Demobilization

The American Expeditionary Forces, on November 11, 1918, were ill prepared to conduct the manifold activities leading to their demobilization. Up to that day the expedition had been too busy going ahead to think much about how it was to get home. But now had come the armistice, the end. The great adventure was over. The guerre was fini.

At once a great wave of homesickness spread over the A. E. F. That song of careless valor, “Where do we go from here?” to the swinging beat of which a million men had marched forward over the French roads, became a querulous “When do we go home?” When indeed? It had taken nearly a year and a half to transport the A. E. F. to France. Disregarding the fact that the Army overseas had at its disposal less than half as many troopships as had supported it up to November 11, before the men could start home in great numbers there had first to be created in France an embarkation system with a capacious equipment of camps and port buildings, if the expedition were to return in good order and not as a disorganized mob.

Never was a daily journal scanned with such emotion as was the Stars and Stripes by its readers during this period of waiting. The Stars and Stripes was the official newspaper of the enlisted men of the A. E. F. After the armistice anything pertaining to the return of the troops to America was the most important news which the publication could possibly print. The Stars and Stripes published the monthly schedules of transport sailings, told of the extraordinary expansion of the Yankee transport fleet, noted the continual improvement in the shipping efficiency of that fleet, rejoiced in black-face type when some ocean flyer broke the record for the turn-around, as the round trip to America and back was called, and in general kept the personnel of the expedition informed of the movement homeward. But, although the return of the A. E. F. was a transportation feat actually more astonishing than that which had placed the forces in Europe, yet to the hundreds of thousands of homesick boys who watched the brown fields of France turn green in the spring of 1919, the pace of the snail and the turtle seemed speed itself in comparison to the progress made by the demobilization machine.

The A. E. F. in November, 1918, possessed no port equipment capable of quick conversion into a plant for embarking the expedition. There had been no need of large port installations in France for the use of debarking troops. The A. E. F. had crossed to France under a scheme of identification that was a marvel of system and organization. Once the system was perfected, every military unit bore as part of its name a so-called item number that told the debarkation officers (by reference to the shipping schedules) exactly where each unit should go upon arrival. So it was with individuals and small detachments traveling as casuals. Their item numbers placed them instantly in the great structure of the A. E. F. No need for vast port rest camps in which thousands must wait until G. H. Q. disposed of them. They were placed before they sailed from America. Expense and confusion saved by the art of management!

The armistice changed all about. Our military ports in France had to become ports for the embarkation of troops with an equipment vastly expanded. America had sent to France an Army perfectly clothed and accoutered. For the sake of uniformity the home ports of embarkation had prepared the 2,000,000 troops for the voyage, and this meant issuing smaller or larger quantities of clothing and other personal articles to practically every man who sailed. The A. E. F. proposed to return its men to their homes well dressed, clean, and self-respecting, and it was logical, too, to accomplish this purpose in France in the process of embarking the troops. To carry out the plan, however, required an extensive plant, something not to be materialized by a wave of the hand. France after the armistice was to witness an extensive military construction carried on by the Americans at their ports.

Brest, Bordeaux, and St. Nazaire had been the three principal landing places for our troops sent to France directly from the United States. Brest, near the northeasternmost extremity of France, possessed a harbor with water that could accommodate the largest ships afloat, but the water near shore was too shallow for docks at which large ships could berth. Consequently the troops rode in lighters between ships and shore. This was Brest’s chief disadvantage as a military port, but it was not a serious disadvantage.

Next southward came St. Nazaire, on the Loire River a few miles inland. The first of the expeditionary troops landed at St. Nazaire, in July, 1917. The port boasted of docks with berths for troopships, but the waters of the river were too shallow for the largest transports.

