Pershing's right-hand man--From the center of power to the
field--Radical measures for the Services of Supply--Our own
Goethals--Varied personnel united in discontent--Regulars and
experts--Harbord's two problems of construction and morale.
As President, Theodore Roosevelt had made Pershing a brigadier over
the heads of a small host of senior officers, and had likewise singled
out Sims, who was to command in European waters. When he was forming
his division, which destiny was not to allow him to lead in France,
he chose for one of his brigade commanders James G. Harbord, then a
major of regulars. Harbord was not a West Pointer; having begun his
army career as a private, his rank was not high for his years when we
entered the war. Had the competition of civil professions applied in
the army, it is safe to say that he would have been a major-general
already, and that some of the colonels who were his seniors would still
have been lieutenants. It is only instruction that one receives at West
Point or at any college; education is for the graduate to receive in
after life, a detail he sometimes neglects. Harbord educated himself
by study and observation in the leisure hours which army officers have
for the purpose.
One's first thought upon meeting him was to wonder why he should have
enlisted in the regulars. He seemed to be the type that would have
become in another environment a judge of the Supreme Court or the
president of a university. After one came to know him, it was evident
that he was in the army because he was naturally a soldier. He was also
to prove to be the kind of organizer who in civil life is a good mayor
of a great city or the efficient head of a large corporation.
As Chief of Staff of the A. E. F., he was Pershing's right-hand man for
our first ten months in France.
It was not long before observers began to appreciate that he was one
of the officers capable of "growing" with the growth of his task.
One of the acquirements of his self-education was lucid and concise
English, whether dictated to a stenographer or written on his little
folding typewriter. When you brought a question before him, there was
action, unfettered by qualifying verbiage. He did not "pass the buck"
to the other fellow, according to the habit which army regulations
and restrictions readily develop. When he went into Pershing's room,
adjoining his, with a bundle of papers, and returned with them signed,
there was finality. He could be tart as well as brief, in the face
of prolix and meandering reports or memoranda. "If this man really
had something to say," he remarked one day after he had read ten
typewritten pages, "I wonder how many more pages he would require."
Next to Pershing himself, Harbord was most familiar with the planning
and forming of an organization which would be equal to handling an
unprecedented problem, three thousand miles from home. That story about
the old quartermaster, who said that everything was going beautifully
until a war came along and ruined his organization, had a most palpable
application when a department which had carried on the routine of
supplying our small regular army had to design a service equal to our
demands in France. It was unequal to the task. A new and comprehensive
system which experience had demonstrated to be suited to our needs
divided the activities of the army into two territorial departments.
One, that of the zone of advance, running from the outskirts of our
training area in Lorraine to the front, was to have charge of the
fighting. The other was to see that the fighters reached the front
and were supplied when they arrived. His headquarters at Tours, the
Commanding General of the new Services of Supply--the "S. O. S.," as
the army knew it--was to be the head of a principality, of almost the
breadth of France itself, under the kingdom of Pershing.
[Illustration: MAP NO. 10
SERVICES OF SUPPLY. SHOWING PORTS AND RAILROAD COMMUNICATIONS.]
One day, when at last our long period of drill and preparation was
having the substantial result of making our pressure at the front felt
in earnest, Pershing said: "I'm going to send Harbord to troops, but
I shall have him back----" the plan being to have him back as Chief
of Staff, I understood. Harbord had his desire, the desire of every
soldier, for field service. A brigadier-general now, he was given
the brigade of Marines in place of Brigadier-General Doyen, who had
been invalided home, where he died, as the result of his hard service
in France. One week I saw him in the barracks building at Chaumont,
surrounded by hundreds of adjutants, in the direction of the whole,
and the next week I found him in charge of one part--but that a very
combatant part--of the whole: with no stenographer, but writing his
reports and orders on the little folding typewriter.
His new command required the tact of a man of the world as well as of a
soldier among soldiers. There are no better fighters than the Marines;
none prouder in their spirit of corps. The only Marine brigade in
France was not pleased at the thought of having a regular in command.
