THROUGH THE SCHOOL OF WAR
Clip the skyline from the Blue Ridge, arch it over with arboreal vistas
from the forests of the Oregon, reflect the two in the placid waters of
the Wisconsin--and you will have some conception of the perfect Eden of
beauty in which the first contingent of the American Expeditionary
Forces trained in France.
Beckoning white roads curl through the rolling hills like ribbons of
dental cream squeezed out evenly on rich green velour. Chateaux, pearl
white centres in settings of emerald green, push their turrets and
bastions above the mossy plush of the mountain side. Lazy little streams
silver the valleys with their aimless wanderings.
It was a peaceful looking garden of pastoral delight that United States
soldiers had picked out for their martial training ground. It was a
section whose physical appearance was untouched by the three years of
red riot and roar that still rumbled away just a few miles to the north.
The training area was located in the Vosges, in east central France. By
train, it was a nine-hour day trip from Paris. It was located about an
hour's motor ride behind the front lines, which at that time were close
to the north of the cities of Nancy and Toul.
The troops were billeted in a string of small villages that comprised
one side of the letter V. French troops and instructing officers
occupied the other converging line of the letter. Between the two lines
was the area in which our men trained. Where the two lines converged
was the town of Gondercourt, the headquarters of Major General Seibert,
the Commander of the first American division in France.
The area had long since been stripped of male civilian population that
could be utilised for the French ranks. The war had taken the men and
the boys, but had left the old people and children to till the fields,
tend the cattle, prune the hedges and trim the roads.
With the advent of our troops, the restful scene began to change.
Treeless ridges carpeted with just enough green to veil the rocky
formation of the ground began to break out with a superficial rash of
the colour of fresh earth. In rows and circles, by angles and zigzags,
the training trenches began to take form daily under the pick and shovel
exercises of French and Americans working side by side.
Along the white roads, clay-coloured rectangles that moved evenly, like
brown caravans, represented the marching units of United States troops.
The columns of bluish-grey that passed them with shorter, quicker steps,
were companies of those tireless Frenchmen, who after almost three years
of the front line real thing, now played at a mimic war of make-believe,
with taller and heavier novitiates.
Those French troops were Alpine Chasseurs--the famous Blue Devils. They
wore dark blue caps, which resemble tam o'shanters, but are not. They
were proud of the distinction which their uniform gave them. They were
proud of their great fighting records. One single battalion of them
boasted that of the twenty-six officers who led it into the first fight
at the opening of the war, only four of them existed.
It was a great advantage for our men to train under such instructors.
Correspondents who had been along the fronts before America's entry
into the war, had a great respect for the soldierly capacity of these
same fighting Frenchmen; not only these sturdy young sons of France who
wore the uniform, but the older French soldiers--ranging in age from
forty to fifty-five years--who had been away to the fronts since the
very beginning of the war.
We had seen them many, many times. Miles upon miles of them, in the
motor trucks along the roads. Twenty of them rode in each truck. They
sat on two side benches facing the centre of the trucks. They were men
actually bent forward from the weight of the martial equipment strapped
to their bodies. They seemed to carry inordinate loads--knapsacks,
blanket roll, spare shoes, haversacks, gas masks, water bottles,
ammunition belts, grenade aprons, rifle, bayonet and helmet.
Many of them were very old men. They had thick black eyebrows and wore
long black beards. They were tired, weary men. We had seen them in the
camions, each man resting his head on the shoulder of the man seated
beside him. The dust of the journey turned their black beards grey. On
the front seat of the camion a sleepless one handled the wheel, while
beside him the relief driver slept on the seat.
Thus they had been seen, mile upon mile of them, thousand upon thousand
of them, moving ever up and down those roads that paralleled the six
hundred and fifty miles of front from Flanders to the Alps--moving
always. Thus they had been seen night and day, winter and summer, for
more than three long years, always trying to be at the place where the
enemy struck. The world knows and the world is thankful that they always
were there.
