With The Doughboy In France Part 7

Do not, I pray you, conceive the idea that all the warehouse work was done in Paris. I have hinted at the importance of Dijon, the great army store center, as a Red Cross stores center, and have, myself, stood in the great American Red Cross warehouse upon the lining of the inner harbor of St. Nazaire and have with mine own eyes seen 8,000 cases stacked under their capacious roofs--foodstuffs and clothing and comforts and hospital supplies which came forever and in a steady stream from the transports docking at that important American receiving point, and have known of warehouses to be established in strange quarters, stranger sometimes than the abandoned stables of the horse-drawn taxicabs of Paris, here in an ancient exposition building upon the outskirts of a sizable French city, there in a convent, and again in a church or a school, or even again in a stable.

Here was a little town, not many miles back from the northern front. The Red Cross determined to set up a warehouse there, both for military and civilian relief supplies. An agent from the Paris headquarters went up there to confer with the local representative in regard to the proper location for the plant. The local man favored one building, the Paris representative another which was nearer to the railroad station. While they argued as to the merits of the two buildings German airmen flew over the town and destroyed one of them. And before they could compromise on the other, the French Government requisitioned it as a barracks.

Now was a time for deep thought rather than compromise. And deep thought won--it always does. Deep thought moved the American Red Cross warehouse into the ancient seminary there, even though that st.u.r.dy structure had been pretty well peppered by the _boche_. When the Red Cross moved in, you still could count fifty-one distinct sh.e.l.l holes in it; another and a final one came while it still was in the process of adaptation to warehouse uses. In this badly battered structure lived the Red Cross warehouse man and his three a.s.sistants--all of them camion chauffeurs--after they had put forty-five panes of gla.s.s in with their own hands. Then the supply of gla.s.s ran out. In the former chapel of the seminary fourteen great window frames had to be covered with muslin, which served, after a fas.h.i.+on, to keep out the stress of weather.

Twenty-seven of the precious panes of gla.s.s went into the office--where daylight was of the greatest necessity. The rest were used, in alternation with the muslin, for the living quarters, where the Red Cross men cooked their own meals, in the intervals between dealing out warehouse supplies. It was hard work, but the chauffeurs did not complain. Indeed it so happened that their chief did most of the complaining.

"What is the use?" he sputtered one afternoon while the war still was a day-by-day uncertainty. "Those boys will put in a big day's work, every one of them, come home and not know enough to go to bed. Like as not they will take a couple of hours and climb up some round knoll to watch the artillery fire. When the town was in the actual line of fire--not more than a fortnight ago--one of them turned up missing. He had been with us only a moment before, so we began hunting through the warehouse for him. Where do you suppose we found him? Let me tell you: he was up in the belfry, the biggest and the best target in the town. Said he wanted to see where the sh.e.l.ls were striking. I told him to come down, the Red Cross wasn't paying him for d.a.m.n foolishness. But you couldn't help liking the nerve of the boy, could you?"

Courage!

How it did run hand in hand with endeavor all through the progress of this war. And it was not limited to the men of the actual fighting forces. The Red Cross had more than its even share of it. The great, appealing roll of honor in the Hotel Regina headquarters--the list of the American Red Cross men and women who gave their lives in the service of their country--was mute evidence of this. Courage in full measure, and yet never with false heroics. Full of the st.u.r.dy everyday courage, the courage of the casual things, exemplified, for instance, in this letter from the files of the Stores Section, written by the agent in charge of another of its warehouses in northern France:

"A s.h.i.+pment of four rolls of oiled cloth arrived most opportunely a few days ago and one roll is being employed locally to repair the many panes of window gla.s.s destroyed in last night's air raid. In connection with this raid it may be added that one of our chauffeurs nearly figured as a victim of this raid, the window in his lodging being blown in and a large hole knocked in the roof of his house.

"I presume that it is violating no military secret to add that another raid from the _boches_ is looked for to-night and in case it does come the other rolls of window cloth may come into play...."

It was in these very days of the great spring offensive of 1918, that the Supplies Department, like the Transportation Department of our Red Cross overseas, began to have its hardest tests. For in addition to the regular routine of its great warehousing function, there came, with the rapidly increasing number of troops, hospitals and refugees, rapidly increasing special duties for it to perform; greatly increased quant.i.ties of goods to be s.h.i.+pped. And I think it but fair to state that without the vision of one man, Major Field, there might not have been many supplies to s.h.i.+p. Immediately after his appointment as Chief of the Bureau of Supplies, Major Field began to purchase goods, in great quant.i.ties and an almost inconceivable variety. He bought in the French market, in the English market, in the Spanish market, from the commissary stores of the United States Army--in fact from every conceivable corner and source of supply; as well as from some which apparently were so remote as hardly to be even conceivable. He stored away beds, tents, sheets, clothing, toilet articles, and cases of groceries by the thousands, and still continued to buy. The Red Cross gasped. The A. E. F. protested. The vast warehouses were filled almost to the bursting point. Major Field listened to the protestations, then smiled, and went out, buying still more supplies. His smile was cryptic, and yet was not; it was the smile of confidence, the smile of serenity.

