BEHIND THE LINES
The difficulty of describing the American organization behind the lines
in France lies in the fact that the story is nowhere near finished. The
end of the first year saw huge things done, but huger ones still in the
doing, and the complete and the incomplete so blended that there was
almost no point at which a finger could be laid and one might say: "They
have done this."
But at the end of the first year all the foundations were down and the
corner-stones named, and though much necessary secrecy still envelops
the actual facts, something at least can be told.
America could no more move direct from home to the line in the matter of
her supplies than she could in that of her men. And it was at her
intermediate stopping-point, in both cases, that her troubles lay. It
was, as Belloc put it, the problem of the hour-glass. Plenty of room at
both ends and plenty of material were invalidated by the little strait
between.
It was not a month from the time of the first landing of troops, in
June, 1917, before the wharfs of the ports chiefly used by incoming
American supplies were stacked high with unmoved cases.
The transportation men worked with might and main, but the Shipping
Board at home, under the goad of restless and anxious people, was
sending and sending the equipment to follow the men. And once landed,
the supplies found neither roof to cover them nor means to carry them
on.
This was the point at which General Pershing began to lament to
Washington over his scarcity of stevedores, and labor units, and soon
thereafter was the point at which he got them.
On September 14, 1917, W. W. Atterbury, vice-president of the
Pennsylvania Railroad, was appointed director-general of transportation
of the United States Expeditionary Force in France, and was given the
rank of brigadier-general. General Atterbury was already in France, and
had been offering such expert advice and assistance to General Pershing
as his civilian capacity would permit. With his appointment came the
announcement of others, giving him the assistance of many well-known
American railroad men.
When the First Division reached France it was discovered that it
required four tons of tonnage to provide for each man. That meant 80,000
tons for each division, which, in the figures of the railroad man, meant
eighty trains of 1,000 tons capacity for every division.
For the first 200,000 men in France, who formed the basis for the first
railroad reckoning, 800 trains were necessary.
Obviously, these trains could not be taken from the already burdened
French. Obviously, they could not tax further the trackage in France,
though the trains and engines shipped had essential measurements to
conform to the French road-beds, so that interchange was easy. Still
more obviously, the trains could not be made in this country and rolled
onto the decks of ships for transportation.
So that before the first soldier packed his first kit on his way to
camp the A. E. F. required railway-tracks, enormous reception-wharfs,
assembling-plants and factories, and arsenals and warehouses beyond
number.
The only things which America could buy in France were those which could
be grown there, by women and old men and children, and those which were
already made. The only continuing surplus product of France was big
guns, which resulted from their terrific specialization in
munition-plants during the war's first three years.
To find out what could legitimately be bought in France, and to buy it,
paying no more for it than could be avoided by wise purchasing, General
Pershing created a General Purchasing Board in Paris late in August.
This board had a general purchasing agent at its head, who was the
representative of the commander-in-chief, and he acted in concert with
similar boards of the other Allied armies. His further job was to
co-ordinate all the efforts of subordinate purchasing agents throughout
the army. The chief of each supply department and of the Red Cross and
the Y. M. C. A. named purchasing agents to act under this board.
It was not long till this board was supervising the spending of many
millions of dollars a month, which gives a fair estimate of what the
total expenditure, both at home and abroad, had to be.
As a case in point, a single branch of this board bought in France, the
first fortnight of November, 26,000 tons of tools and equipment, 4,000
tons of railway-ties, and 160 tons of cars. The cost was something over
$3,000,000. These purchases alone saved the total cargo space of 20
vessels of 1,600 tons each.
The General Purchasing Board adopted the price-fixing policy created at
Washington, in which it was aided by the shrewdest business heads among
the British and French authorities.
This board also had power to commandeer ships, when they had to--notably
in the case of bringing shipments of coal from England, where it was
fairly plentiful, to France, where there was almost none.
A second scheme for co-ordination put into effect by General Pershing
was a board at which heads of all army departments could meet and act
direct, without the necessity of going through the commander-in-chief.
When the quartermaster's department made its budgets, the co-ordination
department went over them and revised the estimates downward, or drafted
work or supplies from some other department with a surplus, or
redistributed within the quartermaster's stores, perhaps even granted
the first requests. But there was a vast saving throughout the army
zone.
The problem of America's "behind the lines," including as it did the
creating of every phase of transportation, from trackage to terminals,
and then providing the things to transport, not only for an army growing
into the millions, but for much of civilian France, was one which, all
wise observers said, was the greatest of the war. Just how staggering
were these difficulties must not be told till later, but surmises are
free. And the praise for overcoming them which poured from British and
French onlookers had the value and authority of coming from men who had
themselves been through like crises, and who knew every obstacle in the
way of the Americans.
But if the preparatory stages must be abridged in the telling, there is
no ban on a little expansiveness as to what was finally done.
Within a year American engineers and laborers and civilians working
behind the lines had made of the waste lands around an old French port a
line of modern docks where sixteen heavy cargo-vessels could rest at the
same time, being unloaded from both sides at once at high speed, by the
help of lighters. These docks were made by a big American pile-driver,
which in less than a year had driven 30,000 piles into the marshy ooze,
and made a foundation for enormous docks.