It was under such veteran instructors as these that our first Americans
in France trained, there, in the Vosges, in a garden spot of beauty, in
the province that boasts the birthplace of Jeanne d'Arc. On the few
leave days, many of our men, with permission, would absent themselves
from camp, and make short pilgrimages over the hills to the little town
of Domremy to visit the house in which the Maid of Orleans was born.
Our men were eager to learn. I observed them daily at their training
tasks. One day when they had progressed as far as the use of the New
French automatic rifles, I visited one of the ranges to witness the
firing.
Just under the crest of the hill was a row of rifle pits, four feet deep
in the slaty white rock. On the opposite hill, across the marshy hollow,
at a distance of two hundred yards, was a line of wooden targets,
painted white with black circles. Poised at intervals on the forward
edge of the pits were a number of automatic rifles of the type used by
the French army. An American soldier and a French soldier attended each
one, the former in the firing position and the latter instructing.
The rear bank of the pits was lined with French and American officers.
The order, "Commence firing," was given, and white spurts of rock dust
began dancing on the opposite hill, while splinters began to fly from
some of the wooden targets.
At one end of the firing trench a raw American recruit, who admitted
that he had never handled an automatic rifle before, flushed to his
hat-brim and gritted his teeth viciously as his shots, registering ten
feet above the targets, brought forth laughter and exclamations from the
French soldiers nearby. He rested on his gun long enough to ask an
interpreter what the Frenchmen were talking about.
"They say," the interpreter replied, "that you belong to the
anti-aircraft service."
The recruit tightened his grip on his rifle and lowered his aim with
better results. At the end of his first fifty shots he was placing one
in three on the target and the others were registering close in.
"Bravo!" came from a group of French officers at the other end of the
trench, where another American, older in the service, had signalised his
first experiences with the new firearm by landing thirty targets out of
thirty-four shots, and four of the targets were bull's-eyes. The French
instructors complimented him on the excellence of his marksmanship,
considering his acknowledged unfamiliarity with the weapon.
Further along the depression, in another set of opposing trenches and
targets, a row of French machine guns manned by young Americans, sprayed
lead with ear-splitting abandon, sometimes reaching the rate of five
hundred shots a minute. Even with such rapidity, the Americans
encountered no difficulties with the new pieces.
French veterans, who for three years had been using those same guns
against German targets, hovered over each piece, explaining in half
French and half English, and answering in the same mixture questions on
ways and means of getting the best results from the weapons.
Here a chasseur of the ranks would stop the firing of one American
squad, with a peremptory, "Regardez." He would proceed with pantomime
and more or less connected words, carrying the warning that firing in
such a manner would result in jamming the guns, a condition which would
be fatal in case the targets in the other trenches were charging upon
the guns.
Then he showed the correct procedure, and the Yanks, watchfully alert to
his every move, changed their method and signified their pleasure with
the expression of "Trays beans," and "Mercy's."
"Do you think it would have resulted in a quicker and possibly more
understanding training if these Americans were instructed by British
veterans instead of French?" I asked an American Staff Officer, who was
observing the demonstration.
"I may have thought so at first," the officer replied, "but not now. The
explanations which our men in the ranks are receiving from the French
soldiers in the ranks are more than word instructions. They are object
lessons in which gesticulation and pantomime are used to act out the
movement or subject under discussion.
"The French are great actors, and I find that American soldiers
unacquainted with the French language are able to understand the French
soldiers who are unacquainted with the English language much better than
the American officers, similarly handicapped, can understand the French
officers.
"I should say that some time would be lost if all of our troops were to
be trained by French soldiers, but I believe that this division under
French tutelage will be better able to teach the new tactics to the new
divisions that are to follow than it would be if it had speedily passed
through training camps like the British system, for instance, where it
must be taken for granted that verbal, instead of actual, instruction is
the means of producing a speeding up of training."
