A soldier's mother in France

A standard joke, used with several variations in French music-halls, is to the effect that “the English only leased their trenches for three years, but the Americans have bought theirs.” This witticism is a tribute to the amount of solid preparation the Americans have made and are making and to the marvelous feats of engineering which are progressing rapidly from southern and western France clear up to the battle lines.

We own, temporarily at least, seven miles of docks and wharves in one great seaport alone. Most of these we have built, and the work is still going on. For forty miles around this seaport the sound of hammer and ax rings day after day as one after another camp and cantonment is established. Some of these camps are really small cities. In one, for example, a hospital camp will house thirty-five thousand people. Provision for twenty thousand beds is being made. It will be, when completed, the largest hospital in the world.

A few months ago that hospital site was a barren waste of prairie. As for water, there was one solitary well. Sewers there were none, and, of course, no streets. Now there is a model drainage and sewer system. There are a dozen miles of paved streets. There is a good water supply, electric lights and telephones. When I visited this camp some fifty hospital buildings were wholly or partially completed, and since then many more must have been built.

Most of the materials used in this vast piece of construction came overseas from the United States, but no small amount of lumber was purchased in France. Now France is very short of lumber and sells as little of it as she can. I asked the colonel in command of the work where he got his building material, and he replied with a broad smile: “Well, I really stole it. I had to have the lumber, so when I found out where it was, I went over there and just insisted. You see,” he added, “over here no excuses are ever accepted from anybody. You simply have to make good on any job they assign you to. If for any reason you don’t make good, you get sent home.”

If we could make up our minds to apply this inexorable method to some of the people who are doing war work on this side of the water we might get better results. At one of the camps in the neighborhood of this same seaport in France they are building a naval aviation station. When it is complete there will be provision for one thousand to fifteen hundred giant seaplanes, great white birds that can sail three days out to sea, that will possess power to sink more submarines than any armed vessels. The submarine is visible from the air at a much greater depth than it is from a ship’s deck, and the seaplanes will carry plenty of deadly depth bombs. Moreover, they will fly safely. The submarine can not fight back at them.

When this camp is completed and equipped—don’t forget that it has to be equipped—those planes will do more than convoy vessels into the harbor, they will be used to train flyers for a dozen other ports into which our ships and our allies’ ships now steal precariously. There were no seaplanes there when I saw the place. The hangars were soon to be ready, though, and so were the big repair shops, the bunkhouses for the men, the ammunition warehouses, and all the other necessary buildings. There is absolutely no inefficiency over there.

The man who is in charge of most of the mammoth undertaking in and around this seaport now bears the title of colonel. Before he entered his country’s service for the duration of the war he was known as one of the greatest engineers in America. His largest feat was the canal which connects Lake Washington with Puget Sound. To build this canal, which flows through the heart of the city of Seattle, the waters of the big lake, which is nearly twenty miles long, had to be lowered nine feet. To a man who could do that without difficulty or serious accident the work undertaken by our army forces in France was a mere matter of taking one step after another. The first step was getting men, and there was no difficulty about that. The draft furnished the men, or at least the mass of them. Voluntary enlistment furnished experts in various lines. And splendid men they are, those American builders in France. Of one regiment of engineers working for the most part as day laborers there fully sixty per cent. are college graduates.

This seaport lies at one end of a vast railroad system which is carrying our men and all the army supplies from the ocean to the fighting front. It is a good harbor and a famous one from the time of the Romans and even further back than the Romans. But for present-day war needs it is not good enough. It has sandbars and shallows, so one of the engineering feats our men are doing is the deepening of that harbor to admit the largest ships.

Another feat is the enlarging of docking facilities so that supplies for an army of three or four million men may be quickly unloaded. Another still is the building of a five-track spur from the docks to the main line of railroad. It would take many chapters to describe adequately all the construction work that is being done in and around this one city in southern France.

Perhaps it is nobody’s fault on this side of the Atlantic that a great deal of the work has been delayed for lack of tools and machinery, but delayed it has been. For example, pile drivers that were urgently needed came slowly, and when they came were found to be relics of the past and practically useless. Locomotives of the vintage of 1868 were grudgingly furnished, and important work was held up while they were put into shape. Steam shovels came a piece at a time. But no matter. The engineers hustled while they waited and built with what material they had on hand.

