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.
* * * * *
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.
When war was declared the Regular Army and the National Guard already
had, of course, their complements of experienced cooks and bakers, though
in wholly insufficient numbers, but the huge National Army had nothing
of the sort. One of the earliest and most pressing problems of the
Quartermaster Corps, therefore, was to train sufficient numbers of men
for this work, which it did by expanding the fourteen Cooks’ and Bakers’
Schools of the regular establishment to twenty and by starting new
schools at the various National Army cantonments. Before these schools
could be successfully operated, however, it was necessary to obtain an
adequate staff of instructors, who themselves had to be trained, the
plan being to give at least one officer in each regiment or separate
battalion sufficient training to make him competent to conduct a school
for cooks and bakers in his own organization. As a result of this system
of culinary education, within a year after the first American troops set
foot in France the Quartermaster Corps had trained 1,200 instructors in
cooking, 16,000 mess sergeants, and 50,000 cooks, in addition to which
there were 40,000 others who, though they had not received sufficient
training to give them a cook’s rating, were nevertheless entirely
competent to prepare food. From the soldiers thus trained there were
organized about seven-score Bakery Companies, more than half of which saw
service overseas. Now that these hundred-odd thousand cooks and bakers
have returned to civil life, there is reason to hope that there will be
manifested a striking improvement in the quality of the national cooking.
It may be that, as a result of this war-enforced training, we will be
able to look forward to taking a meal in a railway restaurant or in a
small-town hotel without dread and, perhaps, even with pleasure.
The food for the troops in cantonments, camps, and rest billets was, of
course, prepared in permanent camp-kitchens, which usually possessed
all the facilities and sometimes a far greater serving capacity than
the kitchens of great hotels. As the front was approached, however, the
problem of preparing food became increasingly difficult, particularly
in the areas which were being systematically harassed by the enemy’s
artillery and airplanes. To have erected kitchens in such areas would
have been to invite their destruction. In order to provide hot food for
soldiers occupying these exposed positions, as well as for troops on the
march, recourse was had to rolling kitchens—_les cuisines roulantes_,
as the French called them. Each kitchen, which was drawn either by a
mule-team or by a tractor, consisted of a stove and limber. The stove
contained a bake-oven and three kettles, thus permitting of four kinds of
food being prepared simultaneously. The limber, which was a two-wheeled
cart to which the kitchen was attached, was fitted with four bread-boxes
which could also be used for water, a cook’s chest containing a set of
culinary utensils which would make a housewife envious, four kettles,
and four fireless cookers. The fireless cooker was, I think, first used
for military purposes on the Italian Front; at least that was where I
first saw it. It was an invaluable contrivance, as it permitted food to
be prepared many hours in advance in the back areas and yet served piping
hot to the men on the firing-line.
For use under heavy fire or other conditions which made it impossible to
serve the men with hot food from the rolling kitchens, the trench ration,
consisting of tinned meat, hard bread, and soluble coffee, together
with salt and sugar, was designed. The food was packed in hermetically
sealed, gas-proof, camouflaged iron containers, each of which held
twenty-five rations, each ration in turn consisting of enough food to
maintain a soldier for one day, sustaining his full strength and vigor.
The food used in the trench ration was the very best that money could
buy. Indeed, it became a matter of pride with the employees of the great
plants where the trench rations were prepared to use exceptional care in
selecting the ingredients for them, for it was realized what good food
meant to the tired and mud-caked men who were holding the Frontier of
Freedom. The office force of one of the big packing-houses learned from a
shipping-clerk that the interstices between the tins in the packing-cases
were being filled with excelsior, so they took up a collection, to which
every one from president to office-boy contributed, and used the money
to fill those interstices with tobacco and cigarettes. When the officers
of the Subsistence Division heard of this they thought so well of the
idea that orders were issued that the empty space in all trench-ration
containers should be filled with tobacco thereafter. Scores of such
incidents, trivial enough in themselves, showed how the hearts and
thoughts of the nation were with the boys who were fighting overseas.