And both confidence and serenity were justified. For the days of the drive showed--and showed conclusively--that if our American Red Cross had not been so well stocked in supplies it would have failed in the great mission overseas to which we had intrusted it.

"The ----th Regiment has moved up beyond its baggage train. Can the Red Cross s.h.i.+p blankets and kits through to it?"

This was a typical emergency request--from an organization of three thousand men. It was answered in the typical fas.h.i.+on--with a full carload of blankets and other bedding. The kits followed in a truck.

"A field hospital is needed behind the new American lines," was another.

It, too, was answered promptly; with several carloads of hospital equipment, surgical dressings, and drugs. These things sound simple, and were not. And the fact that they were many times multiplied added nothing to the simplicity of the situation. In fact there came a time when it was quite impossible to keep any exact account of the tonnage s.h.i.+pped, because the calls came so thick and fast and were so urgent that no one stopped for the usual requisitions but answered any reasonable demands. The requisition system could wait for a less critical time, and did.

One day a message came that a certain field hospital was out of ether--that its surgeons were actually performing painful operations upon conscious men--all because the army had run out of its stock of anaesthetics. The men at the American Red Cross supply headquarters sickened at the very thought; they moved heaven and earth to start a camion load of the precious ether through to the wounded men at the field hospital, and followed it up with twenty-five truckloads of other surgical supplies.

Under the reorganization of the American Red Cross in France which was effected under the Murnane plan, the entire work of purchase and warehousing was brought under a single Bureau of Supplies, which was ranked in turn as a Department of Supplies. This Bureau was promptly subdivided into two sections: that of Stores and that of Purchases.

Taking them in the order set down in the official organization plan, we find that the headquarters section of Stores--situated in Paris--was charged with the operation of all central and port warehouses and their contents and was to be in a position to honor all properly approved requisitions from them, so far as was humanly possible. It was further charged to confer with the comptroller of our French American Red Cross organization and so to prepare a proper system and check upon these supplies. In each of the nine zones there were to be subsections of stores, answerable for operation to the Zone Manager and for policy to the Paris headquarters, but so organized as to keep not only sufficient supplies for all the ordinary needs of the zones, but in various well-situated warehouses, enough for occasions of large emergency--and all within comparatively short haul.

The Section of Purchases corresponded to the purchasing agent of a large corporation. Remember that the purchasing opportunities in France were extremely limited, so that by far the greater part of this work must be performed by the parent organization here in the United States, and sent--as were the circus tents--in response to requisitions, either by cable or by mail. Incidentally, however, remember that no small amount of purchasing for the benefit of our army and navy in France was done both in England and in Spain, which, in turn, was a relief to the overseas transport problem. For it must ever be remembered that the famous "bridge across the Atlantic" was at all times, until after the signing of the armistice at least, fearfully overcrowded. It was only the urgent necessities of the Red Cross and its supplies that made it successful in gaining the previous tonnage s.p.a.ce east from New York, or Boston, or Newport News. And even then the tonnage was held to essentials; essentials whose absoluteness was almost a matter of affidavit.

Yet even the essentials ofttimes mounted high. Before me lies a copy of a cablegram sent from Paris to Was.h.i.+ngton early in January, 1919. It outlines in some detail the foodstuff needs of the American Red Cross in France for the next three months. Some of the larger items, in _tons_, follow:

Sugar 50 Rice 100 Tapioca 10 Cheese 50 Coffee 50 Chocolate 50 Cocoa 100 Bacon 50 Salt Pork 50 Ham 50 Prunes 50 Soap 100 Apricots 25 Peaches 25

And all of this in addition to the 10,000 cases of evaporated milk, 5,000 of condensed milk, 3,000 of canned corn beef, 2,000 of canned tomatoes, 1,000 each of canned corn and canned peas, and 1,000 gross of matches, while the quant.i.ties ordered even of such things as cloves and cinnamon and pepper and mustard ran to sizable amounts.

I have no desire to bore you with long columns or tables of figures--for this is the story of our Red Cross with our army in France and not a report. Yet, after all, some figures are impressive. And these given here are enough to show that of all the cogs and corners of the big machine, the Purchase and Stores sections of the organization in France had its full part to do.