Thus it was that our first American contingent in France was in training
for something more than service on the line. It rapidly qualified into
an expert corps from which large numbers of capable American instructors
were later withdrawn and used for the training of our millions of men
that followed.
This achievement was only accomplished by the exercise of strict
disciplinarian measures by every American officer in the then small
expedition. One day, in the early part of August, 1917, a whirlwind
swept through the string of French villages where the first contingent
was training.
The whirlwind came down the main road in a cloud of dust. It sped on the
fleeting tires of a high-powered motor which flew from its dust-grey
hood a red flag with two white stars. It blew into the villages and out,
through the billets and cook tents, mess halls, and picket lines. The
whirlwind was John J. Pershing.
The commander-in-chief "hit" the training area early in the morning and
his coming was unannounced. Before evening he had completed a stern
inspection which had left only one impression in the minds of the
inspected, and that impression was to the effect that more snap and pep,
more sharpness and keenness were needed.
At the conclusion of the inspection all of the officers of the
contingent were agreeing that the whirlwind visitation was just what had
been needed to arouse the mettle and spirit in an organisation comprised
of over fifty per cent. raw recruits. Many of the officers themselves
had been included in the pointed criticisms which the commander directed
against the persons and things that met disfavour in his eyes.
The night following that inspection or "raid," as it was called, it
would have been safe to say that nowhere in the area was there a recruit
who did not know, in a manner that he would not forget, the correct
position of a soldier--the precise, stiff, snappy attitude to be
presented when called to attention. The enlisted men whose heels did not
click when they met, whose shoulders slouched, whose chins missed the
proper angle, whose eyes were not "front" during the inspection,
underwent embarrassing penalties, calculated to make them remember.
"Have this man fall out," General Pershing directed, as he stood before
a recruit whose attitude appeared sloppy; "teach him the position of a
soldier and have him stand at attention for five minutes."
One company which had prided itself upon having some of the best
embryonic bomb-throwers in the contingent, contributed a number of
victims to the above penalties, and as the General's train of
automobiles swirled out of the village, the main street seemed to be
dotted with silent khaki-clad statues doing their five minute sentences
of rigidity.
"What about your men's shoes?" General Pershing asked a captain sharply,
while he directed his eyes along a company line of feet whose casings
seemed to be approaching the shabby.
"We need hobnails, sir," replied the captain.
"Get them"--the words snapped out from beneath Pershing's close-cropped
grey moustache. "Requisition hobnails. Your men need them. Get them from
the quartermaster."
The American commander stepped into the darkness of a large stone-walled
stable, which represented the billeting accommodations for ten American
soldiers. A dog curled in the doorway growled and showed its teeth. The
General stepped past the menacing animal, and without heeding its snarls
close to his heels, started questioning the sergeants in charge.
"Are any cattle kept in here?" he asked.
"No, sir," replied the sergeant.
"Detail more men with brooms and have it aired thoroughly every day."
Observed from a distance, when he was speaking with battalion and
regimental commanders, the commander manifested no change of attitude
from that which marked his whole inspection. He frequently employed his
characteristic gesture of emphasis--the wadding of his left palm with
his right fist or the energetic opening and closing of the right hand.
When the Pershing whirlwind sped out of the training area that night,
after the first American inspection in France, it left behind it a
thorough realisation of the sternness of the work which was ahead of our
army.
The development of a rigid discipline was the American commander's first
objective in the training schedules which he ordered his staff to
devise. After this schedule had been in operation not ten days, I
happened to witness a demonstration of American discipline which might
be compared to an improved incident of Damocles dining under the
suspended sword at the feast of Dionysius.
A battalion of American Infantry was at practice on one of the training
fields. The grenade-throwing exercises had been concluded and the order
had been given to "fall in" preparatory to the march back to the camp.
