Part 22

It was said of him, as it was said of Grant, that he was not afraid of losses. Like Grant, he was a hammerer. Pershing could depend upon him, as Pétain could depend upon Mangin, to "break the line," and as Lee depended upon Jackson to arrive on time and ahead of the enemy. Considering the objectives he gained, his admirers regarded him as a master economist of lives, as he was, comparing what he gained for a given number of casualties with what many other divisions gained for their casualties. With an iron will be applied the principle that he who hesitates in war is lost. If you keep the upper hand, the enemy suffers more heavily than you. Summerall's standard was always what he was doing to the enemy, and his attitude toward the enemy was not that of a professional soldier who regards war as a game in which you are testing your wits against an adversary. He would at times exhibit a Peter the Hermit fervor when he spoke of his soldiers' crusade against the barbarians, or pointed out to them ruined villages and heart-broken peasants as another reason for charging again. With his staff around him in the midst of an action, he gave an impression of thorough grasp of their parts and his. In this, as in everything he did, he had a touch of the histrionic. He was most concretely modern in arranging his patterns of barrages, and at the same time it occurred to an observer that it would have taken only a change of garb and hardly of mood to make him perfectly at home among the knights before the walls of Jerusalem. By this time you will understand that he is of a type whose characteristics entreat a writer to fluency, and that there are several Summeralls.

There was the Summerall who might turn up at any point on his front at any time and talk to his men, while an officer stood apprehensively by, wondering what might happen to him; a Summerall who rounded on officers and men for carelessness about details that would mean a habit of carelessness which would accompany them into action; a Summerall surprising young officers who considered him a ruthless driver by telling them that they were working too hard--when it seemed to them that they never could work hard enough to please him--and that they must not worry over their maps and orders in a way to keep them from getting enough sleep to insure the strength necessary for self-command and the command of their men. Again, he would speak of his men and particularly of their deeds of initiative with a gentle, worshipful awe, as if every one were greater than any marshal of France in his estimation; again, he would be telling his young officers that they could not be worthy of their men, but that he expected their most devoted effort to that end. The men would always follow if they knew how to lead. He made it an almighty honor and a responsibility to be a second lieutenant, and yet he would censure colonel, lieutenant, or private in a manner which assuredly no politician would ever use in order to win the vote of a constituent. When an officer and a number of men standing in a group were all hit by the same shell, he had a glaring example to demonstrate how untrained we still were when an officer would allow soldiers to gather round him and become a target for the enemy's artillery, thus losing their lives without taking a single German life in return. The sight of those bodies spoiled the victory for Summerall. He burned the picture in the minds of his men in the course of their drills. One lieutenant said that if the spirit of the officer who had been the center of the group could have been given the chance to come back to earthly life, he might refuse it in fear of the lecture he would receive from Summerall for his inefficiency.

All the different Summeralls were the different strings to his bow in applying his teachings and gaining his ends, while he was unconscious of there being more than one Summerall. He was the A. E. F.'s negation of the propagandic habit of building up the characters of generals from one common attribute, when every one of them, whether French or British or American, was an individual human being.

When you went to Summerall's headquarters by day, you were pretty certain, unless there were a big action in progress, to find him absent, looking in on divisional, brigade, regimental, or battalion headquarters, moving about among the guns and transport and troops--wherever it pleased him to go in his insistence upon keeping in close human touch with the forces under his command. He left routine to his staff officers, and he expected much of his chief of staff. How his staff officers, hard master though he was, respected his ability!

He could be forensic on occasion, as he was searchingly brief at others. It was not beneath his military dignity to make a speech, either. On the day before the great final attack on November 1st, when the German line was broken, he was out from morning to night, gathering officers in groups around him and addressing his soldiers, reminding them of their duties on the morrow, when there must be no faint-heartedness. They must go through. When he returned to his headquarters, hoarse from talking in the raw open air, General Maistre, who had come from Marshal Foch, was there, and General Pershing came in a little later. Both asked the one question of Summerall: would he go through? He answered that he would, with the positiveness that he had been instilling into his troops.

If he had ever failed in one of his drives, there would certainly have been a smash, but he made no blind charges. He wanted to know where he was going, and he wanted to be sure that he had his bridge of shells for the men to cross in their advance. He prepared his lightnings well, but when they were loosed he would not stay them.

