Our Army at the Front Part 7

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 sh.e.l.ls, 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 rea.s.sembled.

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 sh.e.l.l. 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 Was.h.i.+ngton, 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, a.s.sembling-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 furbis.h.i.+ng 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 ma.s.s 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 n.i.g.g.ardliness 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-manuvres 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 partic.i.p.ation" of less actual menace than that of Roumania.

The Frankfurter Zeitung said: "There is no doubt that the Entente lay great stress on American a.s.sistance 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 quant.i.ty 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.