Part 15

First of all, I would wish to convey to you some conception of the vastness of the organization commonly referred to as Army Ordnance, the immensity of the sums which it expended, and the enormous quantities in which it dealt. It has been said that a billion is too huge a figure for any one to comprehend. Scarcely a billion minutes have elapsed since the birth of Christ. Yet the estimated cost of the ordnance required to supply our first 5,000,000 men was nearly _thirteen billions of dollars_. But that is, after all, merely an endless caravan of ciphers. Here is another way of expressing it. Between the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the declaration of war against Germany, the sixty-four successive congresses of the United States appropriated but twenty-six billion dollars for every purpose of government, including the cost of five wars, the pensions resulting from those wars, the upkeep of the Army and Navy, the activities of the State, Interior, Treasury, Agriculture, Commerce, and Post-Office Departments, the control of immigration, the administration of justice, river and harbor improvements, public buildings and public works of every description, the salary of every government employee from the President of the United States to the keeper of an obscure lighthouse in the Philippines, these countless items representing in the aggregate the total expenditures, over a period of more than seven-score years, of the richest nation in the world. Thus it will be seen that, had the war continued for another five months, a single branch of the army would have expended approximately one-half as much as the nation expended from its foundation to the date on which it entered the great conflict. Combine the wealth of all of America’s millionaires, add the value of all of America’s railways, throw in the Standard Oil, the Western Union, the Ford Motor Company, and the United States Steel Corporation for good measure, and you will still fall far short of the staggering total which the United States had planned to invest in ordnance. Or, if these comparisons are not sufficiently graphic, the Ordnance Department would have spent enough in the first two years of war to have built twenty-four Panama Canals, to have purchased the entire city of New York, at its assessed valuation, twice over, or to have built 36,000,000 Ford cars—one for every third person in the United States. That is the best that I can do to give you a realization of the immensity of the task assigned to the Ordnance Department.

Ordnance! No word in the whole lexicon of war held so much significance for the fighters at the front—and so little for civilians at home. For ordnance is the bed-plate of the whole military machine. If it breaks or gives way the machine instantly stops running. An army can fight without cavalry, without aircraft, without tanks, without machine-guns, yes, even without artillery, but no army can fight, or ever has fought, without ordnance. It is as essential to the functioning of an army as oil is to the burning of a lamp. Behind the belching _soixante-quinze_, behind the crackling musketry, behind the lumbering, elephantine tanks, behind the _escadrilles_ of airplanes, was the huge organization, its head on the Potomac and its tentacles reaching westward to the Pacific and eastward to the Rhine, which provided the fighting-men with weapons and kept the voracious maws of those weapons supplied with their steel food. The combat troops up on the line knew that should the great Ordnance machine break down, even for an hour, they would be compelled to retreat or surrender. The generals knew it. The statesmen and politicians in Paris knew it, too. And the Germans knew it best of all, as is testified to by the labor troubles which they fomented and the fires and explosions which they caused. You didn’t know that the work of the Ordnance Department was so important, eh? Yet, if I remember rightly, you were always asking why the Allies didn’t end the war by destroying a certain German ordnance establishment called Krupps.

What is ordnance? It were easier to tell what it is not. It is artillery of all types and calibres, with mounts, carriages, and ammunition; small arms of every description; every kind of explosive used in warfare; an endless variety of gas-driven, steam-driven, horse-drawn, and hand-drawn transport; all harness and horse equipment, save that used by the Quartermaster Corps; tools, machinery, and material for making or repairing everything included in the term—in short, every tool used in the fighter’s trade.

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Dawn on the Western Front. Everything is in readiness for a great infantry attack. For weeks past the preparations have been in progress. The roads leading to the front have been ground to powder by the endless processions of heavy-laden motor-lorries bringing up food, ammunition, and supplies. The advanced dumps are piled high with cases of rifle and machine-gun cartridges, trench-mortar ammunition, shell of every calibre and kind, all stencilled with the flaming bomb which is the trade-mark of the Army Ordnance. Up in the forward observation-posts intelligence officers are peering anxiously through periscopes into the fog-hung wastes of No Man’s Land. In the assembly trenches the storm troops are waiting in silence on the tapes which mark the positions of the various units, the faces of the men showing grim and determined under their steel helmets. Each wears a belt containing a hundred cartridges in clips; his bayonet is fixed. The men of the medical detachments, distinguished by the broad-bladed bolos at their hips, lean against their up-ended stretchers, waiting for the beginning of the bloody business which will stain those stretchers red. The officers, a trifle nervous and self-conscious, stroll up and down the ranks, examining their automatics or glancing at the luminous dials of their wrist-watches to note the approach of the zero hour. Rifles, bayonets, pistols, bolos, periscopes, cartridges, together with the clips which hold them and the belts in which they are carried—all are ordnance.

