Part 14

Profiting by the example of our enemy, we exercised the utmost care in fitting our men with footwear. As the result of examinations conducted at a number of training-camps, it was found that out of nearly 60,000 men examined, slightly more than 71 per cent were wearing shoes which were too long and nearly 10 per cent shoes which were too short, only one man in five having shoes of the proper size. These figures were sufficient to demonstrate to the War Department the necessity for extraordinary care in the fitting of soldiers’ shoes, and led to the establishment at Camp Meigs, D. C., and Jefferson Barracks, Mo., of schools for foot-measuring and shoe-fitting. Two officers from every camp and cantonment in the United States were detailed to take this course of instruction, which lasted five days and consisted of lectures, demonstrations of the various appliances, and practical training, the latter being acquired by each officer actually measuring and fitting a thousand men with army shoes under the direction of competent instructors.

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The coal which was required for heating and cooking in the various camps and cantonments both in the United States and France, the coke which was used at our arsenals in the production of ordnance, the gasoline which drove our trucks, tractors, tanks, and airplanes, and the oils which lubricated them, were all procured through the Fuel Branch of the Fuel and Forage Division of the Office of the Quartermaster-General, which in October, 1918, was converted into the Raw Materials Division of the Office of the Director of Purchase and Storage, without, however, in any way affecting its functions. From its creation by the President in August, 1917, until the close of the war, the United States Fuel Administration worked in closest harmony with the Fuel Branch of the Quartermaster Department in supplying the enormous fuel requirements of our fighting forces. The procedure was roughly as follows: The Fuel Branch first ascertained the probable requirements of every camp, post, and station for each month of the fiscal year, and upon receipt of these estimates it would request the Fuel Administration to allocate to the respective camps the tonnages required. Pursuant to these requests, the Fuel Administration would instruct its District Representatives to place the necessary orders with the various coal-shippers, the regulation of shipments and similar matters thenceforth being handled by the District Representatives directly with the Camp Quartermasters. With the abolition of the Fuel Administration at the end of the war, the task of supplying the army with coal and coke devolved upon the officers in charge of the various General Supply Zones into which the United States is now divided.

The prime importance to the army of gasoline and lubricants was made clear by General Pershing when he placed them, with food and forage, in the first division of the automatic supply cable which governed and controlled the movement of all supplies that had to go forward daily to the combat troops on the line. To procure and maintain an adequate supply of petroleum products, and to devise and standardize these products, there was created the Oil Branch of the Fuel and Forage Division of the Quartermaster Corps. Many interesting problems were successfully solved by the Oil Branch, which received assistance of the greatest value from the producers and refiners. Though the oil producing and refining concerns of the United States have repeatedly been characterized by politicians and by the press as “soulless corporations,” their patriotism throughout the great emergency was shown by the fact that their interest and efforts did not end with providing what the government asked for, but every one connected with them, from their presidents down, regarded the matter of supplying the army as a personal responsibility, suggesting many valuable changes, improvements, and economies based on their technical knowledge and experience.

For the benefit of those unfamiliar with the oil industry, I ought to explain that there are many grades of gasoline, differing in character or in method of production. Commercial gasoline, for automobile use, included grades known as “straight-run,” “casing-head,” “blended,” “pressure still,” and “cracked.” In order to standardize gasoline for army use the Fuel and Forage Division worked out, with the co-operation of the refiners, certain specifications, with the result that a gasoline called “Quartermaster Specification” was adopted as a standard fuel. It is known as “428° gasoline,” and is used for motor cars, trucks, tanks, and cycles. For aviation purposes three other grades were produced; two of which, 257° “Fighting Naphtha” and 302° “Export Aviation,” were furnished only to the American Expeditionary Forces. “Fighting Naphtha” is the highest refinement of gasoline ever produced in quantity, being produced by “rerunning” Export Aviation and taking off the “cream” of that extremely high-grade fuel. To distinguish it as the finest motor-fuel in existence and to prevent its indiscriminate use, a small amount of aniline dye was added to color it red. Its use was confined to scout and battle planes, thus giving our flying-fighters an immense superiority over those of our allies or of the enemy, and thereby lending them the confidence which is required for daring deeds. Indeed, many a Hun flier was brought to earth, many a D. S. C. was won, as much by the qualities of the scarlet fuel as by the courage of the aviator. Who says that there is no romance in gasoline?

