THE deadlier end of a snake is the head end, where the snake carries its
stingers. Since something happened in the Garden of Eden this fact has
been a matter of common knowledge, giving to all mankind for all time
respect for the snake and fear of him. But what not everybody knows
is that before a constrictor can exert his squeezing powers to the
uttermost degree he must have a dependable grip for his tail, else those
mighty muscles of his are impotent; because a snake, being a physical
thing, is subject to the immutable laws of physics. There must be a
fulcrum for the lever, always; the coiled spring that is loose at both
ends becomes merely a piece of twisted metal; and a constrictor in
action is part a living lever and part a living spring. And another
thing that not everybody knows is that before a snake with fangs can
fling itself forward and bite it must have a purchase for the greater
part of its length against some reasonably solid object, such as the
earth or a slab of rock.
Now an army might very well be likened to a snake, which sometimes
squeezes its enemy by an enveloping movement but more often strikes at
him with sudden blows. In the case of our own Army I particularly like
the simile of a great snake--a rattlesnake, by preference, since in the
first place the rattlesnake is essentially an American institution, and
since once before our ancestors fought for their own freedom, much as
we now are fighting for the freedom of the world, under a banner that
carried the device of a rattler coiled. Moreover, the rattlesnake, which
craves only to be let alone and which does not attack save on intrusion
or provocation, never quits fighting, once it has started, until it is
absolutely no more. You may scotch it and you may bruise and crush and
break it, but until you have killed it exceedingly dead and cut it to
bits and buried the bits you can never be sure that the job from your
standpoint is finished. So for the purpose of introducing the subject in
hand a rattlesnake it is and a rattlesnake it shall be to the end of
the narrative, the reader kindly consenting--a rattlesnake whose bite is
very, very fatal and whose vibrating tail bears a rattle for every star
in the flag.
For some months past it has been my very good fortune to watch the
rattler's head, snouting its nose forth into the barbed wires
and licking out with the fiery tongue of its artillery across the
intervening shell holes at Heinie the Hun. Now I have just finished a
trip along the body of the snake, stretching and winding through and
across France for 800 miles, more or less, to where its tail is wetted
by salt water at the coast ports in the south and the east and the
southeast. This is giving no information to the enemy, since he knows
already that the snake which is the army must have a head at the
battleground and a neck in the trenches, and behind the head and the
neck a body and a tail, the body being the lines of communication and
the tail the primary supply bases.
His own army is in the likeness of a somewhat similar snake; otherwise
it could not function. Moreover, things are happening to him, even
as these lines are written, that must impress upon his Teutonic
consciousness that our snake is functioning from tip to tip. Unless he
is blind as well as mad he must realise that he made a serious mistake
when he disregarded the injunction of the old Colonials: “Don't Tread On
Me.”
In common with nearly every other man to whom has been given similar
opportunity I have seen hundreds of splendid things at the Front where
our people hold for defence or move for attack--heroism, devotion,
sacrifice, an unquenchable cheerfulness, and a universal determination
that permeates through the ranks from the highest general to the
greenest private to put through the job that destiny has committed into
our keeping, after the only fashion in which this job properly may be
put through.
In the trenches and immediately behind them I thought I had exhausted
the average human capacity for thrills of pride, but it has turned out
that I hadn't. For back of the Front, back of the line troops and the
reserves, back all the way to the tail of the snake, there are things
to be seen that in a less spectacular aspect--though some of them are
spectacular enough, at that--are as finely typical of American resource
and American courage and American capability as any of the sights that
daily and hourly duplicate themselves among the guns.
I am sure there still must be quite a number of persons at home who
somehow think that once a soldier is armed and trained and set afoot
on fighting ground he thereafter becomes a self-sustaining and
self-maintaining organism; that either he is providentially provisioned,
as the ravens of old fed the prophet, or that he forages for himself,
living on the spoils of the country as the train bands and hired
mercenaries used to live by loot in the same lands where our troops are
now engaged. Or possibly they hazily conceive that the provender and the
rest of it, being provided, manage to transport themselves forward to
their user. If already we had not had too many unnecessary delegates
loose-footing it over France this year I could wish that I might have
had along with me on this recent trip a delegation of these unreflecting
folk, for they would have beheld, as I did, a greater miracle than the
one vouchsafed Elijah, yet a miracle of man's èncompassment, and in some
measure would have come to understand how a vast American army, three
thousand miles from home on foreign shores, is fed and furnished and
furbished and refurbished, not at the expense of the dwellers of the
soil but to their abundant personal benefit. Finally they would see in
its operation the vastest composite job of creation, organisation and
construction that has ever been put through, in the space of one year
and three months about, by any men that ever toiled anywhere on this
footstool of Jehovah.
