Our Army at the Front Part 10

"What's military discipline to us? We got Rock Island discipline," said a brawny first lieutenant, when, because he was a fellow pa.s.senger on a train with a correspondent, he felt free to speak his mind.

"I won't say it's not all right in its way, but it's not a patch on what we have in a big yard. A man obeys in his sleep, for he knows if he don't somebody's life may have to pay for it--not his own, either, which would make it worse. That's Rock Island. But it don't involve any salutin', or 'if-you-pleasin'.' If my fellows say 'Tom' I don't pay any attention, unless there's some officer around."

This att.i.tude toward discipline characterizes all the special units to a certain degree, though the engineers somewhat more than the rest, for the reason that they had to offer not a mere negation of discipline but a subst.i.tute of their own.

But, whatever their sentiments toward their incidental job as soldiers, there was no mistaking their zest for their regular job of railroading.

They found the railways of France in amazingly fine condition, in spite of the fact that they had, many of them, been built purely for war uses, and under the pressure inevitable in such work. Those behind the British lines were equally fine.

As soon as the American engineers appeared in the communication-trains, their troubles with the Germans began. On the second run of the "Lucky 13th" men, a German airplane swept down and flew directly over the engine for twenty minutes, taking strict account.

Then they began to bomb the trains, and many a time the crews had to get out and sit under the trains till the raid was over.

The engineers kept their non-combatant character till after the December British thrust at Cambrai, when half a hundred of them, working with their picks and shovels behind the lines, suddenly found themselves face to face with German counter-attacking troops, and had to fight or run.

The engineers s.n.a.t.c.hed up rifles and such weapons as they could from fallen soldiers, and with these and their shovels helped the British to hold their line.

The incident was one of the most brilliant of the year, partly because it was dramatically unexpected, partly because it permitted the Americans to prove their readiness to fight, in whatever circ.u.mstances.

The spectacle of fifty peaceful engineers suddenly turned warriors of pick and shovel was used by the journals of many countries to demonstrate what manner of men the Americans were.

But the work for British and French, on their strategic railways, was not to continue for long. The great American colony was already on blue-print, and the despatches from Was.h.i.+ngton were estimating that many millions would have to be spent for the work.

The annual report of Major-General William Black, chief of engineers, which was made public in December, stated that almost a billion would be needed for engineering work in France in 1919, if the work then in progress were to be concluded satisfactorily.

General Black's report showed that equipment for 70 divisions, or approximately 1,000,000 men, had been purchased within 350 hours after Congress declared war, including nearly 9,000,000 articles, among them 4 miles of pontoon bridges.

Every unit sent to France took its full equipment along, and the cost of the "railroad engineers" alone was more than $12,000,000.

Not long after the men were running the French and British trains, they were building their lines in Flanders, in the interims of building the American lines from sea to camp.

The building was through, and over, such mud as pa.s.ses description. The engineers tell a story of having pa.s.sed a hat on a road, and on picking it up, found that there was a soldier under it. They dug him out. "But I was on horseback," the soldier protested.

The tracks were rather floated than built. Where the sh.e.l.l fire was heavy, the men could only work a few hours each day, under barrage of artillery or darkness, and they were soon making speed records.

"The fight against the mora.s.s is as stern and difficult as the fight against the Boche," said an engineer, speaking of the Flanders tracks.

One party of men, in an exposed position, laid 180 feet of track in a record time, and left the other half of the job till the following day.

When they came back, they found that their work had been riddled with sh.e.l.l-holes, whereat they fell to and finished the other half and repaired the first half in the same time as had starred them on the first day's job.

It was not long till they had a European reputation.

The tracks they were to lay for America, though they were far enough from the Flanders mud, had a sort of their own to offer. The terminal was built by tremendous preliminaries with the suction-dredge. The long lines of communication between camp and sea were varyingly difficult, some of them offering nothing to speak of, some of them abominable. The little spur railways leading to the hospitals, warehouses, and subsidiary training-camps which lay afield from the main line were more quickly done.

In addition to all these things, the engineers were the handy men of France. They picked up some of the versatility of the Regular Army engineers, whose accomplishments are never numbered, and they built hospitals and barracks, too, in spare time, and they laid waterways, and helped out in General Pers.h.i.+ng's scheme to put the inland waterways of France to work. The ca.n.a.l system was finally used to carry all sorts of stores into the interior of France, and before the engineers were finished the army was getting its goods by rail, by motor, and by boat, though it was not till late in the year that the transportation machinery could avoid great jams at the port.

The engineers were, from first to last, the most picturesque Americans in France. They came from the great yards and terminals of East and West, they brought their behavior, their peculiar flavor of speech, and their efficiency with them, and they refused to lose any of them, no matter what the outside pressure.

"It's a great life," said one of them from the Far West, "and I may say it's a blamed sight harder than shooing hoboes off the cars back home.

But there's times when I could do with a sight of the missus and the kids and the Ford. If it takes us long to lick 'em, it won't be my fault."

CHAPTER XIII

BEHIND THE LINES

The difficulty of describing the American organization behind the lines in France lies in the fact that the story is nowhere near finished. The end of the first year saw huge things done, but huger ones still in the doing, and the complete and the incomplete so blended that there was almost no point at which a finger could be laid and one might say: "They have done this."

But at the end of the first year all the foundations were down and the corner-stones named, and though much necessary secrecy still envelops the actual facts, something at least can be told.

America could no more move direct from home to the line in the matter of her supplies than she could in that of her men. And it was at her intermediate stopping-point, in both cases, that her troubles lay. It was, as Belloc put it, the problem of the hour-gla.s.s. Plenty of room at both ends and plenty of material were invalidated by the little strait between.

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 s.h.i.+pping 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 Pers.h.i.+ng began to lament to Was.h.i.+ngton 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 a.s.sistance to General Pers.h.i.+ng as his civilian capacity would permit. With his appointment came the announcement of others, giving him the a.s.sistance 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 s.h.i.+pped 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 s.h.i.+ps 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, a.s.sembling-plants and factories, and a.r.s.enals 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 Pers.h.i.+ng 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 s.p.a.ce of 20 vessels of 1,600 tons each.

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

This board also had power to commandeer s.h.i.+ps, when they had to--notably in the case of bringing s.h.i.+pments 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 Pers.h.i.+ng 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.