Major-General John L. Hines, the new commander of the Third Corps, had been a colonel under Bullard in the 1st Division, and had commanded the bull-dog 4th Division in the Third Corps, under Bullard, in the trough of the Meuse. He was of a wholly different type from Summerall, with whom he shared the honor for swift promotion won in the field. It was said of him that he was the best linguist of the A. E. F., as he could be equally silent in all languages, including English. If the accepted idea of General Grant is true, he and Grant could have had a most sociable evening together by the exchange of a half dozen sentences, of which I am certain that General Hines would not have used more than his share.

He came to France with General Pershing as a major in the adjutant-general's office, where he served for some time before he was sent to a regiment. He seemed to be out of place at a desk. It was like asking taciturn Mars--and I suppose that Mars was taciturn--to do drawn work. Sandy of complexion, sturdily built, he had that suggestive quiet strength, militarized by army service, which we associate with Western sheriffs who do not talk before they shoot. Without his having said a word, you understood, by the very way in which he was taciturn, that if you were in a tight place you would like to have him along. I used to think that if a section of the floor had been blown up in front of his desk while he was signing a paper, the shock of the explosion would not have interfered with the legibility of his signature. There was something in his manner which soldiers would respect. They, too, saw that he would be a good companion in a tight place. When someone had a troublous problem on hand, he would say: "Let me have it. I'll take care of it." He took care of it promptly too, once he had the paper in his strong hands.

Whether as a major or as a corps commander, he was quick to appreciate that a subordinate was preoccupied with unimportant things, and he had seen enough red tape in the old adjutant-general's office to know how to amputate it without too much hemorrhage. In common with Summerall he too had the endurance which no amount of work seems to faze, and that clarity of thought and readiness of decision which thrive on crises. He, too, went among his troops, impressing them with his cool, unchanging personality, his bull-dog tenacity, and his implacably aggressive spirit.

Having spoken his messages over the telephone which called to greater service the adjutants who had served him well, General Pershing might move about his far-flung kingdom again, though he was not to be long away from the battlefront. Nothing in the A. E. F. was better regulated than his own time and movements. Wherever he was, his special train was waiting upon him. In these later days he had a car fitted up as an office, with aides and stenographers in attendance. When the train pulled out from a station, two automobiles were on board. They were in readiness when the train arrived at its destination. If he had only a hundred miles to go, it was covered in the night while he was asleep. The day's beginning found him where he chose to be, at Marshal Foch's headquarters, at the main headquarters at Chaumont, in Paris, or at either Army headquarters. If he wished to speak over the wires, they were instantly cleared of other messages. The President of the United States may only ask a senator or a governor to come to see him; but a word from the C.-in-C. for any officer to report to him at a certain hour and place was an order. One might come clear across France for the ten-minute conference which was set down in the schedule of appointments on the pad of the aide to the C.-in-C. The democracy had bestowed unlimited autocracy and responsibility, too, upon John J. Pershing.

He had become the creature of this responsibility, determined to be equal to it, his human impulsiveness of other days now and then flashing out at the circle of authority that hedged him in, and his indignation cleaving with broad-sword blows the links of bureaucracy that plotting minds had forged around him.

At last after fifteen months his plans had achieved fruition. If he had not had imagination, he could not have visualized the structure before he began its building. Out of his window in that little room of the town hall, which had a significance that none of his other headquarters had, as he turned from his map he looked down upon the "sacred road" to Verdun, which was the main street of Souilly. Motor trucks came and went, and at one side of the town hall the staff cars stood in military line, waiting upon the commands of generals and colonels whom they served. The houses of the little town had not room for all the office force of First Army Headquarters. This had overflowed into many temporary buildings with walls of tar-paper, where all the different branches, to the tune of the hosts of typewriters which was the "jazz" of staff command, worked and had their messes. They sent out the leading, if not always, perhaps, the light, through the battle area, where the trucks surged all night and all day on the roads, going forward laden with ammunition and food and returning empty, where the ambulances went forward empty and returned laden, behind the vortex of the struggle. How was all this power, and how were the men who exerted it on a twenty-mile front in France, brought from home? Long before Marshal Foch had summoned our troops to the attack in the Meuse-Argonne, General Pershing had made his plan of how they should be concentrated as the right flank of an Allied movement. To carry this out he was to depend upon another adjutant.

XXII

A CALL FOR HARBORD

Pershing's right-hand man--From the center of power to the field--Radical measures for the Services of Supply--Our own Goethals--Varied personnel united in discontent--Regulars and experts--Harbord's two problems of construction and morale.