A mile or so in the rear the artillery is likewise waiting, every man at his post. The slim steel projectiles have been shoved home and the breech-blocks closed upon them; the barrage-tables have been worked out to a second, the ranges to a yard; the lids of the caissons are raised, revealing the brass heads of the shell waiting in their pigeonholes; the gunners are grasping the lanyards. Each battery commander stands motionless, one arm raised high, eyes glued to his carefully synchronized watch. The minute-hand, creeping forward slowly—oh, so slowly—rests at last upon the hour set for the beginning of the barrage. The upraised arms drop like semaphores, the watching gunners pull their lanyards, and the heavens seem to split asunder as tongues of flame leap from the eager guns. An instant later thunder and lightning burst above the distant German trenches. Steel falls upon them as water falls over the precipice at Niagara. The earth shakes, the air quivers to the hell of sound. The cannoneers, as though suddenly awakened from a trance, leap into action. Bearing in their arms the steel messengers of death, they dash between the caissons and the guns, sweating like stokers on a record-breaking liner. Farther to the rear are the midcalibre pieces, the “four-point-sevens,” the five and the six inch guns and howitzers, whose great projectiles go shrieking Rhineward with a noise like giants tearing mighty strips of linen. Huge howitzers, streaked like zebras and spotted like giraffes by the camoufleurs, their ugly snouts pointing toward the sky, some drawn by panting tractors, others mounted on the tractors themselves, come plunging and rocking across the broken and all but impassable terrain to take up new positions. The dusty roads are lined for miles with columns of gray trucks laden with ammunition, for the stream of shell between the dumps in the rear and the batteries at the front must never, even for an instant, halt or check. So close are the trucks that an active man could, it seems, travel for miles, without ever setting foot to the ground, by leaping from the tail of one to the hood of another. A fragment from a German shell shatters a gun and puts it out of action. As though by magic two great trucks, tabloid factories on wheels, one a mobile ordnance repair-shop, the other a storeroom of spare parts, appear on the scene, and skilled mechanics, wearing on their collars the bomb insignia of the Ordnance Department, repair the damaged gun, heedless of the fact that death is raining all about them, and put it into action again. From their cleverly camouflaged positions far in the rear the great 8 inch and 9.2 inch howitzers, and the 8, 10, 12, and 14 inch guns on railway-mounts are methodically pounding the enemy’s back areas, shelling his roads and bridges, destroying his ammunition-dumps and railroad-stations, their monster projectiles cleaving the air with a roar like invisible express-trains. Save only the men themselves, everything—guns and howitzers, shrapnel and high explosive, carriages, railway-mounts, tractors, trucks, limbers, caissons, even the harness on the horses—is ordnance.

From out of the smoke, so close behind the rolling barrage that they seem to be moving amid the bursting shell, a long line of tanks—elephantine monsters of the Mark VIII type and little, agile, humpbacked whippets—waddling forward across the welter of No Man’s Land, wading through ooze and slime, clambering over heaps of débris, crushing wire entanglements as easily as though they were made of string, rearing themselves against the walls of concrete pill-boxes and then crashing down upon them, straddling in their stride the yawning chasms of the German trenches, but always pushing forward, like terrible and ruthless prehistoric monsters, one-pounders and machine-guns spurting death from the loopholes in their armored flanks. Tanks and tank-guns are ordnance, of course.

The barrage abruptly lifts, and the eager infantry, pouring out of the trenches, sweeps forward with a roar. Out in front, forming a thin fringe to the leading wave of the assault, are the autoriflemen, playing streams of lead on the enemy trenches from their Brownings and Chauchats as a street-cleaner plays a stream of water upon the asphalt from his hose. As the barrage lifts, the Germans, emerging from the dugouts where they have taken shelter, man their parapets, but volleys of hand-grenades drive them back again. Through the wire demolished by the tanks and into the shell-shattered trenches swarm the cheering Yanks. Parties of “moppers-up” hasten from dugout to dugout, calling upon the occupants to come out and surrender, and when they do not comply, tossing hand or gas grenades into the entrances or wrecking the dugouts with mobile charges. The captured positions are quickly organized. Machine-guns and trench-mortars are brought up and placed in position. Carts and voiturettes, ammunition-laden, some drawn by mules, others by hand, come forward at the double. An enemy machine-gun nest is located and promptly demolished by a pair of Stokes mortars, which send their bombs somersaulting through the air, as a juggler tosses bottles, in an unending stream. Then the enemy launches a counter-attack, the gray-clad hordes advancing doggedly while the rifle-fire crackles along the trenches and the machine-guns go into action with a clatter which sounds like a boy drawing a stick along the palings of a picket fence. Rifle-grenades and shell from the little 37-mm. infantry cannon burst amid the advancing Germans, gaps appearing here and there amid their close-locked ranks as patches appear in a moth-eaten fur when it is beaten. Before this hail of death the counter-attack falters, checks, crumbles, and finally breaks, as an ocean roller dissipates itself against a concrete pier in futile spray. Everything used in the assault and in the repulse of the counter-attack—service and automatic rifles, 37-mm. cannon, rifle, gas and hand grenades, machine-guns and trench-mortars, ammunition-carts and voiturettes, mobile charges—is furnished by the Ordnance Department.