Still farther south was Bordeaux, fifty-two miles from the ocean on the Gironde River. What few troops landed at Bordeaux were incidental, for the port construction at Bordeaux and other great developments at Bassens and Pauillac nearer the mouth of the river were conducted by the A. E. F. with the view of making the Gironde the chief ocean terminal for the reception of army supplies shipped from the United States. Troopships could tie up to the docks at Bordeaux, but the Gironde was so narrow and its tidal currents were so swift that the military administration of the port had to manage the stream on a schedule as it might operate a single-track railroad. There were several places in the river where vessels could not pass each other.

After November 11 followed a few days of indecision and bewilderment in the A. E. F. No one in Europe knew precisely what the armistice meant or what the victorious armies could expect. Quickly, however, it transpired that the armistice was permanent; it was peace itself for all practical purposes, and the only forces we should need to maintain in France would be those chosen to conduct the measured advance into Germany and to garrison the occupied territory. Within a week General Pershing designated the troops for the Army of Occupation and released the rest of the American Expeditionary Forces (more than half its total numerical strength) for return to the United States as soon as transportation facilities were available. He charged the Chief Quartermaster of the expedition with the duty of embarking the returning forces.1

The Chief Quartermaster of the A. E. F. at once designated Brest, St. Nazaire, and Bordeaux as the ports of embarkation. The early plan was to send 20 per cent of the expedition home via Bordeaux and the rest in equal numbers through St. Nazaire and Brest. As it worked out, practically all the overseas soldiers returned through these three ports, although a few sailed from Marseilles, Le Havre, and La Pallice. The division of work, however, did not materialize as planned. Bordeaux handled less than its fifth of the forces, and the embarkations at St. Nazaire were not much larger than those at Bordeaux. The great mass of the A. E. F. came back via Brest, and at Brest was set up the largest installation for the embarkation of passengers the world had ever seen.

The troops of the A. E. F. were of two general sorts—those of the line organized by divisions, corps, and armies, also known as combat troops, and those of supply, who conducted the thousand and one enterprises necessary to the maintenance of a force as large as the A. E. F. three thousand miles away from home. The two sorts of troops were not evenly balanced in number, the combat troops being considerably the more numerous. It was evident that their embarkation offered separate problems.

With the combat troops mass travel could be conducted at its greatest efficiency. The divisional troops were homogeneous, their transportation needs were essentially alike, and a single order could control the movements of tens of thousands of them at once. The supply troops, on the other hand, were heterogeneous. They were organized in thousands of units of varying sizes and kinds. Many of them, particularly officers, were serving in the organization as individuals attached to no particular units. The travel problems of these various elements differed widely. Therefore it was decided to handle the embarkation of divisional troops and supply troops separately. The general demobilization plan adopted about the middle of December, 1918, provided for the establishment of a great embarkation center for the divisional troops—an area which should be convenient to all three ports of embarkation, in which area the combat troops in their large units could be prepared for the overseas voyage, and from which they could go directly to the ships without pausing in the embarkation cities. The installations at the ports themselves were to be used especially in the embarkation of supply troops.

At Le Mans, a spot about midway between Paris and the Biscay coast, the A. E. F. possessed a plant that might be expanded quickly to serve as the divisional embarkation center. When the great flood of American troops began debouching upon French soil in the early summer of 1918 it became evident to the command of the expedition that it needed an area in which the incoming divisions might assemble as their units debarked from the transports and where they might rest while their ranks were being built up to prescribed strength by the addition of replacements. By this time, too, the system of supplying replacement troops to the A. E. F. had become automatic. The replacements were the only American soldiers who crossed to France without definite objective. They were to be used in France as the A. E. F. needed them to fill up its divisional ranks. It was necessary, therefore, to provide a reservoir upon which the depleted combat divisions could draw for replacements. Le Mans was selected as the site of this reservoir and also as the assembling point for the debarking organized divisions. The Le Mans area before the armistice was known as the A. E. F.’s classification and replacement camp.

