Our Army at the Front

And that was the lot of the Expeditionary Force. The French found them backward in trench work and bombing, and naturally enough expected that backwardness to follow through. They conceded the natural quickness of the pupils, but saw a long road ahead before they could become an army. Then the Americans tackled artillery, hardest and deepest of the war problems, and suddenly blossomed out as experts.

Of course, the analogy is not to be leaned on too heavily. The Americans were not, on the instant, the arch-exponents of artillery in all Europe. But it is true that in comparison to the size of their army, and to the extent to which they had prepared nationally for war, their artillery was stronger than that of any other country on the Allied side at the beginning of the war, notwithstanding that it was the point where they might legitimately have been expected to be the weakest.

Hilaire Belloc called the American artillery preparation one of the most dramatic and welcome surprises of the war.

It must be understood that all this applies only to men and not in the least to guns. For big guns, the American reliance was wholly upon France and England, upon the invitation of those two countries when America entered the war.

And the readiness of America's men was not due to a large preparation in artillery as such. The blessing arose from the fact that the coast defense could be diverted, within the first year of war, to the handling of the big guns for land armies, and thus strengthen the artillery arm sent to France for final training.

Artillery was every country's problem, even in peace-times. It was the service which required the greatest wealth and the most profound training. There was no such thing as a citizenry trained to artillery. Mathematics was its stronghold, and no smattering could be made to do. Even more than mathematics was the facility of handling the big guns when mathematics went askew from special conditions.

These things the coast defense had, if not in final perfection, at least in creditable degree. And the diversion of it to the artillery in France stiffened the backbone of the Expeditionary Force to the pride of the force and the glad amazement of its preceptors.

One other thing the coast defense had done: it had pre-empted the greater part of America's attention in times of peace and unpreparedness, so that big-gun problems had received a disproportionate amount of study. The American technical journals on artillery were always of the finest. The war services were honeycombed with men who were big-gun experts.

So when the first artillery training-school opened in France, in mid-August of 1917, the problems to be faced were all of a more or less external character.

The first of these, of course, was airplane work. The second was in mastering gun differences between American and French types, and in learning about the enormous numbers of new weapons which had sprung from battle almost day by day.

The camp, when the Americans moved in, had much to recommend it to its new inhabitants. There need be no attempt to conceal the fact that first satisfaction came with the barracks, second with the weather, and only third with the guns and planes.

Some of the artillerymen had come from the infantry camps, and some direct from the coast. Those from the Vosges camp were boisterous in their praise of their quarters. They had brick barracks, with floors, and where they were billeted with the French they found excellent quarters in the old, low-lying stone and brick houses. The weather would not have been admired by any outsider. But to the men from the Vosges it owed a reputation, because they extolled it both day and night. The artillery camp was in open country, to permit of the long ranges, and if it sunned little enough, neither did it rain.

The guns and airplanes supplied by the French were simple at first, becoming, as to guns at least, steadily more numerous and complicated as the training went on.

The men began on the seventy-fives, approximately the American three-inch gun, and on the howitzers of twice that size.

The airplane service was the only part of the work wholly new to the men, and, naturally enough, it was the most attractive.

Although the officers and instructors warned that air observation and range-finding was by far the most dangerous of all artillery service, seventy-five per cent of the young officers who were eligible for the work volunteered for it. This required a two-thirds weeding out, and insured the very pick of men for the air crews.

The air service with artillery was made over almost entirely by the French between the time of the war's beginning and America's entrance. All the old visual aids were abolished, such as smoke-pointers and rockets, and the telephone and wireless were installed in their stead. The observation-balloons had the telephone service, and the planes had wireless.

By these means the guns were first fired and then reported on. The general system of range-finding was: "First fire long, then fire short, then split the bracket." This was the joint job of planes and gunners – one not to be despised as a feat.

In fact, artillery is, of all services, the one most dependent on co-operation. It is always a joint job, but the joining must be done among many factors.

Its effectiveness depends first upon the precision of the mathematical calculation which goes before the pull of the lanyard. This calculation is complicated by the variety of types of guns and shells, and, in the case of howitzers, by the variable behavior of charges of different size and power. But these are things that can be learned with patience, and require knowledge rather than inspiration.

It is when the air service enters that inspiration enters with it. Observation must be accurate, in spite of weather, visibility, enemy camouflage, and everything else. More than that, the observer in the plane must keep himself safe – often a matter of sheer genius.

The map-maker must do his part, so that targets not so elusive as field-guns and motor-emplacements can be found without much help from the air.