Upon the formation of the long company lines, end on end down the side
of the hill, the order, "attention," was sharply shouted bringing the
men to the rigid pose which permits the eyes to wander neither to the
right nor to the left, above nor below, but straightforward.
As the thousand men stood there, rigid and silent, a sudden disturbance
took place in the sky above them. Shells began exploding up there. At
the same time the men in the ranks could distinctly hear the whirr and
the hum of aeroplane motors above them.
Almost every day reports had been received that German planes had evaded
the Allied aerial patrols along the front and had made long flights
behind our lines for the dual purposes of observing and bombing.
As the American battalion stood stiff and motionless, I knew that the
thought was passing through the minds of every man there that here, at
last, was the expected visitation of the German flyers and that a
terrific bomb from above would be the next event on the programme. The
men recognised the reports of the anti-aircraft guns blazing away, and
the sound of the motors suggested a close range target.
The sound seemed to indicate that the planes were flying low. The
American ranks knew that something was going on immediately above them.
They did not know what it was, but it seems needless to state that they
wanted to know. Still the ranks stood as stiff as rows of clay-coloured
statues.
An almost irresistible impulse to look upward, a strong instinctive
urging to see the danger that impended, and the stern regulations of
"eyes front" that goes with the command "attention," comprised the
elements of conflict that went on in each of the thousand heads in that
battalion line.
In front of each platoon, the lieutenants and captains stood with the
same rigid eyes front facing the men. If one of the company officers had
relaxed to the extent of taking one fleeting upward glance, it is
doubtful whether the men could have further resisted the same
inclination, but not a man shifted his gaze from the direction
prescribed by the last command.
One plane passed closely overhead and nothing happened. Three more
followed and still no bombs fell, and then the tense incident was closed
by the calling out of the order of the march and, in squads of four, the
battalion wheeled into the road and marched back to billets.
As one company went by singing (talking was permitted upon the freedom
of routstep), I heard one of the men say that he had thought all along
that the officers would not have made them stand there at attention if
the danger had not been over.
"As far as I knew, it was over," a comrade added. "It was right over my
head." And in this light manner the men forgot the incident as they
resumed their marching song.
When Mr. W. Hollenzollern of Potsdam put singing lessons in the
curriculum of his soldiers' training, a tremor of military giggling was
heard around the world. But in August, 1914, when Mars smiled at the
sight of those same soldiers, marching across the frontiers east, south
and west, under their throaty barrage of "Deutschland, Deutschland, Ueber
Alles," the derisive giggles completely died out. It immediately became
a case of he who laughs first, lives to yodel.
The American forces then in training took advantage of this. They not
only began to sing as they trained, but they actually began to be
trained to sing. Numerous company commanders who had held strong
opinions against this vocal soldiering, changed their minds and
expressed the new found conviction that the day was past when singing
armies could be compared solely with male coryphees who hold positions
well down stage and clink empty flagons of brown October ale.
"It's a great idea," a company commander told me. "We learned it from
the Blue Devils. They are the toughest set of undersized gentry that I
have run into in France. They have forearms as big as three-inch shells,
and as hard. Their favourite pastime is juggling hand-grenades that
can't possibly explode unless they just lightly touch one another.
"Yesterday we watched them, bared to the waist, as they went through
three hours of grenade and bombing practice that was the last word in
strenuosity. Keeping up with their exercises was hard work for our men,
whose arms soon began to ache from the unaccustomed, overhand heaving.
"Then we watched them as their commander assembled them for the march
back to the village. At the command, 'attention,' their heels clicked,
their heads went back, their chins up and their right hands were pasted
rigidly against their right trouser leg.
"At the command 'march' all of them started off, punctuating their first
step with the first word of their marching song. It was not any sickly
chorus either. There was plenty of beef and lung power behind every
note. My men lined up opposite were not missing a bit of it. Most of
them seemed to know what was expected when I said:
"'On the command of "march," the company will begin to sing, keeping
step with the song. The first sergeant will announce the song.'
