Our Army at the Front

It was not a month from the time of the first landing of troops, in June, 1917, before the wharfs of the ports chiefly used by incoming American supplies were stacked high with unmoved cases.

The transportation men worked with might and main, but the Shipping Board at home, under the goad of restless and anxious people, was sending and sending the equipment to follow the men. And once landed, the supplies found neither roof to cover them nor means to carry them on.

This was the point at which General Pershing began to lament to Washington over his scarcity of stevedores, and labor units, and soon thereafter was the point at which he got them.

On September 14, 1917, W. W. Atterbury, vice-president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, was appointed director-general of transportation of the United States Expeditionary Force in France, and was given the rank of brigadier-general. General Atterbury was already in France, and had been offering such expert advice and assistance to General Pershing as his civilian capacity would permit. With his appointment came the announcement of others, giving him the assistance of many well-known American railroad men.

When the First Division reached France it was discovered that it required four tons of tonnage to provide for each man. That meant 80,000 tons for each division, which, in the figures of the railroad man, meant eighty trains of 1,000 tons capacity for every division.

For the first 200,000 men in France, who formed the basis for the first railroad reckoning, 800 trains were necessary.

Obviously, these trains could not be taken from the already burdened French. Obviously, they could not tax further the trackage in France, though the trains and engines shipped had essential measurements to conform to the French road-beds, so that interchange was easy. Still more obviously, the trains could not be made in this country and rolled onto the decks of ships for transportation.

So that before the first soldier packed his first kit on his way to camp the A. E. F. required railway-tracks, enormous reception-wharfs, assembling-plants and factories, and arsenals and warehouses beyond number.

The only things which America could buy in France were those which could be grown there, by women and old men and children, and those which were already made. The only continuing surplus product of France was big guns, which resulted from their terrific specialization in munition-plants during the war's first three years.

To find out what could legitimately be bought in France, and to buy it, paying no more for it than could be avoided by wise purchasing, General Pershing created a General Purchasing Board in Paris late in August. This board had a general purchasing agent at its head, who was the representative of the commander-in-chief, and he acted in concert with similar boards of the other Allied armies. His further job was to co-ordinate all the efforts of subordinate purchasing agents throughout the army. The chief of each supply department and of the Red Cross and the Y. M. C. A. named purchasing agents to act under this board.

It was not long till this board was supervising the spending of many millions of dollars a month, which gives a fair estimate of what the total expenditure, both at home and abroad, had to be.

As a case in point, a single branch of this board bought in France, the first fortnight of November, 26,000 tons of tools and equipment, 4,000 tons of railway-ties, and 160 tons of cars. The cost was something over $3,000,000. These purchases alone saved the total cargo space of 20 vessels of 1,600 tons each.

The General Purchasing Board adopted the price-fixing policy created at Washington, in which it was aided by the shrewdest business heads among the British and French authorities.

This board also had power to commandeer ships, when they had to – notably in the case of bringing shipments of coal from England, where it was fairly plentiful, to France, where there was almost none.

A second scheme for co-ordination put into effect by General Pershing was a board at which heads of all army departments could meet and act direct, without the necessity of going through the commander-in-chief. When the quartermaster's department made its budgets, the co-ordination department went over them and revised the estimates downward, or drafted work or supplies from some other department with a surplus, or redistributed within the quartermaster's stores, perhaps even granted the first requests. But there was a vast saving throughout the army zone.

The problem of America's "behind the lines," including as it did the creating of every phase of transportation, from trackage to terminals, and then providing the things to transport, not only for an army growing into the millions, but for much of civilian France, was one which, all wise observers said, was the greatest of the war. Just how staggering were these difficulties must not be told till later, but surmises are free. And the praise for overcoming them which poured from British and French onlookers had the value and authority of coming from men who had themselves been through like crises, and who knew every obstacle in the way of the Americans.

But if the preparatory stages must be abridged in the telling, there is no ban on a little expansiveness as to what was finally done.

Within a year American engineers and laborers and civilians working behind the lines had made of the waste lands around an old French port a line of modern docks where sixteen heavy cargo-vessels could rest at the same time, being unloaded from both sides at once at high speed, by the help of lighters. These docks were made by a big American pile-driver, which in less than a year had driven 30,000 piles into the marshy ooze, and made a foundation for enormous docks.

Just behind the docks is a plexus of railway-lines which, what with incoming and outgoing tracks and switches and side-lines, contains 200 miles of trackage in the terminal alone.

It is for the present no German's business how many hundred miles of double and triple track lead back to the fighting-line, and it is the censor's rule that one must tell nothing a German shouldn't know. But there is plenty of track, figures or no figures.

Equal preparation has been made for such supplies as must remain temporarily at the docks.

