Part 26

To be a "Leavenworth man" meant a title to staff position, which you must take whether you wanted it or not. There were many excellent officers who never went to Leavenworth; officers who were masterly company, battalion, and regimental commanders, and who had the quality of natural leaders. They did not want to train for the staff. They preferred the line. Their ambition, nursed through the years of service, with never an assignment to Washington, was to make sure of a command in the field if war came.

"I had rather lead a battalion of infantry than be chief of staff of an army," as one of them said. Another said, early in the war, "I'm all for the Leavenworth men to do the chessboard work, but we'll find that they have studied so much that some of them don't know how to make decisions when they are dealing with a real instead of a paper army. I don't envy them. I obey their orders. I'll make a good regiment; that is all I ask--let me be with troops." He was right in saying that the men who stood high at Leavenworth ran the danger of being too academic for practical war, as surely as the best students at college are unfitted for practical business life. Yet all criticism of the Leavenworth coterie runs foul of the question: "What should we have done without them in France?" If you have to build a great bridge and there is no engineer who has ever erected one, why, it would be better to choose a man who had been through a first-class engineering school to make the plans, than to choose the contractors who got out the stone or sunk the caissons, or the financiers who furnished the funds. Every Leavenworth man had pet ideas of his own, as the result of his study, which he sought to apply when authority came to him, with inevitable interference with team-play. He had all the enthusiasm of a graduate of the Beaux-Arts who is given a million-dollar appropriation to build a state capitol as his first assignment.

In relation to our little army with its scattered posts, their problem in making a great army organization was much the same as the transformation of Japan from medievalism to modernism, or amalgamating and improving all the small plants of individual business of fifty years ago in a year's time into a modern trust. The thing required broad vision. Some of them possessed it, but not all, even if they were Americans. Such was the loyalty of graduates to Leavenworth that I have heard them say that it was the best staff school in the world. A French officer might respond: "Perhaps, but we have had more opportunities for practice in handling large bodies of troops." The British and French staffs thought that our men were worthy of the highest praise; but they thought that our staff was inexperienced and sophomoric. They would not have been averse, as we know, to taking over the staff direction of our army, which, considering the feeling of the line toward the staff on all occasions, would have led to additional inter-allied friction. Relations would be smoother by having the resentment of the men who bore the brunt of casualties directed into home channels.

The Leavenworth men, thinking as army officers and for the army, did not wish to yield power. They wanted to establish a staff system and a tradition for a large American force, in the hope that universal service would be accepted and continued, making the system permanent. Where were they to get the host of additional staff officers required for the armies, the corps, and the divisions in battle? A few student observers could be sent to the British and French staffs; but not a sufficiently large number when any outsider was in the way in the crowded quarters of a series of dugouts, or the ruined houses of a village. Moreover, Leavenworth wanted no system half British and half French, but one suited to our own army for all time. Leavenworth was always thinking of our military future. Following our national bent for excellence and this thought of the future, which led us to aim for the best gas mask, the best aeroplane motor, the best machine-gun, the best gas, the best of everything, Leavenworth proposed to make the best staff. To this tendency of ours to seek perfection the Allies might reply: "Perfection is all very well; but we have tested equipment, and a staff system the result of three years' trial, and time is valuable against the German."

Just as the West Point system, which takes the "plebes" in hand, was being applied in our training camps, so Leavenworth staff college was reproduced in France in the ancient city of Langres, near Chaumont, which had been a fortress in many wars. Here regulars worked beside reserves, while the regulars had no special privileges except the first choice of horses to ride. Here they were to learn how to solve the tactical management of troops in action, the technique of all the different G's of the staff: G-1 and G-4, which had to do with transport and supply; G-2, which had to do with intelligence; G-3, with operations, and G-5, with training.

There was much to teach in that three months' course. How long will it take to reach all the units of a division, billeted in ten villages in an area of ten square miles, with an order for movement? How will it be sent? How will it be written after consultation with G-1, who knows the transport available? Which units will march out first? How long will it take to entrain those going by train? If the motor transport, and the horse-drawn transport, too, have to go overland, what roads will they take to reach their destination? Have the drivers their maps? In making a relief in the trenches, how long will it take to march up and complete the task?

