The Glory of the Coming

The chief regulating officer smiled a little smile.

“That man,” he said, “is an old enlisted man of our little antebellum Regular Army. He didn’t win his commission until he came over here. Before that he was a noncom on clerical duty in the quartermaster’s department, and before that he was a plain private, and as far as I know he never worked a day for any concern except our own Government since he reached the enlisting age.”

In addition to doing what I should say at an offhand guess was the work of ten reasonably active men, the colonel who supervises our Advance Section has found time since he took over his present employment to organise a brass band and a glee dub among his personnel, to map out and stage-manage special entertainments for the men, to entertain visitors who come officially and unofficially, to keep several thousand individuals busy in their working hours and happy in their leisure hours, and at frequent intervals to write for the benefit of his command special bulletins touching on the finer sides of the soldier’s duties and the soldier’s discipline. He gave me a copy of one of his more recent pronouncements. He called it a memorandum; I called it a classic. It ran as follows:

“1. The salute, in addition to being a soldier’s method of greeting, is the gauge by which he shows to the world his proficiency in the profession, his morale and the condition of his discipline.

“2. For me the dial of a soldier’s salute has three marks, and I read his salute more accurately than he himself could tell me.

“3. The three gradations are:

(a) I am a soldier; I know my trade or will know it very soon, and I will be a success as a soldier or a civilian, wherever I may be put.

(b) I do not know what I am and do not care, I only do what I am forced to do, and will never be much of a success at anything.

(c) I am a failure and am down and out, sick, homesick and disgruntled. I cannot stand the gaff.

“4. As Americans try to conceal your feelings from our Allies.

“Remember you are just as much fighters here as you would be carrying a pail of food to the fighting line or actually firing a gun.

“Every extra exertion is an addition to the firing line direct.

“Every bit of shirking is robbing the firing line.”

“Buck Up!”

For qualities of human interest no joints in the snake’s spine, no twists in his manifold convolutions measure up, I think, to the salvage depots. Once upon a time, and not so very long ago, an army in the field threw away what it did not use or what through breakage or stress became unserviceable. That day is gone. In this war the wastage is practically negligible. Our people have learned this lesson from the nations that went into the war before we entered it, but in all modesty I believe, from what I have seen, that we have added some first-rate improvements to the plan in the few months that have been vouchsafed us for experiments and demonstrations. Moreover, to the success of our plans in this regard there have been difficulties that did not confront our Allies to the same extent. For instance our biggest motor-repair depot is housed in what formerly had been a French infantry barracks – a series of buildings that had never been devised for the purposes to which they are now put, and that at first offered many serious problems, mechanical and physical.

In tall brick buildings, under sheds and under tents and out in the open upon the old parade ground a great chain of machine shops, carpenter shops, paint shops, upholstery shops and leather-working shops has been coordinated and is cooperating to attain the maximum of possible production with the minimum of lost energy and lost effort. The scientist who reconstructs a prehistoric monster from a fossilised femur finds here his industrial prototype in the smart American mechanics who build up an ambulance or a motor truck from a fire-blackened, shell-riddled car frame, minus top, minus wheels, minus engine parts. What comes out of one total wreck goes into another that is not quite so totally so. And when a tool is lacking for some intricate job the Yank turns in and makes it himself out of a bit of scrap; and neither he nor his fellows think he has done anything wonderful either. It’s just part of the day’s work.

The salvage depot for human equipment and for lighter field equipment is established at this writing in what was, not so very long ago, a shop where one of the French railroad lines painted its cars. It began active operations last January with six civilian employees under an officer who four weeks before he landed in France was a business man in Philadelphia. In June it had on its pay rolls nearly 4,000 workers, mainly women and many of them refugees.

When all the floor space available – about 200,000 square feet of it – has been taken over the plant will have a personnel of about 5,000 hands, and it will be possible to do the reclamation work in clothing, shoes, rubber boots and slickers, harness and leather, canvas and webbing, field ranges, mess equipments, stoves, helmets, trenching tools, side arms, rifle slings, picks, shovels and metal gear generally for about 400,000 fighting men, with an estimated saving to Uncle Sam – exclusive of the vast sum saved in tonnage and shipping charges – of about $1,000,000 a month.

