A soldier's mother in France

Ridiculing and belittling the American army in France is no longer the great indoor sport of the German government. It was the last one the government has left and until lately it was played desperately with the view of diverting the minds of the people, and keeping hope alive in their sinking hearts.

The German newspapers, of course, are rigidly censored. Not a word of war news is ever published except that which emanates from headquarters. Nevertheless, the German people, who are not fools, now know full well that the kaiser’s war promises are not being fulfilled. He promised in the beginning that their victorious troops would be home by Christmas of 1914. They know now that Christmas, 1918, will see the world still at war.

The kaiser promised his people Verdun, but he could not deliver Verdun. He promised them the annihilation of the British army before this year’s summer. But the British army still fights on and even the German newspapers dare not claim that the British show signs of weakness or surrender.

The German people were promised, above all, that their commander-in-chief would end the war victoriously before the Americans could raise and transport overseas any army worthy of the name. This supreme promise the government, until Pershing annihilated the St. Michiel salient, tried to make the people believe was being kept. Because they knew that unless the war was won before the Americans come in in great numbers, it never could be won.

Secretary of War Baker, quoting from the semi-official Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung of Berlin, gives a sample of the sedative stuff with which the German authorities kept the people’s nerves quiet. Admitting that a country of one hundred million population might conceivably raise an army of one million five hundred thousand men, the article goes to great pains to prove that such an army will never cross the seas. “The American political situation” is such that the greater part of the army will have to be kept at home. At best only four to five hundred thousand men can be put into the European battle-field.

“There is an American army in France,” concedes the article, with an air of being quite candid on the subject, “but it consists entirely of woodcutters, railroad men and doctors, except two or three divisions whose precious lives are being spared in quiet places far behind the front.”

When I read those words I laughed. Because I have been in a good many of those quiet places behind the front, and I know that what was being done there was not coddling American soldiers, nor yet keeping them safe from battle. What was and is being done there is making them one hundred per cent. efficient fighters. Not mass fighters alone, not men who at the word of command go forward to be mown down by machine-gun fire. But individual fighters, men who can move together in a mass, yes, but men who also know how to fight alone, who have initiative, resourcefulness, responsibility. Men who know every trick in the game.

While we were building ships; while we were drafting and drilling men over here; while the despised woodcutters and railroad men and the vigorous young engineers were laying the basis for a long war if necessary, but a clean victory in the end, our soldiers, waiting in scores of camps to take their places in the lines, were being given an intensive training, which I think would astonish even the war-efficient Germans.

We have also special schools for officers, and they are still in full blast, and will be continued as long as they are needed. Our supply of officers will never run short, for the schools will continue to turn them out. The schools give the superior enlisted men a chance to earn commissions. Officers in every regiment are on a constant watch for men who show signs of leadership and military intelligence. Such men are officer material, and on the recommendation of their superiors they are sent to one or another of the schools which have been established over there.

When our men go to France from the cantonments here their training is by no means complete. They have been licked into soldier shape, they are in good physical and mental condition, they have learned to march, to drill, and to shoot. They can use the bayonet, they know something about artillery, about grenades and bombs. But they still have much to learn. They begin to learn soon after they arrive in France. They learn in camps and schools, but the German government doesn’t tell its people about that.

It was a cold, drizzly day in March that I visited a school where infantry, artillery, sanitary and gas lore was being instilled into the intelligence of nearly two thousand hot-blooded young Americans. Some of them were being trained for non-commissioned officers who would be in direct command of squads of soldiers in battle. There were also large classes for lieutenants and captains of infantry, artillery, engineering and aviation.

I can not in one chapter or in two give anything more than an outline of the courses studied. The schedules announcing the classes lie on my desk as I write. They cover eighteen closely typewritten pages.

Take a class of enlisted infantry men who were expected to command squads. These are some of the things they did in school the week of March 4 to March 9, 1918: On Monday and Tuesday they had inspection and drill from 7:50 to 8:45. From 9 until 11:45 they had instruction in musketry, grenade and bayonet work. They went to their noon dinner, and from 1:15 to 4:30 they had more of the same kind of drill.

