Part 24

Caring for the passage of this human stream from the ports to the front was the first duty of the S. O. S. The next was to follow it up with supplies. Wherever men were they must be fed. La Pallice and La Rochelle were also being used; but the main Atlantic cargo ports were Saint-Nazaire and Bordeaux. Ships moved with a processional regularity to their places alongside the docks we had built. Our warehouses stretched out over the sandy reaches where an occasional vine appeared between spur tracks on the site of the vineyards for which we were paying, and which hardly brought as much wealth to Bordeaux as the money we were spending. Broken bags of flour, and broken crates of canned goods, were piled in separate warehouses; as they could not stand the journey to the front, they were used to feed the legions of the S. O. S. For there was an army larger than Grant had in the Appomattox campaign to be supplied between the ports and the front. Fields were filled with the parts of automobiles and trucks. Assembled, they started in long convoys across France to Saint-Mihiel or the Argonne, their drivers having a tour of the château country before passing over the Côte d'Or of Burgundy. All the parts of the railroad locomotives and cars arriving were assembled in the vast shops which we had built and fitted out with machinery according to the latest American models.

We were supposed to have, but never had, ninety days' routine supplies in France for all our forces in France. Of these forty-five days were to be in the warehouses at the base ports. Sometimes trains were loaded at the ports and run straight through to the front. Normally, there were three changes in transit. At our service were all the arterial railroads of central France, and all the locomotives and cars that the French could spare, and all the broken-down French rolling stock which our mechanics could repair. Possibly no denial can ever overtake the report that we built a railroad clear across France; but we did nothing of the kind, and contemplated nothing of the kind. We built spur tracks and sidings and cut-offs; if all the track we laid, figured a statistician in G-4 at Chaumont, had been in line, it would have reached from Saint-Nazaire across France and Germany to the Russian frontier.

All our building construction, if it had been concentrated in one standard barrack building, would extend from Saint-Nazaire as far as the Elbe river in Germany. We erected and put in operation 18,543 American railroad cars, and 1,496 American locomotives. Besides producing enough firewood to form an unbroken wall around three sides of France, one meter high and one meter broad, we sawed 189,564,000 feet of lumber, 2,728,000 standard gauge ties, 923,560 narrow gauge ties, and 1,739,000 poles and pit props. If all the motor vehicles we brought to France were put end to end, they would form a convoy two hundred and ninety miles in length. On the day that the armistice was signed we were operating 1,400 miles of light railway, of which 1,090 miles had been captured from the Germans. They handled 860,652 tons of material.

These figures, put together in a paragraph in passing, give an idea of the magnitude of the business which the army of the S. O. S. was conducting. It was an army which knew no excitement in war except work. The problem of sea transport which faced our ports at home was no more trying than the problem of railroad transport from our ports in France; _liaison_ between combat units in action no more trying than the _liaison_ between our American railroad men with their American training and the French railroad system. We were used to long distances and long hauls; the French, in a country no larger than some of our states, were used to short distances and short hauls. Impatient at first with their methods, we saw how they had come to be applied in France. Amazed at first at ours, the French came to appreciate how well our long heavy trains suited the wholesale business of war. The French seemed unsystematic, yet their worn locomotives and rickety cars managed to carry on an enormous traffic. When we applied our home tracer system for the first time on the railroads of France, the central offices might know the location of every car under their authority.

Our railroad men, under Brigadier-General W. W. Atterbury, our railroad general, used to having at home all the supplies they needed, made victory possible by the way in which they patched and contrived in their energy and resource to meet the demands of the months of September and October, which were far beyond their calculations. They share the honors due to our pioneer railroad builders in the early days of the west, while they exemplified the type of men who operate our great systems of today, whether the engineer, the fireman or shop mechanic, the veteran superintendent, or the young fellow just out of a technical school. I wonder no less how they were able, with the rolling stock at their command, to forward all the tonnage we required at the front, than I wonder how we were able to take some of the positions of the whale-back.

In his office at Tours, surrounded by his adjutants, who, though in khaki, were railroad men in every word and thought, and in the discipline which our home systems have established in webbing our country, Brigadier-General Atterbury had a command which in numbers belonged to a major-general. His discipline was that of a leadership which won loyalty. In all his perplexing situations, when he was striving for authority and material for an undertaking so strictly technical, he never passed on any animus to a subordinate. It is something for an officer to return from France with the respect which he had from his subordinates.