Four German prisoners say one thing, four another, and three another. Take their reports in connection with aeroplane reports and general observation. What is your decision as to the enemy's strength on your front? Two additional divisions are suddenly brought into your sector. How are you to feed them? An attack is planned to pinch out a salient. How long is to be your artillery preparation? What its character? What points will you cover with the corps artillery fire? What with the divisional howitzers? There is your map with the information in G-2's possession for G-3 to consider in working out details. The infantry must be preceded by a barrage worked out with a mathematical accuracy, that will be practicable for the gunners and the infantry. All the fundamentals of technical knowledge were what arithmetic, algebra and geometry, and the strength of materials are to a bridge builder, in solving the problems presented to civilians, lawyers, engineers, and scholars of ages from twenty-five to forty-five, who worked them out and went to recitation in a school-room where they sat at little desks, as they did in boyhood days.

The number of hours of study a student put in at Leavenworth had been a test of capacity--the reason for Leavenworth's existence. While officers who did not take the course were regarded somewhat in the light of outsiders, "We'll show these cits what it is to work," as one regular said. Langres was a very sweatshop in scholastic industry. It was a combination of learning and an infinite amount of clerical detail for men many of whom were used to having their details looked after by clerks. British and French officers, acting as instructors and lecturers, elucidated the problems on the blackboard. As one saturated with war on the Western Front listened to preachment of fundamentals, I was impressed with how much the average man who has not seen war, and has taken his conception of it from a soldier charging or firing a gun, had to learn before he had the a b c's of modern war.

One also wondered if all the hard work were always to the purpose. Practical Allied officers, who were always polite, thought that the students did so much grinding that they became dull and stale; we were trying to teach them too many generalities. A knowing regular said one day to a reservist: "You are too serious. The thing in the army is to make a show at this sort of gymnastics,--then use your common sense when you reach the front." This was in kind with a remark of one regular officer about another, whose information had led us astray: "I know him--a regular West Point trick. You must pretend you know, and be very definite in the pretense. That often gets over." It seemed to me one of the faults of the West Point system.

The regulars had the advantage at Langres in that they had been ingrained in the military instinct, which is what is called the mathematical sense in a schoolboy who finds mathematics easy; but if the instinct were only that of cadet days and of company drill, and their minds had not grown, they suffered from the little learning which is a dangerous thing. Though the average Leavenworth man--not in all cases a class A man--did not see, despite the Canadian example, how anyone could become a staff officer in a few months when you had to study at Leavenworth for years, it soon became evident that some of these reserve officers with finely trained minds, used to the application and competition of civil life, were showing themselves the superior of the regulars. This in the scholastic sense, without considering practice in action. There was one Leavenworth man I knew who, though a master at solving problems in the classroom, seemed unable to solve any problem in action. Beside the Langres school we had a school of the line, and a candidates' school where men who had shown their leadership as privates in combat might be educated in theory for commissions. The reserve graduates of Langres were being sent out in the spring and summer of 1918 to be assistants in the G sections of army and corps and divisions. In a few instances they even became chiefs of section of division staffs. They were promised that one day they might wear the black stripe of the General Staff on their sleeves as the reward of efficient service. "Doping the black stripe" was the slang phrase for the grind at Langres. One day the reserve graduates might also have promotion, and one day, too, the reserve officers, captains and lieutenants and a few majors of the line, arriving with the divisions from the training camps--as our organization grew and was knit together--might also have promotion.

About this time promotion was becoming a form of intoxication with the regulars. They must be cared for first; in due course, after the reservists became soldiers, the reservists would have their turn. New tables of organization were being devised which called for more high-ranking officers. Without rank the work could not be done, said his chiefs to the Commander-in-Chief, who once greeted one of them with the remark: "How many lieutenant-colonels must become colonels in order to do this job?" The regulars kept apart from the reserves, forming a group in their own world. In their messes the talk ran on promotions: each new list brought its tragedies for men who found themselves jumped, and its triumphs for those who had jumped them. If you were not frequently promoted, it was taken as a sign that you were not "making good." Promotion depended upon the good will of your superior, and sometimes, naturally and humanly, upon the fact that you might have served with him at an army post. Promotion became unconsciously corrupting. Some younger men who received their stars after swift passage through the lower grades hardly bore their honors with the equanimity of their elders. One chief of staff I knew had a Napoleonic grandeur. He hedged himself about with the etiquette of royalty. If he had been presented with a three-cornered hat of the kind that Napoleon wore, he would have accepted it in all seriousness. Unhappily his work was not of the Napoleonic standard. There was another chief of staff who was just the same man as a brigadier-general that he had been as a major. He never seemed busy; his work was always in order; his tactics were successful. He knew how to win men to his service, how to delegate authority. Had he been given command of an army he would have carried on in the same imperturbable fashion.

