Our Army at the Front. Heywood Hale Broun
in a circle of trees. Here the major took his first guests and showed how he intended to do his work in the open air, while the famous French sunshine flooded his garden and warmed his little refuge.
The one thing it will never be safe to say to any veteran of the First Division is "Sunny France." The summer of 1917, after a blazing start in June, settled down to drizzle and mist, cold and fog, rain that soaked to the marrow.
The major with the garden sloshed around the whole summer, visiting men who had settled indoors and had fireplaces. By the time the warmth had come back to his summer-house it was time for him to go up to the battle-line, and the man who writes a history of the billets in France will get a lot of help from him.
Some of the makeshifts of this first invasion were excusable and inevitable. Some were not. After the first two or three weeks of settling in, General Pershing made a tour of inspection, and some of the things he said about what he saw didn't make good listening. But after that visit all possible defects were overcome, and the men slept well, ate well, were as well clothed as possible, and were admirably sanitated.
The drinking-water was a matter for the greatest strictness. The French never drink water on any provocation, so that water provisions began from the ground up.
It was drawn into great skins and hung on tripods in the shaded parts of the billets, and it was then treated with a germicide, tasteless fortunately, carried in little glass capsules. This was a legacy from experiences in Panama.
Each man had his own tin cup, and when he got thirsty he went down and turned the faucet in the hanging skin tank. If he drank any other water he repented in the guard-house.
So, though the billets were rude and sometimes uncomfortable, the soldiers did stay in them and out of the hospitals.
And there were compensations.
Half of these were in play-times, and half in work-times. The training, slow at first, speeded up afterward and, with the help of the "Blue Devils" who trained with the Americans, took on all the exhilaration of war with none of its dangers. But how they trained doesn't belong in a chapter on billets. How they played is more suitable.
Three-fourths of their playing they did with the French children. The insurmountable French language, which kept doughboys and poilus at arm's length in spite of their best intentions, broke down with the youngsters.
It was one of the finest sights around the camp to see the big soldiers collecting around the mess-tent after supper, in the daylight-saving long twilight, to hear the band and play in pantomime with the hundreds of children who tagged constantly after them.
The band concerts were a regular evening affair, though musically they didn't come to much. Those were the days before anybody had thought to supply the army bands with new music, so "She's My Daisy" and "The Washington Post" made a daily appearance.
But the concerts did not want for attendance. The soldiers stood around by the hundreds, and listened and looked off over the hills to where the guns were rumbling, whenever the children were not exacting too much attention.
This child-soldier combination had just two words. The child said "Hello," which was all his English, and the party lasted till the soldier, billet-bound, said "Fee-neesh," which was all his French. But nobody could deny that both of them had a good time.
Letter-writing was another favorite sport with the First Division, to the great dole of the censors. Of course the men were homesick. That was one reason. The other was that they had left home as heroes, and they didn't intend to let the glory lapse merely because they had come across to France and been slapped into school. The censors were astounded by what they read … gory battles of the day before, terrific air-raids, bombardments of camp, etc. Some of the men told how they had slaughtered Germans with their bare hands. Most of the letters were adjudged harmless, and of little aid or comfort to the enemy, so they were passed through. But some of the families of the First Division must have thought that the War Department was holding out an awful lot on the American public.
Mid-July saw the camp in fair working order. The First Division had word that it was presently to be joined by the New England Division and the Rainbow Division, both National Guardsmen, and representative of every State.
American participation began to take shape as a real factor, a stern and sombre business, and all the lighter, easier sides of the expedition began to fall back, and work and grimness came on together.
The French Alpine Chasseurs – whom the Americans promptly called "chasers" – had a party with the Americans on July 14, when the whole day was given over to a picnic, with boxing, wrestling, track sports, and a lot of food. That was the last party in the training-camp till Christmas.
The work that began then had no let-up till the first three battalions went into the trenches late in October. The steadily increasing number of men widened the area of the training-camp, but they made no difference in the contents of the working-day, nor in the system by which it proceeded.
Within the three weeks after the First Division had landed, the work of army-building began.
CHAPTER VI
GETTING THEIR STRIDE
THAT part of France which became America in July, 1917, was of about the shape of a long-handled tennis-racket. The broad oval was lying just behind the fighting-lines. The handle reached back to the sea. Then, to the ruin of the simile, the artillery-schools, the aviation-fields, and the base hospitals made excrescences on the handle, so that an apter symbol would be a large and unshapely string of beads.
But France lends itself to pretty exact plotting out. There are no lakes or mountains to dodge, nor particularly big cities to edge over to. In the main, the organizing staffs of the two nations could draw lines from the coast to the battle-fields, and say: "Between these two shall America have her habitation and her name."
The infantry trained in the Vosges. The artillery-ranges were next behind, and then the aviation-grounds. The hospitals were placed everywhere along the lines, from field-bases to those far in the rear. And because neither French train service nor Franco-American motor service could bear the giant burden of man-and-supply transportation, the first job to which the engineer and labor units were assigned was laying road-beds across France for a four-track railroad within the American lines.
In those days America did not look forward to the emergency which was to brigade her troops with French or British, under Allied Generalissimo Foch. Her plans were to put in a force which should be, as the English say of their flats, "self-contained." If this arrangement had a fault, it was that it was too leisurely. It was certainly not lacking on the side of magnificence, either in concept or carrying-out.
The scheme of bringing not only army but base of supplies, both proportionate to a nation of a hundred million people, was necessarily begun from the ground up. The American Army built railroads and warehouses as a matter of course. It laid out training-camps for the various arms of the service on an unheard-of scale. As it happens, the original American plan was changed by the force of circumstances. Much of the American man-power eventually was brigaded with the British and French and went through the British and French soldier-making mills. But the territory marked America still remains America and the excellent showing made by the War Department in shipping men during the spring and early summer of 1918 furnished a supply of soldiers sufficient to make allotments to the Allies directly and at the same time preserve a considerable force as a distinctly American Army. It is possible that the fastest method of preparation possible might have been to brigade with the Allies from the beginning. But it would have been difficult to induce America to accept such a plan if it had not been for the emergency created by the great German drive of the spring of 1918.
American engineers were both building railroads and running them from July on. The hospital units were installed even earlier. The first work of an army comes behind the lines and a large proportion of the early arrivals of the A. E. F. were non-fighting units. At that there was no satisfying the early demands for labor. As late as mid-August General Pershing was still doing the military equivalent of tearing his hair for more labor units and stevedores. A small number of negroes employed as civilian stevedores came with the First Division, but they could not begin to fill the needs.