The reasons which brought about the selection of Le Mans as the site for the replacement and divisional depot served also to make the place the ideal location for the expedition’s embarkation center. Le Mans was at the junction of trunk-line railroads leading to Brest, St. Nazaire, and Bordeaux. It also possessed good railroad connections with Paris and with the front, which in the summer of 1918 had been advanced by the Germans until it was close to the metropolitan limits of Paris and was therefore not far from Le Mans. The depot was established in July, 1918, when the Eighty-third Division occupied the area as its depot division. At that time the depot as projected contemplated the construction of eight divisional camps, each to accommodate 26,000 men, and two forwarding camps, one with accommodations for 25,000 men and the other for 15,000. In other words, the camp eventually was to accommodate a quarter of a million troops. No military center in the United States compared in size with this project.

At the time of the armistice the development of Le Mans had made good progress. It could then maintain about 120,000 troops. On December 14, when Le Mans was officially designated as the embarkation center, its capacity had been increased to 200,000. Shortly after the armistice began, its transient population jumped to 100,000, and it never fell below this mark until the late spring of 1919, when the greater part of the combat divisions of the A. E. F. had embarked for the United States.

The Le Mans center had the duty of completely preparing for embarkation all troops received in the area. Theoretically every man who passed through Le Mans was prepared to go directly to a transport. This meant bathing and delousing for every man who came to the camp, inspecting his equipment and supplying new clothing and other personal articles if he needed them, and perfecting his service records so that he might encounter no difficulty in securing his final pay and discharge in the United States. To do this important work quickly and well, it was necessary to operate an institution of impressive size.

The dimensions of the whole camp were tremendous. There was nothing like it in the United States. A man could walk briskly for an hour in a single direction at Le Mans and see nothing but tents, barracks, drill fields, and troops lined up for preliminary or final inspections. The task of feeding this city full of guests was so great that the camp administration found it economical to build a narrow-gauge railroad system connecting the kitchens with the warehouses. Food moved up to the camp cookstoves by the trainload, and the same locomotives that brought the supplies hauled away the refuse. A whole adjacent forest was cut down to supply firewood. When the Americans occupied the section there were no adequate switching facilities, nor were there storage accommodations. The Quartermaster Corps, which operated the storage project, cleared a field in the midst of a wood and used the clearing for an open storage space (the surrounding trees giving a degree of shelter), connecting the place with the railroad by constructing a spur track. Thereafter, even after great warehouses had been built in the clearing and it had become the supply depot for the entire camp, requiring the services of 6,000 troops in its operation, the place was known to the camp as “The Spur.” As an addition to this storage, smaller covered warehouses were provided at all the divisional sub-depots. At one time the corrals of the camp contained 10,000 horses and mules. In one week in February, 1919, nearly 32,000 troops arrived in camp, a fact indicating the rate at which troops passed through to embarkation. The Quartermaster Corps opened two great central commissaries that were in effect department stores. The camp operated a large laundry, a shoe repair shop, a clothing repair shop, and numerous other industrial plants.

The equipment installed at Le Mans was duplicated in smaller scale at the three embarkation ports. Yet even these port installations could not be called small. Camp Pontanezen at Brest could give accommodations to 80,000 men at once. The largest embarkation camps in the United States were smaller than this. There were thirteen smaller camps and military posts at Brest. The two embarkation camps at Bordeaux could house 22,000 men, but there were billeting accommodations in the district for thousands of others. The construction at St. Nazaire was considerably larger than that at Bordeaux, but not so extensive as that at Brest.

Most of these camps were built after the armistice, and the engineer constructors and the embarking troops elbowed each other as embarkation and construction proceeded simultaneously. Some of the camps had served as rest camps prior to the armistice, but these had to be greatly enlarged and improved in equipment before they could give adequate service as embarkation camps. The weather along the northwestern coast of France is intensely uncomfortable and disagreeable to Americans. In the winter and spring especially, the rains and mists are almost incessant. It was not always possible to choose ideal sites for the embarkation camps in France. The sites had to be near the ports, and in the thickly inhabited countryside the American authorities were forced to accept whatsoever areas they could get, without being too insistent upon such fine points as natural drainage and pleasant surroundings.

