Part 5

Now it was realized, from the very beginning, that the success of our armies in France would depend upon transportation. And, thanks to the threats of Pancho Villa, we had at least the framework of a transportation organization, for when it became necessary to send troops to the Mexican border in 1916, the War Department had organized a transportation service of sorts and had placed Samuel M. Felton, president of the Chicago Great Western Railway, at the head of it. Thus it came about that upon our entrance into the Great War there devolved upon Mr. Felton and his staff the gigantic task of obtaining in the United States and shipping to Europe the enormous quantity of transportation equipment and supplies required for the use of our forces overseas. In order to ascertain just what was required in equipment and supplies, a commission, headed by Colonel William Barclay Parsons, president of the American Society of Civil Engineers, and Colonel (then Major) W. J. Wilgus, formerly vice-president of the New York Central system, was sent to Europe within less than thirty days after the declaration of war. Upon the completion of its preliminary survey of the situation the commission dispersed, leaving Colonel Wilgus as the sole nucleus of the American Transportation Service in France, with Captain L. A. Jenney, formerly chief draftsman of the New York Central, as his assistant. Sitting on soap-boxes in an office in the Boulevard Haussman in Paris, with packing-cases for desks, these two officers outlined the general policy with respect to military transportation for the A. E. F. which the conditions seemed to warrant, and which General Pershing later adopted, and drew up the first requisition for railway and port equipment, materials, and tools. Colonel Wilgus, himself a veteran railroad man, quickly realized the vastness of the problem which confronted us and the gravity of the situation resulting from the dilapidated condition of the French railways and the appalling shortage of French rolling-stock. He accordingly informed the War Department that the American Army must prepare to operate its own trains, made up of its own locomotives and cars, from the seaports to the front, over the French railways under trackage rights. I might add that the principle of trackage rights, so familiar in America, was entirely unknown in France, and at first the French railway officials did not know what Colonel Wilgus was talking about, for they found it difficult to understand how it was possible to operate two systems of transportation over the same tracks at the same time.

The story of how the Engineers, under the direction of Brigadier-General W. W. Atterbury, formerly vice-president of the Pennsylvania, Director-General of Transportation, with Colonel Wilgus as his deputy and Chief of Staff, built up in France a transportation system which was one of the marvels of the war, is outside the province of this narrative, while the story of the production of railway material in America and its shipment overseas would require, for its proper telling, a chapter to itself. It is enough to say that, when the Armistice was signed, 60,000 men were engaged on railroad work of various kinds in France; more than a thousand miles of standard-gauge railway (equal to the distance by the Pennsylvania from New York to Chicago) had been laid; upward of 1,300 locomotives (300 more than are owned by the Atchison system) had been shipped overseas, and, had the war continued, we would have had in France by July, 1919, enough American cars to make up a train the caboose of which would have been leaving Paris when the engine was entering Berlin.

The Transportation Department had in operation between Tours, which was the headquarters of the Services of Supply, and Chaumont, which was the Great Headquarters, an all-American train, drawn by an American locomotive, driven by an American engineer, and, as a final touch, with its sleeping-cars in charge of former Pullman porters, in khaki, it is true, but retaining their grins and their whisk-brushes. Every one in the A. E. F. was inordinately proud of that train, which stood as a sort of visible proof of American accomplishment in France. It had been officially christened the “Atterbury Special” in honor of the Director-General of Transportation, but the soldiers had disrespectfully dubbed it the “Attaboy Special.” One morning, as a group of American congressmen, on their way up to the front, were standing on the platform of the Tours station, the special came roaring in.

“There’s an example of American energy and promptness for you!” exclaimed one of the politicians proudly. “What a contrast to those wretched French trains! Not an hour or so late, as they are, but on time to the very minute.”

“Pardon me, sir,” said a military policeman who had overheard the conversation, “that is _yesterday’s_ train.”

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When it was first proposed by the Transportation Department that locomotives should be shipped to Europe without being knocked down, the Ship-Building Board vigorously protested. There were no ships in existence, the board said, which could stand up under such an immense concentrated load. But the Engineers proved that they knew more about the strength of ships than did the ship-builders, and the locomotives—533 in all—were run out onto the wharves on their own wheels, picked up as easily as though they were baby-carriages by the giant gantry cranes, deposited in the hold—35 to a ship—together with their tenders, packed in baled hay, and upon arrival at the French ports were lifted out by the same method, lowered gently onto the rails, and a few hours later rolled off for the front under their own steam. The success with which the Engineers utilized business methods and revised specifications to meet American manufacturing conditions is strikingly illustrated by the fact that the cost of these locomotives, for which the French had been paying $51,000 each, was brought down to $37,000, thus saving to the American taxpayer some seven millions of dollars—a very tidy sum.