To me statistics are odious things, and whenever possible I avoid them.
Besides, some of the figures I have accumulated in this journey are
so incredibly stupendous that knowing them to be true figures I
nevertheless hesitate to set them down. By my thinking way adjectives
are needed and not numerals to set forth in any small measure a
conception of the undertaking that has been accomplished overseas by our
people and is still being accomplished with every hour that passes.
Before this war came along Europeans were given to saying that we
Americans rarely bragged of producing a beautiful thing or an
artistic thing or a thing painstakingly done, but rather were given to
advertising that here we had erected the longest bridge and there the
tallest building and over yonder the largest railway terminal and
down this way the most expensive mansion--that ever was. Perhaps the
criticism was justified in peacetimes. Today in the light of what we
have done in France these past few months back of the lines it not only
is justified but it is multiplied, magnified and glorified. It no longer
is a criticism; it is a tribute. When you think of the performance that
stands to our credit you must think of it in superlatives, and when you
speak of it you must speak in superlatives too. The words all end in
“est.”
On French soil within twelve months, and in several instances within six
months, we have among other things constructed and set going the biggest
cold-storage plant, with two exceptions, in the world; the biggest
automobile storage depot, excluding one privately owned American
concern, in the world; the biggest system of military-equipment
warehouses in the world; probably the biggest field bakery in the world;
the biggest strictly military seaport base in the world; what will
shortly be the biggest military base hospital in the world; the biggest
single warehouse for stock provender in the world; the biggest junkshop
in the world; the biggest staff training school in the world--three
months ago it had more scholars than any university in America ever
has had; the biggest locomotive roundhouse under one roof; the biggest
gasoline-storage plant; the next to the biggest training camp for
aviators, the same being a sort of 'finishing school for men who have
already had a degree of instruction elsewhere; the biggest acetylene-gas
plant; and half a dozen other biggest things in the world--and we're not
good and started yet!
Every week sees the plants we have already constructed being enlarged and
amplified; every week sees some new contract getting under way. Every
month's end sees any similar period in the building of the Panama Canal
made to seem almost a puny and inconsequential achievement by contrast
and by comparison with what superbly and triumphantly has gone forward
during that month. In military parlance it is called the Service of
Supplies. It should be called the Service of the Supremely Impossible
Supremely Accomplished. When this war is ended and tourists are
permitted to visit foreign parts Americans coming abroad and seeing what
has here been done will be prouder of their country and their fellow
countrymen than ever they have been.
The Service of Supplies, broadly speaking and in its bearing on
operations upon the Continent, begins at tide mark and ends in the
front-line trenches, with ramifications and side issues and annexes
past counting, but all of them more or less interrelated with the main
issues. For example the staff school can hardly be called a part of it,
though lying, so to speak, in a whorl of the snake. It is divided into
a Base Section, which is that part situate nearest to the coasts; an
Intermediate Section, which is what its name implies; and an Advance
Section, which extends as close up to the zone of hostilities as is
consistent with reasonable safety, the term “reasonable safety” being a
relative term in these days of hostile raiding planes. The Base Section
is subdivided again into several lesser segments, each centring about a
main port.
Broadly described it might be said that any military equipment in its
natural course is first unloaded and stored temporarily at the bases.
Then it is moved into the Intermediate Section, where it is housed and
kept until called for. Thereupon it goes on a third rail journey to the
Advance Section, out of the depots of which it is requisitioned and sent
ahead again by trucks or wagons, or more commonly by rail, to meet the
day-to-day and the week-to-week requirements of the units in the field.
While this is going on all the sundry hundreds of thousands of men
engaged on duty along the Service of Supplies must be cared for without
impairment to the principal underlying purpose--that of provisioning and
arming the fighting man, and providing supplies and equipment for the
hospitals and the depots and all the rest of it, world without end.
When you sit down to figure how many times the average consignment, of
whatsoever nature, is loaded and unloaded and reloaded again even after
it has been brought overseas, and how many times it is handled and
rehandled, checked in and checked out, accounted for and entered up, and
eventually fed out in dribs as fodder for the huge coiling serpent we
call an army--you begin to understand why it is that for every 100 men
brought across the ocean upward of 50 must be assigned to work in some
capacity or another along the communication ways.
