CHAPTER XXI. PARADOXES BEHIND THE LINES
WHILE I am on the subject of unusual phases of modern warfare I should like to include just one more thing in the list—and that thing is the suddenness with which in France, and likewise in Belgium, one in going forward passes out of an area of peacefulness into an area of devastation and destruction. Almost invariably the transition is accomplished with a startling abruptness. It is as though a mighty finger had scored a line across the face of the land and said; “On this side of the line life shall go on as it always has gone on. Here men shall plough, and women shall weave, and children shall play, and the ordinary affairs of mankind shall progress with the seasons. On that side there shall be only death and the proofs of death and the promises of yet more deaths. There the fields shall be given over to the raven and the rat; the homes shall be blasted flat, the towns shall be razed and the earth shall be made a charnelhouse and a lazar pit of all that is foul and loathsome and abominable in the sight of God and man.”
For emphasis of this sharp contrast you have only to take a motor run up out of a district as yet untouched by war into the scathed zone of past or present combat. By preference I should elect for you that the trip be made through a British sector, because the British have a way of stamping their racial individuality upon an area that they take over—they Anglicise it, so to speak. Besides, a tour through British-held territory partakes of the nature of a flying visit to an ethnological congress, seeing that nearly all the peoples who make up the empire are likely to have representatives here present, engaged in one capacity or another—and that adds interest and colour to the picture.
Let us start, say, from a French market town on a market day. From far away in the north, as we climb into our car with our soldier driver and our officer escort, comes the faint hollow rumble of the great guns; but that has been going on nearly four years now, and in the monotony of it the people who live here have forgotten the threat that is in that distant thundering. Pippin-cheeked women are driving in, perched upon the high seats of two-wheeled hooded carts and bringing with them fowls and garden truck. In the square before the church booths are being set up for the sale of goods. Plump round-eyed children stand to watch us go down the narrow street, which runs between close rows of wattled, gable-ended stone or plaster cottages. Most of the little girls are minding babies; practically all of the little boys wear black pinafores belted in at their chubby waistlines, with soldier cap—always soldier caps—on their heads, and they love to stiffen to attention and salute the occupants of a military automobile.
There are but few men in sight, and these are old men or else they wear uniforms. The houses are tidied and neat; the soil, every tillable inch of it, is in a state of intensive and painstaking cultivation. On all hands vineyards, orchards, pastures and grain fields are spread in squares and parallelograms. The road is bordered on either side by tall fine trees. Chickens, geese and turkeys scuttle away to safety from before the onrushing car, and at the roadside goats and cattle and sheep and sometimes swine are feeding. Each animal or each group of animals has its attendant herder. Horses are tethered outside the hedges where they may crop the free herbage. The landscape is fecund with life and productivity.
It is a splendid road along which we course, wide and smooth and well-kept, and for this the reason is presently made plain. Steam rollers of British manufacture, with soldiers to steer them, constantly roll back and forth over stretches where broken stone has been spread by the repair gangs. These mending crews may be made up of soldiers—French, British, Portuguese or Italians; and then again they may be drafts of German prisoners or members of labour squads drawn from far corners of the world where the British or the French flag flies. Within an hour you will pass turbaned East Indians, Chinamen, Arabs, Nubians, Ceylonese, Senegalese, Maoris, Afri-dis, Moroccans, Algerians. Their head-dresses are likely to be their own; for the rest they wear the uniforms of the nation that has enlisted or hired them.
Despite this polyglot commingling of types the British influence is upon everything. Military guideposts bearing explicit directions in English stand thick along the wayside, and in the windows of the shops are cruder signs to show that the French proprietors make a specialty of catering to the wants of Britishers. Here is one reading “Eggs and Potato Chips”; there one advertising to whom it may concern, “Washing Done Here.” “Post-cards and Souvenirs” is a common legend, and on the fronts of old wine-shops a still commoner one is “Ale and Stout.” Rows of beer bottles stand upon the window ledges, with platters of buns and sandwiches flanking them. A “Wet and Dry Canteen” flies a diminutive British flag from its peaky roof.