"My first sergeant responded without a change of colour as if the
command to sing had been an old regulation. I knew that he was puzzled,
but he did it well. The name of the song chosen was passed down the line
from man to man.
"When I gave the command to march, the company, almost half of them new
recruits, wheeled in squads of fours, and started off down the road
singing, 'Hail, Hail, the Gang's All Here.' There were some who were
kind of weak on the effort, but there was a noticeable crescendo when
the sergeant passed the word down the squad that the company would be
kept marching until everybody had joined in the singing.
"We swung into camp that night with every voice raising lustily on 'One
Grasshopper Hopped Right Over Another Grasshopper's Back,' and after
dinner the billets just sprouted melody, everything from ragtime to
Christmas carols and baby lullabies."
One noticeable characteristic about our soldiers during that training
period before they had come in contact with the enemy, was a total
absence of violent antipathy toward all persons and things Teutonic.
On the march the men then sang "We'll Hang the Damned Old Kaiser to a
Sour Apple Tree," but at that time I never heard any parodies on the
"Gott Straffe Germany" theme. Our soldiers were of so many different
nationalistic extractions and they had been thrown together for so short
a time, that as yet no especial hatred of the enemy had developed.
An illustration of this very subject and also the manner in which our
boys got along with the civilian populations of the towns they occupied
came to my notice.
A driving rain which filled the valley with mist and made the hills look
like mountain tops projecting above the clouds, had resulted in the
abandonment of the usual daily drills. The men had spent the day in
billets writing letters home, hearing indoor lectures from instructors,
playing with the French children in the cottage doorways, or taking
lessons in French from the peasant girls, whose eyes were inspirations
to the dullest pupils.
I spent several hours in a company commander's quarters while he
censored letters which the men had submitted for transmission back home.
The Captain looked long at a letter in his hand, smiled and called for
his orderly.
"Tell Private Blank I want to see him here right away," were the
Captain's instructions. Blank's name was not quite so German as
Sourkraut, but it had a "berger" ending that was reminiscent of beer,
pretzels and wooden shoes.
"Here's a letter written in German," said the Captain to me, referring
to the open missive. "It's addressed to somebody by the same name as
Blank, and I presume it is to some one in his family. Blank is one of
the best men in my company, and I know that the letter is harmless, but
it is impossible for me to pass it when written in an enemy language."
The door opened and a tall, blonde enlisted man stepped in, shaking the
rain from his hat. He stood at respectful attention, saluted and said:
"Did the Captain wish to see me?"
"Yes, Blank, it is about this letter written in German," the Captain
replied. "Who is it addressed to?"
"My father, in Cincinnati, sir," Blank replied.
"I am unfamiliar with German," the Captain said. "I notice the letter is
brief. Is there anything in it which the company has been ordered to
omit mentioning?"
"No, sir," Blank replied.
"Will you translate it for me?" the Captain asked.
"Yes, sir," said Blank, with just a bare suggestion of a blush. Then he
read as follows:
"Dear Father: I am in good health. Food is good and we are learning
much. I am becoming an expert grenadier. In this village where we
are billeted there is a French girl named Germain. Before the war
she lived in northern France, near the German frontier, and she
speaks German. So it is possible for us to talk together. She fled
before the German troops reached her village. She lives here now
with her aunt.
"I carry water from a well for her and she has given me each day a
roll of fresh made butter for our mess. In the evening we sit on the
front seat of her uncle's small carriage, which is in the front
yard, and we imagine we are taking a drive, but of course there are
no horses. Her uncle's horses were taken by the army a long time
ago. She is very anxious to know all about America, and I have told
her all about you and mother and our home in Cincinnati.
"She asked me what I am going to do after the war, and I told her
that I would return to Cincinnati to help you at the store. She
cried because she said she did not know where she was going after
the war. Her father and two brothers have been killed and her aunt
and uncle are very old.