For the reader to visit the various departments and sub-departments and
subber subdepartments that properly fall within the scope of the Service
of Supplies would take of his time at least two weeks. It took that much
of my time and I had a fast touring car at my disposal and between stops
moved at a cup-racing clip. For the writer to attempt to set down in any
comprehensive form the extent of the thing would fill a fat book of many
pages. By reason of the limitations of space this article can touch only
briefly on the general scheme and only sketchily upon those details that
seemed to the present observer most interesting.
For example at one port--and this not yet the busiest one of the ports
turned over to us by our allies--we are operating an extensive system of
French docks that already were there and with them an even larger system
of docks constructed by our Army and now practically completed. Likewise
we have here a great camp, as big a camp as many a community at home
that calls itself a city, where negro labour battalions are living;
two extensive rest camps for troops newly debarked from the transports;
enormous freight yards and storage warehouses with still another
camp handily near by for the accommodation of the yard gangs and the
warehouse gangs; a base hospital that when completed will be the largest
military base hospital on earth; a sizable artillery camp where gun
crews and ordnance officers take what might be called a post-graduate
course to supplement the training they had in the States; a remount
station; an ordnance and aviation-storage warehouse; and a motor
reception park.
This, remember, is but one of several ports that we practically have
taken over for the period of the war. On the land side of a second port
are grouped a rest camp, a motor-assembling park, a system of docks
inside a basin that is provided with locks, a locomotive-assembling
plant, freight yards, warehouses without end, and two base hospitals.
Taking either of these ports for a starting point and moving inland one
would probably visit first the headquarters of the Service of Supplies,
where also is to be found our main salvage depot for reclaiming all
sorts of equipment except motor and air equipment--these go to salvage
stations specially provided elsewhere--and not far away an aviation
training centre. A little farther along as one travelled up-country
he would come to an artillery instruction centre located in a famous
French military school; to our engineer training centre and our
engineer replacement depots; and thence onward to our air-service
production centre with its mammoth plant for assembling, repairing and
testing planes and with its camp for its personnel. This would bring one
well into the Intermediate Section with its depots, freight yards and
warehouses, and with its refrigerating plant, which is the third largest
in existence and which shortly will have a twin sister a few miles
away. There would be side excursions to the motor supply and spare parts
depot, to the main motor repair station, to the locomotive repair shops,
to the car shops, to the principal one of our aviation training centres,
to the main field bakery, to the gasoline depots, the camouflaging plant
and to various lesser activities.
Finally one would land at the Advance Section depots with their complex
regulating stations for the proper distribution of the material that has
advanced hither by broken stages. And yet when one had journeyed thus
far one would merely be at the point of the beginning of the real work
of getting the stuff through to the forces without congestion, without
unnecessary wastage, without sending up too much or too little but just
exactly the proper amounts as needed.
Now then, on top of this please remember that each important camp, each
station, each centre has its own water system, its own electric light
system, its own police force, its own fire department, its own sanitary
squad, its own sewers, its own walks and drives and flower beds, its own
emergency hospitals and dispensaries and surgeries, its own Y. M. C. A.,
its own Red Cross unit, generally its own K. of C. workers and its own
Salvation Army squad; as likely as not its own newspaper and its own
theatre. Always it has its own separate communal life.
Figure that in a score of places veritable cities have sprung up where
last January the wind whistled over stubbled fields and snow-laden pine
thickets. Figure that altogether 40,000,000 square feet of covered
housing space are required and that more will be required as our
expeditionary force continues to expand. Figure that in and out and
through all these ramified activities our locomotives draw our cars over
several hundred miles of sidings and yard trackage, which Uncle Sam has
put down by the sweat of the brow of his excellent sons, supplemented
by a copious amount of sweat wrung from the brows of thousands of German
prisoners and thousands more of Indo-Chinese labourers imported by
the French and loaned to us, and yet thousands more of native French
labourers past or under the military age.
Figure that while the work of construction has been going on upon a
scope unprecedented in the scheme of human endeavour the men charged
with the responsibility for it have had to divide their energies and
their man power to the end that the growing Army should not suffer
for any lack of essential sustenance while the other jobs went forward
toward completion. Figure at the beginning of last winter, nine months
ago, scarcely a spadeful of earth had been turned for the foundations
anywhere. Figure in with all of this mental pictures of the Children of
Israel building the pyramids for old Mister Pharaoh, of Goethals at
the Isthmus, of Cæsar's legions networking Europe with those justly
celebrated Romanesque roads of his, of the coral insects making an
archipelago in nine months instead of stretching the proceeding through
millions of years, as is the habit of these friendly little insects;
figure in all these things--and if your headache isn't by this time too
acute for additional effort without poignant throbbings at the temples
you may begin to have a shadowy conception of what has happened along
our Service of Supplies over here in France since we really got busy.