Evidences of British military activity multiply and re-multiply themselves. Long trains of motor-trucks lumber by like great, grey elephants each with a dusty Tommy for its mahout. A convoy of small, new tanks go wallowing and bumping along bound frontward, and they suggest a herd of behemoths on the move. Their drivers as likely as not are Chinamen who presently will turn their unwieldy charges over to soldier-crews. Officers clatter past on horse-back looking, all of them, as though they had just escaped from the military outfitters; staff-cars whiz through the slower traffic; troops bound for the baths or for the trenches or for rest billets march stolidly up the road or down it as the case may be. Omnibuses from London town, now converted to military usage, are thick in the press. Military policemen are more numerous and more set upon scrutinising your pass than they were a few miles back. And civilians are fewer.
Alongside the highway, settlements of wooden or iron huts increase in number and in proportions. Hospitals, headquarters of various units, bath-houses, punishment compounds, motor stations, supply depots, airdromes, ordnance repair plants, munition warehouses, Y. M. C. A. huts, gas test stations, rest barracks, gasoline depots and all the rest of it show themselves for what they are both by their shapes and by the notice boards which mark them. Here is cluttered all the infinitely complicated machinery of the war-making industry, with its accessories and its adjuncts, its essentials and its incidentals, but so far there is no actual evidence that the rude and disturbing hand of war has actually been laid upon the land. Rather is it a spectacle to make you think of a thousand circus days rolled into one, and mixed in with all this, travelling caravans, gypsy encampments, Wild West shows, horse-fairs, street carnivals and what not.
Of a sudden the picture changes. There are no civilians visible now, no prisoners and no labour-battalions but only soldiers and not so many soldiers either as you encountered just behind you in the intermediate zone because as a general thing, the nearer you come to the actual theatre of hostilities, the fewer soldiers in mass are you apt to see. The soldiers may be near by but they are not to be found until you search for them. They have taken cover in dug-outs and in trenches and in remote billets hidden in handy, sheltered spots in the conformation of the rolling landscape.
Now the vista stretching before you wears a bleak and untenanted look. You notice that the shade trees have disappeared. Instead of living trees there are only jagged stumps of trees or bare, shattered trunks from which the limbs have been sheared away by shell-fire, and to which the bark clings in scrofulous patches. Across the fields go winding, brown bramble-patches of rusted barbed wire. The earth is depressed into hollows and craters, or upthrown into ugly mounds and hillocks. In the wasted and disfigured meadows rank weeds sprout upon the edges of the ragged shellholes. The very earth seems to give off a sour and rancid stink. There is a village ahead of you; it is a village without roofs to its houses, or dwellers within its breached and tottering walls. It is a jumbled nightmare of a ruin. It is as though a tornado had blown a cluster of brick-kilns flat, and then an earthquake had come along and jumbled the fragments into still greater and more utter confusion.
Protruding from the flattened rubble about it, there uprears a crooked, spindle-like pinnacle of tottering masonry. It may have been a corner of the church wall or the town hall. Now it is like a beckoning finger calling to heaven for vengeance. Upon it is set a notice-board to advise you that you are now in the “Alert Zone,” which means your gas-respirator must be snuggled up under your chin ready for use and that your steel helmet must be worn upon your head and that you must take such other precautions as may be required.
You ride on then at reduced speed along a camouflaged byway for perhaps fifteen minutes. You come to where once upon a time, before the jack-booted, spike-headed apostles of Kul-tur descended upon this country, was another village standing. This village has been more completely obliterated out of its former image—if such a thing is possible—than its neighbour. It is little else than a red smear in the greyish yellow desolation, where constant bombardment has reduced the bricks of its houses to a powder and then has churned and pestled the powder into the harried earth. There remains for proof of one-time occupancy only the jagged lines of certain foundations and ugly mounds of mingled soil and debris. Up from beneath one of these mess-heaps, emerging like a troglodyte, from a hole which burrows downward to a hidden cellar, there crawls forth a grimed soldier who warns you that neither you nor your car may progress farther except at your dire risk, since this is an outpost position and once you pass from your present dubious shelter you will be in full view and easy target range of Brother Boche. You have advanced to the very forward verge of the battle-line and you didn't know it.
