its settled appointments a day's travel from England; more than the French, fighting in their own country with leave to go to their homes—their own homes—once in four months. Our men had a real rest only when they were wounded or ill and were sent back to the hospitals and rest camps.
When a soldier was not fighting, somebody was lecturing to him. His education was never complete. There was some new gas which he must avoid, some new wrinkle in fighting machine-guns which he must learn. As he had so much lecturing on the drill-ground and on the march and in billets about making sure that he did not destroy any property or take a piece of wood or use a tool that did notbelong to him, the orators who came from the United States to tell him how to be "good" though a soldier, and how all the country admired him and depended upon him, were not so popular as they might have been, because he knew the character of his job by very bitter experience. How little such visitors knew of him—in his own world!
As distinguished from the officers of commissioned rank, we spoke of the privates as the men; also as the "doughboys," a name which long ago the cavalry, looking down haughtily from their saddles, applied to the infantry, as kneaders of mud. There was a gulf between officers and privates, settled in old military customs, which at least at the front grew narrower as the old influences were dissolved in the crucible of fire. Many of the privates were superior to their officers. Many won their commissions in the training-camp of battle. I preferred always to think of the whole of generals, colonels, "kid" lieutenants, and privates as men. It was the whole that was majestic; manhood as manhood, which was supreme.
Officers, whether with one bar or two stars on their shoulders, were only the nails holding the structure of manhood together. They might be promoted and demoted; prune themselves on their rank; but the mighty current of soldiery was elemental as the flow of a river. Never had the partof any high commander been relatively less important than in this war; in no army was this so true probably as in ours. By running through a list of names in this age of universal ability, you might find a score of leaders for corps or army who might be better than those in the field; but fresh divisions of infantry were not in such easy call. The names of officers who commanded more men than Napoleon or Wellington had at Waterloo, Meade or Lee at Gettysburg, were unknown to the public. Never had a single human being, no matter how many orders on his breast, appeared more dispensable than in this machine war with its enormous masses of troops. We had two million men in France. Every officer and man counted as one unit in the machine, according, not to rank, but to the giving of all that he had in him. Manhood and not soldiering was glorified.
It was the great heart of our men, beating as the one heart of a great country—simple, vigorous, young, trying out its strength—on the background of old Europe, which appealed to me. It was the spontaneous incidents of emotion breaking out of routine which revealed character. One day on a path across the fields near headquarters town, I met a soldier with a wound stripe who had been invalided back from the front. He was thick-set, bow-legged, with a square, honest face, and eyesslightly walled, and he was leading a bow-legged sturdy child of four years, whose one visible eye showed a cast resembling the soldier's own. The other eye was hidden by a drooping wool Tam-o'-Shanter about four sizes too large for the child's head, while his wool sweater and wool leggings were not more than two sizes too large. It was evident that a man and not a woman had bought his wardrobe, having in mind that the child was to be kept warm at any cost. The pair aroused my interest.
"I heard all about adopting French war orphans through the societies," the soldier said, "and I concluded, when they sent me here, to pick out my own orphan. So I adopted Jake. Yes, I calls him Jake. You see, his father was killed by the boche and his mother croaked. He hadn't anybody to look after him, so I took over the job. Didn't I, Jake?"
Jacob looked up with an eye that seemed to consider this a wonderful world created by the soldier, and removed his finger from his mouth long enough to say "Yep," which he had learned in the place of "Oui."
"I'm going to take Jake home with me, and make him an American, ain't I, Jake? You're learning English too, ain't you, Jake?"—with Jake taking up his cue to prove that he was by responding "Yep!" again.
When they started on, I paused to look after them, with something catching in my throat, and as the soldier paused I overheard him saying:
"I'm going to take you home. Don't you worry—I'm sticking to that, Jake. The French regulations will say that they ain't going to let you leave France when they're so short of kids over here, and the American regulations will say there ain't no room for kids on transports, and probably the censor will lip in too—but I'll bring you after the war if I can't now. You and me's fixed up a life pardnership, ain't we? You'll make a hit with my mother, all right. All you've got to do is look up at her just the way you're looking up at me and say 'Yep.' Oh, it'll be all right over there—no more of this war and regulation stuff!"