"I have some more to write to you about Germain later. But must stop
here because the Sergeants are assembling the men for indoor
instruction. Love to all. It is raining very hard. Your son, ----"
Blank's face seemed to redden as he hesitated over a postscript line at
the bottom of the page.
"This is nothing," he said. "I just asked father to ask mother to send
me one of the photographs I had taken on the day I enlisted."
"For Germain?" the Captain enquired, smilingly.
"Yes, sir," replied Blank.
"Why didn't you write this in English?" the Captain asked.
"My father reads only German," Blank replied.
Blank was instructed to rewrite his letter in English and address it to
some friend who could translate it into German for his father. As the
door closed on this American soldier of German extraction, I asked the
Captain, "Do you think Germain could stand for Blank's German name,
after all she has lost at the hands of the Germans?"
"She'll probably be wearing it proudly around Cincinnati within a year
after the war is over," the Captain replied.
It might be reassuring at this point to remark that girls in America
really have no occasion to fear that many of our soldiers will leave
their hearts in France. The French women are kind to them, help them in
their French lessons, and frequently feed them with home delicacies
unknown to the company mess stoves, but every American soldier overseas
seems to have that perfectly natural hankering to come back to the girls
he left behind.
The soldier mail addressed daily to mothers and sweethearts back in the
States ran far into the tons. The men were really homesick for their
American women folks. I was aware of this even before I witnessed the
reception given by our men to the first American nurses to reach the
other side.
The hospital unit to which they belonged had been transported into that
training area so quickly and so secretly that its presence there was
unknown for some time. I happened to locate it by chance.
Several of us correspondents seeking a change of diet from the
monotonous menu provided by the hard-working madam of our modest
hostelry, motored in a new direction, over roads that opened new vistas
in this picture book of the world.
Long straight avenues of towering trees whose foliage roofed the
roadways were sufficient to reanimate recollections of old masters of
brush realism. Ploughed fields veiled with the low-hanging mist of
evening time, and distant steeples of homely simplicity faintly glazed
by the last rays of the setting sun, reproduced the tones of "The
Angelus" with the over-generous hugeness of nature.
And there in that prettiest of French watering places--Vittel--we came
upon those first American nurses attached to the American Expeditionary
Forces. They told us that all they knew was the name of the place they
were in, that they were without maps and were not even aware of what
part of France they were located in.
It developed that the unit's motor transportation had not arrived and,
other automobiles being as scarce as German flags, communication with
the nearby camps had been almost non-existent. Orders had been received
from field headquarters and acknowledged, but its relation in distance
or direction to their whereabouts were shrouded in mystery. But not for
long.
Soon the word spread through the training area that American nurses had
a hospital in the same zone and some of the homesick Yanks began to make
threats of self-mutilation in order that they might be sent to that
hospital.
The hospital unit was soon followed by the arrival of numerous American
auxiliary organisations and the kindly activities of the workers as well
as their numbers became such as to cause the men to wonder what kind of
a war they were in.
I happened to meet an old top sergeant of the regular army, a man I had
known in Mexico, with the American Punitive Expedition. He had just
received a large bundle of newspapers from home and he was bringing
himself up-to-date on the news. I asked him what was happening back
home.
"Great things are going on in the States," he said, looking up from his
papers. "Here's one story in the newspaper that says the Y. M. C. A. is
sending over five hundred secretaries to tell us jokes and funny
stories. And here's another account about the Red Cross donating half a
million dollars to build recreation booths for us along the front. And
here's a story about a New York actor getting a committee of
entertainers together to come over and sing and dance for us. And down
in Philadelphia they're talking about collecting a million dollars to
build tabernacles along the front so's Billy Sunday can preach to us.
What I'm wondering about is, when in hell they're going to send the army
over."
But that was in the early fall of 1917, and as I write these lines now,
in the last days of 1918, I am aware and so is the world, that in all of
France nobody will ever ask that question again.
That army got there.