Part 11

This photograph was not taken in real action but at the Army Gas School in France.]

As the result of the experiments at American University, Lakehurst, and Edgewood, and the experiences of our troops in the field, several new gases of incredible deadliness were invented as well as numerous new methods of using them, many of which would certainly have been utilized had the war continued. But the League of Nations being still confined to paper, and universal disarmament being still in the distant future, it is as well, I feel, not to particularize about them. It is enough to say that, thanks to the work of the Chemical Warfare Service, there are stored away in the vaults of the War Department certain plans and formulas which, in the event of another war—which God forbid!—would give us a weapon of undreamed-of potency and terror. Speaking from first-hand knowledge, I can assure any potential enemies of the United States that the chemical warfare which we are prepared to wage should the necessity ever arise again would make our recent gas activities, vast as they were, seem like a joke.

IV

THE “Q. M. C.”

Some years ago there was exhibited at the Grand Salon in Paris an immense mural painting, intended, if I remember rightly, for one of the walls of the Panthéon. I think it was by Détaille, but of that I am not certain nor does it matter. The canvas, which reached from floor to ceiling, was of such vast dimensions that the gallery, huge as it is, did not permit of a satisfactory perspective; it was characterized, moreover, by such a wealth of detail that one might look at it from dawn to dusk and yet not grasp it all. So in attempting to depict, even in the sketchiest fashion, the operations and activities of the Quartermaster Corps, I find myself embarrassed by the same limitations. The composition is too vast for proper perspective, too rich in variety and detail to be grasped by the imagination. The best that I can hope to do, therefore, in the limited space at my disposal, is to hurry you along, like the guides who used to conduct visitors through the galleries of the Vatican in an hour, pointing out a picturesque feature here and calling your attention to something of interest there—touching only on the high spots, as it were.

To begin with, let me give you some conception of the subject’s magnitude and importance. The total cost of the war to the United States, plus the estimate of the amount which would be required to carry it on to July 1, 1919, was approximately $16,500,000,000, while the total expenditures and estimates of the Quartermaster Corps for the same period were something over $8,500,000,000. Thus it will be seen that _the expenditures and requirements of the Quartermaster Corps comprised more than half of the total expenditures and requirements of the entire army_. The purchases which it made were remarkable not only for their unprecedented volume but for their amazing variety. It supplied the armies of the United States with practically everything they required, save only ordnance, its purchases running all the way from coal to needles, from lemon-drops to rolling kitchens, from sheet-music to beef and mutton on the hoof. At one time it constituted the entire wool trade of the United States, if not, indeed, of the whole Western Hemisphere, for it optioned every pound of wool in sight and sent its agents out with orders to buy up the excess wool of the earth. It purchased enough cotton goods to make a sheet which would cover the District of Columbia four times over. It controlled the leather trade of the nation. It operated the largest shirt-factory in existence. It developed the most highly specialized shoe ever made, purchased 33,000,000 pairs of them, carried them in 120 sizes, and opened schools to teach its officers the science of shoe-fitting. By enlisting the co-operation of a score of universities it established a great correspondence school for the education of quartermaster officers. It had other schools, a whole system of them, where training was given in cooking, baking, butchery, and coffee-roasting. It purchased every stock of rubber boots and rain-coats in the United States. It established and operated farms and truck-gardens at the various camps and cantonments. By organizing a Salvage Service for the reclamation of articles which would otherwise have been thrown away it saved 151,000,000 of the taxpayers’ dollars. The army needed horses and mules—thousands and thousands of them—whereupon the Quartermaster Corps gave commissions to half a hundred of America’s best-known sportsmen and gentlemen riders and sent them to the West, to Spain, to the Argentine, to purchase animals. General Pershing cabled that he wanted sheet-music for the 390 bands of the A. E. F., whereupon the Quartermaster Corps, not being itself musically inclined, looked about for a man who was. It was discovered that the most successful composer of popular music in America had enlisted in the Coast Guard, but the Quartermaster Corps borrowed him, told him to select the sort of music that he thought the boys in France would like, and send it to Pershing. He did. It cheered up the army overseas and cost the government $50,000. It was cheap at the price. The Quartermaster Corps educated manufacturers in the production of articles strange to their experience, and in some cases it developed entirely new industries. It was a shipmaster, a wool-grower, a coal-operator, a clothier, a builder of vehicles, a school-teacher, a reformer of labor conditions, an inventor of new products, and an originator of new methods. To the miners of Pennsylvania, quarrying coal in the low-roofed galleries by the light of their flickering lamps, to the fruit-pickers in the sun-drenched orchards of Hood River and the Santa Clara, to the pallid clothing-workers, bending over their machines in the stifling sweat-shops of the New York Ghetto, to the great manufacturers of New England, and to the beef barons of the Middle West, “Quartermaster Corps, United States Army,” was a phrase to conjure with.