Reports come in that the enemy is reforming his shattered columns in the shelter of a ridge, preparatory to launching another attack, whereupon the brigade commander orders a machine-gun company to open indirect fire, the rain of bullets mowing down the unseen and now thoroughly demoralized Germans as effectually as though they were advancing in close order across the open. Not only the machine-guns themselves, the tripods on which they are mounted, the ammunition, the belts in which it is contained and the carts in which it is brought up, but the delicate scientific instruments necessary for indirect fire—panoramic sights, clinometers, transits, angle-of-sight instruments, alidades, squares, protractors—are all provided by Army Ordnance.

Meanwhile, simultaneously with the conflict on the ground, an aerial battle has been in progress high in the blue, the German airmen, clearly distinguished by the huge black crosses painted on the under side of their planes, attacking the American flyers who are engaged in locating and photographing the enemy positions and in directing the fire of the American guns. To the support of the slow-moving observation and artillery planes speed the fighters of the _escadrilles de chasse_, their stripped machine-guns, synchronized to fire between the blades of their propellers, blazing away at the rate of 1,200 shots a minute. Their machine-gun belts are loaded with tracer, armor-piercing, and incendiary cartridges in rotation, the first permitting the gunner to correct his aim by following the bullet’s flight, the second to pierce the armored tanks of the enemy machines, the third to set them on fire by igniting the leaking petrol or to destroy observation-balloons, while the belts themselves, made of disintegrating steel links, fall apart as they are fired. Giant bombing planes, keeping to the upper levels, head for the German back areas to drop their ugly eggs, ranging in size from the comparatively small bombs used against troops in the open to the 1600-pound monsters which produce craters 100 feet in diameter and 50 feet deep, upon the enemy’s dumps, warehouses, roads, bridges, and railway-stations. Everything save only the airplane itself—the synchronized machine-gun, the disintegrating belt and the special ammunition, the bombs in all their varying sizes, the mechanisms for suspending and releasing the bombs, the sights to determine the exact moment for release, even the ingenious electrical heaters for preventing the lubricating-oil in the guns from freezing at high altitudes—all these are provided by Army Ordnance.

Down upon our own back areas swoop raiding enemy aircraft, tiny specks against the blue, travelling at 140 miles an hour—the most difficult targets in the world. But complicated instruments, designed by Ordnance, are sighted upon them, determining their altitude, speed, and direction, and taking into account the windage and the trajectory of the shell, predicting the exact positions of the planes when our antiaircraft artillery opens upon them. The slim barrels of a battery of antiaircraft guns, mounted on motor-trucks for mobility, are raised to the indicated elevation, and a salvo of shell goes whining skyward, each projectile fitted with a special fuse so delicate in action that contact with the thin fabric of an airplane’s wing is sufficient to explode it, and yet so designed that it will not explode if, in loading, it should be accidentally dropped upon the ground. Ordnance again.

Night falls. The guns are silent. From along the line of the captured positions rise fireworks like those which delight the summer multitudes at Coney Island. Star-shell, fired from Veriy pistols, make graceful fiery arcs against the purple-velvet sky, bursting, as they descend, into fountains of sparks which illumine the positions where the weary Germans are. A night-bombing plane, prowling above the enemy’s lines, unable to see its target in the darkness, releases a parachute-flare which slowly sinks earthward, illuminating the ground for a radius of a mile as brilliantly as though it were day. From the American positions colored signal stars—red, green, white, or “caterpillar” combinations—fall slowly across the sky, conveying all sorts of cryptic messages to regimental and brigade headquarters in the rear, to the aircraft circling above, or to the patrols scouting in No Man’s Land. All these pyrotechnics were designed and made by Ordnance.