So much for the glittering generalities--and Lawsie, how they do
glitter with the crusted diamond dust of endeavour and stupendous
accomplishment! Now for a few particularly brilliant outcroppings: There
is a certain port at present in our hands. For our purposes it is a
most important port--one of the most important of all the ports that the
French turned over to us. When our engineers set up shop there the port
facilities were very much as they had been when the Phoenicians
first laid them out, barring some comparatively modern improvements
subsequently tacked on by the Roman Emperors and still later by that
famous but somewhat disagreeable old lady, Anne of Brittany. There were
no steam cranes or electric hoists on the docks, and if there had been
they would have been of little value except for ornamental purposes,
seeing that by reason of harbourwise limitations ships of draft or of
size could not range alongside but must be lightered of their cargoes
at their mooring chains out in midchannel anywhere from half a mile to
a mile and a half off shore. Moreover, there was but one railroad track
running down to the water's edge. Even yet there are no steam cranes in
operation; both freight and men must be brought to land in lighters. But
mark you what man power plus brains plus necessity has accomplished in
the face of those structural obstacles and those mechanical drawbacks.
At the outset it was estimated by experts among our allies that possibly
we could land 20,000 troops and 6,000 tons of freight a month at this
port--if we kept nonunion hours and hustled. In one day in the early
part of the present summer 42,000 American soldiers were debarked and
ferried ashore with their portable equipment, and on another day of the
same week through one of the original French-built docks--not through
the whole row of them, but through one of the row--our stevedores
cleared 5,000 tons of freight. Five thousand tons in one day, when those
Continental wiseacres had calculated that by straining ourselves and by
employing to their utmost all the facilities provided by all the docks
in sight we might move 6,000 tons in a month! For this performance and
for so frequent duplication of it that now it has become commonplace and
matter-of-fact and quite in accordance with expectations, a great share
of the credit is due to thousands of brawny black American stevedores
drawn from the wharves of Boston, New York and Philadelphia, Galveston,
Savannah, New Orleans and Newport News. The victory that we are going to
win will not be an all-white victory by any manner of means.
Besides the physical limitations there were certain others, seeming
at first well-nigh insurmountable, which our military and civilian
executives had to meet and contend with and overcome. I mean the
Continental fashion of doing things--a system ponderously slow
and infinitely cumbersome. When a job is done according to native
requirements over here it is thoroughly done, as you may be quite
sure, and it will last for an age; but frequently the preceding age is
required to get it done. Europeans almost without exception are thrifty
and saving beyond any conceivable standards of ours, but they are
prodigals and they are spendthrifts when it comes down to expending what
in America we regard as the most precious commodity of all, and that
commodity is time. Some of our masters of frenzied finance could wreck a
bank in less time than it takes to cash a check in a French one.
Not even the exigencies and the sharp emergencies of wartime conditions
can cure a people, however adaptable and sprightly they may be in most
regards, of a system of thought and a system of habit that go back
as far as they themselves go as a civilised race. Here is a concrete
instance serving to show how at this same port that I have been talking
about the Continental system came into abrupt collision with the
American system and how the American system won out:
The admiral in command of the American naval forces centring at this
place received word that on a given day--to wit: three days from the
time the news was wirelessed to him--a convoy would bring to harbour
transports bearing about 50,000 Yank troopers. It would be the admiral's
task to see that the ships promptly were emptied of their passengers and
that the passengers were expeditiously and safely put upon solid land.
After this had been done it devolved upon the brigadier in command of
the land forces to quarter them in a rest camp until such time as they
would be dispatched up the line toward the Front.
The great movement of our soldiers overseas, which started in April and
which proceeds without noticeable abatement as I write this, was then in
midswing; and the rest camps in the neighbourhood were already crowded
to their most stretchable limits. Nevertheless the general must provide
livable accommodations for approximately 50,000 men somewhere in an
already overcrowded area--and he had less than seventy-two hours in
which to do it. He got busy; the members of his staff likewise got busy.
That same night he called into conference a functionary of the French
Government, in liaison service and detailed to cooperate with the
Americans or with the British in just such situations as the one that
had now risen. The official in question was zealous in the common
cause--as zealous as any man could be--but he could not cure himself of
thinking in the terms of the pattern his nation had followed in times of
peace.