CHAPTER VI

THE DOUGHBOY MOVES TOWARD THE FRONT

By July, 1917, the first Divisions of our amazing army began to seep into the battle countries of Europe. It had not been the intention of either our War Department or its general staff to send the army overseas until the first of 1918; the entire plan of organization and preparation here in the United States had been predicated upon such a program. Yet the situation overseas was dire indeed. Three years of warfare--and such warfare--had begun to f.a.g even the indomitable spirits of England and of France. The debacle of Russia was ever before the eyes of these nations.

In the words of their own leaders, their morale was at its lowest point.

France, in one glorious moment in 1917, had seemed, under the leaders.h.i.+p of Nivelle, to be close to the turning point toward victory. But she had seen herself miss the point, and was forced again in rugged doggedness to stand stoutly with England and hold the line for the democracy of the world.

In such an hour there was no opportunity for delay; not even for the slight delay incidental to raising an American Army of a mere half million, training it in the simplest possible fas.h.i.+on, and then dispatching it overseas. Such a method would have been more gratifying to our military pride. We sacrificed that pride, and shall never regret the hour of that decision. We first sent hospital detachments from our army medical service to be brigaded with the British, who seemed to have suffered their most severe losses in their hospital staffs, and sent engineer regiments not only to build the United States Military Railroad, of which you have already read, but also to aid the weakened land transport sections of the French and British armies. And General John J. Pers.h.i.+ng, with adequate staff a.s.sistance, crossed to Paris to prepare for the first and all-glorious American campaign in Europe.

[Ill.u.s.tration: OUR RED CROSS AT THE FRONT A typical A. R. C. dugout just behind the lines]

"The program had been carefully drawn up," wrote Lieutenant Colonel Repington, the distinguished British military critic, in a review on the performance of our army in the _London Morning Post_, of December 9, 1918. "It antic.i.p.ated the orderly arrival in France of complete units, with all their services, guns, transport, and horses, and when these larger units had received a finis.h.i.+ng course in France and had been trained up to concert pitch it was intended to put them into the line and build up a purely American Army as rapidly as possible. After studying the situation, the program and the available tonnage in those days, I did not expect that General Pers.h.i.+ng could take the field with a trained army of accountable numbers much before the late summer or autumn of 1918."

Yet by the first day of January, 1918, there were already in France four American Divisions, each with an approximate strength of 28,153 men, by February there were six Divisions, and by March, eight. It is fair to say, however, that even by March only two of the Divisions were fit to be in the line, and none in the other active sectors. Training for modern warfare is indeed an arduous task. Yet our amazing army did not s.h.i.+rk it, and even in the dispiriting and terrifying days of the spring of 1918 kept to its task of preparing itself for the great ordeal just ahead, and, almost at the very hour that the last great German drive began to a.s.sume really serious proportions, was finis.h.i.+ng those preparations. Ten Divisions were ready, before the spring was well advanced, to stand shoulder to shoulder with British Divisions should such an unusual course have been found indispensable. In fact, antic.i.p.ating this very emergency, brigading with the British had already been begun. But as the British reinforcements began pouring into Northern France the possibilities of the emergency arising diminished.

And five of our Divisions were returned south into the training camps of the United States Army.

The War Department figures of the size of our army in France throughout 1918--which at the time could not be made public, because of military necessities--tell the story of its rapid growth. They show the number of Divisions in France and in line and in reserve to have been as follows:

_1918 In France In Line and Reserve_ April 1 10 3 May 13 4 June 16 6 July 24 9 August 32 20 September 37 25 October 40 31 November 42 30

This tabulation takes no count whatsoever of the noncombatants of the S.

O. S.--as the army man knows the Service of Supplies--or the other great numbers of men employed in the rearward service of the United States Army. It is perhaps enough to say that the largest number of our troops employed in France was on September 26, the day that General Pers.h.i.+ng began his Meuse-Argonne offensive. On that day our army consisted of 1,224,720 combatants and 493,764 noncombatants, a total of 1,718,484 men in its actual forces.

It is known now that if the war had continued we should probably have doubled those figures within a comparatively few months and should have had eighty Divisions in France by April, 1919, which would have made the United States Army by all odds the most considerable of any of the single belligerent nations fighting in France.

We have told elsewhere a little of the romance of the transport of our men; here in cold figures--statistics which scorn romance in their composition--is their result. We shall see through our Red Cross spectacles again and again the performances of that army, as the men and the women of the American Red Cross saw them.

