Depending on Tours--The "front-sick" S. O. S.--Harbord not
"Bloisé"--Getting his men together--Building morale--Troops as
freight--Brest to the front--Construction figures--Atterybury's
job--Sorting supplies at Gièvres--Hospitals and the product of
war--Feeding the front from Is-sur-Tille--The point of the wedge at
the railheads.
If one division at the front knew little of what another division was
doing, how much less its men knew of what was doing in the capital
of the Services of Supply at Tours, that ancient city in the center
of France. Grand Headquarters in the town of Chaumont, and Army
Headquarters in the village of Souilly, were relatively small office
affairs, compared to Tours.
In place of tables of barrages, maps of trench sectors, photographs of
combat areas, reports of hills and villages and lines of resistance
taken, and the examination of prisoners, which formed the staple
routine of a combat headquarters, there were tables of the daily amount
of tonnage and the number of troops disembarked, maps of transportation
systems and railroad yards, photographs of half-finished quays and
vast piles of cargo, blue prints of the plans of a network of tracks
running up to the doors of hospitals and warehouses, and reports from
foresters getting out timber, from commanders of base sections and
regulating stations.
One thing, however, Tours, Chaumont, and Souilly, and every other
headquarters had in common. That was the call for more guns, rifles,
clothing, shoes, machine-guns, ammunition, engineering tools, balloons,
aeroplanes, ambulances, automobiles, motor-trucks, and other material,
which was passed on from Souilly to Chaumont, from Chaumont to Tours,
and then home. "We are sending them," home responded.
"But hurry!" Tours cried.
"Clear your ports," home replied.
"Stop wasting space! Fully load your ships," said Tours. "Equip the
troops in the way we ask! Send things in the order we ask! Put them
aboard with some kind of classification. Don't throw steel beams on top
of automobile parts and chemical apparatus! Pack your sugar and flour
in bags that don't tear open."
If there had been a long-distance telephone across the Atlantic, steam
might have risen to the surface from the scorching messages; but the
wires we had stretched from Paris to Chaumont and to Tours and to
the coast were used with a prodigality which was an evidence of the
distrust of our own postal system.
The barracks that had been turned into offices at Tours had office
space equivalent to that of a New York "sky-scraper" or of the Army and
Navy Building in Washington. A private was as distinguished a person in
the streets of Tours as in the streets of Washington. Nowhere, not even
in the ordnance department at home, were more leather puttees and boots
with spurs circulating between offices to maintain _liaison_ between
the combat units and the business end of war than at the general
offices of that huge corporation at Tours. The officers worked hard
all day without feeling that they had accomplished anything like as
much as they would have in their own occupation at home. They wondered
sometimes why so many of them were there. Everyone was thinking how
to secure material and labor, and everyone had a sense of struggling
with his hands tied behind his back against walls of cotton wool. There
was a pitiful look in their eyes as they stood before their senior
officers, pleading for a chance to go to the front and fight. Was this
sitting at your desk in your spurs going to war in France?
"Mother, take down your service flag, your son's in the S. O. S.," was
the subject of a popular army song in France.
Not far from Tours was Blois--we shall have more to say about it--where
officers whose seniors reported them unsatisfactory were re-classified
and re-assigned. It was the channel of passage from the front to the
S. O. S., and for officers in one branch of the S. O. S. who might do
better in another. The danger of being sent to Blois was a shadow over
every mind.
Where the fighters were "homesick," the able-bodied workers in the S.
O. S. were "front-sick" and "heart sick." All their selfish interest
centered in escaping the misfortune of having to return home without
having heard a shot fired. If they did not do well, there was no chance
of their reaching the front; if they did well, they became invaluable
to a senior who refused to let them go. Their restlessness and their
feeling of general helplessness in fits of despondency led to a few
cases of suicide.