There are 150 warehouses, most of them completed, each 400 by 50 feet, and each with steel walls and top and concrete floors. When the warehouses are finished they will be able to hold supplies for an army of a million men for thirty days. They are supplemented by a giant refrigerating-plant, with an enormous capacity, which is served by an ice-making factory with an output of 500 tons daily, the whole ice department being operated by a special "ice unit" of the army, officially called Ice Plant Company 301. The ice department also has its own refrigerator-cars for delivering its wares frozen to any part of France.

To provide for gun appetites as abundantly as for human, an arsenal was begun at the same point, which, when completed, will have cost a hundred million dollars. This arsenal and ordnance-depot is being built by an American firm, at the request of the French Mission in America, who vetoed the American project to give the work to French contractors, because of the man-shortage in France.

It has been built under the direct supervision of the War Department, and was specifically planned so that it might in time, or case of need, become one of the main munition-distribution centres for all the Allies. Small arms and ammunition are stored and dispensed there, while big guns go direct from French factories.

Regiments of mechanical and technical experts were constantly being recruited in America for this work, and they were sent by the thousands every month of the first year. Maintenance of the ordnance-base alone requires 450 officers and 16,000 men.

Included in the arsenal and ordnance-depot are a gun-repair shop, equipped to reline more than 800 guns a month, a carriage-repair plant of large capacity, a motor-vehicle repair-shop, able to overhaul more than 1,200 cars a month, a small-arms repair-shop, ready to deal with 58,000 small arms and machine-guns a month, a shop for the repair of horse and infantry equipment, and a reloading-plant, capable of reloading 100,000 artillery-cartridges each day.

The assembling-shops in connection with the railroad were built on a commensurate scale. Even in an incomplete state one shop was able to turn out twenty-odd freight-cars a day, of three different designs, and at a neighboring point a plant for assembling the all-steel cars was making one full train a day. The locomotives were assembled in still a third place. This will have turned out 1,100 locomotives, built and shipped flat from America, at the end of its present contract. Already a third of this work has been done.

And there were, of course, the necessary number of roundhouses, and the like, to complete the organization of the self-sufficient railroad.

Not far away was a tremendous assembling and repair plant for airplanes, the operators of which had all been trained in the French factories, so that they knew the planes to the last inner bolthead.

The last assembly-plant was far from least in picturesqueness. It was for the construction, from numbered pieces shipped from Switzerland, of 3,500 wooden barracks, each about 100 feet long by 20 wide, and of double thickness for protection against French weather.

The most amusing of the incidental depots was called the Reclamation Depot, at which the numerous articles collected on the battle-field by special salvage units were overhauled and refurbished, or altered to other uses. Nothing was too trifling to be accepted. The "old-clo' man" of No Man's Land was responsible for an amazing amount of good material, made at the Reclamation Depot from old belts, coat sleeves, and the like. Many a good German helmet went back to the "square-heads" as American bullets.

In the same American district there was a great artillery camp, with remount stables, containing thousands of horses and mules. Under French tutelage, the American veterinarians had learned to extract the bray from the army mule, reducing his far-carrying silvery cry to a mere wheeze, with which he could do no indiscreet informing of his presence near the battle-lines. So the mule-hospital was one of the busiest spots in the port.

A short distance from the port, the engineers built a 20,000-bed hospital, the largest in existence, comprising hundreds of little one-story structures, set in squares over huge grounds, so that every room faced the out-of-doors.

Between the port and the hospital, and beyond the port along the coast, were the rest-camps, the receiving-camps, and a huge separate camp for the negro stevedores. Near enough to be convenient, but not for sociability, were the camps for the German prisoners, who put in plenty of hard licks in the great port-building.

Midway between all this activity at the coast and the training and fighting activity at the fighting-line there was what figured on the army charts as "Intermediate Section," whose commanders were responsible for the daily averaging of supply and demand.

In the intermediate section, linked by rail, were the supplementary training-camps, schools, base hospitals, rest-areas, engineering and repair shops, tank-assembling plants, ordnance-dumps and repair-shops, the chief storage for "spare parts," all machinery used in the army, cold-storage plants, oil and petrol depots, the army bakeries, the camouflage centre, and the forestry departments, busy with fuel for the army and timber for the engineers.

The achievement of the first year was literally worthy of the unstinted praise it received. And perhaps its finest attribute was that most of it was permanent, and will remain, while France remains, as America's supreme gift toward her post-war recovery.