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Though this is the greatest horse-breeding nation in the world, and though Americans fondly think of themselves as a nation of horsemen, no one of the warring countries found itself so utterly unprepared in respect to remounts as the United States. The importance with which the War Department had regarded the question is best illustrated by the fact that at the outbreak of the war remount matters were in charge of one officer, with two civilian clerks, as a subsection of the Transportation Branch of the Quartermaster-General’s Office. For a number of years prior to the war repeated efforts had been made by enthusiastic horsemen, both in the army and out of it, to induce the government to undertake the breeding of cavalry and artillery mounts on a large scale, or at least to encourage their breeding by farmers, as has been done for centuries by certain of the European nations. But the parsimony of Congress, combined with the lack of vision of officers high in the military councils of the nation, blocked all these plans, and though one or two government studs were established with animals presented by public-spirited breeders, so little of real value was accomplished that of the 458,000 animals purchased during the war by the Remount Service, only about 5,000 were horses bred specially for military purposes.

Upon the outbreak of the war it became necessary, therefore, to scour the country for suitable animals, which had, perforce, to be purchased in the open market, which had already been gone over with a fine-tooth comb by British, French, Italians, and Russians, all of whom had maintained remount commissions in this country from the very beginning of the conflict. Fortunately for us, under the circumstances, the requirements of the Expeditionary Forces were confined to officers’ mounts, artillery horses and mules, only one regiment of cavalry, in addition to the headquarters troops of the various divisions, being sent overseas. There were, however, demands for large numbers of horses for the use of the two cavalry divisions which were in process of organization in this country, and for the cavalry regiments which were kept on patrol duty along the Mexican border.

As soon as it became apparent that it would be necessary for the government to make large purchases of horses and mules, hundreds of horse-breeders, racing and hunting men and polo-players offered their services as purchasing agents. Some fifty of these gentlemen, as shrewd judges of horse-flesh as the Blue Grass region of Kentucky, the hunting-fields of Long Island and Virginia, and the show-rings and race-courses of the great cities could produce, were given commissions as captains in the Quartermaster Corps, and were sent to the headquarters of the various purchasing zones for a short period of practical instruction in the type of horse required by the army, and in army methods generally, before being sent on the road to purchase animals. How efficiently and conscientiously these officers, unaccustomed to military methods, performed their duties is shown by the exceptionally high class of animals which they purchased and shipped to the various auxiliary remount depots, where they were trained and conditioned for army use. As the dearth of tonnage placed a limit on the number of animals which could be shipped overseas, a number of remount officers were sent to Europe, where large purchases of live stock were made, about 110,000 horses and 10,000 mules being bought from the French, some 12,000 horses and 6,000 mules from the British, and upward of 12,000 mules—the big, 16-hand Andalusians—in Spain.

At the beginning of the war there were only three remount depots in the United States—at Front Royal, Virginia, Fort Keogh, Montana, and Fort Reno, Oklahoma—together with auxiliary depots at Fort Bliss and Fort Sam Houston in Texas, but with the rapid expansion of the forces it was found necessary to establish an auxiliary remount depot adjacent to each of the thirty-three camps and cantonments of the National Guard and the National Army. This naturally necessitated an enormous increase in the Remount Service personnel, which shortly before the Armistice numbered 400 officers and 19,000 enlisted men. As the war progressed it became increasingly difficult for the Remount Service to meet the demands made by the auxiliary depots for officers, for the available supply of amateur horsemen who had volunteered their services quickly became exhausted, many of them going into other branches of the army. In order to meet this demand camps were organized at Camp Joseph E. Johnston, near Jacksonville, Florida, and at Camp Shelby, Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where enlisted men who possessed the necessary qualifications were trained for commissions as officers. There was also established at Camp Johnston a mobilization camp for the organization and training of Field Remount Depots, but as this organization did not prove sufficiently flexible, there was authorized a smaller unit, known as a Field Remount Squadron, consisting of 6 officers and 157 enlisted men, it being estimated that one squadron would be required for every replacement of 400 animals. And replacements were, of necessity, frequent, it having been estimated that the average life of a horse in France was only sixteen days. There were organized at Camp Johnston a total of sixty-three Field Remount Squadrons, three wagon companies, and twelve pack-trains, of which all but seventeen squadrons saw service abroad. The enlisted personnel of these squadrons consisted of drafted men who were carefully selected because of their knowledge of horses, most of them having been farmers, ranchmen, cow-punchers, and, in a few cases, jockeys. Provision was also made for training the enlisted specialists attached to each squadron, schools being established for horse-shoers, saddlers, farriers, teamsters, and squadron clerks. Indeed, there was no more interesting sight at a cantonment than the Remount Depot, where bronco-busters, fresh from the ranges, could be seen breaking unruly horses in the “bull-pens,” while veteran packers and plainsmen gave instruction to classes of raw recruits in the art of harnessing and driving a six-horse “swing” or of throwing the “diamond hitch.”