And, apropos of rolling-stock, here is a bit of secret history hitherto unpublished. When Villa’s raiders were threatening to destroy the railway-lines paralleling the Mexican border, the Engineer Corps designed and built a number of self-propelling armored railway-cars armed with 3-inch rifles, machine-guns, and search-lights. When the German submarines began their piratical operations along the Atlantic seaboard in the spring of 1918, these moving fortresses were secretly rushed up from the Rio Grande in order to afford protection to the undefended Jersey coast towns. It was well for the U-boat commanders that they did not attempt to shell Long Branch and Atlantic City as they shelled Scarborough and Broadstairs. If they had, the Engineers and their armored cars would have given them the surprise of their lives.

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The non-military person does not ordinarily associate with war such prosaic occupations as lumbering, quarrying, and highway building. They seem, at least at first thought, to be in character essentially industrial. But it must be remembered that the workman played fully as great a part as the soldier in winning the Great War. In fact, the combat troops could not have held the line for a day had it not been for the labor battalions, which, without incentive or excitement, glory or reward, and in most cases without public appreciation, toiled so faithfully and unceasingly to build the wharves, to unload the ships, to lay the railways, to construct the roads, and to hurry forward, in an unending stream, the food for the men and the food for the guns. It is quite understandable, once you stop to think about it, that in order to maintain our great armies in the field, there were required immense quantities of lumber for building wharves, barracks, storehouses, hangars, and hospitals, and enormous amounts of stone, crushed rock, and gravel for metalling the roads, ballasting the railways, buttressing the bridges, and making concrete for the fortifications. When we entered the war the supply of lumber was not nearly equal to the demands of the Allied Armies, to say nothing of our own. And, though there was, of course, plenty of rock and gravel in this country, we could not spare the tonnage to ship it overseas, even had such a course been practicable. (Perhaps it has never occurred to you how vitally important an item gravel is in military operations. Yet at one time the Germans threatened the Dutch with war if the latter persisted in their refusal to permit German gravel to be shipped across Holland for the construction of concrete fortifications in Belgium.) In view of these conditions, it devolved upon the Engineers to organize and equip special forestry, quarry, and highway regiments, as well as numerous labor battalions, and hurry them overseas with orders to obtain the urgently needed materials from the forests and quarries of France.

Though Engineer officers of the regular establishment were, of course, given command of these specialist regiments, the other officers as well as the soldiers themselves were recruited from men trained in the particular sort of work which each regiment was expected to perform. How to obtain officers of sufficient experience in these various lines of industry, and in sufficient numbers, promised at first to be a serious problem, but it was quickly solved by the Personnel Division of the Engineers, which had had on file, ever since the war-clouds first appeared on America’s horizon, tens of thousands of letters from men trained in every branch of the engineering profession, offering their services to the government in case of war. Hence, when it was decided to raise a forestry regiment, it was a simple matter to turn to the files and find the names of thousands of men—mill-owners, forest-rangers, lumbermen—with their experience and qualifications carefully listed, who were intimately familiar with every phase of the industry, from tree to finished board. The best qualified of these applicants were offered commissions by telegraph and instructed to go out into the lumber country and recruit their companies and battalions from men who had worked under them or whom they knew. Soon the walls of every employment-office, bunk-house, and cook-shack from the pine woods of Maine to the spruce forests of Washington blossomed with posters calling for axemen, sawyers, log-drivers, timber-cruisers, mill-operators, cookees, teamsters, for immediate service overseas. The response was prompt and startling. From their camps on the Kennebec and the Androscoggin, from the Adirondacks, from the pine-clad shores of Superior and Huron, from the Michigan Peninsula and the North Woods of Minnesota, from the forested slopes of the Wind River, the Bitter Roots, and the Cascades, from the big timber of the Far Nor’west the lumbermen came pouring in, in mackinaws and parkas, in moccasins and shoepacks, in knitted toques and caps of fur, their scanty belongings wrapped in the blanket-rolls slung across their backs and often with their axes on their shoulders. Sinewy-limbed, saddle-colored, horny-handed, tough as the timber of the forests whence they came, these were the real pioneers, the conquerors of the wilderness, the last of the frontiersmen, and Europe will, in all likelihood, never see their picturesque like again.