This statement is particularly applicable to Pontanezen, which was pitched on high but poorly drained ground. Ordinarily the Army would not have occupied such a location without first making permanent improvements. The continual rains, the lack of strong drainage, and the heavy traffic of men, animals, and trucks combined to make the Pontanezen site in 1919 a morass of quaking mud. Only the strongest of emergencies justified its use. Because of the daily cost of maintaining the A. E. F. and because the expeditionary soldiers themselves wished to return home as soon as possible, regardless of the conditions of their travel, it was decided to make use of these port camps even while they were being constructed, instead of holding up the whole movement until the camp arrangements could be made perfect.

Tales of suffering among our soldiers at Pontanezen came to the United States and were even aired on the floors of Congress, but the suffering alleged was more apparent than real. Those who went through the experience of residence in Pontanezen, even at its worst, were not injured in health. Despite appearances, the camp’s sanitary arrangements were of high merit. The medical records of Camp Pontanezen show that its sickness and death rates, leaving the domestic epidemic of influenza altogether out of the comparison, were as low as those of the best camps in the United States.

In the spring of 1919 most of the construction work at the embarkation camps was complete, and they became more comfortable. The camps consisted of miles of one-story, tar-papered, rough-board buildings connected with wooden sidewalks of duck-boards. Pontanezen was a complete American city set down amid the quaint roads of old Brittany. It had newspapers, banks, theatres, stores, public libraries, restaurants, hospitals, churches, telephones, and electric lights, and even a narrow-gauge railway for freighting about its supplies. The entire American military population in the camps at Brest quite outnumbered the French inhabitants of the region. The water system installed by the Engineers to serve all the American establishments at the port was sufficient for the city of 150,000 people. There was a special camp for casual officers. A section of this camp was set aside for the French, English, Belgian, and Italian wives that American soldiers had married abroad. There was a hospital camp, a camp for the white troops on permanent duty at the port, and another for colored troops so assigned. There were numerous small camps for labor battalions, and a special camp for engineer and motor transport organizations. Not far away was a large German prison camp.

In one important respect embarkation in France differed from what it had been in the United States. It was extremely necessary to rid the home-coming troops of body vermin before placing them on the ships. The delousing process at our French ports of embarkation was the most thorough experienced by the doughboy during his foreign service, and this process chiefly distinguished embarkation abroad from that which the soldier had known at Hoboken and Newport News.

Our forebears shared none of the modern aversion to discussion of the louse. One of the great monarchs of France set the stamp of his royal approval upon scratching publicly when one itched, and Robert Burns once addressed a poem to a louse. The louse, however, cannot survive American habits of personal cleanliness; and, justly enough, the insect has become associated with filth and has dropped out of polite conversation. The war revived the fame of this parasite. An inspection at one time revealed the fact that 90 per cent of the American troops at the front were infested. These men naturally wrote home about it, and then the louse, euphemized as “cootie,” became a national figure.

There was a serious aspect to the situation, however, that the military authorities could not overlook. Besides being a source of discomfort, the louse is the sole carrier of one of the most dread diseases that afflict mankind—typhus fever. In bygone times typhus was known variously as army fever, camp fever, or jail fever. It was particularly prevalent in this country at the time of the Revolution, and it existed to some extent here during the Civil War—an indication of what must have been the condition of individual American soldiers in those days. Typhus exists to-day practically as an endemic on the central plateau of Mexico, the range of the disease touching the border of the United States. The disease cannot invade this country, however, because of the lack of carriers. But if the A. E. F. had returned to the United States with its 2,000,000 men lice-infested, the demobilized soldiers might have distributed typhus carriers from one end of the country to the other and exposed the nation to a terrible menace.

The sanitary regulations of the A. E. F. kept typhus away from the troops by controlling the lice. The Quartermaster Corps operated a number of mobile delousing plants just behind the front lines and in the billeting areas to the rear. It is interesting to note that these plants had to be camouflaged because the airmen of the enemy sometimes mistook them for batteries of artillery and directed gunfire upon them. As these plants increased in number and efficiency they reduced the lousiness of the combat troops to a scant 3 per cent.