The train that started on the steel trail across France, leaving behind the hectic labor and the piles of cargo and the warehouses built and building, when it passed out of the region of the base sections came to the intermediate zone. In the regular routine it lost its entity when it ascended the "hump" which we had built at Gièvres,--that American hump, singularly characteristic of our system of labor-saving organization. Every car was loaded with material belonging to some branch of the army. One by one they were "dropped" down the incline, each being switched to a track, as its downgrade momentum, subject to the brakes, sent it--with the facility of letters tossed into mail bags by a railway mail clerk--where its contents belonged, whether to the door of an engineer, an ordnance, a signal corps, a medical corps, or a Y. M. C. A. or Red Cross warehouse, while the meat trains or others with perishable cargo went to our vast cold-storage plant. From the "hump" you looked out over a city of warehouses, of barracks, and other structures, with its guardhouse, its clubs, its motion-picture theaters, its military policemen, under a colonel who was mayor, common council, and king--all having been built in the open fields as a way station from the New York docks to the front.

Here at Gièvres other trains were made up to continue the journey forward in answer to the daily requisitions of the regulating stations upon the intermediate reserves. War being a one-way business, all expenditure and no income, all loaded cars were going one way except those bringing lumber and ties that we were cutting from the forests for construction, salvage from the battlefield, broken trucks, and vehicles--and the hospital trains. Here prevision must be most sure. Man was the most valuable piece of machinery; his repair the most important of all repairs. We had enormous hospitals in the intermediate zone as well as at the base ports; and indeed all over central and southern France. The medical corps used great hotels and other buildings to care for the hosts of broken, gassed, exhausted, sick men from the Meuse-Argonne battle; but when we had to build we ran out spur tracks--deep was our faith in spur tracks--into open fields upon which rose cities of standardized unit hospital buildings, all of a color, all of a pattern, and also operating rooms and Y. M. C. A. clubs and theaters, under the autocracy of some regular surgeon who looked up from his desk at the chart on the wall showing the number of his patients and the number of vacant beds. The hospital trains ran up on the spur tracks, and hobbling wounded descended, and wounded who could not hobble were carried on stretchers to their beds--each a card-indexed automaton, no less than when he entered the training camp, as he would remain until he was demobilized or buried in France.

So the trains of munitions passed the trains laden with the products of war, the knowledge of whose sacrifice is the only value of war. Right and left through the intermediate zone, from Orléans to the Mediterranean, were more repair shops, remount depots, training camps for aviators, tank crews, machine-gunners and carrier pigeons, each worker striving for the same purpose that shoveled the coal into the locomotive firebox or slipped a shell into a gun or a cartridge into a rifle. At Is-sur-Tille, near Dijon, was another "hump," which looked down on what seemed a training camp in its streets of mud: for there was mud in the S. O. S. as well as at the front--mud kept soft by the damp atmosphere when autumn rain was not falling, and deep by the trampling of many feet. Here, as at Gièvres, the train sent its cars on their way to the warehouses to which their contents belonged; here you felt at first hand the breath of the front in all its hot and pressing demands; here was the largest bakery, with cement floors and all up-to-date apparatus, directed by the head of one of our large bakeries at home, rolling out the round loaves with the ease of peas shelled from a pod. All night long, as at Gièvres and at the base ports, the switch engines coughed forth their growls as they shunted cars, and the laborers worked at loading and unloading. The officer in charge in his little office was directing as insistent an excursion business as ever fell to the lot of man. His nightmare, and the nightmare of all the regulating officers of the S. O. S., was moving cars. Every hour a car was needlessly idle was waste. This called for labor, and more labor--for more warehouse space, for more locomotives, for more sidings; but as they were not forthcoming, why, man and machine must be made to do more work. The excess strain on either was not considered. The pressure was the same as that for the relief of a city stricken by fire or earthquake.

Beyond Is-sur-Tille at Saint-Dizier was another, a supplementary, regulating station for the Meuse-Argonne battle, which during the battle fed, apart from the troops in the Saint-Mihiel and other sectors, 645,000 men and 115,000 animals. Regulating stations did the detail, while Gièvres and the base ports did the wholesale. They saw that each division received its daily rations of food and ammunition. Each division had its "cut in" of cars, with all its daily supplies, which was made up a day in advance and sent to the divisional railhead. Knowing the needs of the divisions, a regulating station sent its requisition back to the big warehouse centers, while it always tried to keep on hand a small amount of all articles likely to be needed in haste. When we were swinging our divisions around for the Château-Thierry emergency, one division had seven railheads in eight days; its trains were on hand on each occasion. They must be; otherwise the divisions went hungry. All other demands must yield to the routine which brings the morning milk and the grocer's boy to the kitchen door.