They repeated this during the rest of the week, and on Wednesday they had besides a lecture on some theoretical problem of their work by a veteran colonel, a West Point man. They also studied a map problem, and in the evening they saw in the engineers’ school a night demonstration of wiring in the field. They finished on Saturday afternoon with a “tactical walk.” Quite a busy week.

It was just as busy with the class in automatic weapons. On Monday they had close order drill, barrage drill, a lecture on direct fire, another on indirect fire, practise in range firing and the use of range finders. Finally they had an hour’s pistol practise.

They had a great deal of artillery target practise that week, also a lecture on trench routing, a conference on indirect fire tables, whatever they may be, and two days’ hard work in the gas school. You can not, you know, just pick up a gas mask, put it on and successfully fight. You have to learn how. I tried on a gas mask and couldn’t breath in it five minutes. So the soldiers have to learn how to wear their masks, and a great deal besides before they can safely face a gas attack.

They hear lectures on how gas is used, preparation for the attacks, on the mechanics of the box respirator used by our army, and on the effects of gas. They learn the history of gas warfare and the German orders and reports concerning it. They learn what to do during and after an attack. They drill in actual gas chambers.

The officers in this school had much more technical work. A tactical course for field officers interested me greatly. The men studied the technique of grenade, trench mortar and one pound cannon firing. Trench fighting, when I visited the school, was being vigorously studied, and I heard part of an intensely interesting lecture on “The Attack in Trench Warfare,” from a lieutenant-colonel of the British army who had led many such attacks himself since 1915.

It seems odd to hear of seminars in war wisdom, but they have them there, officers who had experienced trench fighting sitting around a table and discussing nice questions of tactics, just as a short time ago some of them were sitting around university tables and discussing political economy or English literature.

They had a course for signal men which was very valuable. Field telegraphs and telephones play an exciting part in modern battles, and the students in this course devoted much time to buzzer telegraph work. They learned how to string field telephones, and to use them. They had lectures on ciphers and signals, endless and intricate. They learned to read maps.

In the aero school they were training aerial photographers and teaching them how to interpret photographs taken in the skies. The flyers were being taught to signal troops from above and to read army signals thousands of feet below. What the soldiers on the ground seemed to be doing was spreading freshly washed towels and sheets on the grass, but what they were really doing, it appeared, was asking questions of the aviators about the enemy’s maneuvers.

A little later I visited another army school, or rather an army college, for there line and staff officers of superior rank were under instruction. Our army authorities do not intend to repeat the mistakes of the Civil War in regard to superior officers. It has been said that it took only a year to teach the rank and file of our men to fight, but that we fought for two years to train lieutenants and captains, and three years to train generals. The war was ended in one more year.

This war college in France, where some great general may now be in training, perhaps for the highest command of all, is located in a medieval town which must have seen a lot of fighting in the distant past. Its stout city walls still stand, and it is plain that a long battle would have to be fought before the besieging army reached the walls. The town stands on a rocky height little accessible in the old days. Below stretches a level plain where all the enemy’s movements would have been visible for miles.

It is an appropriate place in which to train future American generals, for this war is being fought, not only with all modern weapons, but with many of the weapons of the past. One can easily fancy the ghosts of the great Charlemagne, Godfrey of Bouillon, Richard Lion Heart, Sir John Chandos, hovering in the shadows of the classrooms, and listening delightedly to familiar things, talk of liquid fire, hand grenades, storming positions with bayonets and long knives.

But the ghostly warriors would hear other talk, and when final examination time came, I imagine that they might thank their stars that they were safely dead, for this war makes demands on the intelligence of commanding officers that the middle ages wotted nothing of.

I took a brief survey of one examination paper in which it was put up to a commander to move several divisions of men from one district in France to the fighting front. He had a railroad map of France before him and he was required to state at length and in detail exactly how and when and where he would entrain his one hundred and twenty-five thousand men; when and where he would stop each unit for meals; what he would do with his men when they left the railroad; what villages and towns he would occupy; where he would billet the soldiers; how and with what he would feed and supply them; how he would move supplies. It made my head swim, but it also made my heart swell with proud confidence in our army.

Efficiency! There is only one real and permanent efficiency. It is not possible to achieve it under a slave system. It can only be achieved by freemen, willing to follow their chosen leaders into the valley of the shadow of death if that is the road through which more freedom, freedom of all the world, is to be gained.