SEEING AMERICA OVER THERE
Vacation days are always swift flying, but that vacation week I spent
in Aix-les-Bains with my soldier son broke all the records for brevity.
The day of departure came almost before I realized that we had been
fortunate enough to meet. We left Aix within a few hours of each other,
my train first. I had a last glimpse of the boy standing on the station
platform waving his cap and smiling. How is it that we can smile at
such moments? Perhaps only because we are a little something more than
dust, because we have aspirations, dim and dreaming though they may be,
beyond mortal life and love. So we went our ways toward our separate
duties, he to the front, I to the rear. His task was to fight, mine to
write. If he could go to his work with a smile, then I could too. And I
did.
I want to visualize to the American people who have sons and brothers
and husbands in this war the immensity of the work the men have
undertaken. Not only the work of fighting, but of building and
preparation. Fighting furnishes the most spectacular and tragic aspect
of war. But that is not all there is to the great game. War is a
stupendous business enterprise. It is a feat of engineering beside
which the building of the Panama Canal looks like a mere pastime. When
I started out to see America, as it had established itself in France,
I did not dream of the greatness I was to encounter, a greatness which
has fairly staggered and inspired those of our allies who have seen it.
The first anniversary of the American entrance into the world war was
the occasion of what almost might be called special American editions
of most of the large English and French newspapers. Columns of space
in these papers were devoted to encomiums of praise of our enterprise,
our ingenuity, our manifold and miraculous accomplishments in the space
of twelve short months. Miraculous was a word most frequently used,
miraculous and astounding.
It is too bad that the people of the United States can not at
present be told all of the amazing feats of building, engineering,
transportation and railroad construction which have so impressed
the allies abroad. It would inspire and encourage them to know it,
but unfortunately it is necessary to keep as many of the details as
possible a secret from Germany. Before the fateful August day in 1914,
when the vast German army started on its march across doomed Belgium,
the war lords knew the French railroad system as well as they knew
their own. They had maps of every foot of railroad in the French
republic. They had an accurate catalogue of French rolling stock, and
they knew exactly the number and capacity of railroad manufacturing and
repair shops. They probably knew the railroad men of the country down
to the last patch on an engineer’s overalls.
But the Germans do not know what has happened to the French railroad
system since April 6, 1917, the date of our entrance into the war. Of
course we do not want them to know, but I don’t mind telling them that
what has happened deserves the adjectives lavished on us by the English
and French newspapers. I have been over hundreds of miles of that part
of the French railroad system which moves our men and their supplies
from ocean ports to the fighting front, and I agree with Secretary
Baker when he said, on his departure from France, that what had been
accomplished was inspiring to behold.
I shall never forget a Sunday that I spent at a railroad station in
a town in central France. The town, which can not be named, is a
small and not very important manufacturing city, but it is now one of
the important junctions in the chain of railroads leading from the
southwestern and northwestern seaports to the battle-front of the
northeast.
The day was Sunday, just three days after the great push of March
twenty-first began. I was returning to Paris after a visit to certain
large aviation fields in the neighborhood, and got off at this junction
for luncheon and a change of cars. Few French trains now carry
restaurant wagons, and travelers, except on express trains, have to
carry luncheon baskets or depend on station buffets.
I arrived at the junction at eleven o’clock, but I did not take the
two o’clock Paris express, as I had planned. I stayed in the station
all day and all evening watching the breath-taking procession of trains
tearing northward to the fight, and the equally amazing procession
of trains rolling southward and bearing the flotsam and jetsam of
battle--wounded and dying men, despairing refugees, damaged guns,
broken airplanes. French trains, including our own over there, move
methodically in blocks called _marches_. They never have any traffic
tie-ups, because all the trains move at exactly the same speed, and
every train has its prescribed place in the _marche_, just so far ahead
or behind the next train. It is an excellent system. But it seemed to
me that day that the trains would certainly telescope one another, they
came on and on so unceasingly and so close together.
The trains moving northward were laden with soldiers, horses, guns,
airplanes, ammunition wagons, food, supplies of every conceivable
description. Trainload after trainload of horses, eight to a car
with four men, generally asleep on the hay in the middle space of
the car. The horses, beautiful, tragic creatures, going to almost
certain destruction wrung the heart to see. They gazed out at the
flying landscape and the cheering station crowds with big, soft,
uncomprehending eyes. How I wish we did not have to use horses in war.
Of course the lives of men are far more valuable, but the men at least
know why they fight and die.
Trainloads of men, so many that within an hour I had ceased to count
them, rolled through that junction. Men from England, Frenchmen
hurriedly recalled from leave in their southern homes. All ages. I saw
French boys who must have been eighteen, but who looked younger by two
years, and I saw men who might have been grandfathers. These older men
do not often fight. They serve meals in the trenches and perform other
non-combatant services. All France--all--is mobilized for some kind of
service.