It wanted one of its own corps. Harbord had not been about among the
officers and men many times before the Marines were saying, "Well, if
we had to have an army man, we're glad we've got Harbord." By the time
they were fighting in Belleau Wood, they had put their globe insignia
on his collar, which he was proud to wear. He was adopted into the
Marines, while regular officers were saying that he had better make his
transfer official.
His record of the battle was a model of military reports, which did not
hesitate to acknowledge mistakes in detail, the point being that the
Marines won the wood. Promoted to be a major-general and to command the
2nd Division (which included the Marines), he led the race-horse 2nd in
the counter-offensive in the Château-Thierry operations, which was the
turn of the tide against the Germans. After this success the next step
for him seemed to be a corps command, and possibly the command of an
army, in the course of the rapid promotions that were due to care for
the immense forces now arriving in France. His division had only just
been relieved, when he received a hurry call to go to Chaumont. When
he arrived, Pershing looked him over to see how he had been standing
the strain of two months of severe fighting, after his ten months of
harassing strain as Chief of Staff. Harbord appeared fresh, and ready
for another year's hard work.
"Harbord, I'm going to send you down to straighten out things in the
S. O. S.," Pershing then told him....
"Well, you see what my general has done to me," Harbord remarked a few
hours later in an outburst to a friendly ear. "He's taken me away from
my division,--but," he added, "he's my general. He knows what he wants
me to do----" Then a toss of the head, and from that moment his thought
was concentrated on his new duties.
Things had been going badly in the Services of Supply. There was
congestion at the ports; construction work was not proceeding. In view
of the enormous demands which would arise when we should have two
million men, instead of the million we had planned, in the autumn, the
situation had suddenly become most serious. Washington, with our own
ports sensitive to delays at those on the other side of the Atlantic,
had about decided to send General Goethals to France to take charge
of the Services of Supply as a co-ordinate commander with General
Pershing. This was a radical departure. It meant two commanders in
France instead of one, directly responsible to Washington. Such divided
authority in such a crisis stirred the apprehension of every soldier
lest in a great crisis the fighting branch should not be supreme over
every other branch which served its will and necessities. The simplest
of military principles required that the commander of the forces at
the front must command the whole, or his fearful responsibility for
needless loss of life rested on inadequate authority.
Harbord, Pershing's right-hand man, was the counter to Washington's
suggestion; that major of cavalry, whom nobody knew in the days when
Goethals was building the Panama Canal, would prove that we already had
a Goethals of our own in France. Without going over the ground of the
pioneer stages of the Services of Supply, covered in my first book,
the requirement upon which all transport depended was construction.
We must enlarge the plant which France offered us for our needs. This
meant building new docks to accommodate the requisite shipping, webs
of spur tracks, immense areas of warehouses at the ports and others
inland to accommodate our supplies; plants for assembling our railroad
locomotives and cars brought from home; repair shops for them, and for
guns and gun carriages, ambulances and aeroplanes and automobiles,
motor trucks, and all other vehicular transport. More important still,
there must be repair shops for human beings--enormous hospitals for
caring for the sick and wounded, who might come by the hundreds of
thousands in a single month. Hospital trains must be ready for their
transport from the front. Enormous bakeries must provide hundreds of
thousands of loaves every day. There must be barracks for the nurses
and all the workers; barracks for the aviators and helpers who were
drilling; lighters for disembarking troops when they arrived; camps,
where they could spend the night ashore. Railroad sidings must enlarge
railroad capacity; more spur tracks must be built wherever we had
railheads at the front, and regulating stations which should dispatch
the trains to the railheads. Around quiet villages must arise temporary
cities of our building, connected with all the other activities in a
system which was punctual and dependable.
