Our Army at the Front Part 8

The aviators worked hard enough to deserve the German honor. In the French school supervised by the Americans the schedule would have furnished d.i.c.kens some fine material for pathos.

The day began at 4 A. M., with a little coffee for an eye-opener. The working-day began in the fields at 5 sharp. If the weather permitted there were flights till 11, when the pupil knocked off for a midday meal. He was told to sleep then till 4 in the afternoon, when flying recommenced, and continued till 8.30. The rest of his time was all his own. He spent it getting to bed.

There was an average of four months under this regime. The flier began on the ground, and for weeks he was permitted no more than a dummy machine, which wobbled along the ground like a broken-winged duck, and this he used to learn levers and mechanics--those things he had toiled over on paper before he was even allowed on the field.

After a while he was permitted in the air with an instructor, and finally alone. There were creditably few disasters. For months there was never a casualty. But if a man had an accident it was a perfectly open-and-shut affair. Either he ruined himself or he escaped. It was part of the French system with men who escaped to send them right back into the air, as soon as they could breathe, so that the accident would not impair their flying-nerves.

After the three or four months of foundation work, if the term is not too inept for flying, the aviator had his final examination, a triangular flight of about ninety miles, with three landings. The landings are the great trick of flying. Like the old Irish story, it isn't the falling that hurts you, it's the sudden stop.

If the pupil made his landings with accuracy he was pa.s.sed on to the big school at Pau, where acrobatics are taught. The flight acrobat was the ace, the armies found. And no man went to battle till he could do spiral, serpentine, and hairpin turns, could manage a tail spin, and "go into a vrille"--a corkscrew fall which permitted the flier to make great haste from where he was, and yet not lose control of his machine, at the same time that he made a tricky target for a Boche machine-gun.

While all this training was going on the ranks of American aviators were filling in at the top. The celebrated Lafayette Escadrille, the American aviators who joined the French Army at the beginning of the war, was taken into the American Army in the late summer. Then all the Americans who were in the French aviation service who had arrived by way of the Foreign Legion were called home.

These were put at instructing for a time, then their several members became the veteran core of later American squadrons. This air unit was finally placed at 12 fliers and 250 men, and before Christmas there was a goodly number of them, a number not to be told till the care-free and uncensored days after the war.

By the beginning of the new year American aviation-fields were taking shape. The engineers had laid a spur of railroad to link the largest of them with the main arteries of communication, and the labor units had built the same sort of small wooden city that sprang up all over America as cantonments.

There were roomy barracks, a big hall where chapel services alternated with itinerant entertainers, a little newspaper building, plenty of office-barracks with typewriters galore and the little models on which aviators learn their preliminary lessons.

There is one training-field six miles long and a mile and a half wide, where all kinds of instruction is going on, even to acrobatics.

And there are several large training-schools just behind the fighting-lines, which have plenty of visiting Germans to practise on.

The enormity of the American air programme made it a little unwieldy at first, and it got a late start. But on the anniversary of its beginning it had unmeasured praise from official France, and even before that the French newspapers had loudly sung its praises.

The American aviator as an individual was a success from the beginning.

He has unsurpa.s.sed natural equipment for an ace, and his training has been unprecedentedly thorough. And he has dedicated his spirit through and through. He has set out to make the Germans see how wise they were to be afraid.

CHAPTER X

THE SCHOOLS FOR OFFICERS

The first economy effected after the broad sweep of training was in swing was to segregate the officers for special training, and these officers' schools fell into two types.

First, there was the camp for the young commissioned officers from Plattsburg, and similar camps in America, to give them virtually the same training as the soldiers had, but at a sharper pace, inclusive also of more theory, and to increase their executive ability in action; second, there was the school established by General Pershing, late in the year, through which non-commissioned officers could train to take commissions.

Of the first type, there were many, of the second, only one.

The camp for the Plattsburg graduates which turned its men first into the fighting was one having about 300 men, situated in the south of France, where the weather could do its minimum of impeding.

These youngsters arrived in September, and they were fighting by Thanksgiving. The next batch took appreciably less time to train, partly because the organization had been tried out and perfected on the first contingent, and partly because they were destined for a longer stay in the line before they were hauled back for training others. This process was duplicated in scores of schools throughout France, so that the Expeditionary Force, what with its reorganization to require fewer officers, and its complementary schools, never lacked for able leadership.