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The chief function of the Quartermaster Corps might be described, I suppose, as spending. It was, in fact, barring the Ordnance Department, the greatest spending agency in America, if not in the world, during the war. Not many persons are aware, however, I imagine, that it has a division whose sole purpose is saving. I refer to the Salvage Division. This was the only organization in the army which turned waste into profit. It was a ragpicker, a garbage-collector, a junk-dealer, and an ole-clothes man combined. While certain departments of the government seized on the great emergency to spend money like a drunken sailor, as the politicians put it, the Salvage Service was as systematic a saver as the late Russell Sage. And, like that famous financier, it was able to show something for its savings—to be exact, something over $100,000,000. It had a perfect passion for economy. It saved everything, from the pieces clipped from a soldier’s overcoat when it was shortened to the food which he left on his plate. Nothing was too large or too small to escape it. Indeed, the members of the Salvage Service should have adopted for their shoulder-badge a design showing an ever-open eye. If a locomotive was utterly demolished in a railway wreck the men of the Salvage Service appeared on the scene almost before the wheels had stopped turning and collected the splintered remnants. If a soldier tossed a pair of worn-out socks into the garbage-barrel, the Salvage Service fished them out and used them for something or other. In France it saved and sorted the millions of sand-bags which lined the parapets of the trenches; it untangled and rerolled for future use the millions of feet of twisted, rusted barbed wire which formed the entanglements in front of the trenches; it gathered and sorted and sent back for reloading the empty shells from the field-guns; it fumigated and cleaned and pressed the soldiers’ uniforms; it washed their shirts and socks and underwear; it mended their shoes; it transformed their obsolete campaign hats into felt slippers, and both in this country and abroad it collected the waste from the mess-tables as well as introducing various methods of food-saving; it operated hundreds of camp and mobile laundries, where for a dollar a month a soldier could have washed all the clothing he wished; it ran farms and truck-gardens at the camps and cantonments in order to supply the troops with fresh vegetables; it maintained printing-shops, wagon-repair shops, carpentry-shops, and paint-shops, and just as the Treasury Department appealed to the country to “Buy! Buy! Buy!” so the Salvage Service, by means of posters and placards, appealed to the army to “Save! Save! Save!”

In the happy, careless, easy-going days before the war, the question of repairing the worn shoes and clothing of the soldiers was not considered of sufficient importance to merit even passing attention from the War Department. The army was small, material was plentiful, and the clothing belonged to the soldier. The government issued a man a uniform and out of his pay required him to keep it clean and in repair; if his clothing did not present a neat appearance, he received a reprimand or a court martial. When his shoes wore out he had to have them mended at his own expense—all out of the munificent salary of fifteen dollars a month! But under the new system, introduced at the beginning of the war, the soldier’s clothing is the property of the government, and the government undertakes to keep it clean and in repair. And that is where the work of the Salvage Service comes in.

Within five months after its entry into the war the United States, profiting by the experience of the Allies, took steps toward the organization of a branch of the army which would devote itself to the conservation and reclamation of articles and materials which would otherwise be wasted. Pursuant to this policy there was established in October, 1917, the Conservation Branch of the Supplies Division of the Quartermaster-General’s Office with a personnel of two officers and a stenographer. Within less than a year this little nucleus had expanded into the huge Salvage Division of the Office of the Director of Purchase and Storage, with 500 officers, 20,000 enlisted men, and 2,000 civilian employees. The work of this division has consisted, generally speaking, in cleaning, laundering, repairing, renovating, and otherwise looking after the uniform and equipment of the American soldier, and in those cases where the uniform or equipment was too badly damaged to be worth repairing, the service has devised means of using the sound material for other purposes. During the six months beginning April 1, 1918, the service salvaged nearly 9,250,000 articles of clothing and equipment. The value of these articles when new was something over $41,000,000. After their repair it is estimated that their value was in the neighborhood of $29,000,000. The total cost of repair was a little more than $2,500,000, leaving a net saving due to this salvage operation of about $23,500,000. Quite a tidy sum. During four months of 1918 the Salvage Service collected approximately 43,000,000 pounds of junk, including old metals, iron, rubber, cotton and woollen rags, rope, paper, leather, and horsehair. About 3,000,000 pounds of this material, having an estimated value of $769,000, was reissued for army use, while 19,000,000 pounds was sold for $508,000, leaving 23,000,000 pounds still to be disposed of. Had it not been for the Salvage Service, practically all this would have gone to waste. In addition this division collected a great quantity of lumber, mostly odds and ends, of which $25,000 worth was reissued for army use and $475,000 worth was sold, leaving approximately 1,750,000 board feet on hand. From May to November, 1918, the Salvage Division collected and sold $300,000 worth of garbage, and nearly $200,000 worth of manure and condemned hay and straw, to say nothing of dead animals to the value of $5,000, thus netting upward of $500,000 from the swill-pail, the manure-pile, and the bone-yard alone! The American soldier likes to sit down to his meals with a heaping plate before him, and as he rarely eats everything on his plate, an enormous amount of perfectly good material finds its way to the garbage-barrel. It is estimated that prior to July, 1918, every man in the camps in the United States wasted approximately two pounds of food per day in this fashion. Then the machinery of the Salvage Service was set in operation, it being estimated that in five months, on the basis of 1,000,000 men, it saved _nearly a quarter of a billion pounds of foodstuffs_.