But the work of Ordnance does not end when the guns cease firing. Far from it. The wear of battle on weapons of all kinds is enormous: guns must be relined and fitted with new recoil mechanisms; shattered wheels and trails must be replaced; broken rifles, pistols, bayonets, machine-guns, scabbards, helmets, trench-knives, periscopes, caissons, limbers, tractors, trucks, tanks, must be collected and transported to the rear for repair or salvage. For the maintenance of its material Army Ordnance had in the field many special facilities: mobile repair-shops, miniature machine-shops mounted on trucks to accompany each division; semiheavy repair-shops mounted on five-ton trailers to accompany each corps; heavy semipermanent repair-shops for each army; railway repair-shops for the railway artillery, each successively less mobile but of greater capacity. In addition to this vast equipment for repair work in the field there were the complete expeditionary base repair-shops, requiring for their operation a personnel three times as large as the peace-time organizations of all the arsenals in the United States put together, capable of repairing each month 2,000 pistols, 7,000 machine-guns, 50,000 rifles, of overhauling 2,000 motor-vehicles, and of relining a thousand cannon. Ordnance once more.

And back of all this was the mammoth organization created by Army Ordnance in America itself: arsenals, gun-foundries, rifle and revolver factories, wagon-plants, ammunition-plants, nitrate-plants, silk-mills, tanneries, harness and leather-goods factories, 8,000 manufacturing plants in all, in which nearly 4,000,000 workers toiled day and night to produce the 100,000 separate Ordnance items required by our armies oversea. Beyond the activities that I have just sketched, the Ordnance Department didn’t do much in the war.

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Now it must be kept constantly in mind that the Ordnance problem with which America was confronted upon her entry into the war was essentially a non-commercial one. By that I mean that the articles required by the Ordnance Department had an extremely restricted use, in many cases, indeed, no use at all, in the commercial life of the nation. In the piping times of peace what use did we have for field-guns, howitzers, machine-guns, automatic rifles, antiaircraft and railway artillery, shell, caissons, limbers, synchronizing devices, steel helmets, trench-mortars, periscopes, tanks, tracer, armor-piercing, and incendiary ammunition? Unlike the nations of continental Europe, we not only did not believe in war or anticipate war, but we deliberately blinded ourselves to the possibility of becoming involved in war, so that we were, consequently, wholly unprepared for war when it came. Hence, having no use for the tools of war in the pursuits of peace, we had little, if any, knowledge of how to manufacture them. The European Powers, on the other hand, having for centuries sat on a powder-magazine which, as they perfectly realized, might blow up at any moment, had prepared themselves to meet the conditions which would inevitably result from such an explosion by giving government support to private industry in the manufacture of war material. Thus were developed such vast ordnance industries as Krupp in Germany, Schneider-Creusot in France, Skoda in Austria, Ansaldo in Italy, which, though operating as private firms in time of peace, were always under government supervision, and automatically passed into government control in time of war. But even the great armaments maintained by Germany could not utilize in peace-time the enormous volume of war material produced at Essen. Yet it was imperative that the huge organization should be kept intact and ready for the war which would one day come. In order to maintain its organization and, so far as possible, its output, Krupp’s was encouraged, therefore, to seek foreign markets for its surplus products, Germany’s diplomatic, consular, and commercial representatives virtually becoming Krupp sales-agents in every corner of the globe. Thus it came about that wherever there was a promise of fighting, whether in China, in Mexico, in Abyssinia, in Venezuela, or in the Balkans, war material bearing the trade-mark of the great ironmaster of Essen was found in the hands of the prospective belligerents. If they could not pay cash, they were given credit, often long credit, and, when they did not possess credit, they usually were given the arms anyway. In this manner the German ordnance-machine was kept oiled and active, largely by foreign money, against the day when Germany would have need for its maximum output herself. Thus the government at Berlin had at hand, in time of peace, a tremendous and highly trained industrial organization which fitted neatly into the German war-machine in time of war. The same was true, though in lesser measure, of the great French, Italian, and Austrian ordnance concerns. We in the United States, however, had nothing of the sort. The Bethlehem Steel Company manufactured a limited amount of artillery, it is true, and the Colt, Winchester, Savage, and Remington corporations manufactured small arms, though mainly for sporting purposes, but they made them without any hope of government encouragement or co-operation, and they marketed them in foreign countries without any save the most casual assistance from our diplomatic and consular officials. In certain cases, indeed, the government actively discouraged American arms manufacturers from disposing of their wares to foreign belligerents.