One rather dark night, travelling in an unlighted car, three of us were trying to reach an American brigade headquarters where we expected to sleep. Our particular destination was a hamlet in a forest just behind and slightly east of the main defences of Verdun.
We must have taken the wrong turn at a crossroads, for after going some distance along a rutted cart track through the woods we came to where a deep ditch—at least it seemed to be a deep ditch—had been dug right across the trail from side to side. By throwing on the brakes the chauffeur succeeded in halting the car before its front wheels went over and into the cut. We climbed out to investigate, and then we became aware of an American sentry standing twenty feet beyond us in the aforesaid ditch.
“We are correspondents,” said a spokesman among us, “and we are trying to get to General So-and-So's headquarters. Can't we go any farther along this road?”
Being an American this soldier had a sense of humour.
“Not unless you speak German, you can't,” he drawled. “The Heinies are dead ahead of you, not two hundred yards from this here trench.”
Without once suspecting it we had ridden clear through a sector held by us to the frontline defences alongside the beleaguered city of Verdun.
It's just one paradox after another, is the thing we call war.
CHAPTER XXII. THE TAIL OF THE SNAKE
THE deadlier end of a snake is the head end, where the snake carries its stingers. Since something happened in the Garden of Eden this fact has been a matter of common knowledge, giving to all mankind for all time respect for the snake and fear of him. But what not everybody knows is that before a constrictor can exert his squeezing powers to the uttermost degree he must have a dependable grip for his tail, else those mighty muscles of his are impotent; because a snake, being a physical thing, is subject to the immutable laws of physics. There must be a fulcrum for the lever, always; the coiled spring that is loose at both ends becomes merely a piece of twisted metal; and a constrictor in action is part a living lever and part a living spring. And another thing that not everybody knows is that before a snake with fangs can fling itself forward and bite it must have a purchase for the greater part of its length against some reasonably solid object, such as the earth or a slab of rock.
Now an army might very well be likened to a snake, which sometimes squeezes its enemy by an enveloping movement but more often strikes at him with sudden blows. In the case of our own Army I particularly like the simile of a great snake—a rattlesnake, by preference, since in the first place the rattlesnake is essentially an American institution, and since once before our ancestors fought for their own freedom, much as we now are fighting for the freedom of the world, under a banner that carried the device of a rattler coiled. Moreover, the rattlesnake, which craves only to be let alone and which does not attack save on intrusion or provocation, never quits fighting, once it has started, until it is absolutely no more. You may scotch it and you may bruise and crush and break it, but until you have killed it exceedingly dead and cut it to bits and buried the bits you can never be sure that the job from your standpoint is finished. So for the purpose of introducing the subject in hand a rattlesnake it is and a rattlesnake it shall be to the end of the narrative, the reader kindly consenting—a rattlesnake whose bite is very, very fatal and whose vibrating tail bears a rattle for every star in the flag.
For some months past it has been my very good fortune to watch the rattler's head, snouting its nose forth into the barbed wires and licking out with the fiery tongue of its artillery across the intervening shell holes at Heinie the Hun. Now I have just finished a trip along the body of the snake, stretching and winding through and across France for 800 miles, more or less, to where its tail is wetted by salt water at the coast ports in the south and the east and the southeast. This is giving no information to the enemy, since he knows already that the snake which is the army must have a head at the battleground and a neck in the trenches, and behind the head and the neck a body and a tail, the body being the lines of communication and the tail the primary supply bases.
His own army is in the likeness of a somewhat similar snake; otherwise it could not function. Moreover, things are happening to him, even as these lines are written, that must impress upon his Teutonic consciousness that our snake is functioning from tip to tip. Unless he is blind as well as mad he must realise that he made a serious mistake when he disregarded the injunction of the old Colonials: “Don't Tread On Me.”
In common with nearly every other man to whom has been given similar opportunity I have seen hundreds of splendid things at the Front where our people hold for defence or move for attack—heroism, devotion, sacrifice, an unquenchable cheerfulness, and a universal determination that permeates through the ranks from the highest general to the greenest private to put through the job that destiny has committed into our keeping, after the only fashion in which this job properly may be put through.
