The salvage service fumigated, cleaned, pressed the soldiers’ uniforms,
washed their shirts, socks, and underwear. It mended shoes and
transformed campaign hats into felt slippers.
_Photograph by Signal Corps, U. S. A._]
[Illustration: AN AMERICAN DELOUSING STATION.
The weary men returning from the trenches found the delousing and
fumigating stations set up and awaiting them.]
[Illustration: AN AMERICAN LAUNDRY IN OPERATION NEAR THE FRONT.
Each of these units can wash the clothing of 10,000 men, fresh from the
trenches, weekly.
_Photograph by Signal Corps, U. S. A._]
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.
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.
* * * * *
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.
[Illustration: A 16-INCH HOWITZER.
Huge howitzers, streaked like zebras and spotted like giraffes, point
their ugly snouts toward the sky.]
[Illustration: A 16-INCH HOWITZER ON A RAILWAY MOUNT.
Camouflaged monsters on railway mounts which can drop a ton of explosives
on a given target twenty miles away.]
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.