At this time 10,000 garments and articles of personal attire are passing through this plant every twenty-four hours, and coming out cleaned, mended, remade or converted to other purposes. A man could spend a week here, I feel certain, and not count his sight-seeing time as wasted. Among the men workers he would find invalided and crippled soldiers of at least six nations – America, Belgium, France, Greece, Serbia and Italy. Among the women workers, who average in pay seven francs a day – big wages for rural France – he would find many women of refinement and education hailing from evacuated districts in northern France and Belgium, whose faces bespeak the terrors and torments through which they have passed in the attempted implanting of the seeds of Kultur upon their homelands. Now they sit all day, driving sewing machines or managing knitting looms alongside their chattering, gossiping sisters of the peasant class.

And every hour in this beehive of industry the man who looked close would come upon things eloquently bespeaking the tragedy or the comedy of war’s flotsam and jetsam. Now perhaps it would be a battered German bugle picked up by some souvenir-loving soldier, only to be flung into the camp salvage dump when its finder wearied of carrying it; and now it would be a khaki blouse with a bullet hole in the breast of it and great brown stains, stiff and dry, in its lining. A talking machine in fair order, the half of a tombstone and the full-dress equipment of a captain of Prussian Hussars were among the relics that turned up at the salvage depot in one week.

There is no dump heap behind the converted paint bam, for the very good reason that practically there is nothing to dump. Everything is saved. The salvaged junk comes in by the carload lot from the Front – filthy, crumpled, broken, blood-crusted, verminous, tattered, smelly and smashed. Sorters seize upon it and separate it and classify it according to kind and state of disrepair. Men and women bear it in armloads to sterilisers, where live steam kills the lice and the lice eggs; thence it goes to the cleaning vats, after which it is sorted again and the real job of making something out of what seemed to be worse than nothing at all is undertaken, with experts, mainly Americans, to supervise each forward step in the big contract of renovation, restoration and utilisation.

After the body clothing has been made clean and odourless it is assigned to one of three classes, to wit: (a) Garments needing minor repairs and still sightly and serviceable, which are put in perfect order and reissued to front-line troops; (b) garments not so sightly but still serviceable, which are issued to S O S workers, including stevedores, labourers, railroad engineers, firemen and forestry workers; (c) garments that are not sightly but that will repay repairing. These are dyed green and given to German prisoners of war. Practically no new material is used for repair. Garments that are past salvation in their present shape are cut up to furnish patches. Three garments out of four are reclaimed in one form or another; the fourth one becomes scrap for patchings. Shoes are washed in an acid disinfectant that cleanses the leather without injuring its fabric, and then they are dried and greased before going in to the workers. Shoes that are worth saving are saved to the last one; those past saving are ripped apart and the uppers are cut into shoe strings, while the soles furnish ground-up leather for compositions. Thanks to processes of washing, cleansing and repairing, a salvage average of approximately ninety per cent, is attained in slickers and rubber boots.

Last spring the high military authorities decided to shorten the heavy overcoats worn by our soldiers, so it befalls that the lengths of cloth cut from the skirts of the overcoats are now being fashioned at the salvage plants into uppers for hospital slippers, while old campaign hats furnish the material for the soles. The completed article, very neat in appearance and very comfortable to wear, is turned out here in great numbers. Old tires are cooked down to furnish new heels for rubber boots. Old socks are unravelled for the sake of the wool in them. Tin receptacles that have held gasoline or oil are melted apart, and from their sides and tops disks are fashioned which, being coated with aluminum, become markers for the graves where our dead soldier boys have been buried. Smaller tins are smelted down into lumps and used for a dozen purposes. The solder from the cans is not wasted either. Even the hobnails of worn-down boot soles are saved for future use.