At the railhead you felt not only the breath of battle but that throbbing suspense and intensity of purpose which is associated with men in action. Here came the empty trucks and wagons from the front, and the ambulances traveling in their convoys on the crowded roads up to the zone of fire, while men worked in darkness. Here the wedge from home was narrowing under the hammer strokes, until you could feel it splitting the oak--the hammer strokes of the hundred millions, their energy, their prayers and thoughts.

Those empty trucks seemed ever hungry, open mouths, the mute expression of the call for more, and still more, of everything with which to keep up the driving--more replacements as well as material.

When the front wanted anything, it was wanted immediately. Improvise it, purloin it, beg for it, but send it, was the command that admitted of no refusal. If this officer could not get it, put another in his place who could. Officers when they lay down for a few hours' sleep had their telephones at their elbow, ready as firemen to answer the call. Men worked until the doctors ordered them to the hospital--that they must do. They could do no more. The S. O. S. could not send guns or tanks when it had none from home; but American resourcefulness surpassed its own dreams of probabilities. Harbord could well say to Pershing: "I've straightened out things in the S. O. S."

XXIV

REGULARS AND RESERVES

Isolation of West Pointers--College graduates not dissociated from the community--The monastic ideal of the founder of West Point--And the caste ideal--The officer a cleat on the escalator of promotion--Out of contact with America--Five years to make a soldier--A clan tradition--A blank check to the regulars.

Before our entry into the war our busy people had occasional reminders that we had a United States Military Academy for training army officers. Its gray walls on the bluffs at West Point were one of the sights of the Hudson valley to passengers on river steamers. There was an annual football game between the West Point and Annapolis cadets. As every schoolboy knew, both teams were better than those of the small eastern colleges, but not so good as those of the large eastern colleges. The cadets were in the inaugural parade. Their marching thrilled observers with an excellence which, however, is always expected from professionals, whether ballplayers, billiardists, actors, pugilists, circus performers, opera singers, or poets. It was the cadets' business to march well. Of course they were superior to amateurs in their own line. Investigations of "hazing" had also at one time attracted wide attention to the Academy. Some of us were horrified, and others of us amused--still others disinterested as long as they did not have to take the dose themselves--at reports of first-class men having to swallow large draughts of tabasco sauce in order to toughen their stomachs for the horrors of war.

A community which sent only an occasional boy to West Point sent many boys to civil colleges. I was one of the boys who went to a civil college, and knew how we felt in our time. We returned at the end of our freshman year with the attitude of "How little they know!" as we looked around our native town. During our college career we spent our holidays in home surroundings, which formed a break in college influences. At the end of our senior year we had the "rah! rah!" spirit of class, alma mater, and college fraternity, and a feeling that the men who went to the principal collegiate football rival were of a low caste. We were graduated full of theories and wisdom, and set out to earn a living and incidentally to demonstrate how little "they" really knew. By the time we were able to earn a living we concluded that "they" had known more than we thought.

In fact, we ourselves now belonged to the "theys" struggling in the great competition of professional and industrial life. We met men who had not been to college, who were the betters of college men. Having left college sworn to keep the fraternity first in our hearts and to write frequently to our friends, other interests and other acquaintances took our time. Meeting men from the deadly football rival, we found that they were the same kind of men as ourselves. We went to the annual football game and to class reunions where the old spirit revived transiently, and old memories were recalled as we met our old mates; but we found that we had not as much in common with them, beyond memories, as we had had in our youth. They had gone into different occupations, developed different tastes, and enjoyed varying measures of success. Some had become rich and famous; some had gone into politics; some had achieved respectable citizenship and some had failed. Jones at the head of the class had not done well; Smith at the foot had become a power in the world. Robinson, who had not been a remarkable scholar in his youth, was now a great professor. Brown, who had been a most serious student, was interested only in his golf score; Higgins, who had barely escaped expulsion for frivolity, was a serious judge. Larkin, who had been pointed out as a born leader of men at twenty-one, was a follower of meager influence. All this proved that college was only a curriculum in studies and basic character-building, while development came in after life from inherent vitality, persistence, latent talent, health, environment, and innumerable influences.

The occasional West Pointer who returned home at the end of his second year with squared shoulders and chin drawn in had become far more dissociated from his surroundings than the freshman of a civil college. He too was thinking, "How little they know!" After his graduation, except for a rare visit to his parents, he had ceased to be a part of the home community. He was here and there at army posts, and serving in the Philippines. It was not unlikely that he had been a poor boy. I have known instances where boys had to borrow the money to travel to West Point. Many of the appointees had no particular call to the profession of arms; but they knew and their parents knew that from the day he entered the academy a cadet would not require a cent from home or have to "work his way," or win a scholarship. The nation took him under its wing. In order to receive an appointment it was well to know the local Congressman or a Senator, even in these days of competitive examinations.