The S. O. S. had been arranged to meet the demands of an army in our
own sector. Its plan was disrupted by the switching of our troops
to Château-Thierry and Picardy to meet the German offensives. The
mobilization for Saint-Mihiel brought us back to our own sector. After
Saint-Mihiel came the Argonne concentration, called into being by the
hope of a speedy end of the war through one supreme effort by all the
Allies. Should our new troops, thrown in action without sufficient
preparation, and the veteran troops, thrown in without time for
recuperation after Château-Thierry and Saint-Mihiel, go without food
and ammunition, we might have a disaster. The wisdom of our insistence
that we could form and supply and fight an integral army, instead of
infiltrating our men into the British and French armies, was on trial.
Victory and our soldiers' lives were at stake.
The battle was to be fought not only against machine-gun nests, but in
the sweating effort of stevedores, of mechanics, and laborers, in the
roar of foundries, in the rattle of trains far from the sound of the
guns. For officer personnel in the S. O. S. we had first, of course,
the regulars, those of the old quartermaster department and of the
engineers, who would not ordinarily command troops, and those who could
be spared from the zone of advance where every able fighting officer
was required. These must be few, compared to the numbers of the whole.
Second, we had all the men in the thirties, forties, and fifties,
experts in every calling, who had come to France in their enthusiasm,
in answer to the summons, in the days when the thing was for every
man to serve in uniform in France. These were too old for combat,
even if they thought they were not. They could not stand the physical
hardship of the front, however brave their spirit. The S. O. S. was the
place for them. There, or in building the organization of supply at
home--which was primarily important--the nation could make the best use
of their training in civil life. Third were younger officers, from the
Guard or a training-camp, caught by the card-index system classifying
occupations, and separated from their regiments because they were
experts in some line of activity which was short of personnel in the S.
O. S. They knew how to fight; but their knowledge of something else,
their superiors thought, not they, was more useful to the nation.
For mechanics we had all the men skilled in trades at home who were as
ready to give up high wages for a soldier's pay, and to work double
union hours, as they would have been to stick tight in a fox-hole
against a counter-attack, if they had had the chance. These came
in their thousands, living under conditions far more miserable, in
contrast to their habits, than their officers--from railroad trains
and shops, bakeries, cement factories, contractors' firms, and every
industry on the list--the typical American army, which has made
industrial America.
For labor we had all we could pick up abroad: able-bodied German
prisoners, middle-aged and invalided French territorials, Senegambians,
Turcos, Belgians, Spaniards, Chinese, Annamites. From home we had,
aside from expert labor, chiefly the colored men, who had no rivals
in "rustling" cargo. At the docks their giant strength and their
good-natured team-play were supreme; but they were in evidence all the
way forward to the shelled roads which they were repairing back of the
front where their kinsmen had their place in line.
The feeling between the regulars and reserves, which I shall describe
in general terms elsewhere, was bound to be most acute in the S. O.
S. Suffice it to say for the present that it was a gospel with the
regulars that they should hold all the high commands in the S. O. S. as
well as at the front. It was granted that the regulars must be absolute
in the zone of advance, and all reserves their pupils or "plebes"; but
how was the manager of a great railroad, of a bakery, of a contracting
firm, a chemist, a civil engineer who had built tunnels and bridges, or
a business organizer, to feel that a regular officer was his superior
in his own line? The answer of the regular was that only he understood
how to coördinate all policy for military end,--the old, old answer
of the inner temple of mystery, from the days of the Egyptian priests
to the present. The regulars said, too: "How can we tell who is the
real expert? These big men from civil life are jealous of one another.
To appoint one over the heads of others would bring friction. We know
war. Supply is a part of war. And we shall keep matters in our own
hands----" and promotions, too, as the reserves might whisper.