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In those casual, comfortable, easy-going days before the Great War startled us out of our national complacency, when the work of the army consisted in garrisoning many small and widely scattered posts and in doing police duty on the Canal Zone or in “the Islands,” the Quartermaster Corps, the “Q. M.,” as it was familiarly called, occupied much the same relation to our little military establishment that a “general store” does to a village. By this I mean that it supplied most of the army’s wants. It was charged, to put it briefly, with clothing, feeding, housing, and paying the army, supplying it with horses, harness, vehicles, and, in short, virtually everything else save only the actual tools of war. It also manned and operated the steamers of the Army Transport Service, was charged with the movement of troops on land, and had jurisdiction to a large extent over motor transportation, especially the movement of supplies. Though its business methods were as antiquated as the quill pen and the copying-press, like the mules which drew its wagons it jogged unconcernedly along. If the colonel’s wife needed some shelves in her kitchen she sent for the quartermaster and they were put up with neatness and despatch. When the junior officers at a post wanted to attend a dance in town the quartermaster could always be depended upon to provide a conveyance. The quartermaster ran the post exchanges and canteens. If there was a delay in the delivery of the winter’s coal, if the bread was poorly baked, if the milk was sour, if the men’s shoes did not fit, if there was a leak in a barracks roof, if a horse developed a spavin, if the pay-checks were not received on time, it was the quartermaster who had to take the blame. He was all things to all men, and if he did not do all things as well as they might have been done, it was not his fault so much as the fault of the antiquated and cumbersome system in which he had been trained.

But upon the outbreak of war this state of affairs underwent a sudden change. It was no more possible for the Quartermaster Corps, as it was then organized, to feed and clothe and transport overseas an army of 5,000,000 men than it would be for a village merchant to meet the demands which would be made upon him if oil were discovered in the vicinity and the village expanded into a city overnight. At the outbreak of the war the Office of the Quartermaster-General consisted of five divisions—Administrative, Finance, Supplies, Construction, and Transportation—but when our stupendous military programme began to assume definite form it became increasingly apparent that no single department could successfully direct so many and varied activities, and that the Quartermaster Corps must confine itself to the huge task of purchase and supply. The first step toward its reorganization along these lines was the divorce of the Construction Division, which was made a separate branch of the War Department under Colonel (later Brigadier-General) I. W. Littell, who reported directly to the secretary of war. Though the officers of this division, to which was assigned the tremendous task of constructing the camps and cantonments for our new armies, continued to wear the insignia of the Quartermaster Corps, and though they were known as construction quartermasters, they had no connection with the Office of the Quartermaster-General. During the first year of the war the Transportation Division operated a considerable fleet of vessels engaged in the transport of troops, animals, and supplies, but in April, 1918, this division was abolished, the entire transportation service being taken from the Quartermaster Corps and placed with the Purchase, Storage, and Traffic Division of the General Staff. The next branch to be lopped off was the Finance Division, the functions of which were transferred to the newly organized Office of the Director of Finance, who assumed charge of all financial matters for the army. In response to the constantly increasing demands for motor transport, a Motor Transport Service was added to the Quartermaster Corps in April, 1918, but was taken away from it three months later and established as a separate branch of the army under the title of the Motor Transport Corps. This is, however, strictly an operating unit and should not be confused with the Motor and Vehicles Division of the Quartermaster Corps. By this time the “Q. M.” had been so completely transformed as to be almost unrecognizable to men who had grown old in the service. Little remained of the old organization, indeed, save the name, and even that all but disappeared when, in October, 1918, the Office of the Quartermaster-General was merged in the newly organized Office of the Director of Purchase and Storage. By the concluding month of the war, therefore, the old Quartermaster Corps had lost all control over construction, finance, and transportation, so that of its original five divisions only the Administrative and Supplies remained. The latter had been expanded, however, into nine purchasing divisions and there had also been added to the organization—now commonly referred to as “Purchase and Storage”—five storage divisions and a Salvage Division. At the same time that the Office of the Director of Purchase and Storage assumed the functions of the Quartermaster Corps it also took over the procurement activities of the Medical Corps and of the Corps of Engineers, as well as procuring certain standardized articles for the Signal Corps and the Ordnance Department, thus bringing under a single head all the purchase, storage, and distribution agencies of the army. In order to make this extremely involved relationship a little clearer, I ought to explain, perhaps, that the Office of the Director of Purchase and Storage is one of the three chief operating branches of the Purchase, Storage, and Traffic Division of the General Staff, the others being the Office of the Director of Traffic and the Office of the Director of Finance.