"It will be hard on some of us regulars," he remarked, "when we wake up the 'morning after' and find ourselves majors back in the good old Philippines."

Naturally, in this environment, the reservists caught the contagion of promotion. If promotion were the criterion of having done your "bit," well, then, what would your friends think of you if you returned with the same rank you had when you left home? When you did return, you found that your friends could not remember whether you had been a major or a colonel. They were relieved if they might call you "mister" or Tom or George. It didn't matter to them what kind of insignia you had as long as you had been "over there," doing your bit. They had perspective which was hard to preserve in France.

XXVI

OTHERS OBEY

Misfit and unfit sorted at Blois--Clan again--What to do with the "dodo"--Making good after Blois--Its significance to the regular--The fear of Blois in its effect on the reservist--Faults of reserve officers--Feeling of the medicos--Staff propaganda--Getting to troops--Staff and line--Slow weeding out.

When the promotion disease was most acute, however, the word promotion never exercised over the army the spell of the word Blois. Though Blois was not mentioned in the press, it was as familiar in the secrecy of the army world as Verdun, Ypres, Paris, or Château-Thierry. Every officer who was uncertain whether or not he was pleasing his superior stood in fear of Blois, which was the synonym of failure. Downcast generals and lieutenants traveled together from the front to Blois.

What was to be done with officers who broke down in health, or who did not come up to the standards required in their work? They might be sent home; but white-haired generals and colonels who had reputations as able officers in time of peace were not wanted airing their grievances on the steps of the Army and Navy Building in Washington. There was an injustice, too, in placing on any officer the stigma of having been sent back from France, which would react on the many capable officers who were recalled from France in order to apply their experience abroad in furthering our preparations at home. Then, too, we needed the service of any officer who could do any kind of work in France. In the majority of instances it was not so much a question of being unfit as being "misfit." The thing was to put round pegs in round holes.

The town of Blois near Tours became a depot for classification and reassignment of officers who had been relieved by their superiors. A Leavenworth man who was in charge had the power to reduce an officer in rank if he thought this were warranted. He secretly interrogated the arriving officer, who was told that his record would not be considered against him; his superiors might have been unjust to him; if he had "stubbed his toe," this did not mean that he would do it again. Though the plan was as logical as the transfer of an employee of a business from the manufacturing to the selling branch, the object of the attention felt the humiliation none the less. Despite all propaganda to alleviate its association in the minds of fellow-officers, "being sent to Blois" had only one generally accepted significance, which was wickedly unfair to many a victim. There were superiors who followed their subordinates to Blois; while the subordinates were later promoted, they sank into the desuetude of a routine position. Indigestion, a burst of temper, a case of nerves, of prejudice, of finding a scapegoat for a senior's mistakes, might start an officer away from the front with his unhappy travel order. I knew of instances where it was a tribute to the officer that he had been sent: a tribute to his honest effort, his initiative, his unselfish spirit in trying to do his duty under an incompetent, irascible superior, who himself should not have received the consideration of Blois but been sent to a labor battalion, in the hope that by a few hours of physical effort a day he might have earned a part of the pay and the pains his country had wasted on him.

Considering how valuable was the regular's professional training for combat, and considering too that only half of the regular officers ever reached France, it was surprising how many regular officers were sent from the front to Blois. The percentage of regulars who failed in action was said to be as large as the percentage of reserves. The Leavenworth group, aiming to be impartial in the ruthlessness which they thought their duty, declared that when a man failed to make good he went, whether regular or reserve.

"If there's a reserve officer who can do my job better than I can, I want him to have it," said a regular colonel of thirty-five. "I'll give all I have and do my best wherever I am sent. That's service and duty. My country thought I was fit to be an officer. It paid me to serve where I could serve best. What is the use of holding to the clannish idea that any regular is better than a reserve? That isn't the idea of efficiency. If a man who has served only six months is better than a man who has served thirty years, the old regular ought not to growl. He ought to feel ashamed. He is beholden to his country for having given him a livelihood for thirty years. He could not have earned as good a one in any other occupation."