Every American soldier when he went into action carried in the upper
left-hand pocket of his blouse a small flat tin—no larger than the
pocket Bible which the sob-story writers always place in that same
pocket to stop the fatal bullet—bearing on its lid the legend: “U. S.
Army Emergency Ration. Not to be opened except by order of an officer,
or in extremity.” This was the American equivalent of the “starvation
ration” of the European armies. To it many a man caught in a shell-hole
between the lines or lost in the Forest of the Argonne owed his life. Its
contents represented the results of many experiments and much experience
and the combined suggestions of scientists, food experts, and soldiers.
The emergency ration consists of three rather dubious-looking cakes of
prepared beef combined with a bread compound made of ground cooked wheat,
weighing three ounces each, three ounces of chocolate, three-quarters of
an ounce of fine salt, and a dram of black pepper. There are almost as
many ways of preparing the ration as there are of preparing an egg. The
bread-and-meat cakes can be eaten dry—provided one is sufficiently near
starvation. When boiled in three pints of water they make a palatable
soup, and when the water was obtained, as was frequently the case, from
shell-holes and ditches, the pepper and salt served to disguise the
muddy flavor. Where water was scarce, only a pint of it was needed to
transform the cake into a sort of porridge, something like cornmeal mush,
which could be eaten hot or cold or which could be sliced and fried,
circumstances and the Germans permitting. The chocolate could be made
into a drink by dissolving it in hot water, or it could be eaten as candy.
Candy, by the way, formed one of the most acceptable items of the
American soldier’s ration, half a pound being issued to each man every
ten days. In December, 1918, the Subsistence Division shipped to the A.
E. F. more than 10,000,000 pounds of candy—the largest exportation of its
kind on record. Don’t get the idea that this was “grocer’s candy”—the
kind that comes in wooden buckets. It was nothing of the sort. No society
girl, sitting in a box at a matinée, munched better chocolates than the
American soldier. Moreover, the same chocolates which sold for a dollar
a pound in the candy-stores of America could be bought for forty-eight
cents a pound in the canteens of the A. E. F. Stick-candy and lemon-drops
which ordinarily sold for seventy cents a pound at home were sold to the
soldiers for twenty-eight cents. I say _sold_, for the pound and a half
of candy which was a part of every soldier’s ration rarely satisfied
the sweet tooth of the doughboy. Though everything in the confectionery
line from peppermints to caramels was provided, lemon-drops were the
soldier’s favorite. They were to the Yankee doughboy what gum-drops were
to Doctor Cook’s Esquimaux. They devoured them at the rate of a hundred
tons a month! At the beginning of the war it was found that most of the
lemon-drops manufactured for the commercial market, being made of glucose
and inferior or imitation fruit flavors, were not of good enough quality
for the soldiers. So lemon-drops of the most expensive kind—the kind
that they sell in the smart shops on Fifth Avenue and Tremont Street and
Michigan Boulevard—were adopted as a standard, the recipes for making
them being distributed to a number of candy manufacturers. Now the
lemon-drops for the army are made from pure granulated sugar and flavored
with an emulsion made from the rind of the lemon. The sourer they are the
better, say the soldiers. So great became the demand for candy—which,
by the way, is of great value in rebuilding wasted tissues—that the
Chief Quartermaster of the A. E. F. took over a number of French candy
factories and, using American sugar, manufactured huge quantities of
candy for our troops in France.