CHAPTER XIV

FRANCE AND THE MEDICOES

THE history of the A. E. F. will be in most respects the history of resources cunningly turned to new ends, of force redirected, with some of its erstwhile uses retained, and of a colossal adventure in making things do. Where the artillery was weak, the A. E. F. eked out with the coast-artillery. Where the engineer corps was insufficient, the railroads were called on for special units, frankly unmilitary. A whole citizenry was abruptly turned to infantry. But one branch of the service, though scarcely worthy of much responsibility when the war began, was, nevertheless, the one most thoroughly prepared. The prize service was the Medical Corps, and it was in this state of astonishing preparedness because immediately before it became the Medical Corps, it had been the Red Cross, and the Red Cross knows no peace-times.

The question of what is Medical Corps and what is Red Cross has always been a facer for the superficial historian.

Broadly speaking, the base hospitals of the army are organizations recruited and equipped in America by the Red Cross, and transported to France, where they become units of the army, under army discipline and direction, and supplied by the Medical Corps stores except in cases where these are inadvertently lacking, or unprovided for by the strictness of military supervision. In any case, where sufficient supplies are not forthcoming from the Medical Corps, they are given by the Red Cross.

This is the Red Cross on its military side. In its civilian work, which is extensive, and in its recreational work it carries on under its own name and by its own authority. Where it divides territory with the Y. M. C. A., the division is that the Y. M. C. A. takes the well soldier and the Red Cross the sick one, whenever either has time on his hands.

But the Medical Corps plus the Red Cross created between them a branch of the American Army in France which, from the moment of landing, was the boast of the nation.

For a year before America entered the war Colonel Jefferson Kean, director-general of the military department of the American Red Cross, had been organizing against the coming of American participation. Within thirty days after America's war declaration Colonel Kean announced that he had six base hospitals in readiness to go to the front, and within another thirty days these six units were on their way, equipped and ready to step into the French hospitals, schools, and what-not, waiting to receive them, and to do business as usual the following morning.

The six were organized at leading hospitals and medical schools: the Presbyterian Hospital of New York, with Doctor George E. Brewer in command; the Lakeside Hospital, Cleveland, with Doctor George W. Crile; the Medical School of Harvard University, with Doctor Harvey Cushing; the Pennsylvania Hospital, Philadelphia, with Doctor Richard Harte; the Medical School of Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, with Doctor Frederick Besley, and Washington University Hospital, Saint Louis, with Doctor Frederick T. Murphy.

A little while later the Postgraduate unit went from New York, the Roosevelt Hospital unit from there, and the Johns Hopkins unit from Baltimore. Many others followed in due time.

These hospital units, recruited and organized under the Red Cross, took their full complement of surgeons, physicians, and nurses. All these became members of the army as soon as they landed in France, and they were supplemented, either there or before they crossed, with members of Medical Corps, enlisted just after America entered the war.

The military rank of the physicians and surgeons conformed in a general way to the unofficial rank of the same men when they had worked together in the hospitals from which they came. There were, of course, some exceptions to this rule, but not enough to make it no rule at all.

It was true of the medicoes, as it was of the engineers, that they took military discipline none too seriously, because they brought a discipline of their own. Wherever, in civilian pursuits, the lives of others hang on prompt obedience, there is a strictness which no military strictness can outdo. This was true of the personnel of any hospital in America, before there was thought of war. It was equally true, of course, after the units were established behind the fighting-lines. But there was a certain lack of prompt salute and a certain freedom with first names which not the stoutest management from the military arm of the service could obliterate from the base hospitals. The Medical Corps enlisted men were naturally not sinners in this respect. The routine work of the base hospitals all fell to them. It was usually a sergeant of the army – though he was never a veteran – who attended the reception-rooms, kept account of symptoms, clothes, and first and second names, and did the work of orderly in the hospital. It was the privates who kept the mess and washed the dishes and changed the sheets.

The nurses went under military discipline and into military segregation – sometimes a little nettlesome, when the hospitals were far from companionship of any outside sort.

The sites selected for the hospitals were either French hospitals which were given over, or schools or big public buildings remade into hospitals by the engineers. Each site was arranged so that it could be enlarged at will. And the railways which connected the outlying hospitals with the rest of the American communications were laid so that other hospitals could be easily placed along their line. There was a splendid elasticity in the Medical Corps plan.

One base hospital was much like another, except for size. Those near the line differed somewhat from those farther back, but their scheme was uniform. At any rate, the history of their doings was similar enough to have one history do for them all. Take, for example, one of the New York units which landed in August and was placed nearer the coast than the fighting. It was put in trim by the engineers, then sanitated by the humbler members of the Medical Corps. The great wards were laid out, the kitchens were built, windows were pried open – always the first American job in France, to the great disgust and alarm of the French – and baths were put in.

The chief surgeon had specialized in noses and throats at home. When the hospital was ready, naturally the soldiers were not in need of it – being still in training in the Vosges – so the services of the hospital were opened to the civilian population of France.

