Our Army at the Front Part 9

After General Petain's visit with the American troops, he recommended their training and their physique equally, and said: "I think the American Army will be an admirable fighting force within a short time."

This was also General Pershing's day for learning--his first session with one of his most difficult tasks. He had to follow the example of General Petain, and kiss the children, and accept the bouquets thrust upon both generals by all the little girls of the near-by Vosges towns.

General Pershing did better with the kissing as his day wore on, though its foreignness to his experience was plain to the end. But with the bouquets he was an outright failure. Graciously as he might accept them, the holding of them was much as a doughboy might hold his first armful of live grenades.

The camp's next distinguished visitor was Georges Clemenceau, the veteran French statesman who was soon to be Premier of France.

Clemenceau saw American troops that day for the second time, the first having been when, as a young French senator, he watched General Grant's soldiers march into Richmond.

He recalled to the sons and grandsons of those dusty warriors how inspired a sight it had been, and he added that he hoped to see the present generation march into Berlin.

When Clemenceau talked to the doughboys, however, he had more than old memories with which to stir them. He has a graceful, complete command of the English language, in which he made the two or three addresses interspersed in the full programme of his stay.

In one speech M. Clemenceau said: "I feel highly honored at the privilege of addressing you. I know America well, having lived in your country, which I have always admired, and I am deeply impressed by the presence of an American army on French soil, in defense of liberty, right, and civilization, against the barbarians. My mind compares this event to the Pilgrim Fathers, who landed on Plymouth Rock, seeking liberty and finding it. Now their children's children are returning to fight for the liberty of France and the world.

"You men have come to France with disinterested motives. You came not because you were compelled to come, but because you wished to come.

Your country always had love and friendship for France. Now you are at home here, and every French house is open to you. You are not like the people of other nations, because your motives are devoid of personal interest, and because you are filled with ideals. You have heard of the hardships before you, but the record of your countrymen proves that you will acquit yourselves n.o.bly, earning the grat.i.tude of France and the world."

At the end of this speech General Sibert said to the men who had heard it: "You will henceforth be known as the Clemenceau Battalion." That was the first unit of the American Army to have any designation other than its number.

Another civilian visitor was next, though he was civilian only in the sense that he had neither task nor uniform of the army. He was Raymond Poincare, President of the French Republic, the leader of the French "bitter-enders," and sometimes called the stoutest-hearted soldier France has ever had.

President Poincare made a thorough inspection. He, too, began with the billets, but he was not content to see them from the outside. In fact, the first that one new major-general saw of him was the half from the waist down, the other half being obscured by the floor of the barn attic he was peering into.

President Poincare made cheering speeches to the men, for the force of which they were obliged to rely upon his gestures and his intonations, since he spoke no English. But his sense was not wholly lost to the doughboys. At the peak of one of the President's most soaring flights those who understood French interrupted to applaud him.

"What did he say?" asked a doughboy.

"He said to give 'em h.e.l.l," said another.

Fourth, and last, of the great Frenchmen, and greatest, from the soldier point of view, was Marshal Joffre, Marne hero, who came and spent a night and a day at camp.

It was mid-October when he came, and weeks of driving rain had preceded him. In spite of their gloom over the weather, the doughboys were eagerly antic.i.p.ating the visit of Joffre, and they were wondering if the man of many battles would think them worth standing in the rain to watch.

A detachment of French buglers--buglers whom the Americans could never sufficiently admire or imitate, because they could twirl the bugles between beats and take up their blasts with neither pitch nor time lost--waited outside the quarters where the marshal was to spend the night. Half an hour before his motor came up the sun broke through the drizzle.

"He brings it with him," said a doughboy.

Marshal Joffre was accompanied by General Pershing, the Pershing personal staff and Joffre's aide, Lieutenant-Colonel Jean Fabry, who was with the French Mission in America. There were ovations in all the French villages through which they pa.s.sed, and there were uproarious cheers when the party reached the American officers who were to be addressed by Marshal Joffre. In his short speech he said that America had come to help deliver humanity from the yoke of German insolence, and added: "Let us be united. Victory surely will be ours."

Later, after picked men had shown Joffre what they could do with grenades and bayonets, the marshal made a short speech to them, telling them of how his visit to America had cheered and strengthened him, and how even greater was the stimulation he had had from seeing the Americans train in France.

In a statement to the a.s.sociated Press he said: "I have been highly gratified by what I have seen to-day. I am confident that when the time comes for American troops to go into the trenches and meet the enemy they will give the same excellent account of themselves in action as they did to-day in practice."

Northcliffe came in December, with Colonel House and members of the House Mission. He wrote a long impression of his visit for the English at home, in which he said that the finest sight he saw was the American rifle practice, in which the United States troops did exceptionally well. Then he praised them for their mastery of the British type of trench mortar, for their accuracy with grenades and, most significant of all, for their able handling of themselves after the bombs were thrown, so that they should have a maximum of safety in battle. The doughboys had finally learned their hardest lesson.

Sir Walter Roper Lawrence, who was coming to America on a special war mission, went to camp in early December to see how the doughboys fared, so that he might report on them at home.

He had just inquired of General Sir Julian Byng, who had accidentally had the a.s.sistance of some American engineers at Cambrai, what they should be valued at, and Sir Julian had answered: "Very earnest, very modest, and very helpful."

