THE MEN WHO DID EVERYTHING
If the American Expeditionary Force had landed in the middle of the
Sahara Desert instead of France, it would not have been under greater
necessity to do things for itself, and immediately. For even where the
gallant French were entirely willing to pull their belts in one more
notch and make provision for the newcomers, the moral obligation not to
permit their further sacrifice was enormous. And although, as it
happened, there were many things, at first, in which the A. E. F. was
obliged to ask French aid, this number was speedily cut down and finally
obliterated.
The men on whom fell the largest burden of making American troops
self-sufficing in the first half-year of war, were the nine regiments of
engineers recruited in nine chief cities of America before General
Pershing sailed. They were officered to a certain extent by Regular Army
engineers, but more by railroad officials who were recruited at the
same time from all the large railroads of America.
And they operated what roads they found, and built more, till finally,
after a year, during which they had assistance from the army engineers
and a fair number of labor and special units, they had created in France
a railroad equal to any one of the middle-sized roads of long standing
in this country, with road-beds, rolling-stock, and equipment equal to
the best, and railway terminals which, in the case of one of their
number, rivalled the port of Hamburg.
These were the men who were first to arrive in Europe after General
Pershing, who beat them over by only a few days. They were not fighting
units, so that they did not dim the glory of the Regulars, though they
had the honor to carry the American army uniform first through the
streets of London.
They were the first of the army in the battle-line, too, though again
their civilian pursuit, though failing to serve to protect them against
German attack, deprived them of the flag-flying and jubilation that
attended the infantrymen and artillerymen in late October.
But though their public honor was so limited, their private honor with
the Expeditionary Force was without stint. It was "the engineers here"
and "the engineers there" till it must have seemed to them that they
were carrying the burden of the entire world.
On May 6, 1917, the War Department issued this statement: "The War
Department has sent out orders for the raising, as rapidly as possible,
of nine additional regiments of engineers which are destined to proceed
to France at the earliest possible moment, for work on the lines of
communication.... All details regarding the force will be given out as
fast as compatible with the best public interests."
The recruiting-points were New York, Chicago, St. Louis, Boston,
Pittsburgh, Detroit, Atlanta, San Francisco, and Philadelphia. It was
the job of each city to provide a regiment. And it became the job of the
great railway brotherhoods to see that neither the kind nor the number
of men accepted would cripple the railways at home.
The War Department asked for 12,000 men, and had offers of about four
times that many. The result was, of course, that the 9 regiments were
men of magnificent physique and sterling equipment. One regiment boasted
125 members who measured more than 6 feet.
Their first official task was to help to repair and man the French
railways leading up to the lines, carrying food for men and guns.
Their next was to build and man the railways which were to connect the
American seaport with the training-camps, and last, with the
fighting-line itself.
The promise of immediate action in France was fulfilled to the letter.
Two months from the day the recruiting began, the "Lucky 13th," the
regiment recruited in Chicago, landed in a far-away French town, whose
inhabitants leaned out of their windows in the late, still night, to
throw them roses and whispers of good cheer--anything louder than
whispers being under a ban because of the nearness to the front--and the
day following, with French crews at their elbows, they were running
French trains up and down the last line of communications.
These were men who had years of railroading behind them. Many of them
were officered by the same men who had been their directors in civil
life. It was no uncommon thing to hear a private address his captain by
his first name. One day a private said to his captain. "Bill, you got
all the wrong dope on this," to which the captain replied severely: "I
told you before about this discipline--if you want to quarrel with my
orders, you call me mister."
But military discipline was never a real love with the engineers.
"What's military discipline to us? We got Rock Island discipline," said
a brawny first lieutenant, when, because he was a fellow passenger on a
train with a correspondent, he felt free to speak his mind.
"I won't say it's not all right in its way, but it's not a patch on what
we have in a big yard. A man obeys in his sleep, for he knows if he
don't somebody's life may have to pay for it--not his own, either, which
would make it worse. That's Rock Island. But it don't involve any
salutin', or 'if-you-pleasin'.' If my fellows say 'Tom' I don't pay any
attention, unless there's some officer around."
This attitude toward discipline characterizes all the special units to a
certain degree, though the engineers somewhat more than the rest, for
the reason that they had to offer not a mere negation of discipline but
a substitute of their own.