Just behind the docks is a plexus of railway-lines which, what with
incoming and outgoing tracks and switches and side-lines, contains 200
miles of trackage in the terminal alone.
It is for the present no German's business how many hundred miles of
double and triple track lead back to the fighting-line, and it is the
censor's rule that one must tell nothing a German shouldn't know. But
there is plenty of track, figures or no figures.
Equal preparation has been made for such supplies as must remain
temporarily at the docks.
There are 150 warehouses, most of them completed, each 400 by 50 feet,
and each with steel walls and top and concrete floors. When the
warehouses are finished they will be able to hold supplies for an army
of a million men for thirty days. They are supplemented by a giant
refrigerating-plant, with an enormous capacity, which is served by an
ice-making factory with an output of 500 tons daily, the whole ice
department being operated by a special "ice unit" of the army,
officially called Ice Plant Company 301. The ice department also has its
own refrigerator-cars for delivering its wares frozen to any part of
France.
To provide for gun appetites as abundantly as for human, an arsenal was
begun at the same point, which, when completed, will have cost a hundred
million dollars. This arsenal and ordnance-depot is being built by an
American firm, at the request of the French Mission in America, who
vetoed the American project to give the work to French contractors,
because of the man-shortage in France.
It has been built under the direct supervision of the War Department,
and was specifically planned so that it might in time, or case of need,
become one of the main munition-distribution centres for all the Allies.
Small arms and ammunition are stored and dispensed there, while big guns
go direct from French factories.
Regiments of mechanical and technical experts were constantly being
recruited in America for this work, and they were sent by the thousands
every month of the first year. Maintenance of the ordnance-base alone
requires 450 officers and 16,000 men.
Included in the arsenal and ordnance-depot are a gun-repair shop,
equipped to reline more than 800 guns a month, a carriage-repair plant
of large capacity, a motor-vehicle repair-shop, able to overhaul more
than 1,200 cars a month, a small-arms repair-shop, ready to deal with
58,000 small arms and machine-guns a month, a shop for the repair of
horse and infantry equipment, and a reloading-plant, capable of
reloading 100,000 artillery-cartridges each day.
The assembling-shops in connection with the railroad were built on a
commensurate scale. Even in an incomplete state one shop was able to
turn out twenty-odd freight-cars a day, of three different designs, and
at a neighboring point a plant for assembling the all-steel cars was
making one full train a day. The locomotives were assembled in still a
third place. This will have turned out 1,100 locomotives, built and
shipped flat from America, at the end of its present contract. Already a
third of this work has been done.
And there were, of course, the necessary number of roundhouses, and the
like, to complete the organization of the self-sufficient railroad.
Not far away was a tremendous assembling and repair plant for airplanes,
the operators of which had all been trained in the French factories, so
that they knew the planes to the last inner bolthead.
The last assembly-plant was far from least in picturesqueness. It was
for the construction, from numbered pieces shipped from Switzerland,
of 3,500 wooden barracks, each about 100 feet long by 20 wide, and of
double thickness for protection against French weather.
[Illustration: _Copyright by the Committee on Public Information._
U. S. locomotive-assembling yards in France.]
The most amusing of the incidental depots was called the Reclamation
Depot, at which the numerous articles collected on the battle-field by
special salvage units were overhauled and refurbished, or altered to
other uses. Nothing was too trifling to be accepted. The "old-clo' man"
of No Man's Land was responsible for an amazing amount of good material,
made at the Reclamation Depot from old belts, coat sleeves, and the
like. Many a good German helmet went back to the "square-heads" as
American bullets.
In the same American district there was a great artillery camp, with
remount stables, containing thousands of horses and mules. Under French
tutelage, the American veterinarians had learned to extract the bray
from the army mule, reducing his far-carrying silvery cry to a mere
wheeze, with which he could do no indiscreet informing of his presence
near the battle-lines. So the mule-hospital was one of the busiest spots
in the port.
A short distance from the port, the engineers built a 20,000-bed
hospital, the largest in existence, comprising hundreds of little
one-story structures, set in squares over huge grounds, so that every
room faced the out-of-doors.
Between the port and the hospital, and beyond the port along the coast,
were the rest-camps, the receiving-camps, and a huge separate camp for
the negro stevedores. Near enough to be convenient, but not for
sociability, were the camps for the German prisoners, who put in plenty
of hard licks in the great port-building.
Midway between all this activity at the coast and the training and
fighting activity at the fighting-line there was what figured on the
army charts as "Intermediate Section," whose commanders were responsible
for the daily averaging of supply and demand.
In the intermediate section, linked by rail, were the supplementary
training-camps, schools, base hospitals, rest-areas, engineering and
repair shops, tank-assembling plants, ordnance-dumps and repair-shops,
the chief storage for "spare parts," all machinery used in the army,
cold-storage plants, oil and petrol depots, the army bakeries, the
camouflage centre, and the forestry departments, busy with fuel for the
army and timber for the engineers.
The achievement of the first year was literally worthy of the unstinted
praise it received. And perhaps its finest attribute was that most of it
was permanent, and will remain, while France remains, as America's
supreme gift toward her post-war recovery.