When Harbord came to Tours, it was not by the way of Blois. He was no
major-general of engineers or of the Q. M. C. who, however specially
capable for his task, had not been in combat service. Here was
Pershing's favorite adjutant, fresh from victories in the field, come
back from the limelight at the front to help "count the beans and
rustle freight." This of itself gave him a prestige that affected the
state of mind of the whole organization. He must be a man of action;
and the S. O. S. wanted action. He knew his regulars and his reserves,
and Headquarters at Chaumont, and the needs of the army from ship's
hold to the fox-holes. The business men in uniform, with U. S. R. on
their collars, did not care whether or not their chief was a Catholic
or a Presbyterian. A regular or a reserve? Was he the man?
He found the S. O. S. working in a series of compartments rather
than departments. Though each was most conscientiously striving for
coördination, different chiefs were in a mood that meant friction.
Projects whose immediate completion was vital were not as far along as
those whose completion could wait. Many were being constructed on too
elaborate and lavish a scale by chiefs who had won a disproportionate
amount of authority to carry out their ideas. They were enjoying the
building of a plant that would last for twenty years, when the war
might be won in another six months. Harbord did what Pershing would
have done if the C.-in-C. had come to Tours; he was Pershing's man, as
he had said. He grasped his problem, made his plan, and then set his
adjutants to driving.
"The first time I went in to see Harbord," said one of them, "I knew
that he knew his own mind, and that he was going to tell me what to do;
and that I was going out to do it with the confidence that he would
back me up. His 'no' to my suggestions was as convincing as his 'yes'
that we were to have team-play--and that he was master."
His faculty of drawing men together was put in full play in some of
the obvious methods of leadership which had been somewhat neglected
in the S. O. S., where there had evidently been a policy that if you
honestly follow the regulations all will come out well in the end.
All the chiefs gathered at his house once a week for luncheon, where
they found one another to be human. Instead of remaining at Tours,
he left routine to his Chief of Staff, and spent three nights out of
four on his railroad car in going and coming, with his office on board
always in touch with Tours, while his inspections kept him informed of
progress and aroused the enthusiasm of subordinates. The feeling passed
that you were derelict if fate sent you to work in the S. O. S. The S.
O. S. began to have the fighting spirit of corps of the front--that
of an ambitious business concern. Harbord had not been a week in
command before the S. O. S. was feeling a new force emanating from
headquarters. They were calling to the fighters: "We're with you. Take
more prisoners, so that we can set them to work. It means more supplies
for you." That new commander who now had under him more than four
hundred thousand men, and activities exceeding those of the largest
of our trusts, would make every worker feel that he was contributing
his part, not for his wage envelope, but for winning the war which had
brought him to France.
Our cargo was now flowing into every one of the ports of France south
of Cherbourg, and overflowing into Marseilles in the Mediterranean
too. The less that had to go to Marseilles, the more shipping time
would be saved from the longer trip through the Strait of Gibraltar. We
Americans like competition. The different Atlantic ports were started
on a "race to Berlin" unloading contest; the stevedores of the port
which won would be the first to go home. No Americans in France were
more homesick than our colored men. When one was asked whether he would
rather work at Bordeaux than at Saint-Nazaire, he replied: "Is Bordeaux
any nearer home?" The "rustling" of cargo now became a game in which
joyous calls were heard in common urging against any shirking which
might delay the return of the workers to the levees and the cotton
fields of their own southland. In tune with the Herculean mechanical
effort of the giant American cranes, their Herculean muscular effort
in its impetuosity was in imminent danger of removing the stanchions
from the ships as well as the cargo. A British skipper who thought
that he would be two days in unloading, and found that only one day
was required, returned home to say that he was lucky to escape without
having his ship's plates torn off and started toward the front. When
bags of sugar were piled so high on one dock that several tons went
through the floor into the water, it was a tragedy to people on sugar
rations at home and to the sugar-hungry men at the front, but in the
fever of effort to win the war by supplying two million men with
their requirements for battle it was only an incident of the wicked
extravagance of war, which led one of the stevedores to say that the
sugar must count in the record as cargo discharged, while he did not
think that it would make that old sea that had made him seasick so much
sweeter that you would notice it.