Another activity of the Salvage Corps was the operation of hundreds of camp and mobile laundries. When war was declared the government owned fourteen small steam-laundries which provided for the needs of the few hundred men stationed at the posts where they were located. But with the declaration of war and the concentration of hundreds of thousands of men in the various cantonments, the laundry question assumed such serious proportions that nineteen cantonment laundries were hastily erected and placed in operation. The urgent need for these laundries is illustrated by the fact that on September 1, 1918, nearly 6,000,000 pieces of clothing were awaiting laundering. Quite a wash-basket, wasn’t it?

The Mobile Laundry Unit was one of the novelties introduced by the Great War. Instead of the soldiers being compelled to take their soiled clothing to the laundry, the laundry came to them. No matter how remote the town in which their rest billets might be located, no matter how exposed it might be to the fire of the enemy’s long-range guns, the weary men, returning from the trenches, found the mobile laundry set up and awaiting them. Each unit consists of a large steam-tractor and four trailers. When erected for operation the trailers form a room thirty feet long and twenty-eight feet wide, with power provided from outside by the tractor. The trailers contain two large washing-machines, two extractors, a drying tumbler, hot and cold water tanks, a pump to lift water from wells and streams, a soap-tank, and a dynamo for electric lighting. Each of these units, by operating twenty-four hours a day, can wash the clothing of ten thousand men, fresh from the trenches, weekly. So rapidly and systematically was the work done that when the men left the “wash-up” and “delousing” stations, after having rid themselves of the filth and vermin acquired at the front, they found clean clothing awaiting them. And clean clothing—and this I say from experience—means more to the soldier than anything save a bath and food.

The Salvage Service has been one of the least advertised, as it has been one of the most efficient, branches of the army. Probably not one out of a thousand readers of this book was previously aware of its existence. Yet during the twelve months of 1918 it saved to the government, either in articles repaired and reissued or in materials saved and sold, _one hundred and one millions of dollars_. (If this does not impress you, let me remind you that the entire appropriation for the support of the army for 1898—the year of the Spanish-American War—was only a little over $70,000,000.) It has developed what was formerly a liability into a tremendous asset. It has conserved untold quantities of raw materials at a time when those materials were most vitally needed and were most difficult to obtain. By again and again repairing and using worn-out clothing and equipment and thereby permitting the shipment of vital necessities, it saved thousands of tons of shipping at a time when every ton counted.

If, in this impressionistic sketch of the activities of the Salvage Service, and of its parent, the Quartermaster Corps, I seem to have indulged too freely in the use of figures, it is because those figures are of vital concern to _you_. They represent _your_ dollars, Mr. Reader; they show where the money from _your_ Liberty Bonds has gone.

V

ORDNANCE

The history of mankind is punctuated by a few examples of endeavor which, by reason of their magnitude, cannot be fully comprehended by the human mind. That phase of America’s part in the Great War comprised in the work of the Ordnance Department of the Army is one of them. It has been termed, and without exaggeration, the greatest effort, directed by a single head, of all time. It was incomparably the greatest industrial undertaking that the world has ever seen. Therein lies the difficulty of writing an adequate story of ordnance—it is too big, too complex, for any writer entirely to grasp, for any reader completely to comprehend. It is like attempting to describe the grandeur of the Grand Canyon; so stupendous a thing can neither be translated into words nor encompassed by the mind. The best that I can hope to do is to sketch a few of the most salient features of the great story in barest outline.