As President, Theodore Roosevelt had made Pershing a brigadier over the heads of a small host of senior officers, and had likewise singled out Sims, who was to command in European waters. When he was forming his division, which destiny was not to allow him to lead in France, he chose for one of his brigade commanders James G. Harbord, then a major of regulars. Harbord was not a West Pointer; having begun his army career as a private, his rank was not high for his years when we entered the war. Had the competition of civil professions applied in the army, it is safe to say that he would have been a major-general already, and that some of the colonels who were his seniors would still have been lieutenants. It is only instruction that one receives at West Point or at any college; education is for the graduate to receive in after life, a detail he sometimes neglects. Harbord educated himself by study and observation in the leisure hours which army officers have for the purpose.

One's first thought upon meeting him was to wonder why he should have enlisted in the regulars. He seemed to be the type that would have become in another environment a judge of the Supreme Court or the president of a university. After one came to know him, it was evident that he was in the army because he was naturally a soldier. He was also to prove to be the kind of organizer who in civil life is a good mayor of a great city or the efficient head of a large corporation.

As Chief of Staff of the A. E. F., he was Pershing's right-hand man for our first ten months in France.

It was not long before observers began to appreciate that he was one of the officers capable of "growing" with the growth of his task. One of the acquirements of his self-education was lucid and concise English, whether dictated to a stenographer or written on his little folding typewriter. When you brought a question before him, there was action, unfettered by qualifying verbiage. He did not "pass the buck" to the other fellow, according to the habit which army regulations and restrictions readily develop. When he went into Pershing's room, adjoining his, with a bundle of papers, and returned with them signed, there was finality. He could be tart as well as brief, in the face of prolix and meandering reports or memoranda. "If this man really had something to say," he remarked one day after he had read ten typewritten pages, "I wonder how many more pages he would require."

Next to Pershing himself, Harbord was most familiar with the planning and forming of an organization which would be equal to handling an unprecedented problem, three thousand miles from home. That story about the old quartermaster, who said that everything was going beautifully until a war came along and ruined his organization, had a most palpable application when a department which had carried on the routine of supplying our small regular army had to design a service equal to our demands in France. It was unequal to the task. A new and comprehensive system which experience had demonstrated to be suited to our needs divided the activities of the army into two territorial departments. One, that of the zone of advance, running from the outskirts of our training area in Lorraine to the front, was to have charge of the fighting. The other was to see that the fighters reached the front and were supplied when they arrived. His headquarters at Tours, the Commanding General of the new Services of Supply--the "S. O. S.," as the army knew it--was to be the head of a principality, of almost the breadth of France itself, under the kingdom of Pershing.

One day, when at last our long period of drill and preparation was having the substantial result of making our pressure at the front felt in earnest, Pershing said: "I'm going to send Harbord to troops, but I shall have him back----" the plan being to have him back as Chief of Staff, I understood. Harbord had his desire, the desire of every soldier, for field service. A brigadier-general now, he was given the brigade of Marines in place of Brigadier-General Doyen, who had been invalided home, where he died, as the result of his hard service in France. One week I saw him in the barracks building at Chaumont, surrounded by hundreds of adjutants, in the direction of the whole, and the next week I found him in charge of one part--but that a very combatant part--of the whole: with no stenographer, but writing his reports and orders on the little folding typewriter.

His new command required the tact of a man of the world as well as of a soldier among soldiers. There are no better fighters than the Marines; none prouder in their spirit of corps. The only Marine brigade in France was not pleased at the thought of having a regular in command. It wanted one of its own corps. Harbord had not been about among the officers and men many times before the Marines were saying, "Well, if we had to have an army man, we're glad we've got Harbord." By the time they were fighting in Belleau Wood, they had put their globe insignia on his collar, which he was proud to wear. He was adopted into the Marines, while regular officers were saying that he had better make his transfer official.

His record of the battle was a model of military reports, which did not hesitate to acknowledge mistakes in detail, the point being that the Marines won the wood. Promoted to be a major-general and to command the 2nd Division (which included the Marines), he led the race-horse 2nd in the counter-offensive in the Château-Thierry operations, which was the turn of the tide against the Germans. After this success the next step for him seemed to be a corps command, and possibly the command of an army, in the course of the rapid promotions that were due to care for the immense forces now arriving in France. His division had only just been relieved, when he received a hurry call to go to Chaumont. When he arrived, Pershing looked him over to see how he had been standing the strain of two months of severe fighting, after his ten months of harassing strain as Chief of Staff. Harbord appeared fresh, and ready for another year's hard work.