The impetus which the coming of Harbord gave to the S. O. S. implies no
criticism of past accomplishment. His business was to "go through," as
it had been at Belleau Wood and in the counter-offensive. An unfinished
plant, preparing for an offensive in the spring of 1919, must be made
equal to one in the fall of 1918. There had never been any lack of
energy in the S. O. S. This was guaranteed by our national character,
under the whip of war. All the while we had been making progress.
The feeling of helplessness on the part of the workers had been due
to ambition thwarted in gaining the full results of the supreme
efforts which they were eager to exert. There had been no cessation of
building; no cessation in striving to find in Europe every available
article which would save transport, without reference to the cost--cost
being the one thing that never made us hesitate. Every man accepted
the idea that all the money in the world was ours.
There was already an end to the confusion of the early days when the
parts of a piece of machinery arrived on different ships. Tables of
priority for each month were sent ahead to Washington, which might
well think that the A. E. F. considered that the War Department had
the magical power of pulling anything that it required out of a hat.
Instead of sending his requisitions for material through Chaumont,
Harbord now sent them direct to the War Department; he was the great
administrative agent for the chief of G-4 at Chaumont, who coördinated
combat and supply, holding the balance between the demands of the front
and the wherewithal to meet them. There was increasing coördination at
home, too, under the indomitable authority of General March.
The wedges which our divisions were driving down the walls of the Aire
and the Meuse rivers and against the Kriemhilde Stellung were only a
part of the giant wedge of the supply system, with its bases as broad
as the United States, which narrowed to the breadth of the Atlantic
Coast of France from Brest to Bordeaux. Most of our troops arrived at
Brest, where the harbor was deep enough for the draught of the mighty
German liners which had been transformed into transports. Navy blue
and army khaki swarmed on the docks where our sea and land forces met.
Our destroyers sped out of the harbor to disappear on the horizon, and
reappear as the protective scurrying guards of the transports which
they brought safe into port before they slipped out to sea again, to
see more freighters safe through the submarine zone under their agile
husbanding.
During the height of that transatlantic excursion season of ours the
men on board slept in three shifts of eight hours each; they had two
meals a day. Their warm bodies were close-packed, breathing into one
another's faces, in tiers of low-ceilinged rooms, for from seven to ten
days, after the healthy life of the training camps which had accustomed
their lungs to fresh air. When the transport passed into the harbor
mouth, and the submarine danger was over, as ants might swarm out of
their runways to the top of a hill they swarmed on deck, where first-
and second-class passengers had sauntered and promenaded, in solid
masses of khaki, who formed the most valuable and superior first-class
passengers America had ever sent to Europe. They had arrived. They
made the harbor echo with calls and hurrahs. Theirs had been a passage
which money could not buy or would want to buy for more than one
experience; a passage not for pay or adventure, whose glamour was a
sight of the sea and of France and of all they had read about the war.
They were man-power, man-power by its thousands and millions, formed in
a common mold no less than egg-grenades, their clothes cut according
to the same pattern no less than their gas masks, the man-power which
we had to give if we did lack artillery and aeroplanes, automata who
were sentient parts of a machine responding to the mechanism of orders
rather than of levers. Equipped, disciplined, trained, hardened, the
preparatory processes of the training camps sent them to us for the
final processes in France.
Mighty lighters hurried alongside the transport, whose time must not
be wasted while the hundreds of thousands of other passengers waited
three thousand miles away. Swiftly, more swiftly than any but human
cargo could be unloaded, they were disembarked, the decks and the hold
becoming strangely empty with the resounding footsteps of the officers
and crew in place of the hum of conversation and the atmosphere of
human bodies crowded together.