Master of theatrical trick and device that he is, none the less David Belasco could learn lessons at our camouflaging plant. He probably would feel quite at home there, too, seeing that the place has a most distinctive behind-the-scenes atmosphere of its own; it is a sort of overgrown combination of scenery loft, property room, paint shop and fancy-dress costumer’s establishment, where men who gave up sizable incomes to serve their country in this new calling work long hours seeking to improve upon the artifices already developed – and succeeding – and to create brand-new ones of their own.

As a branch of military modernism camouflaging is even newer than the trade of scientific salvaging is and offers far larger opportunities for future exploitation. After all there are just so many things and no more that may be done with and to a pair of worn-out rubber boots, but in the other field the only limits are the limits of the designer’s individual ingenuity and his individual skill.

We came, under guidance, to a big open-fronted barracks where hundreds of French women and French girls made screenage for road protection and gun emplacements. The materials they worked with were simple enough: rolls of ordinary chicken wire, strips of burlap sacking dyed in four colours – bright green, yellowish green, tawny and brown – and wisps of raffia with which to bind the cloth scraps into the meshes of the wire. For summer use the bright green is used, for early spring and fall the lighter green and the tawny; and for winter the brown and the tawny mingled. For, you see, camouflage has its seasons, too, marching in step with the swing of the year. Viewed close up the completed article looks to be exactly what it is – chicken wire festooned thickly with gaudy rags. But stretch a breadth of it across a dip in the earth and then fling against it a few boughs cut from trees, and at a distance of seventy-five yards no man, however keen-eyed, can say just where the authentic foliage leaves off and the artificial joins on.

For roadsides in special cases there is still another variety of camouflage, done in zebra-like strips of light and dark rags alternating, and this stuff being erected alongside the open highway is very apt indeed to deceive your hostile observer into thinking that what he beholds is merely a play of sunlight and shade upon a sloped flank of earth; and he must venture very perilously near indeed to discern that the seeming pattern of shadows really masks the movements of troops. This deceit has been described often enough, but the sheer art of it takes on added interest when one witnesses its processes and sees how marvellously its effects are brought about.

In an open field used for experimenting and testing was a dump pile dotted thickly with all the nondescript débris that accumulates upon the outer slope of a dug-in defence where soldiers have been – loose clods of earth, bits of chalky stone, shattered stumps, empty beef tins, broken mess gear, discarded boots, smashed helmets, and such like. It was crowned with a frieze of stakes projecting above the top of the trench behind it, and on its crest stood one of those shattered trees, limbless and ragged, that often are to be found upon terrains where the shelling has been brisk.

Here for our benefit a sort of game was staged. First we stationed ourselves sixty feet away from the mound. Immediately five heads appeared above the parapet – heads with shrapnel helmets upon them, and beneath the helmet rims sunburnt faces peering out. The eyes looked this way and that as the heads turned from side to side.

“Please watch closely,” said the camouflage officer accompanying us. “And as you watch, remember this: Two of those heads are the heads of men. The three others are dummies mounted on sticks and manipulated from below. Since you have been at the Front you know the use of the dummy – the enemy sniper shoots a hole in it and the men in the pit, by tracing the direction of the bullet through the pierced composition, are able to locate the spot where Mister Sniper is hidden. Now then, try to pick out the real heads from the fake ones.”

There were three of us, and we all three of us tried. No two agreed in our guesses and not one of us scored a perfect record; and yet we stood very much nearer than any enemy marksman could ever hope to get. The lifelikeness of the thing was uncanny.

“Next take in the general layout of that spot,” said the camouflage expert, with a wave of his hand toward the dump pile. “Looks natural and orthodox, doesn’t it? Seems to be just the outer side of a bit of trench work, doesn’t it? Well, it isn’t. Two of those stakes are what they appear to be – ordinary common stakes. The other two are hollow metal tubes, inside of which trench periscopes are placed. And the tree trunk is faked, too. It is all hollow within – a shell of light tough steel with a ladder inside, and behind that twisted crotch where the limbs are broken off the observer is stationed at this moment watching us through a manufactured knothole. The only genuine thing about that tree trunk is the bark on it – we stripped that off of a beech over in the woods.