In the old days the procurement activities of the army were decentralized to such an extent that every depot, camp, and post, wherever situated, had charge of procuring practically everything it used except uniforms, the procurement being under the direction of the camp or post quartermaster, as the case might be. The new organization has produced a system, however, whereby everything required by the army is purchased either by the officers in charge of the thirteen General Supply Zones into which the United States has been divided, or direct from Washington. It is scarcely necessary to comment on the enormous saving in time, money, and labor thus effected. We will now say “Amen” to this little sermon on organization, which is a dry subject at best, and turn to more interesting topics.

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Of the countless problems which confronted the Quartermaster Corps at the outbreak of the war, by far the most important was that of feeding the army, for an army, as Napoleon inelegantly but truthfully put it, travels upon its belly. The American soldier, like the American small boy, is a prodigious eater and he is always hungry. He is, moreover, extremely finical about the quality and variety of his food. He has been accustomed from boyhood to have unrestricted access to the cooky jar and the cake-box, and things were wrong, indeed, when there were not at least three kinds of mother’s pies on the top shelf in the pantry. He laughed at danger and jeered at hardships, but in return he expected a grateful Uncle Sam, as represented by the Quartermaster Corps, to show the same consideration for him when it came to a question of food that his mother had always done. And Uncle Sam measured up to his expectations. Not only was the American soldier given all the food that he required—at the time of the Armistice approximately 10,000,000 pounds of food were being sent every day to the troops in France—but he had the best food in Europe. In those lean days of 1918, when it was impossible to obtain a spoonful of sugar in the smartest restaurants in Paris, and when the manufacture of pastries of every description had been prohibited by law, the Yankee doughboys always had full sugar-bowls and unlimited quantities of pies, cake, and puddings. Indeed, it is not the slightest exaggeration to say that the American enlisted man had a considerably better mess than most French generals. I know, for I have eaten with both.

Never before has an army been called upon to send subsistence so great a distance to so many men. It was obviously impossible to ask France and England to provide for our rapidly increasing armies from their own scanty stores, for those countries were already rationing their civilian populations. The food had, therefore, to be obtained in the United States, some of it being transported 6,000 miles before reaching the mess-tables of the A. E. F. Moreover, in order to provide against the possibility of the food-ships being torpedoed or the capture of the base depots, it was necessary to send two pounds of food where one would ordinarily have answered. To make things worse, as the demands for food increased, the available tonnage decreased. The utmost economy in space became so imperative, indeed, that inspectors from the Packing Service Branch were stationed at the various depots with instructions to pay particular attention to the thickness of lumber used in the packing-cases and to insist on the utilization of every cubic foot of spare space, as, for example, the boilers in rolling kitchens, which were filled with various articles of subsistence supplies. Even the marmites—the camp cooking-pots—were filled with beans, peas, and other dry stores. When, in the spring of 1918, the Germans launched that tremendous offensive which has been so fittingly called “the charge of a nation,” and every available ton of shipping was required for the transport of the troops which we were rushing overseas to stem the Teutonic onslaught, all canned fruits and vegetables—pears, apples, pineapple, peas, corn, asparagus, sweet potatoes—were stricken from the lists, such space as was available being filled with boneless beef, dried fruits, dehydrated vegetables—and tomatoes! I do not mean to imply that such mainstays as the “four B’s”—bread, bacon, beef, and beans—were sacrificed for the juicy fruit of the tomato-vine, for they were not, but tomatoes were regarded as such an important item of the soldier’s menu that, notwithstanding the poverty of space, their shipments, instead of being diminished, were increased. In addition to the customary ways of serving them, thousands of cans were taken up to the line to relieve the soldier’s thirst, a quart of tomato juice being more effective than a gallon of water. Lest you should get the impression, from what I have just said, that there was a shortage of beans, I might mention, in passing, that 75,000,000 cans of baked beans with tomato sauce were put in the hands of the army cooks, and in order to provide against any possible lack of this stand-by, there was purchased to supplement them 77,000,000 pounds of dried beans. I have never heard an American soldier complain that he did not have enough beans. Foreseeing the enormous demand which there would be for prunes and dried apricots and apples, the quartermaster-general summoned from his ranch in the Santa Clara Valley of California, where he was living in pleasant retirement, the foremost authority on dried fruits in America, informed him of the army’s needs, and gave him _carte blanche_ to fill them. He sent overseas enough prunes to have supplied all the boarding-houses in America for years to come. Coffee was another important item. The British Army consumed enormous quantities of tea, the Italians depended largely upon their cheap native wines, and the French drank an alleged coffee which was really camouflaged chicory, but the American troops were given real coffee—the best that money could buy. Nothing better illustrates the quality of the food served to our men than the following telegram, sent by the quartermaster-general of the A. E. F. to Washington.