Their confinement normally and charitably required that stiffened
bodies and minds and suffocated lungs should have a period of
relaxation and exercise. This indeed was a part of the original plans;
but now when original plans had gone by the board in feeding in men to
make the present the decisive offensive, though horses must be given
rest, it was found that men who had been through a régime to toughen
their human adaptability for what four-legged animals could not endure,
could do without such consideration when they were needed as the minute
men of the Meuse-Argonne battle. Shipped as freight from camp to pier,
from pier on to transport, and then from Brest across France, which
they saw only through the doors of box cars where they were packed
as close as on board the transports, the one idea at every point was
to hurry them along until they were delivered f. o. b. at the front.
There, after coming from comfortable barracks, after the devitalizing
closeness of transport and train, in a merciless climatic change, they
could remain in the fox-holes in the chill penetrating mists and rains
as they were still being hurried against the enemy, until death or
wounds or "flu" or pneumonia or the dizziness of fatigue reported them
as "expended."
Caring for the passage of this human stream from the ports to the
front was the first duty of the S. O. S. The next was to follow it up
with supplies. Wherever men were they must be fed. La Pallice and La
Rochelle were also being used; but the main Atlantic cargo ports were
Saint-Nazaire and Bordeaux. Ships moved with a processional regularity
to their places alongside the docks we had built. Our warehouses
stretched out over the sandy reaches where an occasional vine appeared
between spur tracks on the site of the vineyards for which we were
paying, and which hardly brought as much wealth to Bordeaux as the
money we were spending. Broken bags of flour, and broken crates of
canned goods, were piled in separate warehouses; as they could not
stand the journey to the front, they were used to feed the legions
of the S. O. S. For there was an army larger than Grant had in the
Appomattox campaign to be supplied between the ports and the front.
Fields were filled with the parts of automobiles and trucks. Assembled,
they started in long convoys across France to Saint-Mihiel or the
Argonne, their drivers having a tour of the château country before
passing over the Côte d'Or of Burgundy. All the parts of the railroad
locomotives and cars arriving were assembled in the vast shops which
we had built and fitted out with machinery according to the latest
American models.
We were supposed to have, but never had, ninety days' routine supplies
in France for all our forces in France. Of these forty-five days were
to be in the warehouses at the base ports. Sometimes trains were loaded
at the ports and run straight through to the front. Normally, there
were three changes in transit. At our service were all the arterial
railroads of central France, and all the locomotives and cars that
the French could spare, and all the broken-down French rolling stock
which our mechanics could repair. Possibly no denial can ever overtake
the report that we built a railroad clear across France; but we did
nothing of the kind, and contemplated nothing of the kind. We built
spur tracks and sidings and cut-offs; if all the track we laid, figured
a statistician in G-4 at Chaumont, had been in line, it would have
reached from Saint-Nazaire across France and Germany to the Russian
frontier.
All our building construction, if it had been concentrated in one
standard barrack building, would extend from Saint-Nazaire as far as
the Elbe river in Germany. We erected and put in operation 18,543
American railroad cars, and 1,496 American locomotives. Besides
producing enough firewood to form an unbroken wall around three sides
of France, one meter high and one meter broad, we sawed 189,564,000
feet of lumber, 2,728,000 standard gauge ties, 923,560 narrow gauge
ties, and 1,739,000 poles and pit props. If all the motor vehicles we
brought to France were put end to end, they would form a convoy two
hundred and ninety miles in length. On the day that the armistice was
signed we were operating 1,400 miles of light railway, of which 1,090
miles had been captured from the Germans. They handled 860,652 tons of
material.
These figures, put together in a paragraph in passing, give an idea
of the magnitude of the business which the army of the S. O. S. was
conducting. It was an army which knew no excitement in war except work.