As long as our troops remained in France largely billeted on the French population, it was unlikely that the field sanitary measures could extinguish the louse altogether; but the command of the expedition determined that at the ports of embarkation the American doughboy should bid good-bye to P. vestimenti forever. The importance of completely delousing the troops was emphasized in the same G. H. Q. memorandum that had set up the embarkation system.

In pursuance of this policy every embarkation camp in France was established in two isolated sections. One section was known as the “dirty” camp and the other as the “clean” camp. Upon arrival from the front the troops first took quarters in the “dirty” camp. Between the two sections lay the buildings in which the camp administration conducted all the various processes of preparing soldiers for embarkation for the United States. One of the most important of these activities was bathing and delousing the troops. As far as scientific measures could prevent it, not a louse was permitted to cross from the “dirty” camp to the “clean” camp. The measures were highly effective. Only a few men were found to be infested upon arrival in America. For these there were final delousing facilities at all our debarkation camps. When the overseas veterans took trains for home at the Atlantic ports they were completely verminless. The medical officers at the demobilization centers in this country failed to discover a single exception.

The embarkation plant at Bordeaux was known to returning soldiers as “The Mill.” Its processes were typical of those at all the embarkation camps in France. The Bordeaux mill ground swiftly, yet ground exceeding fine. To it came the raw material—dirty, ragged, weary humanity. It reached out for this material, whirled it into its machinery, and a little while later delivered from the other end its finished product—clean, well-clothed, deloused, and comfortable American soldiers, their service records compiled up to the minute, American money in their pockets, and a mighty self-respect swelling their chests.

To France America sent the best clothed and best equipped army that had ever stepped on European soil. The two million men arrived in France outfitted almost completely in new clothing and equipment which they had received in the American embarkation camps just before they boarded the transports. In 1919 we brought home the first American army that had ever fought in a great war and returned in anything but rags. By special act Congress gave permission to each discharged soldier to keep his uniform and certain other equipment when he returned to civilian life. Even though, for most of the men coming up into the embarkation ports in France, their final discharge was only a few weeks away, nevertheless the military organization there saw to it that every man was decently clad before he began the return voyage, and this often meant the issue of entirely new articles. The Quartermaster Corps abroad wanted to win from the folks at home the verdict, when they had looked over their restored boys—“Guess they took pretty good care of you over there, after all.”

The “mill” at Bordeaux was housed in a long, low hut with separate departments for the chief operations necessary to the preparation of troops for embarkation, the steps being arranged progressively. At the entrance end were the executive offices. Here the soldier, as he passed through, received his service records, withdrawn from his company’s files, and also a Red Cross bag in which to carry his personal trinkets and his record cards and papers on the journey through the “mill.” Next he came to the records inspection section, where officers perfected the entries in his record. Here he also received a copy of the orders under which his unit was traveling, his pay card, and a card known as the individual equipment record. On the equipment card appeared the printed names of all articles which a completely outfitted American soldier should wear or carry wherever he went. Next the soldier stood before an inspector who examined the worn equipment, noted wherein it was incomplete, labeled any damaged or worn-out articles for discard and salvage, and checked on the equipment card such new articles as should be issued to the soldier later on. The standard equipment of each returning soldier was as follows:

The soldier next went to the disrobing room, where he divested himself of all clothing except his shoes, which he was to carry through with him. The cootie would not cling to leather. Then he passed on to a medical examination for infectious disease. If he passed this safely, he proceeded to the bathing department, where, under the watchful eyes of a sergeant, he soaped and scrubbed himself thoroughly, first in a hot shower bath and then in a cold one. Experience had taught that the greatest enemy of the louse was plain soap and water and plenty of it. Meanwhile certain of his discarded garments, if they were in good condition or if they could be repaired for future wear, had been sent from the disrobing room to the steam sterilizer in another part of the building. The sterilization process took thirty minutes, which was just about the time it took the soldier to go through the “mill.”