In the meantime let us turn again, therefore, to Lieutenant Colonel Repington, whose reputation in this regard is well established, and find him saying of the commanding general of our army:

"To my mind, there is nothing finer in the war than the splendid good comrades.h.i.+p which General Pers.h.i.+ng displayed throughout, and nothing more striking than the determined way in which he pursued the original American plan of making the American arms both respected and feared. The program of arrivals, speeded up and varied in response to the appeal of the Allies, involved him in appalling difficulties, from which the American army suffered to the last. His generous answer to cries for help in other sectors left him for long stretches almost, if not quite, without an army. He played the game like a man by his friends, but all the time with a singleness of purpose and a strength of character which history will applaud; he kept his eyes fixed on the great objective which he ultimately attained and silenced his detractors in attaining it. To his calm and steadfast spirit we owe much. To his staff, cool amidst the most disturbing events, impervious to panic, rapid in decision, and quick to act, the allied world owes a tribute. To his troops, what can we say? They were crusaders. They came to beat the Germans and they beat them soundly. They worthily maintained the tradition of their race. They fought and won for an idea."

Truer words have not been written. To one who has made even a superficial study of our army in France, the figure of the doughboy--the boy from the little home in Connecticut or Kansas or Oregon--looms large indeed. I did not, myself, see him in action. Other and abler pens have told and are still telling of his unselfishness, his audacity, his seemingly unbounded heroism both in the trenches and upon the open field of battle. The little rows of crosses in the shattered forest of the Argonne or upon the roads leading from Paris into Chateau-Thierry, elsewhere over the face of lovely France, tell the story of his sacrifice more graphically than any pen may ever tell it.

Frequently I have seen the doughboy in Paris as well as in the other cities and towns and in our military camps in France. He is an amusing fellow. One can hardly fail to like him. I have talked with him--by the dozens and by the hundreds. I have argued with him, for sometimes we have failed to agree. But I have never failed to sympathize, or to understand. Nor, as for that matter, to appreciate. No one who has seen the performance of our amazing army in France, or the immediate results of that performance, can fail to appreciate. If you are a finicky person you may easily see the defects that haste brought into the making of our expeditionary army--waste in material and in personnel here and there; but, after all, these very defects are almost inherent in any organization raised to meet a supreme emergency, and they appear picayune indeed when one places them alongside the marvel of its performance--when one thinks of Chateau-Thierry or Saint Mihiel or the Argonne.

It is not the province of this book to describe the operations of our army in France except in so far as they were touched directly by the operations of our Red Cross over there. So, back to our text. You will recall that Major Grayson M.-P. Murphy, our first Red Cross Commissioner to France, and his staff arrived in Paris coincidently with General Pers.h.i.+ng on the thirteenth of June, 1917. They went right to work, despite terrific odds, in the building of a working organization. At about the hour of their coming there was developing here in the United States a rather distinct feeling in certain widespread religious and philanthropic organizations that they should be distinctly represented in our war enterprise in Europe. The patriotism that stirred these great organizations was admirable; it was unmistakable, and finally resulted in certain of the larger ones--the Young Men's Christian a.s.sociation, the Knights of Columbus, the Young Women's Christian a.s.sociation and the Salvation Army--being given definite status in the war work overseas. In the case of the Y. M. C. A.--by far the largest of all these organizations--it was allotted the major problem of providing entertainment for the enlisted men and the officers at the camps in France, in England, in Italy and, in due time, in the German valley of the Rhine. At a later hour the very difficult problem of providing canteens, that would be, in effect, nothing more nor less than huge post exchanges, was thrust upon the Y. M. C. A. It accepted the problem--not gladly, but in patriotic spirit--and even though the experiment brought upon its shoulders much thoughtless and bitter criticism, saw it bravely through.

The Y. M. C. A. therefore, was to undertake, speaking by and large, the canteen problem of the camps, while that of the hospitals, the docks at the ports of debarkation and embarkation, the railroad junctions, and the cities of France was handed to the American Red Cross. The Red Cross began its preparations for this particular part of its task by establis.h.i.+ng stations for the French Army, which, pending the arrival of the American forces, would serve admirably as experiment stations. Major Murphy at once conferred with the French military authorities and, after finding from them where their greatest need lay, proceeded without delay to the establishment of model canteens on the French lines of communication; in the metropolitan zone of Paris and at the front. And before our army came, and the great bulk of the work of our Red Cross naturally s.h.i.+fted to it, these early canteens supplied rations to literally millions of French soldiers.

"In view of keeping up the good spirits of troops it is indispensable that soldiers on leave be able to find, while waiting at railroad stations in the course of their journeys, canteens which will allow them to have comfortable rest and refreshment. Good results have already been obtained in this direction, but it is necessary to improve the canteens already existing and to create new ones in stations that do not already have them."