Sometimes these troop trains made brief stops at our station. Of
course, there was a Red Cross canteen there, and I worked with the fine
French women who were in charge of it, ladling hot coffee into mugs,
and handing thick sandwiches to the crowding, hungry _poilus_. Some
of the trains had their own kitchens, portable affairs on flat cars,
and when the train stopped the men fairly boiled out of the carriages,
pails and bowls in hand, to get the delicious soup prepared by the
cooks. The Red Cross women supplemented the meal with sandwiches and
coffee, at least when time permitted, which was not often. Those troop
trains were on their way north with no unnecessary stops.
More often than not the trains did not stop. Once as a train was
rolling through the station a soldier called to me asking for the
newspaper I held in my hand. Of course I gave it to him, sprinting
along the platform at a lively rate. The next time I saw a train coming
I ran to the newsstand and bought three francs’ worth of papers, about
as many as I could carry, and had them ready for rapid distribution to
the effusive and laughing soldiers.
But right in the middle of that exciting procession of trains came
something that brought my heart to my throat. It was an immensely long
train of all new cars, painted olive drab, with U. S. A. in white
letters on the side. And the cars, dozens and dozens of them, were
loaded with railroad building material. Portable tracks, switches,
signals, exactly like the expensive and fascinating toy railroads which
children delight in. Steel rails, wooden ties, machinery for laying
them, flat cars, wheels, tools and nails, and last of all tiny little
locomotives, two of them to a flat car, all American, going up to the
front with the French and the English soldiers.
Right behind that train of cars came another, a shorter one, and this
was full of brown-clad American engineers, going up to the front with
the allied soldiers, to lay those tracks and operate that little
narrow-gauge railroad under gun-fire. Our own sons.
That was not all. In the middle of the afternoon another train went
northward, olive drab, with U. S. A. in white letters. This was a
hospital train of entirely new cars, the finest and most complete I had
ever seen. It was a palace on wheels, with every conceivable appliance
for the comfort of wounded soldiers. There were kitchen cars, operating
cars, X-ray compartments, cars with beds, cars with couches for the
sitting cases. Cars for doctors and nurses as well as patients.
Nothing I had seen, not even men going into the trenches, brought
home to me so sharply the fact that we were in the war and were fully
determined to hold our end up.
We could not have done it so well had we not, in the last fifty years,
developed such extraordinary railroad builders and operators. The
French had a railroad system adequate for peace-time uses, but when war
came, and especially after the tide of Americans began to pour into the
country, the system had to be enormously enlarged. It had to be planned
and organized also, in order not to disturb unduly the life of the
country. And it had to be done quickly.
It is not going beyond the permissible line to say that our railroad
experts have worked out a wonderful system for the transportation of
men and supplies. Several big seaports in the northwest now receive
most of the men who in larger and larger units are being transported
to France. One very large port in the southwest is the receiving
station of most of the supplies sent over. A network of railroads, some
of which we have double-tracked, convey these men and the supplies
eastward and northward to their destinations. There is never any
confusion of freight and passenger trains, because they do not start
from the same ports, and most of the time they are not even on the same
lines.
All through central France along this railroad system the Americans
have taken over old towns and cities as bases for war work. Outside
of the towns are great camps, with army bakeries, quartermasters’
depots, hospitals, shops and factories. In one of these camps, near a
railroad junction, is a supply station which is preparing to feed a
million men at the front. At another camp I saw a distribution depot
for medical and surgical supplies for the whole army. At both of these
camps railroad building was going on at a lively rate, miles and miles
of spurs and switches.
At a lovely old town which was once the stronghold of feudal barons,
whose hoary old château rises over the place like a watch tower, I saw
an immense factory for repairing locomotives and rolling stock. It was
no flimsy wooden structure built for a few months, but an enormous mass
of brick and concrete such as we build in Pittsburgh and Gary. I saw in
the woods outside this town gangs of American foresters. I saw American
sawmills. I saw logging trains manned by Americans.
I have seen American workmen making wagons, portable houses, trucks,
locomotives. I have seen them building cold storage warehouses and
ice-making plants. Building them substantially, as though we had moved
to Europe to stay, as indeed we have until we put the war out of the
world, together with the militarism that made it.
Do the Germans know it? Their leaders do, of course, but I doubt very
much whether the mass of the people do. Working under guard in many of
our camps in France are gangs of German prisoners. Watching several
hundred of these men, in fierce green uniforms and shapeless boots,
I asked the young officer who was my escort what they thought of the
American activities.
“I was curious about that, too,” he replied, “and I took pains to find
out. Would you believe it, that most of the prisoners refuse to credit
the fact that we are here at all? They say, ‘Before we were taken
prisoner our officers told us that we would see soldiers who would
claim to be Americans, but they aren’t. They are Canadians or English.
The Americans can not get over here. Our kaiser has said so.’”
In another camp I asked the same question. What did the Germans
think about us? They say, I was told, that they didn’t mind building
railroads in France. The kaiser would be glad to have them when he
came. What will happen to the kaiser when the German people learn the
truth?