Our Army at the Front. Heywood Hale Broun
man has achieved the setting of moral right above brute force; that might is taking its stand beside right, to accomplish the greatest revolution in the history of mankind. That is the lesson which Pershing's coming has taught us, and that is why we rejoice."
But even while the commentators were at their task General Pershing had left off celebrating and got to work. The First Division was on the seas.
A few very important persons in France and America knew where they were to land, and when, but nobody in the world knew just what was to be done for and with them once they landed, for the plans did not even exist. It was the business of the general and his staff to create them. And they say that the amount of work done in those first days in France was incredible even to them when they looked back on it.
As a first step American headquarters were installed in 31 Rue Constantine, a broad, shaded street near the Hôtel des Invalides, overlooking the Champs de Mars. The house had belonged once to a prodigiously popular Paris actress, and it was correspondingly magnificent.
But the magnificence, except that which was inalienably in space and structure, was banished by the busy Americans. In the hallway they stretched a plank railing, behind which American private soldiers asked and answered questions. Under the once sumptuous stairway there were stacks of army cots. The walls were bulletined and covered with directions carefully done in two languages. The chief of the Intelligence Section had the ex-dining-room, and the adjutant-general had the ballroom on the second floor. Even so, it was not long before this spaciousness was insufficient, and the headquarters brimmed over into No. 27 as well.
It was in these two houses that the whole army organization was plotted out, and General Pershing made good his prediction that the Americans would not merely seem, but would be, businesslike.
After ten days or so of beaver-like absorption in their jobs the American headquarters announced to the war correspondents that they must take a certain train at a certain hour, under the guidance of Major Frederick Palmer, press officer and censor, to a certain port in France. There, at a certain moment, they would see what they would see.
CHAPTER III
THE FIRST DIVISION LANDS
THEY saw the gray troop-ships steaming majestically into the middle distance from the gray of the open sea, with the little convoy fleet alongside. It was a gray morning, and at first the ships were hardly more than nebulous patches of a deeper tone than sea and sky. As they neared the port, and took on outline, the watchers increased, and took on internationalism.
The Americans, who had come to see this consequential landing, some in uniform and some civilians, had arrived in the very early morning, before the inhabitants of the little seaport town were up and about, let alone aware of what an event was that day to put them into the history books.
But it never takes a French civilian long to discover that something is afoot – what with three years of big happenings to sharpen his wits and keep him on the lookout.
At the front of the quay were Americans two deep, straining to make out the incoming ships, on tiptoe to count their number, breathless to shout a welcome to the first "Old Glory" to be let loose to the harbor winds. Forming rapidly behind the Americans were French men, French women, and French children, indifferent to affairs, kitchens, or schools, chattering that "Mais surement, c' sont les Américains – regardez, regardez!.."
Ignominiously in the rear, but watching too, were the German prisoners who worked, in theory at least, at transferring rails from inconvenient places to convenient ones for the loading of coaster steamers. They said little enough, having learned that a respectful hearing was not to be their lot for a while. But they moved fewer rails than ever, and nobody bothered to speed them up.
The great ships came in slowly. Before long, the watchers could see lines of dull yellow banding the gray hulks, and then the yellow lines took on form and separateness, and were visible one soldier at a time.
Last, one ship steamed apart from the others and made direct for the quay, and the solemn business of landing American troops on French soil was about to begin.
There was to be a certain ceremony for the landing, but, like all the ceremonies conceded to these great occasions by the American Army, it was to be of extreme simplicity. When they were near enough to the quay to be heard, the transport band played "The Star-Spangled Banner," while all the soldiers stood at salute, and then they played the "Marseillaise," while everybody on ship and shore stood at salute. With that, they called it a morning, as far as celebration was concerned, and to the accompaniment of a great deal of talk and a volley of light-hearted questions, they began to disembark.
The first question, called from some distance away, was: "What place is this?" The next was, "Do they let the enlisted men drink in the saloons over here?" and there was a miscellany about apple pie and doughnuts, cigarettes, etc. And very briefly after the first soldiers were ashore nothing could be heard but "Don't they speak any English at all?"
The outstanding impression of that morning may be what it will to the French civilians, to the American newspaper correspondents, and to the officers both ashore and on board. To the privates of the First Division it will always be the incomprehensible nonsense that goes by the name of the French language, spoken with perfect assurance by people old enough to know better, who refuse to make one syllable of intelligible sound in answer to even the simplest requests.
The privates were prepared to hear the French speak their own language at mention of Alsace-Lorraine and war aims, or to propound their private philosophies that way. They granted the right of the French to talk how they pleased of their emotional pleasure at seeing the troops, or of any other subject above the timber-line.
What staggered them was the insane top-loftiness of using French to ask for ham and eggs, and beer, or the way to camp. For nothing, not volumes of warning before they left home, nor interminable hours of French-grammar instruction on board the troop-ships, had really got it deep inside the American private's head that French was not an accomplishment to be used as evidence of cosmopolitan culture, but a mere prosy necessity, without which daily existence was a nightmare and a frustration.
The French, on their side, were helpless enough, but not so bewildered. They had lived too long, in peace as well as war, across a narrow channel from that stanch English-speaking race who brought both their tea and their language with them to France and everywhere else, to be dumfounded that strangers should balk at their foreign tongue.
The inevitable result was that here, in their first contact with the French, as later, throughout the fighting areas, the American soldiers learned to understand French-English long before they could speak a decent word of French.
Fortunately for the First Division, it had had some able bilingual forerunners at the seaport town where they landed. The camps had been built by the French, a few miles back from the town, but a few of the housekeeping necessities had been installed by General Pershing's staff-officers, and signs in good, plain English showed the proper roads. And as the single files of soldiers began to descend the gang-plank of the first transport, and to form for marching to camp, their own officers were having some compact instruction from the staff-officers on how to get to camp and what to do when they got there.
There was no waste motion about getting the troops under way. The first companies were tramp-tramping up the streets before the last companies were overside, and the first transport was free to go back and give place to the next one before the mayor had got his red sash and gilt chains in place and arrived to do them suitable honor.
So, while the shore watchers fell back into safe observation-posts, the soldiers clattered down through the quay-sheds to the little street, formed and swung away, and one ship after another disgorged its passengers, and presently the sheds were overrun with the blue-clad sailors from the convoys.
All that day, the soldiers marched through the town. Their camps lay at the end of a long white shore road, and jobs were not wanting when they got there. Their pace was easy, because of these things, and they probably would not have put out any French eye with their flawless marching, even under less indulgent circumstances. For this First Division was recruited in a hurry, and most of their real training lay ahead of them.
Where