The problem of sea transport which faced our ports at home was no
more trying than the problem of railroad transport from our ports in
France; _liaison_ between combat units in action no more trying than
the _liaison_ between our American railroad men with their American
training and the French railroad system. We were used to long distances
and long hauls; the French, in a country no larger than some of our
states, were used to short distances and short hauls. Impatient at
first with their methods, we saw how they had come to be applied in
France. Amazed at first at ours, the French came to appreciate how
well our long heavy trains suited the wholesale business of war. The
French seemed unsystematic, yet their worn locomotives and rickety
cars managed to carry on an enormous traffic. When we applied our
home tracer system for the first time on the railroads of France,
the central offices might know the location of every car under their
authority.
Our railroad men, under Brigadier-General W. W. Atterbury, our railroad
general, used to having at home all the supplies they needed, made
victory possible by the way in which they patched and contrived
in their energy and resource to meet the demands of the months of
September and October, which were far beyond their calculations. They
share the honors due to our pioneer railroad builders in the early
days of the west, while they exemplified the type of men who operate
our great systems of today, whether the engineer, the fireman or shop
mechanic, the veteran superintendent, or the young fellow just out of a
technical school. I wonder no less how they were able, with the rolling
stock at their command, to forward all the tonnage we required at the
front, than I wonder how we were able to take some of the positions of
the whale-back.
In his office at Tours, surrounded by his adjutants, who, though
in khaki, were railroad men in every word and thought, and in the
discipline which our home systems have established in webbing our
country, Brigadier-General Atterbury had a command which in numbers
belonged to a major-general. His discipline was that of a leadership
which won loyalty. In all his perplexing situations, when he was
striving for authority and material for an undertaking so strictly
technical, he never passed on any animus to a subordinate. It is
something for an officer to return from France with the respect which
he had from his subordinates.
The train that started on the steel trail across France, leaving behind
the hectic labor and the piles of cargo and the warehouses built and
building, when it passed out of the region of the base sections came
to the intermediate zone. In the regular routine it lost its entity
when it ascended the "hump" which we had built at Gièvres,--that
American hump, singularly characteristic of our system of labor-saving
organization. Every car was loaded with material belonging to some
branch of the army. One by one they were "dropped" down the incline,
each being switched to a track, as its downgrade momentum, subject to
the brakes, sent it--with the facility of letters tossed into mail bags
by a railway mail clerk--where its contents belonged, whether to the
door of an engineer, an ordnance, a signal corps, a medical corps, or
a Y. M. C. A. or Red Cross warehouse, while the meat trains or others
with perishable cargo went to our vast cold-storage plant. From the
"hump" you looked out over a city of warehouses, of barracks, and
other structures, with its guardhouse, its clubs, its motion-picture
theaters, its military policemen, under a colonel who was mayor, common
council, and king--all having been built in the open fields as a way
station from the New York docks to the front.
Here at Gièvres other trains were made up to continue the journey
forward in answer to the daily requisitions of the regulating stations
upon the intermediate reserves. War being a one-way business, all
expenditure and no income, all loaded cars were going one way except
those bringing lumber and ties that we were cutting from the forests
for construction, salvage from the battlefield, broken trucks, and
vehicles--and the hospital trains. Here prevision must be most sure.
Man was the most valuable piece of machinery; his repair the most
important of all repairs. We had enormous hospitals in the intermediate
zone as well as at the base ports; and indeed all over central and
southern France. The medical corps used great hotels and other
buildings to care for the hosts of broken, gassed, exhausted, sick
men from the Meuse-Argonne battle; but when we had to build we ran
out spur tracks--deep was our faith in spur tracks--into open fields
upon which rose cities of standardized unit hospital buildings, all of
a color, all of a pattern, and also operating rooms and Y. M. C. A.
clubs and theaters, under the autocracy of some regular surgeon who
looked up from his desk at the chart on the wall showing the number of
his patients and the number of vacant beds. The hospital trains ran
up on the spur tracks, and hobbling wounded descended, and wounded
who could not hobble were carried on stretchers to their beds--each a
card-indexed automaton, no less than when he entered the training camp,
as he would remain until he was demobilized or buried in France.