If Germany has spies in those camps, and if they have contrived to make reports on what is happening there, the knowledge will bring no comfort to Emperor William and his junkers. The Potsdam fire department which was to dispose of all the army that the United States could send to Europe will be assigned to a simpler task. The mere personnel of that working force of engineers in southern France is enough to make the Germans turn pale.

The man in charge of repairs and equipment of naval aviation, with headquarters in this southern port made a fortune in the automobile manufacturing business and just before the war he retired from business. He is still young, but he had all the money he needed and he wanted to enjoy life in other ways than business. Now he draws the pay of a lieutenant-commander in the navy and devotes what time he has free from his duties to inducing other successful business men to enter army service. This man was on the boat with me coming home from France. He was going back to get three thousand more expert mechanics, and incidentally to persuade one of the biggest millionaire railroad men in the country to put on a uniform.

A captain of engineers who is bossing part of the work of building warehouses was drawing a salary of fifteen thousand a year in the contracting business in New York. Working under him in overalls are master mechanics, machinists, bridge carpenters, skilled men of many trades. They may seem to be wasted on these laboring jobs, but the work has to be done, and there are not enough men of lesser skill to go around. Later these men will be found and the skilled ones will be overseers.

To this end the world is being scoured for laborers. We have Chinese coolies working for us, Japanese, Spaniards, Dutch, Scandinavians. In one camp I saw a large detachment of Africans from Algeria, Mohammedans. They were under the command of French non-commissioned officers, men who had spent years in North Africa and know the language. The colonel in command took me to their quarters and into the cook house, where the noon meal was in preparation. A giant African in a white cotton robe and turban, the sweat running in streams down his face, was making soup in a great copper caldron. Other men, similarly attired and equally hot, were slicing vegetables, cutting bread into big chunks, opening cans of tomatoes and pouring the contents into the stew which formed the basis of the meal.

“I can’t get used to this job of mine,” said the colonel. “A year ago I filled a little army department job at home and was getting old and fat. Now I am responsible for a regiment of engineers and nine hundred workmen, most of whom can’t speak a word of English.

“These Africans, for instance. I have to leave them to their French sergeants, and look how they manage them.” I looked. The squad that was laying bricks for a drain outside the cook house had apparently committed a slight breach of discipline, for the lithe little French sergeant in charge was administering punishment. He was bounding around in a series of catlike jumps, at each jump landing an amazing kick on exactly the same portion of each man’s anatomy. He never said a word, he just leaped and kicked.

“Now, what ought I to do about that?” demanded the colonel. “It’s against every rule and procedure of the American army.”

I suggested that the American army was in process of upheaval in a good many directions, and he agreed with me.

I ought not to leave the Africans without paying a tribute to the American negroes who by thousands are helping to build camps and railroads and docks in southern France. And in many other parts of France as well. They are doing splendid work and behaving wonderfully well. France is bewildering to these men, and one of the most bewildering things is the fact that it has a dark-skinned population which does not speak United States. It is enough to rattle any good-natured black man from a Louisiana rice field to speak to a brother laborer and have him answer back in French or Arabic.

“Go ’way with tha’ talk,” he exclaims. “You ain’t no real colored man nohow. Cain’t speak your own language.”

But if the colored American is short on language in a foreign land he is all there when it comes to imagination. Some of the men from the far South are illiterate, but the majority can read and write, and according to the regimental censors some of the letters they write home to the folks must keep Georgia and Mississippi neighborhoods keyed up to the boiling point of excitement. Hundreds of miles removed from the fighting lines does not prevent the letters from dripping gore.

“Just back from a hard day in the trenches,” writes a man whose job is working on a slag heap. “I tell you we done some bloody work. I tell you. We killed a hundred Germans in one trench and cut um up like sausage meat. I cut a officer’s head clean off with my bayonet. I cuts Germans ears off when I kills um. I got a whole string of ears in my bunkhouse. Write soon, ’cause I might get hit with one of them big guns and killed.”

These lurid recitals emanate from the gentlest and most childlike of all our enlisted forces. They sit around evenings in the Y. M. C. A. huts reserved for them, eat candy, look at illustrated papers and sing their plantation and campmeeting songs in voices sweet and lonely. The French children creep up to the doors and windows of the huts to look and listen in wonder. Of all the queer and fascinating Americans in their land the colored men are the queerest and most fascinating. If it were not for the children and their shy friendliness I don’t know what the colored fellow would do, for he is very, very far from home.