Scrubbed and clean, the soldier went from the bath into another room where doctors examined him for diseases of the throat, lungs, and skin. After that, the barber shop and a hair cut. The barber shop at the “mill” was equipped with fifty chairs.

At last the object of these official attentions reached his goal, the equipment room. What he had feared in the process were the two medical inspections, either of which might stop his progress instanter and send him scurrying to a camp hospital for observation or treatment. In either circumstance, his embarkation would be deferred indefinitely. But if he were allowed to reach the equipment room, he knew he was safe. Here he found great bins containing large quantities of the articles named on the equipment card. As he passed the bins every soldier received clean socks and underclothing, new tape for his identification tags and a clean shelter half in which to carry his equipment. He also received such new articles as were checked on his equipment card.

In the dressing room beyond, he found waiting for him a uniform and the serviceable portions of the outfit he had brought with him to the “mill,” all the textile articles having been thoroughly deloused and sterilized. He found his old uniform, if that had been in good condition; otherwise, a new one or a respectable one from the repair factory. Sometimes his old uniform came back shrunken and faded by the hot steam of the delousing plant. In that event a serviceable uniform was substituted for it.

The final station in the “mill” was the pay office. It sometimes happened that troops came up for embarkation with their pay months in arrears. Now, with his records perfected, the soldier received all his back pay. Thanks to the exchange system set up by the A. E. F. in the embarkation camps, he received his pay in American money, perhaps the first he had seen in many months. The “feel” of the familiar bills and the jingle of the silver were like a taste of home. Clean, neatly clothed, restored once more to man’s estate, the soldier emerged from the “mill” and made his way to quarters in the “clean” camp, his heart light because he knew now that he was going home “toot sweet.” The sense of well-being moved one soldier-poet to praise of the “mill” as follows:

The embarkation plant at Bordeaux, if pressed, could cleanse, delouse, equip, and otherwise prepare for the home voyage 180,000 men in a month. During the busy times in 1919 a continuous column of men filed through the departments. They went through in blocks of twelve. In each of the various departments were ten booths, each accommodating twelve men.

The processes at the other embarkation camps were essentially the same. In each of the Le Mans divisional camps was installed a bathing and delousing plant with a capacity of 1,200 men an hour. For the sterilization of clothing in the area there were three large central “disinfesting” plants, five smaller stationary steam sterilizers, and more than a dozen mobile sterilizers.

The two port camps at Bordeaux were known as Camp Neuve and Camp Genicart. After the armistice these two camps were reorganized and enlarged. Camp Neuve became the “dirty” or entrance camp. It accommodated 5,400 men. Camp Genicart was designated as the “clean” or evacuation camp, and its barracks could house nearly 17,000 men. The busiest day for Bordeaux was Sunday, May 11, 1919, when 6,399 men passed through the “mill” and made ready to embark. St. Nazaire handled 15,306 embarkations on June 17, 1919, its record day.

Salvage was an important operation at all the embarkation points in France. Thousands of articles of apparel discarded by the returning troops were not so worn but that they could be made serviceable again. The salvage plant at Le Mans could repair 1,700 pairs of shoes, dry-clean, sterilize, and repair 4,000 pieces of clothing, wash 10,000 garments in the laundry, and disinfect 10,000 blankets every day. The plant occupied eight buildings, and the average value of clothing repaired monthly was over $150,000. There were salvage plants also at Brest, St. Nazaire, and Bordeaux, the one at Brest being of great size.

The task of feeding men at the embarkation camps gave the Quartermaster Corps one of its chief problems. Each divisional sub-depot at Le Mans carried at all times sufficient food to supply the appetites of 25,000 men for fifteen days, and in addition the central warehouses contained 500,000 emergency rations to substitute for the garrison rations if anything went wrong with the food supply. In December, 1918, the subsistence services in the area had been built up to the capacity of 500,000 rations cooked and served each day.