Finally, the artillery depends, even more than any other branch of the service, on the rapidity with which its wants can be filled from the rear. The mobility of the big pieces, and their constant connections with ammunition-stores, are matters depending directly on the training of the artillerymen.

These, then, were the things in which the Americans were either tested or trained. Their mathematics were A1, as has been noted, and their familiarity with existing models of big guns sufficient to enable them to pick up the new types without long effort.

They had a few weeks of heavy going with pad and pencil, then they were led to the giant stores of French ammunition – more than any of them had ever seen before – and told to open fire. One dramatic touch exacted by the French instructors was that the guns should be pointed toward Germany, no matter how impotent their distance made them.

Long lanes, up to 12,000 metres, were told off for the ranges. The training was intensive, because at that time there was a half-plan to put the artillery first into the battle-line. In any case it is easier to make time on secondary problems than on primary.

Throughout September, while the artillerymen grew in numbers as well as proficiency, the mastering of gun types was perfected, and the theory of aim was worked out on paper.

Late in the month the French added more guns, chief among them being a monster mounted on railway-trucks whose projectile weighed 1,800 pounds. The artillerymen named her "Mosquito," "because she had a sting," although she had served for 300 charges at Verdun. It was not long before every type of gun in the French Army, and many from the British, were lined up in the artillery camp, being expertly pulled apart and reassembled.

By the time the artillery went into battle with the infantry, failing in their intention to go first alone, but nevertheless first in actual fighting, they were able to give a fine account of themselves. By the time they had got back to camp and were training new troops from their own experience, they were the centre of an extraordinary organization.

The rolling of men from camp to battle and back again, training, retraining, and fighting in the circle, with an increasing number of men able to remain in the line, and a constantly increasing number of new men permitted to come in at the beginning, ground out an admirable system before the old year was out.

The fact that the artillery-school could not take its material raw did not make the hitches it otherwise would, chiefly, of course, because of the coast defense, and somewhat because American college men were found to have a fine substratum of technical knowledge which artillery could turn to account.

After all the routine was fairly learned, and there had been a helpful interim in the line, the artillery practised on some specialties, partly of their own contribution, and partly those suggested by the other armies.

One of these, the most picturesque, was the shattering of the "pill-boxes," German inventions for staying in No Man's Land without being hit.

A "pill-box" is a tiny concrete fortress, set up in front of the trenches, usually in groups of fifteen to twenty. They have slot-like apertures, through which Germans do their sniping. They are supposed to be immune from anything except direct hit by a huge shell. But the American artillery camp worked out a way of getting them – with luck. Each aperture, through which the German inmates sighted and shot, was put under fire from automatic rifles, coming from several directions at once, so that it was indiscreet for the Boche to stay near his windows, on any slant he could devise. Under cover of this rifle barrage, bombers crept forward, and at a signal the rifle fire stopped, and the bombers threw their destruction in.

All these accomplishments, which did not take overlong to learn, enhanced the natural value of the American artilleryman. He became, in a short time, the pride of the army and a warmly welcomed mainstay to the Allies.

Major-General Peyton C. March, who took the artillery to France and commanded them in their days of organization, before he was called back to be Chief of Staff at Washington, was always credited, by his men, with being three-fourths of the reason why they made such a showing. General March always credited the matter to his men. At any rate, between them they put their country's best foot foremost for the first year of America in France, and they served as optimism centres even when distress over other delays threatened the stoutest hearts.

CHAPTER IX

THE EYES OF THE ARMY

AMERICA'S beginnings in the air service were pretty closely kin to her other beginnings – she furnished the men and took over the apparatus. And although by September 1, 1917, she had large numbers of aviators in the making in France, they were flying – or aspiring to – in French schools, under American supervision, with French machines and French instructors.

There existed, in prospect, and already in detailed design, several enormous flying-fields, to be built and equipped by America, as well as half a dozen big repair-shops, and one gigantic combination repair-shop, assembling-shop, and manufacturing plant.

But in the autumn, when there were aviators waiting in France to go up that very day, there was no waiting on fields trimmed by America.

When the main school, under American supervision, had filled to overflowing, the remaining probationers were scattered among the French schools under French supervision. Meanwhile, the engineers and stevedores shared the work of constructing "the largest aviation-field in the world" in central France.

It was once true of complete armies that they could be trained to warfare in their own home fields, and then sent to whatever part of the world happened to be in dispute, and they required no more additional furbishing up than a short rest from the journey. That is no longer true of anything about an army except the air service, and it isn't literally true of them. But they approach it.