So the trains of munitions passed the trains laden with the products
of war, the knowledge of whose sacrifice is the only value of war.
Right and left through the intermediate zone, from Orléans to the
Mediterranean, were more repair shops, remount depots, training camps
for aviators, tank crews, machine-gunners and carrier pigeons, each
worker striving for the same purpose that shoveled the coal into the
locomotive firebox or slipped a shell into a gun or a cartridge into a
rifle. At Is-sur-Tille, near Dijon, was another "hump," which looked
down on what seemed a training camp in its streets of mud: for there
was mud in the S. O. S. as well as at the front--mud kept soft by the
damp atmosphere when autumn rain was not falling, and deep by the
trampling of many feet. Here, as at Gièvres, the train sent its cars on
their way to the warehouses to which their contents belonged; here you
felt at first hand the breath of the front in all its hot and pressing
demands; here was the largest bakery, with cement floors and all
up-to-date apparatus, directed by the head of one of our large bakeries
at home, rolling out the round loaves with the ease of peas shelled
from a pod. All night long, as at Gièvres and at the base ports, the
switch engines coughed forth their growls as they shunted cars, and
the laborers worked at loading and unloading. The officer in charge
in his little office was directing as insistent an excursion business
as ever fell to the lot of man. His nightmare, and the nightmare of
all the regulating officers of the S. O. S., was moving cars. Every
hour a car was needlessly idle was waste. This called for labor, and
more labor--for more warehouse space, for more locomotives, for more
sidings; but as they were not forthcoming, why, man and machine must be
made to do more work. The excess strain on either was not considered.
The pressure was the same as that for the relief of a city stricken by
fire or earthquake.
Beyond Is-sur-Tille at Saint-Dizier was another, a supplementary,
regulating station for the Meuse-Argonne battle, which during the
battle fed, apart from the troops in the Saint-Mihiel and other
sectors, 645,000 men and 115,000 animals. Regulating stations did the
detail, while Gièvres and the base ports did the wholesale. They saw
that each division received its daily rations of food and ammunition.
Each division had its "cut in" of cars, with all its daily supplies,
which was made up a day in advance and sent to the divisional railhead.
Knowing the needs of the divisions, a regulating station sent its
requisition back to the big warehouse centers, while it always
tried to keep on hand a small amount of all articles likely to be
needed in haste. When we were swinging our divisions around for the
Château-Thierry emergency, one division had seven railheads in eight
days; its trains were on hand on each occasion. They must be; otherwise
the divisions went hungry. All other demands must yield to the routine
which brings the morning milk and the grocer's boy to the kitchen door.
At the railhead you felt not only the breath of battle but that
throbbing suspense and intensity of purpose which is associated with
men in action. Here came the empty trucks and wagons from the front,
and the ambulances traveling in their convoys on the crowded roads up
to the zone of fire, while men worked in darkness. Here the wedge from
home was narrowing under the hammer strokes, until you could feel it
splitting the oak--the hammer strokes of the hundred millions, their
energy, their prayers and thoughts.
Those empty trucks seemed ever hungry, open mouths, the mute expression
of the call for more, and still more, of everything with which to keep
up the driving--more replacements as well as material.
When the front wanted anything, it was wanted immediately. Improvise
it, purloin it, beg for it, but send it, was the command that admitted
of no refusal. If this officer could not get it, put another in his
place who could. Officers when they lay down for a few hours' sleep
had their telephones at their elbow, ready as firemen to answer the
call. Men worked until the doctors ordered them to the hospital--that
they must do. They could do no more. The S. O. S. could not send guns
or tanks when it had none from home; but American resourcefulness
surpassed its own dreams of probabilities. Harbord could well say to
Pershing: "I've straightened out things in the S. O. S."