In the trenches and immediately behind them I thought I had exhausted the average human capacity for thrills of pride, but it has turned out that I hadn't. For back of the Front, back of the line troops and the reserves, back all the way to the tail of the snake, there are things to be seen that in a less spectacular aspect—though some of them are spectacular enough, at that—are as finely typical of American resource and American courage and American capability as any of the sights that daily and hourly duplicate themselves among the guns.
I am sure there still must be quite a number of persons at home who somehow think that once a soldier is armed and trained and set afoot on fighting ground he thereafter becomes a self-sustaining and self-maintaining organism; that either he is providentially provisioned, as the ravens of old fed the prophet, or that he forages for himself, living on the spoils of the country as the train bands and hired mercenaries used to live by loot in the same lands where our troops are now engaged. Or possibly they hazily conceive that the provender and the rest of it, being provided, manage to transport themselves forward to their user. If already we had not had too many unnecessary delegates loose-footing it over France this year I could wish that I might have had along with me on this recent trip a delegation of these unreflecting folk, for they would have beheld, as I did, a greater miracle than the one vouchsafed Elijah, yet a miracle of man's èncompassment, and in some measure would have come to understand how a vast American army, three thousand miles from home on foreign shores, is fed and furnished and furbished and refurbished, not at the expense of the dwellers of the soil but to their abundant personal benefit. Finally they would see in its operation the vastest composite job of creation, organisation and construction that has ever been put through, in the space of one year and three months about, by any men that ever toiled anywhere on this footstool of Jehovah.
To me statistics are odious things, and whenever possible I avoid them. Besides, some of the figures I have accumulated in this journey are so incredibly stupendous that knowing them to be true figures I nevertheless hesitate to set them down. By my thinking way adjectives are needed and not numerals to set forth in any small measure a conception of the undertaking that has been accomplished overseas by our people and is still being accomplished with every hour that passes.
Before this war came along Europeans were given to saying that we Americans rarely bragged of producing a beautiful thing or an artistic thing or a thing painstakingly done, but rather were given to advertising that here we had erected the longest bridge and there the tallest building and over yonder the largest railway terminal and down this way the most expensive mansion—that ever was. Perhaps the criticism was justified in peacetimes. Today in the light of what we have done in France these past few months back of the lines it not only is justified but it is multiplied, magnified and glorified. It no longer is a criticism; it is a tribute. When you think of the performance that stands to our credit you must think of it in superlatives, and when you speak of it you must speak in superlatives too. The words all end in “est.”
On French soil within twelve months, and in several instances within six months, we have among other things constructed and set going the biggest cold-storage plant, with two exceptions, in the world; the biggest automobile storage depot, excluding one privately owned American concern, in the world; the biggest system of military-equipment warehouses in the world; probably the biggest field bakery in the world; the biggest strictly military seaport base in the world; what will shortly be the biggest military base hospital in the world; the biggest single warehouse for stock provender in the world; the biggest junkshop in the world; the biggest staff training school in the world—three months ago it had more scholars than any university in America ever has had; the biggest locomotive roundhouse under one roof; the biggest gasoline-storage plant; the next to the biggest training camp for aviators, the same being a sort of 'finishing school for men who have already had a degree of instruction elsewhere; the biggest acetylene-gas plant; and half a dozen other biggest things in the world—and we're not good and started yet!
Every week sees the plants we have already constructed being enlarged and amplified; every week sees some new contract getting under way. Every month's end sees any similar period in the building of the Panama Canal made to seem almost a puny and inconsequential achievement by contrast and by comparison with what superbly and triumphantly has gone forward during that month. In military parlance it is called the Service of Supplies. It should be called the Service of the Supremely Impossible Supremely Accomplished. When this war is ended and tourists are permitted to visit foreign parts Americans coming abroad and seeing what has here been done will be prouder of their country and their fellow countrymen than ever they have been.
The Service of Supplies, broadly speaking and in its bearing on operations upon the Continent, begins at tide mark and ends in the front-line trenches, with ramifications and side issues and annexes past counting, but all of them more or less interrelated with the main issues. For example the staff school can hardly be called a part of it, though lying, so to speak, in a whorl of the snake. It is divided into a Base Section, which is that part situate nearest to the coasts; an Intermediate Section, which is what its name implies; and an Advance Section, which extends as close up to the zone of hostilities as is consistent with reasonable safety, the term “reasonable safety” being a relative term in these days of hostile raiding planes. The Base Section is subdivided again into several lesser segments, each centring about a main port.