Tobacco was a recognized item in the ration of the A. E. F., statistics
showing that 95 per cent of the men used it in one form or another—which
serves to show how the soldier vote would go should the reformers ever
attempt to saddle the Constitution with an antitobacco amendment. To men
enduring great physical hardships, obliged to live without the comforts
and frequently without the necessities of life, and always under the
terrific strain imposed by war, tobacco fills a need which nothing else
can satisfy. In view of this, it was decided to adopt the practice of
our allies and allow each soldier a certain amount of tobacco a day, the
ration being four cigarettes, four ounces of chewing-tobacco, or four
ounces of smoking-tobacco, and one hundred papers. Though cigars were not
included in the army ration, they could be purchased at the Quartermaster
stores in France at astonishingly low prices. Havana cigars were sold at
the same price which the government paid for them in Cuba, there being
no tax or import duty, no charge for transportation, and no middleman’s
profit. Smokers of cigars will appreciate how cheap they were when I
mention that at the commissaries in France I paid eighteen cents apiece
for Corona Coronas. In order to provide “smokes” for the army, the entire
stocks of several of the largest cigarette and tobacco manufacturers
were commandeered—a fact with which they quickly acquainted the public
in their advertising. A single purchase consisted of 3,000,000,000
cigarettes—enough to provide two “fags” for approximately every human
being on the globe. The difference between the old army and the new was
strikingly illustrated by the difference in their choice of tobacco. The
soldier of the old army was most strongly addicted to the use of that
unlovely article known as “plug”—thereby giving steady employment to
the spittoon-makers. The men of our new armies, however, expressed an
overwhelming preference for the cigarette. Thus does tobacco gauge the
progress of civilization!
A close third to tobacco and candy in the affections of the soldiers
was chewing-gum. Three and a half million packages of the shop-girl’s
delight were sent overseas during the month of January alone. Chewing-gum
has come, indeed, to be regarded as little short of a necessity for
the soldier, both because of its value as a substitute for water—it is
estimated that 250 pounds of chewing-gum will save 100 gallons of water
when it is needed most—and because it is a heat and energy producer.
During intensive drilling, practice firing, and on marches the more
gum a man chews the less water he drinks—obviously a highly important
consideration, for at the front water is usually scarce and difficult to
obtain. Curiously enough, the consumption of gum is heavier in winter
than in summer, this doubtless being due, as I have already mentioned, to
the fact that it is a heat-producer. It took the British, oddly enough,
to devise a novel and interesting use for chewing-gum which was later
adopted by certain of our own commanders. Just before an attack, when
the assaulting battalions were formed up on the tapes waiting for the
word which would send them over the top, the enemy’s scouts, prowling in
No Man’s Land, frequently detected the presence of the waiting troops
by their subdued chorus of coughing. A British officer who had been in
the United States evolved the idea of stopping these betraying coughs
by giving every man a stick of chewing-gum. So Messrs. Wrigley, Beeman,
White, and Adams may congratulate themselves on having “done their bit”
toward walloping the Hun.
My mention of a chorus of coughs naturally suggests the subject
of music, which was another of the multitudinous activities of the
Quartermaster Corps. By this I do not mean to imply that the “Q. M.”
furnished the army with bands, for it did not, but it did supply the
bands of the army with instruments and music. Music, you must understand,
was one of the most important factors in the maintenance of that
intangible something called morale. It was a curious characteristic
of the American psychology that when a homesick soldier heard a band
playing “Home, Sweet Home,” or “When You Come Back,” or “Keep the Home
Fires Burning,” it did not increase his homesickness. It had, instead,
precisely the opposite effect: it cheered him up! Recognizing this, the
military authorities saw to it that bands were stationed in every town
and hamlet in France where any considerable body of troops was billeted.
By the last summer of the war we had in France nearly 400 bands, to say
nothing of the musical organizations improvised by the various units.
As a result, the French inhabitants of the zones in which our armies
were operating became as familiar with “Over There,” “Good Morning, Mr.
Zip-zip-zip,” and particularly with “Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the
Morning,” which was the soldier’s favorite because it so satisfyingly
expressed his feelings, as they were with the “Marseillaise.” The
American Army was, indeed, as noticeable for its musical proclivities as
the French Army was for its total absence of them. Ours was a whistling,
singing army, if ever there was one, though for some reason it seemed
to delight in plaintive, melancholy tunes. Many and many a time I have
heard a column coming down a road in the darkness, the softly whistled
chorus of “The Long, Long Trail” rising above the clink of accoutrements
and the _slog-slog-slog_ of marching feet.