At Brest also the feeding arrangements were laid out on an immense scale. The men ate food prepared in standard kitchens, each capable of providing subsistence for thousands. The cold-storage and other storage spaces of one of the standard kitchens were large enough to hold such items as 10,000 pounds of beef and 6,000 pounds of bread. The kitchen facilities included a meat cutting room, a tool room, a scullery, a garbage incinerator, a great mess hall, and finally the galleys, each of which contained four large hotel ranges with work-tables, serving tables, and all necessary cooking utensils. Ten men did the cooking in each galley. Each mess hall was 280 feet long. End to end, its metal topped tables measured 495 feet in length. Galleys, storage rooms, and mess halls had cement floors. The whole plant was illuminated by electricity.

Each mess hall at Brest was operated on the cafeteria plan. Each was equipped to feed 20,000 soldiers. The men entered the hall marching in column of squads. They passed through the galleys, filling their kits with hot food, then secured places at the tables, ate, and left the hall at the opposite end, where there were refuse cans in which to scrape off their dishes and also tanks of boiling, soapy water and hot rinsing water. Here they cleaned their equipment. The facilities were such that each kitchen could serve a brigade of troops entering the building at the ordinary marching pace. Frequent inspections kept the food up to standard. The camps at Brest also maintained night soup stands at which any soldier could get bread and hot soup between the hours of 8:30 p.m. and 2:30 a.m. The force that operated the messing facilities at Brest numbered 1,600 officers and men.

At Bordeaux the troops temporarily occupying the embarkation camps cooked their own meals at the mess halls, drawing their supplies from the camp organization. At St. Nazaire the messes were similar to those at Brest. The old army transport McClellan, which had crossed to France in the first American convoy in 1917, was stationed at St. Nazaire, where it served the subsistence organization as a floating refrigerator with capacity for 3,000,000 pounds of food. The McClellan was too old to stand the buffeting of the North Atlantic, and the Embarkation Service, unwilling to risk bringing her home, turned the ship over to the A. E. F. After the expedition had returned to the United States the Government sold the McClellan to France.

To the individual soldier, quite the most important branch of the embarkation organization was that one which paid the money due him from the Government. It paid him his money in francs, either in the currency itself or by check, and then saw to it that he exchanged his French money for its equivalent in American currency. Both of these enterprises in finance—disbursement and exchange—were in the hands of the A. E. F. Quartermaster Corps. The disbursement offered little difficulty, although the monthly pay roll at Brest sometimes contained as many as 100,000 names, while those at St. Nazaire and Bordeaux were proportionately large. The question of foreign exchange presented more of a problem.

Soon after the van of the A. E. F. reached France the Treasury Department at Washington requested the War Department to pay all its troops on foreign soil in the money of the country in which they chanced to be stationed. This meant that most of the men of the expedition received their pay in francs. Before the armistice, questions of currency exchange were of slight concern to the overseas soldier. After the Government had deducted his allotment to his dependents, his monthly premium payment for war risk insurance, and his partial payment for any Liberty Bonds he might have purchased through the Army, there was not much left for him, anyhow. When francs were cheaper he received more of them from the pay officer than he had expected, but as long as he stayed in France and spent his money there the rate of exchange made little difference to him.

French exchange continually strengthened during the sojourn of the expedition in France—until after the armistice began. The normal value of francs is 5.18 to the dollar. In July, 1917, the rate was 5.70. This rate gradually improved until at its strongest point it stood at 5.45. The few wounded men and casuals returning to the United States during this period were thus able to benefit financially by exchanging their French savings for American currency.