The first of the forestry regiments, the 10th Engineers, sailed for Europe five months after the declaration of war, followed at short intervals by several similar organizations. Immediately upon their arrival in France lumbering operations were begun in the Vosges and the Pyrenees (so do not be surprised if the next time you go shooting in Maine or fishing in Michigan your guide interlards his conversation with French or Spanish phrases), using French mills at first but later installing plants of the American type. The enlisted men of the forestry outfits were, as I have said, for the most part lumbermen by trade, officered by men familiar with lumbering in all its details. The result was a striking illustration of what American energy and American methods can do, for the official reports show that mills which, under French management, were yielding 500 board feet a day, were made to yield ten times that quantity when operated by Yankee lumbermen. In the Vosges this work was carried on so close to the front that the plants were repeatedly bombed by enemy aircraft and shelled by enemy artillery, the forestry troops, though listed as non-combatants, frequently suffering heavy casualties. It took a high order of courage for these men to go unconcernedly about their business of tree-felling, hauling, and sawing with German shells yowling through the branches and bursting all about them. The sawmills were of the portable type, however, and when the fire of the German guns became too accurate and heavy, the whole plant was packed up and shifted to a new location. I don’t believe in letting loose upon my defenseless readers swarms of figures, but it will serve to give those of them who are familiar with lumbering some idea of what our forestry regiments accomplished when I mention that during the month of October, 1918, alone, they produced 50,000,000 board feet of sawed lumber, 80,000 cords of firewood, and enough standard-gauge ties to build a single-track railway from the Great Lakes to the Gulf.

In raising the quarry, highway, and inland waterway regiments, the same method was adopted as in the organization of the forestry battalions. Enormous quantities of crushed rock were required for concrete and for the construction and repair of roads, but though numerous quarries were available in the American areas, experienced quarrymen and quarrying equipment were lacking. Accordingly a special quarry regiment, the 28th Engineers, was organized in the United States in November, 1917, with a strength of 60 officers and some 1,500 men. A skeleton organization was formed by transferring a few officers and a small detachment of men from a road regiment, the new unit being raised to strength by giving commissions to quarry managers and superintendents and filling up the ranks with drafted quarrymen.

Spreading over almost the whole of France is a veritable network of navigable rivers and canals, of which the Engineers availed themselves to the utmost in the transportation of material and supplies. Transportation by the inland waterways was in charge of the 57th Engineers, this regiment being largely recruited from men who had had experience on the canals and rivers of the United States. In the days to come many are the tales that will be told by skippers of stern-wheelers on the Mississippi and captains on the Erie Canal of the days when they and their huskies of the Inland Waterways battalions moved the supplies for Pershing’s men up the Seine and through the canals of the Marne and the Rhône.

To the dredging, dock construction, and stevedore regiments was assigned the gigantic task of dredging the channels and harbors of the seaports which the French placed at our disposal, of building wharves and berths for the reception of American ships, and of the transferring of the cargoes from ship to shore. The magnitude of their task is shown by the fact that cargo shipments grew from 20,000 tons in July, 1917, to 1,000,000 tons in November of the following year, while the 23 ship-berths which the French Government originally assigned to us had nearly quadrupled when the Armistice was signed.

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Unless you have marched with armies or trekked across hot and arid lands, you cannot know what it is to be thirsty—really thirsty, I mean; so thirsty that your tongue swells until it all but chokes you or lolls from your mouth like that of a panting dog. Water is infinitely more important to the success of a military operation than arms or ammunition; to a certain extent it is more important than food; for, though troops can fight for an amazingly long time on short rations, or even on no rations at all, they cannot fight without water. The vital importance of providing an adequate water-supply was learned by the French in Algeria and Morocco, by the British in India and the Sudan, where the deserts were strewn for miles with the bodies of soldiers who had died from thirst. In the Cuban campaign our armies had far more deaths from impure water than from Spanish bullets. During the Italian offensive on the Carso, that terrible plateau of sun-scorched rock which lies beyond the Isonzo, hundreds of men, Italians and Austrians alike, died from thirst, the Austrians being eventually compelled to retreat because the Italian artillery had destroyed the pipe-lines which supplied them with water. During the fighting on the Western Front during the last summer of the war, when the semitropic sun of eastern France beat down on the heavy-laden backs of the panting, sweating men, when millions of feet and hoofs ground the roads to powder and filled eyes, ears, throats, and nostrils with the yellow, choking dust, when the air reeked with the mingled stenches of leather, gasoline, sweating horse-flesh, and human perspiration, and when, as the canteens emptied, the men peered anxiously over their shoulders for the company water-carts, thousands realized as never before the truth of Kipling’s words:

“When it comes to slaughter, You must do your work on water.”