The first school was under command of Major-General Robert Bullard, a veteran infantry officer with long experience in the Philippines to draw on, and a conviction that the proper time for men to stop work was when they dropped of exhaustion.

His officers began their course with a battalion of French troops to aid them, and they were put into company formation, of about 75 men to the company, just as the humble doughboy was.

They were all infantry officers, who were to take command as first and second lieutenants, but they specialized in whatever they chose. They were distinguished by their hat-bands: white for bayonet experts, blue for the liquid-fire throwers, yellow for the machine-gunners, red for the rifle-grenadiers, orange for the hand-grenadiers, and green for the riflemen. These indicated roughly the various things they were taught there, in addition to trench-digging and the so-called battalion problems, recognizable to the civilian as team-work.

Their work was not of the fireside or the library. It was the joint opinion of General Pershing, General Sibert, and General Bullard that the way to learn to dig a trench was to dig it, and that nothing could so a.s.sist an officer in directing men at work as having first done the very same job himself.

They had a permanent barracks which had once housed young French officers, in pre-war days, and they had a generous Sat.u.r.day-to-Monday town leave.

These two benefactions, plus their tidal waves of enthusiasm, carried them through the herculean programme devised by General Bullard and the a.s.sisting French officers and troops.

They began, of course, with trench-digging, and followed with live grenades, machine-guns, automatic rifles, service-sh.e.l.ls, bayonet work, infantry formation for attack, and gas tests. Then they were initiated into light and fire signals, star-sh.e.l.ls, gas-bombing, and liquid fire.

Last, they came in on the rise of the wave of rifle popularity, and trained at it even more intensively than the first of the doughboys.

"The rifle is the American weapon," was General Pershing's constant reiteration, "and it has other uses than as a stick for a bayonet."

But efficacious as schools of this type were, there was a need they did not meet, a need first practical, then sentimental, and equally valuable on both counts.

This was the training for the man from the ranks. The War College in America, acting in one of its rare s.n.a.t.c.hes of spare time, had ordered a school for officers in America to which any enlisted man was eligible.

General Pershing overhauled this arrangement in one particular: he framed his school in France so that nothing lower than a corporal could enter it. This was on the theory that a man in the ranks who had ability showed it soon enough, and was rewarded by a non-com. rank. That was the time when the way ahead should rightfully be opened to him.

This school commenced its courses just before Christmas, with everything connected with it thoroughly worked out first.

The commissions it was ent.i.tled to bestow went up to the rank of major.

Scholars entered it by recommendation of their superior officers, which were forwarded by the commanders of divisions or other separate units, and by the chiefs of departmental staffs, to the commander-in-chief.

Before these recommendations could be made, the record of the applicant must be scanned closely, and his efficiency rated--if he were a linesman, by fighting quality, and if in training still or behind the lines, by efficiency in all other duties.

Then he entered and fared as it might happen. If he succeeded, his place was waiting for him at his graduation, as second lieutenant in a replacement division.

Enormous numbers of these replacement divisions had to be held behind the lines. From them, all vacancies occurring in the combat units in the lines were filled. And rank, within them, proceeded in the same manner as in any other division. Their chief difference was that there was no limit set upon the number of second lieutenants they could include, so that promotions waited mainly for action to earn them.

Within the combat units, the vacancies were to be filled two-thirds by men in line of promotion within the unit itself, and one-third from the replacement divisions.

The replacement division's higher officers were those recovered from wounds, who had lost their place in line, and those who had not yet had any a.s.signments. To keep up a sufficient number of replacement divisions, the arriving depot battalions were held to belong with them.

This school was located near the fighting-line, and its instructors were preponderantly American.

It put the "stars of the general into the private's knapsack," and began the great mill of officer-making that the experiences of other armies had shown to be so tragically necessary. Needless to say, it was packed to overflowing from its first day.

CHAPTER XI

SOME DISTINGUISHED VISITORS

So satisfactory to itself was the progress of the American Expeditionary Force in becoming an army that by the end of its first month of training it was ready for important visitors. True, the first to come was one who would be certain to understand the force's initial difficulties, and who would also be able to help as well as inspect. He was General Petain, Commander-in-Chief of the French Army, and he came for inspection of both French and American troops on August 19, three days after General Sibert had had a family field-day to take account of his troops.

General Petain came down with General Pershing, and the first inspection was of billets. Then the two generals reviewed the Alpine Cha.s.seurs, and General Petain awarded some medals which had been due since the month before, when the Blue Devils were in the line.