The appointment of poor boys to be officers had the appeal of democracy. It was a system devised in the days following the Revolution, when in England commissions in the red-coats were bought and sold, and only the sons of the gentry became officers. West Point, now well over a hundred years old, was at first an engineering school, but the real founder of the academy of today was Sylvanus Thayer, who had Prussian ideas of the same kind as von Steuben, drillmaster of the Revolutionary armies. He was of the old school of martinets, who proposed to establish in the midst of this pioneering, lawless, new country an institution where pupils could be caught young and so disciplined and formed that they would be worthy of the strictest European military tradition. In return for this privilege, the Congressman was to have the power of appointment. Congress accepted the idea. It did not interfere with the militia organizations, or any group of amateurs, or the conviction that any man in his shirt-sleeves and with a squirrel rifle was the equal of any European regular. At the same time it trained some really professional officers, who might become generals in time of war. Moreover, it was democratic; this was the compelling argument. America was opportunity; a poor boy might become a general; the Congressman might select the poor boy who was to be a general.

The founder was a wise man and a stern one. He set the tradition which endured; he put the cadets into the uniform which we see in the cuts of Wellington's veterans who fought at Waterloo, and which they were to wear for a hundred years. He put a stigma upon being "dropped" from the Academy, which was a counter to family and political influence for a softer course. Doubtless he foresaw that when the graduates were through with these hard four years, they would be a unit for its continuance, particularly as they had not to go through it again. He had no illusions about democracy; he knew that democracy was the curse of military discipline. He believed in an officer caste; there could not be a good army without caste. If he could not have students from families belonging to the officer caste according to European traditions, he would make them gentlemen. They would be taught to dance, and initiated into a code of officer ethics and etiquette. In later times the Point had its polo team, a luxury which only rich youth could afford.

This did not imply any relaxation of that severe régime in which theoretically only the fittest were to survive. The cadets might not smoke cigarettes or drink; they might not go skylarking to neighboring towns. Their every hour of drill, study, and recreation was counted. Far from the freedom of the elective course, every mind and body was filled into a mold a century old. Three-fourths of the study was scholastic; only a fourth, outside the drill, could be classed as strictly military: for the cadets were supposed to receive the equivalent of a collegiate education at the same time that they were being trained to be officers. With few exceptions their instructors were former graduates, called in from service with the army. Some of these might be rusty, compared to the experts of civil colleges, who gave their lives to specializing in one branch; but civilian teachers could not supply military discipline and atmosphere.

The boy who went to West Point was an average boy. At an impressionable age he entered a world as isolated and self-centered as that of a monastery. The effects of college and fraternity spirit were many times intensified. He had almost no opportunities of renewing the associations of civil life; all was of the army, for the army, and by the army. Though he served in the ranks as a cadet, he never served in the ranks as a soldier. His "How little they know!" was not to suffer the shock of competitive strife with the millions of other boys whom he was to lead as a general. His quality of leadership had been tested only in marks on drill and scholarship.

When he was graduated, he became an officer, his position assured for life. The fellows of his school days who went into professions had to have their way paid, or to work their way, through college and professional school, and then slowly build up a practice. All this the West Pointer had free, as the gift of his country, in the name of democracy. His income would be more than equal to that of the average graduate of our leading law and medical schools, with the certainty of sufficient pay to care for his old age when he was retired. Once an officer, he could lean back on his oars if he chose,--the hardest work of his career having been finished when other boys are beginning theirs. He became a cleat on the slow-moving escalator of promotion, waiting on the death and retirement of seniors or the expansion of the army. There were other cleats than those with the West Point marking, those of officers who had worked their way up from the ranks, and a larger class which had come in through examination; but the West Point spirit was dominant. The West Pointer was a West Pointer; his tradition the tradition of the army.

Superb of health, and hardened of physique, the graduate, I should add, need not continue the West Point régime after his graduation. He might neglect exercise to the point that led President Roosevelt to issue his order compelling tests of physical endurance, which led to such an uproar in army circles. Roosevelt proceeded on the sound principle that capacity for enormous and sudden physical strain is a prime requisite--as the Great War so abundantly proved--for leading infantry on marches and in battle, and for sleeping on the ground.