So it was practicable to give the American aviators nine-tenths of their training at home, and leave the merest frills to a few spare days in France. This, of course, takes no account of the first weeks at the battle-front, which are only nominally training, since in the course of them a flier may well have to battle for his life, and often does catch a German, if he chances on one as untutored as himself.

The French estimate of the necessary time to make an aviator is about four months before he goes up on the line, and about four months in patrol, on the line, before he is a thoroughly capable handler of a battle-plane. They cap that by saying that an aviator is born, not made, anyway, and that "all generalizations about them are untrue, including this one."

The air policy of France, however, was in a state of great fluidity at this time. They were not prepared to lay down the law, because they were in the very act of giving up their own romantic, adventurous system of single-man combat, and were borrowing the German system of squadron formation. They were reluctant enough to accept it, let alone acknowledge their debt to the Germans. But the old knight-errantry of the air could not hold up against the new mass attacks. And the French are nothing if not practical.

Even their early war aviators had prudence dinned into them – that prudence which does not mean a niggardliness of fighting spirit, but rather an abstaining from foolhardiness.

Each aviator was warned that if he lost his life before he had to, he was not only squandering his own greatest treasure, but he was leaving one man less for France.

This was the philosophy of the training-school. If the French were impatient with a flier who lost his life to the Germans through excess of friskiness, they were doubly so at the flier who endangered his life at school through heedlessness.

"If you pull the wrong lever," they said, "you will kill a man and wreck a machine. Your country cannot afford to pay, either, for your fool mistakes."

But there their dogma ended. Once the flier had learned to handle his machine, his further behavior was in the hands of American officers solely, and these, he found, were stored with several very definite ideas.

The first of these – the most marked distinction between the French system and the American – was that all American aviators should know the theories of flying and most of its mathematics.

Concerning these things the French cared not a hang.

Neither did the American aviators. But they toed the mark just the same, and many a youngster gnawed his pencil indoors and cursed the fate that had placed him with a country so finicky about air-currents on paper and so indifferent to the joys of learning by ear.

The Americans accepted from the beginning the edict on squadron flying. It was as much a part of their training as field-manœuvres for the infantry. And because they had no golden days of derring-do to look back upon, they did less grumbling. Besides, there was always the chance of getting lost, and patrols offered some good opportunities to the venturesome.

The air service had at this time an extra distinction. They were the only arm of America's service that had really impressed the Germans. The German experts, as they spoke through their newspapers, were contemptuous of the army and all its works. They maintained that it would be impossible for American transports to bring more than half a million men to France, if they tried forever, because the submarines would add to the inherent difficulties, and make "American participation" of less actual menace than that of Roumania.

The Frankfurter Zeitung said: "There is no doubt that the Entente lay great stress on American assistance on this point (air warfare). Nor do we doubt that the technical resources of the enemy will achieve brilliant work in this branch. But all this has its limits … in this field, superiority in numbers is by no means decisive. Quality and the men are what decide."

Major Hoffe, of the German General Staff, wrote in the Weser Zeitung: "The only American help seriously to be reckoned with is aerial aid."

There was a quantity of such talk. Incidentally, the same experts who limited America's troops to half a million in France at the most indulgent estimate, said, over and over, that a million were to be feared, just the number announced to be in France by President Wilson one year from the time of the first debarkation.

The aviators worked hard enough to deserve the German honor. In the French school supervised by the Americans the schedule would have furnished Dickens some fine material for pathos.

The day began at 4 A. M., with a little coffee for an eye-opener. The working-day began in the fields at 5 sharp. If the weather permitted there were flights till 11, when the pupil knocked off for a midday meal. He was told to sleep then till 4 in the afternoon, when flying recommenced, and continued till 8.30. The rest of his time was all his own. He spent it getting to bed.

There was an average of four months under this régime. The flier began on the ground, and for weeks he was permitted no more than a dummy machine, which wobbled along the ground like a broken-winged duck, and this he used to learn levers and mechanics – those things he had toiled over on paper before he was even allowed on the field.

After a while he was permitted in the air with an instructor, and finally alone. There were creditably few disasters. For months there was never a casualty. But if a man had an accident it was a perfectly open-and-shut affair. Either he ruined himself or he escaped. It was part of the French system with men who escaped to send them right back into the air, as soon as they could breathe, so that the accident would not impair their flying-nerves.

After the three or four months of foundation work, if the term is not too inept for flying, the aviator had his final examination, a triangular flight of about ninety miles, with three landings. The landings are the great trick of flying. Like the old Irish story, it isn't the falling that hurts you, it's the sudden stop.