“I must have a big rest camp ready by this time day after to-morrow,”
said, in effect, the American. “So I went out this afternoon with my
adjutant and some of my other officers and I found it.”
Briefly he described a suitable tract four or five miles from the town.
Then he went on: “How long do you think it would take for your engineers
to furnish me with a fairly complete working survey of that stretch,
including boundaries and the general topography with particular regards
to drainage and elevations?”
The Frenchman thought a minute, making mental calculations.
“From four to six weeks I should say,” he hazarded. “Not sooner than
four weeks surely.”
“I think I can beat that,” said the American.
He turned to his desk phone and called up another office in the same
building in which this conference was taking place--the office of his
chief engineer officer.
“Blank,” he said when he had secured connection, “how long will it take
you to give me the survey of that property we went over this afternoon?
You were to let me know by this evening.”
Back came the answer:
“By working all night, sir, I can hand it to you at noon to-morrow.”
“Are you sure I'll get it then?”
“Absolutely sure, sir.”
“Good,” said the general, and rang off. He faced the Frenchman.
“The survey will be ready at noon tomorrow,” he said. “Now, then, I want
arrangements made so that construction gangs can take possession of that
land in the morning early. They've got a good many thousand tents to set
up and some temporary shacks to build, and I'm going to sick 'em on the
job at daylight.”
“But what you ask is impossible, _mon général,_” expostulated the
Frenchman. “Days will be required--perhaps weeks. We must follow a
regular custom, else there will be legal complications. We must search
out the owners of the various parcels of land included in the area and
make separate terms with each of them for the use of his land by your
people.”
“And meanwhile what will those 50,000 soldiers that are due here inside
of seventy-two hours be doing?”
The Frenchman shrugged his shoulders. “Very well then,” said the
American. “Now here's what we must do: I want you please to get in
touch, right away, with your Minister of War at Paris and tell him
with my compliments that at daylight in the morning I am going to take
possession of that tract, and I want the sanction of his department for
my authority in taking the step. Afterward we'll settle with the owners
of the land for the ground rent and for the proper damages and for all
the rest of it. But now--with my compliments--tell the minister we've
got to have a little action.”
“But to write a letter and send it to Paris even by special courier, and
to have it read and to get a reply back, would take three days at the
very quickest,” the Frenchman replied.
“I'm not asking you to write any letters. I'm asking you to call up the
minister on the telephone--now, this minute, from this office, and over
this telephone.”
“But, my dear general, it is not customary to call a minister of the
government on the telephone to discuss anything. There is a procedure
for this sort of thing--a tradition, a precedent if you will.”
“We'll have to make a new precedent of our own then. Here's the
telephone. Suppose you get the minister on the wire and leave the
rest to me. I'll do the talking from this end--and I'll take the
responsibility.”
“But--but, general,” faltered the dum-founded Frenchman, “have you
thought of the question of water supply? There are no running streams
near your proposed site; there are no reservoirs. Of what use for me to
do as you wish and run the risk of annoying our Minister of War when you
have no water? And of course without water of what use is your camp?”
“Don't let that worry you,” said the American. “The water supply has all
been arranged for. In fact”--he glanced at his watch--“in fact you might
say that already it is being installed.”
“But--if you will pardon me--what you say is impossible!”
“Not at all; it's very simple. This town is full of vintners' places and
every vintner has--or rather he did have--a lot of those big empty wine
casks on hand. Well, I sent two of my officers out this afternoon and
bought every empty wine cask in this town. They rounded up 600 of them,
and there'll be more coming in from the surrounding country to-morrow
morning. I know there will be, because I've got men out scouting for
them, and at the price I'm willing to pay I'll have every spare wine
cask in this part of France delivered here to me by this time to-morrow.
But 600 was enough to start on. I've had 800 of them set up at handy
places over my camp site--had it done this evening--and at this moment
the other 300 are being loaded upon army trucks--six casks to a truck.
To-morrow morning the trucks will begin hauling water to fill the casks
now on the ground.”
It was as he had said. The minister was called up at night on the
telephone, and from him a very willing approval of the unprecedented
step in contemplation was secured. The water hauling started at dawn,
and so did the tent raising start. The survey was delivered at noon;
half an hour later American labour battalions were digging ditches for
kitchen drains and latrines, and in accordance with the contour of
the chosen spot a makeshift but serviceable sewerage system was being
installed. When the troops marched out to their camp in the late
afternoon of the second day following, their camp was there waiting for
them and their supper was ready.