“Ship 2,000,000 reserve rations packed in hermetically sealed galvanized iron cases, 25 to the case, meat to be substituted in lieu of bacon and choice George Washington coffee or other similar substitute in lieu of ground coffee.”

As even the best grades of coffee can be ruined if improperly prepared, there were established at Camp Meade and Camp Johnston schools for coffee-roasting. Here enlisted men were given a course of instruction in coffee roasting, blending, grinding, and packing, and upon graduation were sent to the various camps where coffee-roasting plants had been installed. Thus the soldier received a fresher and a better cup of coffee than ever before, and the government made a saving of from two to three cents a pound, for as the green coffee was shipped to the camps by the various Zone Supply officers and was roasted every day, there was practically no overhead expense incurred.

Beef is, of course, the chief muscle and fat-producing food, the army allowing 456 pounds of beef per year for each soldier. This does not mean, however, that the soldier actually eats that amount of beef annually, for, just as the currency of the country is based on the gold standard, the meat ration of the army is based on the beef standard. It is customary, therefore, to substitute pork, usually in the form of bacon, for 30 per cent of the beef ration, twelve ounces of bacon being equivalent to twenty ounces of beef. The balance of the meat ration consists for the most part of fresh beef, when it is procurable, supplemented by canned beef, corned beef, and canned hash. The meat-cutting for the army is performed by Butchery Companies, the personnel of which was trained at Camp Joseph E. Johnston, near Jacksonville, Florida, where a practical course of instruction was given in cutting meat by the so-called “natural-guide method.” By following this method, which is an expanding rather than a cutting process, inexperienced men who did not know a cleaver from a skewer were made into practical meat-cutters in less than two months. The curriculum of the School for Butchers also included a course of intensive training in the boxing of boneless frozen beef by a method which saved about 32 per cent storage and cargo space and was used extensively during the winter months. With the return of peace, graduates of this unique educational institution, many of them illiterate, find themselves as well qualified to take up the butcher’s trade as though they had wielded a cleaver and worn a white apron all their lives.

In spite of all that has been written by travellers and novelists about certain American delicacies—the ham of Virginia, the chicken of Maryland, the pies and doughnuts of New England, the pompano of New Orleans—the fact remains that Americans, as a people, are not good cooks. This assertion may be ridiculed by some of my readers, but, generally speaking, it is true. Almost any Frenchman can prepare from the cheapest materials a well-cooked and tempting meal; the ability of most Americans in the culinary art is confined to boiling eggs. A man who spends his days in an office can sit down to a breakfast consisting of soggy biscuits, poorly prepared coffee, and an omelet that looks and tastes as though it were made of chrome leather, and though it may affect his disposition it will not seriously affect his work, for when the noon-hour comes around he can go over to Delmonico’s or step into Childs’s, as his tastes and pocketbook may dictate, and restore his balance of digestion by a well-cooked meal. But the soldier had no such resource. There were no Delmonicos or Childses at the front. He had to eat what was given him. And as his vigor and staying powers depended on his food, it was essential that that food should be well cooked. To tell the truth, the Italian débâcle of 1917 was due as much to poor and insufficient food as it was to Austrian propaganda, for nothing affects morale like an empty stomach.