“The dump heap isn’t on the level either, as you possibly know, since you may have seen such dump piles concealing the sites of observation pits up at the Front. Inside it is all dug out into galleries and on the side facing us it is full of peepholes – seventeen peepholes in all, I think there are. Let’s go within fifteen feet of it and see how many of them you can detect.”

At a fifteen-foot range it was hard enough for us to make out five of the seventeen peep places. Yet beforehand we understood that each tin can, each curled-up boot, each sizable tuft of withered grass, each swirl of the tree stump – masked a craftily hidden opening shielded with fine netting, through which a man crouching in safety beneath the surface of the earth might study the land in front of him. That innocent-appearing, made-to-order dump pile had the eyes of a spider; but even so, the uniformed invader might have climbed up and across it without once suspecting the truth.

For a final touch the camouflage crew put on their best stunt of all. Five men encased themselves in camouflage suits of greenish-brown canvas which covered them head, feet, body and limbs, and which being decorated with quantities of dried, grasslike stuff sewed on in patches, made them look very much as Fred Stone used to look when he played the Scarecrow Man in “The Wizard of Oz” years ago. Each man carried a rifle, likewise camouflaged. Then we turned our backs while they took position upon a half-bare, half-greened hillock less than a hundred feet from us.

This being done we faced about, and each knowing that five armed men were snuggled there against the bank tried to pick them out from their background. It was hard sledding, so completely had the motionless figures melted into the herbage and the chalky soil. Finally we united in the opinion that we had located three of the five. But we were wrong again. We really had picked out only one of the five. The two other suspected clumps were not men but what they seemed to be – small protrusions in the ragged and irregular turf. Yes, I am sure Mr. Belasco could have spent a fruitful half hour or so there with us.

Thanks to yet another crafty and deceitful artifice of the camouflage outfit it is possible to make the enemy think he is being attacked by raiders advancing in force when as a matter of fact what he beholds approaching him are not files of men but harmless dummies operated by a mechanism that is as simple as simplicity itself. The attack will come from elsewhere while his attention is focused upon the make-believe feint, but just at present there are military reasons why he should not know any of the particulars. It would take the edge of his surprise, even though he is not likely to live to appreciate the surprise once the trick has been pulled.

These details of the whole vast undertaking that I have touched upon here are merely bits that stand out with especial vividness from the recent recollections of a trip every rod of which was freighted with the most compelling interest for any one, and for an American with enduring and constant pride in the achievements of his own countrymen.

There are still other impressions, many of than, big and little, that are going always to stick in my brain – the smell of the crisp brown crusty loaves, mingling with the smell of the wood fires at the bakery where half a million bread rations are cooked and shipped every day, seven days a week; the sight at the motor reception park, where a big proportion of the 60,000 motor vehicles of all sorts that are called for in our programme, as it stands now, can be stored at one time; the miles upon miles of canned goods through which I have passed, with the boxes towering in walls upon either side of me; the cold-storage chamber as big as a cathedral, where a supply of 5,000 tons of fresh meat is kept on hand and ready for use; a cemetery for our people, only a few months old, but lovely already with flowers and grass and neat gravel paths between the mounds; a blacksmith riveting about the left wrists of Chinese labourers their steel identification markers so that there may always be a positive and certain way of knowing just who is who in the gang, since to stupid occidental eyes all Chinamen look alike and except for these little bangles made fast upon the arms of the wearers there would be complications and there might be wilful falsifications in the pay rolls; a spectacled underofficer hailing us in perfect but plaintive English from a group of prisoners mending roads, to say in tones of deep lament that he used to be a dentist in Baltimore but made the mistake of going back to Germany for a visit to his old home just before the war broke out; a Catholic chaplain superintending the beautifying of a row of graves of Mohammedans who had died in our service, and who had been laid away according to the ritual of their own faith in a corner of a burying ground where Christians and Jews are sleeping together; a maimed Belgian soldier with three medals for valour on his shirt front, cobbling shoe soles in the salvage plant; a French waiter boy in a headquarters mess learning to pick out the chords of Dixie Land on an American negro’s homemade guitar; a room in the staff school where a former member of the Cabinet of the United States, an ex-Congressman, an ex-police commissioner of New York City and one of the richest men in America, all four of them volunteer officers, sat at their lessons with their spines fish-hooked and their brows knotted; nineteen-year-old Yankee apprentice flyer doing such heart-stopping stunts in a practice plane as I never expect to see equalled by any veteran airman; the funeral, on the same day and at the same time, of one of his mates, who had been killed by a fall upon the field over which this daring youth now cavorted, with the coffin in an ambulance and a flag over the coffin, and behind the ambulance the firing squad, the Red Cross nurses from the local hospital and a company of his fellow cadets marching.