"Speaking a few words of French" could only open a chink in the barrier of language between our men and the French people. Wherever two Americans met they could begin talking without waiting on an interpreter. The common bond of language promoted the family feeling of the A. E. F. In all their relations our men saw with fresh eyes, in the light of foreign surroundings, how like they were, not only in uniform and equipment and ways of thought, but how distinctly American even the European born and the sons of European parents had become. Old differences disappeared in thisnew sense of a fundamental similarity. Men from the different parts of the United States came together not only in the combat divisions but around the docks and railway yards and wherever they labored in the Services of Supply. Kansas, Oregon, and Maine had adjoining beds at a hospital, while a doctor from Pittsburgh or Oskaloosa, or a nurse from New York or Cheyenne, looked after them. Reserve officers who had been lawyers, merchants, engineers, gang foremen, bakers, bankers, manufacturers, lived and worked together in keeping the army fed with shells and food.
"The gang's all here," was as expressive of the soldier's feeling in the Great War as "There'll be a hot time in the old town tonight" in the little war with Spain. To all in whom there was the germ from which it could develop, the stern fighting and effort brought a sense of personal power, quiet, observant, undemonstrative; and their sense of the presence there in France of two millions of Americans—scattered far and wide, omnipresent in their energy, welded into one mighty organization, pulsing with the heart of the home country three thousand miles away, as California looked Maine in the eye in that common family—brought a new sense of national power. It occurred to me that the A. E. F. symbolized how a great overgrown boy of a nation, with a puzzled feeling about its expanding physique, hadsuddenly become a dignified, poised, self-respecting adult.
The men knew why they were in France, even if they did not express it in the phrases of oratory or propaganda. Their logic was as cold as their steel, as vivid as gun flashes. They were in France to beat the Germans. The period for argument had passed for them. They had the business in hand. Their bitterness toward the foe was not as great as that at home. Why waste words on him when you had bullets and shells to fire at him? He was taken for granted no less than burglary and murder: a positive material force to be overcome.
Whether college graduates or street-sweepers, the privates were a guild as exclusive in its way—as it always has been—as a regular mess. They had voted themselves into their task. It was the will of the majority of their country that we go to France. The majority rules; general and other officers may act as legatees for the majority. The thing was to "play the game." Those who rebelled found that there was nothing else to do. They were in the machine's grip. "Play the game!" No phrase better expressed their attitude than this. It was a wicked, filthy, dangerous game. They had signed on for it; they would see it through.
Given this conviction, and no soldier will endure more hardship than the American. It was the bedrock of adherence to that rigid discipline which inour western democracy surprised Europeans. We saluted on all occasions—what a punctiliously saluting army we were!—and followed all the rules of etiquette that the experts said were necessary, and learned to take "bawlings out" with soldierly philosophy. As children know their parents, the men knew their officers' characters; a fresh replacement lieutenant was promptly "sized up," but final judgment was reserved until he had led them under fire, where he must stand the real test. It was a relief to them that they did not have to add an extra salute for every grade of an officer's rank. One salute would do for a general as well as a second lieutenant. Generals passed them on the road in cars; generals inspected them. They did not take much interest in generals, who were also a part of the game to them. Company and battalion commanders alone could make their personal leadership felt. They were the "heroes" when they were good, and rightly so.
Officers made strange guesses sometimes as to what their men were thinking. The men were wiser than many officers knew; for they were the mass intelligence of America. They understood that the Stars and Stripes was propaganda; but it was interesting. They read it with avidity. Propaganda was one of the parts of the mysterious, ugly game. I have heard it compared to the coaching from the bleachers at a league game. The men smiled over the communiqué's records of actions in which theyparticipated. Communiqués were a part of the game, helping propaganda to coach from the side lines. It would not do to say that a company had been sent by mistake into interlocking machine-gun fire to take a town which the survivors had to yield. When the men read the home papers, there was no mention of their losses or their suffering. One might think from the accounts that they were enjoying themselves immensely, and were quite comfortable in the fox-holes. This, too, was a part of the game.
They were there to see the game through. The sooner it was through, the sooner they would go home. Veterans who had spent one winter in France did not want to spend another; those who had not did not care to try the experience. They had no more reason for liking France than a man who sleeps on the ground in Central Park in December, eating cold rations, under machine-gun fire, has for liking New York City. "I want to get back to the cactus!" as an Arizona man said. All were fighting to reach home and be free men again; freedom having a practical application for them. The longer they were in France, the more they felt that they were fighting for America. As Americans they were on their mettle. Such was the spirit that carried them as Americans through the Meuse-Argonne, which was the American army's battle.