If the pupil made his landings with accuracy he was passed on to the big school at Pau, where acrobatics are taught. The flight acrobat was the ace, the armies found. And no man went to battle till he could do spiral, serpentine, and hairpin turns, could manage a tail spin, and "go into a vrille" – a corkscrew fall which permitted the flier to make great haste from where he was, and yet not lose control of his machine, at the same time that he made a tricky target for a Boche machine-gun.

While all this training was going on the ranks of American aviators were filling in at the top. The celebrated Lafayette Escadrille, the American aviators who joined the French Army at the beginning of the war, was taken into the American Army in the late summer. Then all the Americans who were in the French aviation service who had arrived by way of the Foreign Legion were called home.

These were put at instructing for a time, then their several members became the veteran core of later American squadrons. This air unit was finally placed at 12 fliers and 250 men, and before Christmas there was a goodly number of them, a number not to be told till the care-free and uncensored days after the war.

By the beginning of the new year American aviation-fields were taking shape. The engineers had laid a spur of railroad to link the largest of them with the main arteries of communication, and the labor units had built the same sort of small wooden city that sprang up all over America as cantonments.

There were roomy barracks, a big hall where chapel services alternated with itinerant entertainers, a little newspaper building, plenty of office-barracks with typewriters galore and the little models on which aviators learn their preliminary lessons.

There is one training-field six miles long and a mile and a half wide, where all kinds of instruction is going on, even to acrobatics.

And there are several large training-schools just behind the fighting-lines, which have plenty of visiting Germans to practise on.

The enormity of the American air programme made it a little unwieldy at first, and it got a late start. But on the anniversary of its beginning it had unmeasured praise from official France, and even before that the French newspapers had loudly sung its praises.

The American aviator as an individual was a success from the beginning. He has unsurpassed natural equipment for an ace, and his training has been unprecedentedly thorough. And he has dedicated his spirit through and through. He has set out to make the Germans see how wise they were to be afraid.

CHAPTER X

THE SCHOOLS FOR OFFICERS

THE first economy effected after the broad sweep of training was in swing was to segregate the officers for special training, and these officers' schools fell into two types.

First, there was the camp for the young commissioned officers from Plattsburg, and similar camps in America, to give them virtually the same training as the soldiers had, but at a sharper pace, inclusive also of more theory, and to increase their executive ability in action; second, there was the school established by General Pershing, late in the year, through which non-commissioned officers could train to take commissions.

Of the first type, there were many, of the second, only one.

The camp for the Plattsburg graduates which turned its men first into the fighting was one having about 300 men, situated in the south of France, where the weather could do its minimum of impeding.

These youngsters arrived in September, and they were fighting by Thanksgiving. The next batch took appreciably less time to train, partly because the organization had been tried out and perfected on the first contingent, and partly because they were destined for a longer stay in the line before they were hauled back for training others. This process was duplicated in scores of schools throughout France, so that the Expeditionary Force, what with its reorganization to require fewer officers, and its complementary schools, never lacked for able leadership.

The first school was under command of Major-General Robert Bullard, a veteran infantry officer with long experience in the Philippines to draw on, and a conviction that the proper time for men to stop work was when they dropped of exhaustion.

His officers began their course with a battalion of French troops to aid them, and they were put into company formation, of about 75 men to the company, just as the humble doughboy was.

They were all infantry officers, who were to take command as first and second lieutenants, but they specialized in whatever they chose. They were distinguished by their hat-bands: white for bayonet experts, blue for the liquid-fire throwers, yellow for the machine-gunners, red for the rifle-grenadiers, orange for the hand-grenadiers, and green for the riflemen. These indicated roughly the various things they were taught there, in addition to trench-digging and the so-called battalion problems, recognizable to the civilian as team-work.

Their work was not of the fireside or the library. It was the joint opinion of General Pershing, General Sibert, and General Bullard that the way to learn to dig a trench was to dig it, and that nothing could so assist an officer in directing men at work as having first done the very same job himself.

They had a permanent barracks which had once housed young French officers, in pre-war days, and they had a generous Saturday-to-Monday town leave.

These two benefactions, plus their tidal waves of enthusiasm, carried them through the herculean programme devised by General Bullard and the assisting French officers and troops.

They began, of course, with trench-digging, and followed with live grenades, machine-guns, automatic rifles, service-shells, bayonet work, infantry formation for attack, and gas tests. Then they were initiated into light and fire signals, star-shells, gas-bombing, and liquid fire.

Last, they came in on the rise of the wave of rifle popularity, and trained at it even more intensively than the first of the doughboys. "The rifle is the American weapon," was General Pershing's constant reiteration, "and it has other uses than as a stick for a bayonet."