Our Army at the Front Part 4

For bathing facilities, there were neat paths marked to the river. That is, the French called it a river. Every American who rides through France for the first time has the same experience: he looks out of his train-window and remarks to his companion, who knows France well: "Isn't that a pretty little creek? Are there many springs about here?" And the companion replies scornfully: "That isn't a creek--that's the Marne River," or "That's the Aisne," or "That's the Meuse." The American always wonders what the French would call the Hudson.

It was one of these storied streams that ran through the American training-camp, in which the Americans did their bathing. Whenever a soldier wanted to get his head wet he waded across.

Later, when the camps were filled, these river-banks were to offer a remarkable sight to the French peasants, who thought all Americans were bathing-mad anyway. Hundreds of soldiers, in the a.s.sorted postures of men scrubbing backs and knees and elbows, disported with soap and wash-cloth along the banks. Hundreds of others, swimming their suds off, flashed here an arm and there a leg in the stream itself. It did not take much distance to make them look like figures on a frieze, a new Olympic group. Modesty knew them not, but there were not supposed to be women about, and the peasants had a nice j.a.panese point of view in the matter. At any rate, there was the training-camp bathtub, and they used it at least once a day, to the unending stupefaction of the French.

Where they slept was another matter, suggesting neither Corot nor Phidias.

The privates had houses first, then barns. The barns were freed of the live stock, which was turned into meadows to graze, and the floors were dug down to clean earth, and vast quant.i.ties of formaldehyde were sprayed around. Then the cots were carried up to the second floors of the barns and put along in tidy rows. At the foot of each soldier's bed was whatever manner of small wooden box he could corral from the quartermaster, and there he kept all he owned. His pack unfolded its contents into the box, and his comfort-kit perched on the top. And there he kept the little mess of treasures he bought from the gypsy wagons that rode all day around the outskirts of the camp.

Windows were knocked out, just under the eaves, for the fresh air that seemed, so inexplicably to the French, so essential to the Americans.

Even with the First Division, acknowledged to be about the smallest expeditionary force known to the Great War, the soldiers averaged a little over two thousand to the village, and since not one of the villages had more than four or five hundred population in peace-times, the troubles of the man who arranged the billets were far from light.

Fortunately, the First Division did not ask for luxuries. Even the officers spent more time in simplifying their quarters than in tr.i.m.m.i.n.g them up. The colonel of one regiment--one of those who became major-generals soon after the arrival in France--had his quarters in an aristocratic old house, set back in a long yard, where plum-trees dropped their red fruit in the vivid green gra.s.s and roses overgrew their confines--it was the sort of house before which the pre-war motor tourists used to stop and breathe long "ohs" of satisfaction.

The entrance was by a low, arched doorway. The hall was built of beautifully grained woods, old and mellow of tone. The stairway was broad and easy to climb. The colonel had the second floor front, just level with the tree-tops.

In the room there were rich woods and tapestried walls, and at the back was a four-poster mahogany bed with heavy satin hangings, brocaded with fleur-de-lis. The Pompadour would have been entirely happy there. But the American colonel had done things to it--things that would have popped the eyes out of the Pompadour's head. He pinned up the four-poster hangings with a safety-pin, that being the only way he could convey to his amiable little French servant-girl that he didn't want that bed turned down for him of nights. And he had taken all the satin hangings down from the windows. Under these windows he had drawn up a little board table and an army cot. Beside the table was his little army trunk. The s.p.a.ce he used did not measure more than ten feet in any direction, and his luxuries waited unmolested for some more sybaritic soul than he.

A major in that same village who had had a cavalry command before the cavalry, as he put it, became "mere messengers," picked his quarters out himself, on the strength of all he had heard about "Sunny France." His house was nothing much, but behind it was a garden--a long garden, filled with vegetables, decorated with roses, shaded by fruit-trees. At the far end of the garden was a summer-house, 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 gla.s.s 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 "h.e.l.lo," which was all his English, and the party lasted till the soldier, billet-bound, said "Fee-neesh," which was all his French. But n.o.body 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 pa.s.sed 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Copyright by the Committee on Public Information._

Buglers of the Alpine Cha.s.seurs, a.s.sisted by their military band, entertaining American soldiers of the First Division.]

American partic.i.p.ation 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 Cha.s.seurs--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 a.s.signed 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 circ.u.mstances. 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. Later all the stevedores sent were regularly enlisted members of the army. While the great undertaking was still on paper and the tips of tongues, the infantry was beginning its hard lessons in the Vosges. The First Division was made up of something less than 50 per cent of experienced soldiers, although it was a regular army division. The leaven of learning was too scant. The rookies were all potentiality. The training was done with French soldiers and for the first little while under French officers. A division of Cha.s.seurs Alpines was withdrawn from the line to act as instructors for the Americans, and for two months the armies worked side by side. "You will have the honor," so the French order read, "of spending your permission in training the American troops." This might not seem like the pleasantest of all possible vacations for men from the line, but the cha.s.seurs seemed to take to it readily enough. These Cha.s.seurs Alpines--the Blue Devils--were the finest troops the French had. And if they were to give their American guests some sound instruction later on, they were to give them the surprise of their lives first.

The French officer is the most dazzling sight alive, but the French soldier is not. Five feet of height is regarded as an abundance. He got his name of "poilu" not so much from his beard as from his perpetual little black mustache.

The doughboys called him "Froggy" with ever so definite a sense of condescension.

"Yes, they look like nothing--but you try following them for half a day," said an American officer of the "poilus."

They have a short, choppy stride, far different to the gangling gait of the American soldier. The observer who looks them over and decides they would be piffling on the march, forgets to see that they have the width of an opera-singer under the arms, and that they no more get winded on their terrific sprints than Caruso does on his high C's.

And after they had done some stunts with lifting guns by the bayonet tip, and had heaved bombs by the afternoon, the doughboys called in their old opinions and got some new ones.

All sorts of things were helping along the international liking and respect. The prowess of the French soldiers was one of the most important. But the soldiers' interpretation of Pershing's first general order to the troops was another. This order ran:

"For the first time in history an American Army finds itself in European territory. The good name of the United States of America and the maintenance of cordial relations require the perfect deportment of each member of this command. It is of the gravest importance that the soldiers of the American Army shall at all times treat the French people, and especially the women, with the greatest courtesy and consideration. The valiant deeds of the French Army and the Allies, by which together they have successfully maintained the common cause for three years, and the sacrifices of the civil population of France in support of their armies command our profound respect. This can best be expressed on the part of our forces by uniform courtesies to all the French people, and by the faithful observance of their laws and customs.