A point which the regulars dwelt upon even more emphatically was that
the reserve officers did not know discipline and army forms. Some of
these reservists had directed thousands of men in organizations at
home, without knowing how to drill a company. In their experience,
building railroad yards and warehouses did not require military
etiquette. The men under them held even stronger convictions on the
subject. They were doing the same kind of work that they did at home,
and amid peaceful surroundings. If they were workmen and not soldiers,
why should they have to submit to all the distinctions between rank
and file? Must they salute every man with a gold bar who happened to
pass along, when he was no nearer the front than they? He was not
their boss. What mattered, except that they were "on the job"? Why
did not these officers pay more attention to getting the tools and
material whose lack hampered progress? The officers could only turn to
their seniors, who turned to other seniors, on through the channels of
authority, to the lack of shipping, and to the plants at home, where
the workmen were being driven equally hard, but did not have to wear
uniforms and crook elbows in salute. As for army forms, the reserve
officers were ready to comply with them if they could find that there
was any settled system; but army forms seemed to change to meet the
requirements, as the reservists sometimes thought, of delaying action,
when that suited a commanding officer's idea.
Meanwhile, why should the assistant to the chief baker be an
infantryman? Not that he wanted to be in the S. O. S.: he wanted to be
at the front. Was the baking of bread taught only in the army? For the
army, yes, thought the regulars. The complaints of the soldiers about
the quality of the bread, which were warrantable, seemed to indicate
that the regulars might have escaped blame by giving the responsibility
to a civilian baker. A reserve officer whose business was automobile
manufacture, serving in a repair shop under a cavalryman, did not deny
that the cavalryman knew how to lead a squadron in a charge, but did
he know about mending broken motor trucks? The civil engineer, who had
once executed a contract for five millions, as he reported to a young
West Point engineer who had been a lieutenant when we entered the war,
might ponder the difference between theory and practice. A regular
engineer lieutenant-colonel of twenty-nine said: "From what I have seen
of the eminent civil engineers, I should think that they ought to be my
subordinates." He was young; so was Napoleon at Marengo and Austerlitz.
Both were soldiers.
When reserve officers, because of their expertness, were given
authority, it did not mean that they were always able to exercise it.
One who came to France under the express condition that he was to
be supreme in his branch found that he was made a subordinate. What
could he do? Resign? Resign in time of war? There was another to whom
General Pershing said: "You go ahead. I give you carte blanche in
your work." One day he was called on the carpet by his regular senior
for acting on his own authority. "Who told you to do this?" asked the
superior.
"General Pershing!"
"Well, then you better report to him. You go tell him you have been
insubordinate, you haven't been doing things through channels, and see
what he says."
This was putting the Commander-in-Chief himself to the test of regular
loyalty.
"You tell that narrow-minded regular for me," said Pershing, "to leave
you alone."
This did not mean that the reserve officer was left alone. He could not
carry all his troubles to the busy Commander-in-Chief, as he struggled
against the system.
The reservists, both officers and the whole force of workers, were
not meeting as a rule the best class of regulars. A brigadier or a
colonel in the zone of advance, who was wearing himself out physically
and mentally, or who for less temporary reasons was not efficient,
was relegated to the rear, with the idea that he might be good
enough for the S. O. S. Yes, anything was good enough for the S. O.
S., thought its pestered, nerve-racked workers. Was that colonel or
brigadier, who had served his country for twenty or thirty years,
to be made subordinate to some railroad man, civil engineer, or
manufacturer, who had been in uniform only a few months? He might
be sent home; but surely not on the invitation of General Peyton C.
March, Chief of Staff in Washington, who had his own domestic problem
in derelicts without the further annoyance of importations. So the
colonel or the brigadier was cared for in the S. O. S., all the while
feeling keenly his humiliation at not having command of a regiment
or brigade in combat operations. If he were wise enough to serve his
country and keep his health, he only signed the papers turned in by
an energetic subordinate, be he regular or reserve; but if he were
mischievous in his insistence upon authority, he clogged the wheels of
organization,--which is not saying that he was not a worthy, honorable,
and agreeable gentleman, even if he were not of much service in
building a bridge or a warehouse in a hurry, or in forcing five days'
rations through to a division at the front. Considering these things,
and considering that every man tied to some humdrum task in the S. O.
S. wanted to be up under fire instead of one, two, or three hundred
miles away from the guns, it is not surprising that the spirit of corps
of the S. O. S. was not good. It was well that Harbord arrived in July;
or he might have been too late.