By November there was not an adenoid in all those parts. The death-rate almost vanished. Into this rural France, where there had been no hospital and only a nursing home kept by some Sisters of Mercy who saw their first surgical operation within the base hospital, there came this skilful organization, handled by men whose incomes at home had been measured in five figures, and all the healing they had was free.

Multiply this by twenty, and then by thirty, before the pressing need for care for soldiers directed the Medical Corps back to first channels, and there will be some gauge of what this service did for France.

And the gratitude of France was more than commensurate. Praise of the American Medical Service flowed unceasingly from officials and civilians, statesmen and journalists. There were constant demands made upon the French Government that it should pattern its own medical forces exactly upon the American, making it the branch of the medical specialist and not of the politician or the military man.

The individual officers of the Medical Corps had much to learn, however, from the French and the British. Though they knew hygiene, prophylaxis, antisepsis, and surgery as few groups of men have ever known it, they became scholars of the humblest in the surgery of the battle-field. Every officer of the Medical Corps was kept on a round of visits behind French and British fronts during the fairly peaceful interim between their landing and the American occupation of a front-line sector.

The Red Cross was the great auxiliary of the Medical Corps. It kept up its recruiting in America, both for nurses and physicians, and for supplies.

And in supplies it played its greatest part. The Red Cross maintained enormous warehouses, separate entirely from army control, which contained provisions to meet every possible shortage. It was known by the Red Cross that never in the history of the world had there been a medical corps of any army that had not finally broken down. No matter how painstaking the provision, the need was always tragically greater.

And so surgical dressings, sets of surgical instruments, medicines, antiseptics, and anæsthetics piled up in the great A. R. C. store-houses.

Then there were the things for which the Medical Corps frankly made no provision, which could have no place in a strictly military programme, such as food delicacies of great cost, special articles of clothing, and amusements. Every hospital convalescent ward had its phonograph, its checker-boards, its chess-sets, and its dominoes. That was the Red Cross.

The Red Cross had three hospitals of its own in Paris. The first of these was at Neuilly, the hospital which had been the American Ambulance Hospital from the beginning of the war, given over on the third anniversary of its inauguration. Here French and American soldiers, American civilians who worked with the army, and Red Cross officers and men were cared for. The second had been Doctor Blake's Hospital, and when it became a Red Cross hospital, it was made to include the gigantic laboratory where investigations were made, and where the American Red Cross had the honor to ferret out the cause of trench-fever. This fever had been one of the baffling tragedies of the war, because in the press of caring for their wounded, other hospitals had been unable to give it sufficient research.

The third was the Reid Hospital, equipped and supplied by Mrs. Whitelaw Reid.

In the long period when all this hospital organization was at the command of civilian France, inestimably fine work was done. It was a sort of poetic tuition fee for the instruction in war surgery which was meanwhile going on from veteran French surgeons to the American newcomers. At the end of the first year, the Medical Corps was itself ready for any stress, and it had mightily relieved the stress it had already found.

CHAPTER XV

IN CHARGE OF MORALE

IF the army as a whole was a story of old skill in new uses, certainly the most extraordinary single upheaval was that of the Y. M. C. A. Though it had grown into many paths of civil life, in peace-times, that could not have been foreshadowed by its founders, probably the wildest speculation of its future never included the purveying of vaudeville and cigarettes to soldiers in France.

Yet just that was what the Y. M. C. A. was doing, within less than a year from the American Army's arrival in France, and its only lamentation was that it had nowhere near enough cigarettes and vaudeville to purvey.

It accepted the offer of the United States Government to watch over the morale of the soldiers abroad, partly because it was so excellently organized that it could handle a task of such vast scope, and partly because both French and British Armies had got such fine results from similar organizations that the American Y. M. C. A. felt itself to be historically elected.

The Y. M. C. A. had cut its wisdom-teeth long before it became a part of the army. Its directors had accepted the fact that a young man is apt to be more interested in his biceps than in his soul, and that if he can have athletics aplenty, and entertainment that really entertains, he'd as lief be out of mischief as in it.

But even this was not quite broad enough for the needs of the army away from home. And one of the first things the Y. M. C. A. did in France, and the stoutest pillar of its great success, was to abandon the slightest aversion to bad language, or to the irreligion that brims out of a cold, wet, and tired soldier in defiant spurts, and to cultivate, in their stead, a sympathetic feeling for the want of smokes and a good show.

The secretaries sent abroad to build the first huts and watch over the first soldiers were men selected for their skill in getting results against considerable obstacles. Those who followed, as the organization grew, were specialists of every sort. There were nationally famous sportsmen, to keep the baseball games up to scratch, and to see that gymnastics out-of-doors were helped out by the rules. There were men who could handle crowds, keep an evening's entertainment going, play good ragtime, make good coffee, and produce cigarettes and matches out of thin air.