"Harbord, I'm going to send you down to straighten out things in the S. O. S.," Pershing then told him....

"Well, you see what my general has done to me," Harbord remarked a few hours later in an outburst to a friendly ear. "He's taken me away from my division,--but," he added, "he's my general. He knows what he wants me to do----" Then a toss of the head, and from that moment his thought was concentrated on his new duties.

Things had been going badly in the Services of Supply. There was congestion at the ports; construction work was not proceeding. In view of the enormous demands which would arise when we should have two million men, instead of the million we had planned, in the autumn, the situation had suddenly become most serious. Washington, with our own ports sensitive to delays at those on the other side of the Atlantic, had about decided to send General Goethals to France to take charge of the Services of Supply as a co-ordinate commander with General Pershing. This was a radical departure. It meant two commanders in France instead of one, directly responsible to Washington. Such divided authority in such a crisis stirred the apprehension of every soldier lest in a great crisis the fighting branch should not be supreme over every other branch which served its will and necessities. The simplest of military principles required that the commander of the forces at the front must command the whole, or his fearful responsibility for needless loss of life rested on inadequate authority.

Harbord, Pershing's right-hand man, was the counter to Washington's suggestion; that major of cavalry, whom nobody knew in the days when Goethals was building the Panama Canal, would prove that we already had a Goethals of our own in France. Without going over the ground of the pioneer stages of the Services of Supply, covered in my first book, the requirement upon which all transport depended was construction. We must enlarge the plant which France offered us for our needs. This meant building new docks to accommodate the requisite shipping, webs of spur tracks, immense areas of warehouses at the ports and others inland to accommodate our supplies; plants for assembling our railroad locomotives and cars brought from home; repair shops for them, and for guns and gun carriages, ambulances and aeroplanes and automobiles, motor trucks, and all other vehicular transport. More important still, there must be repair shops for human beings--enormous hospitals for caring for the sick and wounded, who might come by the hundreds of thousands in a single month. Hospital trains must be ready for their transport from the front. Enormous bakeries must provide hundreds of thousands of loaves every day. There must be barracks for the nurses and all the workers; barracks for the aviators and helpers who were drilling; lighters for disembarking troops when they arrived; camps, where they could spend the night ashore. Railroad sidings must enlarge railroad capacity; more spur tracks must be built wherever we had railheads at the front, and regulating stations which should dispatch the trains to the railheads. Around quiet villages must arise temporary cities of our building, connected with all the other activities in a system which was punctual and dependable.

The S. O. S. had been arranged to meet the demands of an army in our own sector. Its plan was disrupted by the switching of our troops to Château-Thierry and Picardy to meet the German offensives. The mobilization for Saint-Mihiel brought us back to our own sector. After Saint-Mihiel came the Argonne concentration, called into being by the hope of a speedy end of the war through one supreme effort by all the Allies. Should our new troops, thrown in action without sufficient preparation, and the veteran troops, thrown in without time for recuperation after Château-Thierry and Saint-Mihiel, go without food and ammunition, we might have a disaster. The wisdom of our insistence that we could form and supply and fight an integral army, instead of infiltrating our men into the British and French armies, was on trial. Victory and our soldiers' lives were at stake.

The battle was to be fought not only against machine-gun nests, but in the sweating effort of stevedores, of mechanics, and laborers, in the roar of foundries, in the rattle of trains far from the sound of the guns. For officer personnel in the S. O. S. we had first, of course, the regulars, those of the old quartermaster department and of the engineers, who would not ordinarily command troops, and those who could be spared from the zone of advance where every able fighting officer was required. These must be few, compared to the numbers of the whole. Second, we had all the men in the thirties, forties, and fifties, experts in every calling, who had come to France in their enthusiasm, in answer to the summons, in the days when the thing was for every man to serve in uniform in France. These were too old for combat, even if they thought they were not. They could not stand the physical hardship of the front, however brave their spirit. The S. O. S. was the place for them. There, or in building the organization of supply at home--which was primarily important--the nation could make the best use of their training in civil life. Third were younger officers, from the Guard or a training-camp, caught by the card-index system classifying occupations, and separated from their regiments because they were experts in some line of activity which was short of personnel in the S. O. S. They knew how to fight; but their knowledge of something else, their superiors thought, not they, was more useful to the nation.