He was the same officer who had spoken his convictions after my remarks at the maneuver at Leavenworth. Of humble origin, proving the democratic test by his conduct, he was an honor to the profession of arms,--as he would have been to any profession. The whole army recognized his ability. Of course no reserve officer or National Guard officer could be better than he; his subordinates were proud to serve under him. If his reward could have been judged by a monetary standard, he earned all the pay he had ever received from the government by one month's service in France. He would return to a major's rank under mediocre officers, whose work he now directed from the staff.

Had he made the remarks which I have just quoted to reserve officers when any regulars were present, even his ability would not have saved him from the charge of disloyalty to the clan. So the strain on class A men in the staff or in the line was heavy. As Leavenworth men, the Leavenworth men stood together, thought the observing reserves--and with them, of course, I include National Guard officers--while the regulars, forming up against the magic inner circle, stood together as regulars in the magic outer circle.

The human equation and friendships were bound to enter into the honest effort at impartiality. Here was a brigadier-general of fifty-five or sixty who had been your commanding officer at a post. He was hopelessly superannuated. There was no place of responsibility in keeping with his rank where his services would not be fatal to efficiency. No one desired to hurt his feelings. Diplomacy must arrange cushions for him. He was given a car, and aides, and sent about on inspections, to make reports which were received with serious attention, or he was given a first-class officer as chief of staff. One of these amiable "dodos," as the regulars called them among themselves--never in the presence of a reserve officer--complained, so the story ran, that "another general had a cut-glass vase for flowers in his limousine, and he had none." The strife for cars befitting rank was almost as vigorous as for promotion, while some regimental commanders rode in side-cars or cars of a "low rank"; but they, who passed through shell-fire and bumped over shell-craters, would not have exchanged their commands for the most luxurious of limousines flying along good roads out of sound of the guns. It was hard, indeed, that upstarts from Leavenworth in the name of John J. Pershing should consign to Blois, and from Blois to a base section of the S. O. S., veterans of thirty and forty years' service in the regulars. There was another method applied on one occasion, when a division commander told a brigadier who had mismanaged his command that his brigade would be cared for in the morrow's attack, and that he would have his chance to redeem himself in the manner of a brave man, by going "over the top." He went, of course, winning that respect which is given every man, regardless of age or ability, for unflinching courage. Others might have been given the same opportunity to win gold letters in the memorial hall at West Point as an enduring epitaph; but there were strong arguments against this. The incompetent were not fit for the serious business of combat organizations; men's lives could not be trusted to their direction. In case of death, the officer's widow would receive a small pension, while if he survived and was retired, he would receive retired pay enough to assure comfort to his family.

The human equation reappears. A reservist was a stranger, a regular might be an old comrade, calling on a senior's affection and the loyalty to clan, when the latter considered sending an officer to Blois. Still other influences might make a regular's shortcomings more easily forgiven than a reservist's. If a regular did not succeed in carrying out orders, as he was a professional, failure must be accepted as unavoidable. In a word, if Ed or John with whom you had served could not put the trains through or take a machine-gun nest, then it was impossible.

There was no such personal standard of professionalism to apply to a reservist. Success must be the only standard for him. On the other hand, I did not envy some Leavenworth men, who leaned over backward in being resolute to comrades, when they should revert to their original rank and be once more serving under officers whom they had commanded from the staff. "He's got it in for me," was an expression sometimes heard, as you will hear it in different forms in any class community. It was an excuse for having been sent to Blois. Meanwhile, new grudges were being formed. It was dramatic when a regular officer, who had been sent to Blois, upon reassignment to the front won his brigadiership in a brilliant action; but not so dramatic as when a National Guard brigadier, who had had his stars removed at Blois, refused a colonelcy in the rear, received a majority in the line, returned as a major to his own brigade, and was killed in leading his battalion gallantly in a charge.

The heartbreaks among the regulars must be more lasting than among the reservists. War was the regular's profession. He returned to live with his reputation in the army world. The reservists returned to the civil world, where the war would soon be forgotten. This accounted for the greediness for promotion, which throughout the lives of regular officers would be the mark of their careers, while the guerdon of the future for the reservist was success in another occupation.

"Do these reservists want to jump in and take everything away from us, when they are in the army only for the war?" as a veteran regular complained when he was not receiving the promotion which he thought was his due.

The more subordinates you had, the more chance of promotion.

"Get a lot of young officers around you, form a bureau, and you will get a colonelcy in the new tables of organization," said one regular officer to another, both efficient, upstanding men.