After the armistice, however, and during the very time the expeditionary troops were returning to the United States in greatest numbers, the exchange value of the franc slumped badly. Shortly after November 11, 1918, the rate was 5.80 to 1. It continued to fall steadily until in the autumn of 1919 it took 9.70 francs to purchase one dollar. It follows that the provident soldier who had saved the francs paid to him on a basis of less than six to the dollar lost heavily when he was forced to convert his savings back into dollars again on a basis of nearly ten francs to the dollar. The loss was particularly heavy upon officers who maintained drawing and savings accounts in French banks or who had not cashed their pay checks. Sometimes, too, officers lost their checks. Later they obtained duplicates, which the declining exchange had made less valuable. The War Department considered itself bound to protect soldiers from losses on this account. Congress is now considering a war department bill which, if enacted into law, will provide for the reimbursement of losses incurred by soldiers because of variations in foreign exchange.

It was good financial policy for the A. E. F. to leave all its French currency behind as it embarked for the United States, and to bring home only American money. Yet it would have resulted in confusion in the A. E. F. finances to have changed the pay system at the ports of embarkation. Therefore the Quartermaster Corps did the next best thing: it paid off the embarking troops in francs as usual and then immediately converted their francs into American currency. Since both payment and exchange were at the same rate of exchange, there was no loss to the troops in this transaction.

In order to provide the American money for this exchange it was necessary for the Treasury to ship to France great quantities of currency. It took the A. E. F. some time to convince the Treasury Department of the necessity for such shipments. The day after the armistice began, the command of the A. E. F. cabled to the Treasury requesting the immediate shipment of $500,000 in currency, an order afterwards increased to $2,000,000. This money did not actually reach the A. E. F. until the last day of January, 1919. By that date the expedition was beginning to embark rapidly. There was not enough American currency in Europe to buy all the French money of the expeditionary troops, and only by the most strenuous efforts could the Quartermaster Corps provide money for exchange until the first shipment of currency arrived from the United States. Finance officers were stationed in Paris, London, and at the principal seaports with orders to buy all the American money they could secure. By combing the banks and the countingrooms of brokers and by maintaining in Paris a fund from which shipments were rushed by motor convoys to the ports as these exhausted their supplies of currency, the Corps managed to keep the exchange system running. After the January shipment of $2,000,000 the Treasury Department arranged for an automatic supply of $10,000,000 every month.

Meanwhile, at the ports the Corps had built up the exchange plan. Booths were set up on all docks, and a force of disbursing quartermasters was organized to go on board all transports and exchange the money of soldiers who had failed to make the exchange on shore. The A. E. F. passed an order making it compulsory for all soldiers to exchange their cash before sailing. Notices to this effect were posted conspicuously in all the embarkation camps. In the larger units the officers attended to the matter, collecting the French money from their men, receiving American money for it from the exchange officers, and then distributing the familiar currency among the troops. Individuals and men traveling in small units attended to their own exchange. The quartermasters at Brest distributed as much as $400,000 in American currency in a single day. Up to July 1 Brest had paid out $60,000,000 in American money to troops boarding ship there.

By the late spring of 1919 most of the combat divisions, except those on active duty with the Army of Occupation, had crossed the ocean or had started for home. By that time the facilities at the base ports had been developed to a capacity that enabled them to handle all further embarkations, and the command of the expedition closed and abandoned the embarkation center at Le Mans. All of the physical equipment there went to the French Government under the terms of the general sale consummated in August of that year. On June 30 Bordeaux was closed as a port of embarkation. It had embarked 258,000 troops. St. Nazaire officially ceased to exist as a port of embarkation on July 26, although thereafter it embarked a few casuals. Approximately 500,000 American soldiers said farewell to France at St. Nazaire.

A million and a quarter American expeditionary soldiers departed from Brest for the United States. Brest was the last of the ports to close. The embarkation of the millionth American at Brest seemed almost as momentous as the arrival of the millionth American in France a year earlier. In August General Pershing and the historic First Division sailed from Brest, and the last of the combat troops had gone. On October 1 American troops were stationed in France only at Brest and in Paris, but Brest continued in operation as the port of embarkation until the last American had departed. On October 1 there were a few thousand men still to sail, but the A. E. F. no longer existed in France. Its headquarters had moved to Washington. The great task was done.