But, whatever their sentiments toward their incidental job as soldiers,
there was no mistaking their zest for their regular job of railroading.
They found the railways of France in amazingly fine condition, in spite
of the fact that they had, many of them, been built purely for war uses,
and under the pressure inevitable in such work. Those behind the British
lines were equally fine.
As soon as the American engineers appeared in the communication-trains,
their troubles with the Germans began. On the second run of the "Lucky
13th" men, a German airplane swept down and flew directly over the
engine for twenty minutes, taking strict account.
Then they began to bomb the trains, and many a time the crews had to get
out and sit under the trains till the raid was over.
The engineers kept their non-combatant character till after the December
British thrust at Cambrai, when half a hundred of them, working with
their picks and shovels behind the lines, suddenly found themselves face
to face with German counter-attacking troops, and had to fight or run.
The engineers snatched up rifles and such weapons as they could from
fallen soldiers, and with these and their shovels helped the British to
hold their line.
The incident was one of the most brilliant of the year, partly because
it was dramatically unexpected, partly because it permitted the
Americans to prove their readiness to fight, in whatever circumstances.
The spectacle of fifty peaceful engineers suddenly turned warriors of
pick and shovel was used by the journals of many countries to
demonstrate what manner of men the Americans were.
But the work for British and French, on their strategic railways, was
not to continue for long. The great American colony was already on
blue-print, and the despatches from Washington were estimating that many
millions would have to be spent for the work.
The annual report of Major-General William Black, chief of engineers,
which was made public in December, stated that almost a billion would
be needed for engineering work in France in 1919, if the work then in
progress were to be concluded satisfactorily.
General Black's report showed that equipment for 70 divisions, or
approximately 1,000,000 men, had been purchased within 350 hours after
Congress declared war, including nearly 9,000,000 articles, among them 4
miles of pontoon bridges.
Every unit sent to France took its full equipment along, and the cost of
the "railroad engineers" alone was more than $12,000,000.
Not long after the men were running the French and British trains, they
were building their lines in Flanders, in the interims of building the
American lines from sea to camp.
The building was through, and over, such mud as passes description. The
engineers tell a story of having passed a hat on a road, and on picking
it up, found that there was a soldier under it. They dug him out. "But I
was on horseback," the soldier protested.
The tracks were rather floated than built. Where the shell fire was
heavy, the men could only work a few hours each day, under barrage of
artillery or darkness, and they were soon making speed records.
"The fight against the morass is as stern and difficult as the fight
against the Boche," said an engineer, speaking of the Flanders tracks.
One party of men, in an exposed position, laid 180 feet of track in a
record time, and left the other half of the job till the following day.
When they came back, they found that their work had been riddled with
shell-holes, whereat they fell to and finished the other half and
repaired the first half in the same time as had starred them on the
first day's job.
It was not long till they had a European reputation.
The tracks they were to lay for America, though they were far enough
from the Flanders mud, had a sort of their own to offer. The terminal
was built by tremendous preliminaries with the suction-dredge. The long
lines of communication between camp and sea were varyingly difficult,
some of them offering nothing to speak of, some of them abominable. The
little spur railways leading to the hospitals, warehouses, and
subsidiary training-camps which lay afield from the main line were more
quickly done.
In addition to all these things, the engineers were the handy men of
France. They picked up some of the versatility of the Regular Army
engineers, whose accomplishments are never numbered, and they built
hospitals and barracks, too, in spare time, and they laid waterways, and
helped out in General Pershing's scheme to put the inland waterways of
France to work. The canal system was finally used to carry all sorts of
stores into the interior of France, and before the engineers were
finished the army was getting its goods by rail, by motor, and by boat,
though it was not till late in the year that the transportation
machinery could avoid great jams at the port.
The engineers were, from first to last, the most picturesque Americans
in France. They came from the great yards and terminals of East and
West, they brought their behavior, their peculiar flavor of speech, and
their efficiency with them, and they refused to lose any of them, no
matter what the outside pressure.
"It's a great life," said one of them from the Far West, "and I may say
it's a blamed sight harder than shooing hoboes off the cars back home.
But there's times when I could do with a sight of the missus and the
kids and the Ford. If it takes us long to lick 'em, it won't be my
fault."