"I must say that is my opinion, too," said Sir Walter, when he came to camp. "They are fine fellows to look at--as good-looking soldiers as any man might wish to see. They have a wonderfully springy step, much more springy than one sees in other soldiers. They are clean, well set up, and they are always cheerful. They are splendidly fed and well quartered, and they are desperately keen to learn, and as desperately keen to get into the thick of things. If they seem to have any worries it is that they are not getting in as quickly as they would like to.

"The American troops have everywhere made a decidedly favorable impression. I am extremely proud of my British citizenship, I have been all my life, but if I were an American I would be insufferably proud of my citizenship. In all history there is nothing that approaches her transporting such an enormous army so great a distance oversea to fight for an ideal."

After the new year W. A. Appleton, secretary of the General Federation of Trades Unions in England, made a visit to France, and described the American camps for his own public through the Federation organ.

"I see everywhere," he wrote, "samples of the American armies that we are expecting will enable the Allies to clear France of the Germans.

Most of the men are fine specimens of humanity, and those with whom I spoke showed no signs of braggadocio, too frequently attributed to America. They were quiet, well-spoken fellows, fully alive to the seriousness of the task they have undertaken, and they apparently have but one regret--that they had not come into the war soon enough. It was pleasant to talk to these men and to derive encouragement from their quiet, un.o.btrusive strength."

These were the things which were playing upon public opinion in France and England, reinforcing the good-will with which the first American soldiers were welcomed there.

When United States soldiers paraded again in the streets of London, late in the spring of 1918, and when they marched down the new Avenue du President Wilson in Paris, on July 4, 1918, the greetings to them had lost in hysteria and grown in depth, till the magnitude of the demonstrations and the quality of them drew amazement from the oldest of the old stagers.

CHAPTER XII

THE MEN WHO DID EVERYTHING

If the American Expeditionary Force had landed in the middle of the Sahara Desert instead of France, it would not have been under greater necessity to do things for itself, and immediately. For even where the gallant French were entirely willing to pull their belts in one more notch and make provision for the newcomers, the moral obligation not to permit their further sacrifice was enormous. And although, as it happened, there were many things, at first, in which the A. E. F. was obliged to ask French aid, this number was speedily cut down and finally obliterated.

The men on whom fell the largest burden of making American troops self-sufficing in the first half-year of war, were the nine regiments of engineers recruited in nine chief cities of America before General Pershing sailed. They were officered to a certain extent by Regular Army engineers, but more by railroad officials who were recruited at the same time from all the large railroads of America.

And they operated what roads they found, and built more, till finally, after a year, during which they had a.s.sistance from the army engineers and a fair number of labor and special units, they had created in France a railroad equal to any one of the middle-sized roads of long standing in this country, with road-beds, rolling-stock, and equipment equal to the best, and railway terminals which, in the case of one of their number, rivalled the port of Hamburg.

These were the men who were first to arrive in Europe after General Pershing, who beat them over by only a few days. They were not fighting units, so that they did not dim the glory of the Regulars, though they had the honor to carry the American army uniform first through the streets of London.

They were the first of the army in the battle-line, too, though again their civilian pursuit, though failing to serve to protect them against German attack, deprived them of the flag-flying and jubilation that attended the infantrymen and artillerymen in late October.

But though their public honor was so limited, their private honor with the Expeditionary Force was without stint. It was "the engineers here"

and "the engineers there" till it must have seemed to them that they were carrying the burden of the entire world.

On May 6, 1917, the War Department issued this statement: "The War Department has sent out orders for the raising, as rapidly as possible, of nine additional regiments of engineers which are destined to proceed to France at the earliest possible moment, for work on the lines of communication.... All details regarding the force will be given out as fast as compatible with the best public interests."

The recruiting-points were New York, Chicago, St. Louis, Boston, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Atlanta, San Francisco, and Philadelphia. It was the job of each city to provide a regiment. And it became the job of the great railway brotherhoods to see that neither the kind nor the number of men accepted would cripple the railways at home.

The War Department asked for 12,000 men, and had offers of about four times that many. The result was, of course, that the 9 regiments were men of magnificent physique and sterling equipment. One regiment boasted 125 members who measured more than 6 feet.

Their first official task was to help to repair and man the French railways leading up to the lines, carrying food for men and guns.

Their next was to build and man the railways which were to connect the American seaport with the training-camps, and last, with the fighting-line itself.

The promise of immediate action in France was fulfilled to the letter.

Two months from the day the recruiting began, the "Lucky 13th," the regiment recruited in Chicago, landed in a far-away French town, whose inhabitants leaned out of their windows in the late, still night, to throw them roses and whispers of good cheer--anything louder than whispers being under a ban because of the nearness to the front--and the day following, with French crews at their elbows, they were running French trains up and down the last line of communications.

These were men who had years of railroading behind them. Many of them were officered by the same men who had been their directors in civil life. It was no uncommon thing to hear a private address his captain by his first name. One day a private said to his captain. "Bill, you got all the wrong dope on this," to which the captain replied severely: "I told you before about this discipline--if you want to quarrel with my orders, you call me mister."

But military discipline was never a real love with the engineers.