Now, when a hundred thousand men and thirty-five thousand animals are crowded into a sector perhaps three miles wide and seven miles deep, the problem of keeping those men and animals supplied with water becomes tremendous. The responsibility for supplying with water the troops in the field fell upon the Army Water-Supply Service, which, as might be expected, was a branch of the Corps of Engineers. The Water-Supply Service was really a wholesaler of water, delivery being made at “water-points,” from which water was drawn directly by men and animals, the largest customers being, however, the ubiquitous two-wheel water-carts of the infantry and artillery. To supply these “water-points” every available source was utilized, springs developed, deep wells bored, village wells and cisterns cleaned out, streams purified and pumping-stations established, the aim being to provide water within a mile and a half of every consumer at the front. Ordinarily two gallons of water per man per day were furnished at the front, this quantity being sufficient for drinking, cooking, and lavatory purposes, but during the enormous troop concentrations incident to the St. Mihiel and Argonne offensives this quantity had to be materially reduced, during those periods of stress and action the men having scant opportunity for either cooking or bathing. It was impossible, however, to reduce the quantity for the animals, for each of which eight to ten gallons had to be provided daily.

Even under battle conditions the purity of the water was the first consideration, for impure water can work far more havoc with an army than enemy shell. In order to provide against this contingency, mobile laboratories for water-testing purposes moved in the van of the armies, and during the drives the Water-Supply troops were provided with poison-testing kits, for, warned by the experiences of the British in German Southwest Africa, where wells were systematically poisoned by the enemy, we took no chances. Sources of supply were, wherever possible, protected, it being considered almost as serious an offense for a soldier to contaminate a water-supply as for him to sleep on post. Where water was found to be polluted, the troops, no matter how thirsty, were under no circumstances permitted to use it until it had been filtered and sterilized. It is a curious fact that the chlorine used in gas-shell to kill Germans was used by the Water-Supply Service in minute quantities to kill an equally dangerous and far more insidious enemy—the microbic disease-carriers in the water. Special motor-trucks, equipped with pumping, filtering, sterilizing, and testing apparatus, time after time demonstrated that they were able to get into action and deliver pure water from a polluted supply _within thirty minutes_ after their arrival.

In many cases the position of the troops and the nature of the terrain made it possible to deliver water only by hauling. This was done by means of trains of motorized water-tanks and by special tank-cars operating over the narrow-gauge railway systems, the tank trucks and cars being emptied into reservoirs built in strategic positions near the front. A common and quickly built reservoir consisted of a hole in the ground, a waterproof canvas lining, and a camouflaged cover. The lives of the tank-train truck-drivers were hard and exciting, for though the roads over which they had to pass in approaching the front were nearly always subjected to heavy shell-fire, there could be no let-up in supplying water for the troops on the firing-line. Most of the activities of the Water-Supply troops were between the locations of the light artillery and the heavy artillery, the men consequently working almost continuously within the areas under enemy bombardment. On one occasion, during the open warfare incident to the St. Mihiel offensive, the driver of a water-truck ventured so close to a German machine-gun nest that when he came back his tank was found to be better adapted for road-sprinkling than for water-transportation purposes.

It is scarcely necessary to remark that enormous quantities of material were required for the work of the Water-Supply Service, 60 miles of pipe and 300 gas-driven pumps being used during the St. Mihiel and Argonne-Meuse operations alone. As there were not enough Water-Supply troops—the 26th Engineers—for the needs of the army, it was found necessary to supplement their numbers with other Engineer units, motor-truck companies, and pioneer infantry, the Water-Supply Service of the First Army reaching a maximum of 3,500 officers and men.

One does not usually associate intelligence work with water-supply, yet the American Water-Supply Service had an intelligence section which was as efficient as that of any branch of the army. Information regarding the water-supply in the territory behind the enemy lines was gathered from all available sources, the _Wasserversorgung_ maps captured from the Germans affording much valuable data, and the information thus obtained was published at frequent intervals, together with maps. The production of these water-maps finally became so highly developed that it was possible for the intelligence section of the Water-Supply Service to place full information at the disposal of the divisional intelligence officers within twenty-four hours after it had been received. So rapid was the American advance in certain sectors that scores of Boche pumping-plants were captured while still in operation, and turned to the task of supplying the thirsty Yanks. I might add that German prisoners, particularly of the corresponding enemy service, frequently were as successfully pumped for information as the wells sunk by the enemy were pumped for water.

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