And seeing all these sights and a thousand more like unto them I found myself as I finished my tour along the winding lengths of the great snake we call the Service of Supplies, wondering just who, of all the thousands among the men that labour behind the men behind the guns, deserve of their countrymen the greatest meed of credit – the high salaried executives out of civilian life who dropped careers and comforts and hope of preferment in their professions at home, to give of the genius of their brains to this cause; or the officers of our little old peacetime Army who here serve so gladly and so efficiently upon the poor pay that we give our officers, without hope ever of getting a proper measure of national appreciation for their efforts, since this war is so nearly an anonymous war, where the performances of the individual are swallowed up in the united efforts of the mass; or the skilled railway trainmen volunteering to work on privates’ wages for the period of the war; or the plain enlisted man cheerfully, eagerly, enthusiastically toiling here, so far back of the Front, when in his heart he must long to be up there with his fellows where the big guns boom.

CHAPTER XXIV. FROM MY OVERSEAS NOTE-BOOK

BLOWS with a hammer may numb one, but it is the bee-sting that quickens the sensibilities to a realisation of what is afoot. That is why, I suppose, the mighty thing called war is for me always summed up in small, incidental but outstanding phases of it. In its complete aspect it is too vast to be comprehended by any one mind or any thousand minds; but by piecing together the lesser things, one after a while begins in a dim groping fashion to get a concept of the entirety.

When I went up to Ypres, it was not the unutterable desolation and hideousness of what had been once one of the fairest spots on earth that especially impressed me: possibly because Ypres to-day is a horror too terrible and a tragedy too utter for human contemplation save at the risk of losing one’s belief in the ultimate wisdom of the cosmic scheme of things. Nor was it the wreck of the great Cloth Hall which even now, with its overthrown walls and its broken lines and its one remaining spindle of ruined tower, manages to retain a suggestion of the matchless beauty which forevermore is gone. Nor yet was it the cemetery, whereon for sheer, degenerate malignity the Germans targeted their heavy guns until they had broached nearly every grave, heaving up the dead to sprawl upon the displaced clods. One becomes, in time, accustomed to the sight of dead soldiers lying where they have fallen, because a soldier accepts the chances of being killed and of being left untombed after he is killed. The dread spectacle he presented is part and parcel of the picture of war. But these men and women and babes that the shells dispossessed from their narrow tenements of mould had died peacefully in their beds away back yonder – and how long ago it seems now! – when the world itself was at peace. They had been shrouded in their funeral vestments; they had been laid away with cross and candle, with Book and prayer; over them slabs of the everlasting granite had been set, and flowers had been planted above them and memorials set up; and they had been left there beneath the kindly loam, cradled for all eternity till Gabriel’s Trump should blow.

But when I came there and saw what Kul-tur had wrought amongst them – how with exquisite irony the blasts had shattered grave after grave whose stones bore the carved words Held in Perpetuity and how grandmothers and grandsires and the pitiable small bones of little children had been flung forth out of the gaping holes and left to moulder in the rags of their cerements where all who passed that way might see them – why, it was a blasphemy and an indecency and a sacrilege which no man, beholding it, could ever, so long as he lived, hope to forget.