Broadly described it might be said that any military equipment in its natural course is first unloaded and stored temporarily at the bases. Then it is moved into the Intermediate Section, where it is housed and kept until called for. Thereupon it goes on a third rail journey to the Advance Section, out of the depots of which it is requisitioned and sent ahead again by trucks or wagons, or more commonly by rail, to meet the day-to-day and the week-to-week requirements of the units in the field.
While this is going on all the sundry hundreds of thousands of men engaged on duty along the Service of Supplies must be cared for without impairment to the principal underlying purpose—that of provisioning and arming the fighting man, and providing supplies and equipment for the hospitals and the depots and all the rest of it, world without end. When you sit down to figure how many times the average consignment, of whatsoever nature, is loaded and unloaded and reloaded again even after it has been brought overseas, and how many times it is handled and rehandled, checked in and checked out, accounted for and entered up, and eventually fed out in dribs as fodder for the huge coiling serpent we call an army—you begin to understand why it is that for every 100 men brought across the ocean upward of 50 must be assigned to work in some capacity or another along the communication ways.
For the reader to visit the various departments and sub-departments and subber subdepartments that properly fall within the scope of the Service of Supplies would take of his time at least two weeks. It took that much of my time and I had a fast touring car at my disposal and between stops moved at a cup-racing clip. For the writer to attempt to set down in any comprehensive form the extent of the thing would fill a fat book of many pages. By reason of the limitations of space this article can touch only briefly on the general scheme and only sketchily upon those details that seemed to the present observer most interesting.
For example at one port—and this not yet the busiest one of the ports turned over to us by our allies—we are operating an extensive system of French docks that already were there and with them an even larger system of docks constructed by our Army and now practically completed. Likewise we have here a great camp, as big a camp as many a community at home that calls itself a city, where negro labour battalions are living; two extensive rest camps for troops newly debarked from the transports; enormous freight yards and storage warehouses with still another camp handily near by for the accommodation of the yard gangs and the warehouse gangs; a base hospital that when completed will be the largest military base hospital on earth; a sizable artillery camp where gun crews and ordnance officers take what might be called a post-graduate course to supplement the training they had in the States; a remount station; an ordnance and aviation-storage warehouse; and a motor reception park.
This, remember, is but one of several ports that we practically have taken over for the period of the war. On the land side of a second port are grouped a rest camp, a motor-assembling park, a system of docks inside a basin that is provided with locks, a locomotive-assembling plant, freight yards, warehouses without end, and two base hospitals.
Taking either of these ports for a starting point and moving inland one would probably visit first the headquarters of the Service of Supplies, where also is to be found our main salvage depot for reclaiming all sorts of equipment except motor and air equipment—these go to salvage stations specially provided elsewhere—and not far away an aviation training centre. A little farther along as one travelled up-country he would come to an artillery instruction centre located in a famous French military school; to our engineer training centre and our engineer replacement depots; and thence onward to our air-service production centre with its mammoth plant for assembling, repairing and testing planes and with its camp for its personnel. This would bring one well into the Intermediate Section with its depots, freight yards and warehouses, and with its refrigerating plant, which is the third largest in existence and which shortly will have a twin sister a few miles away. There would be side excursions to the motor supply and spare parts depot, to the main motor repair station, to the locomotive repair shops, to the car shops, to the principal one of our aviation training centres, to the main field bakery, to the gasoline depots, the camouflaging plant and to various lesser activities.
Finally one would land at the Advance Section depots with their complex regulating stations for the proper distribution of the material that has advanced hither by broken stages. And yet when one had journeyed thus far one would merely be at the point of the beginning of the real work of getting the stuff through to the forces without congestion, without unnecessary wastage, without sending up too much or too little but just exactly the proper amounts as needed.
Now then, on top of this please remember that each important camp, each station, each centre has its own water system, its own electric light system, its own police force, its own fire department, its own sanitary squad, its own sewers, its own walks and drives and flower beds, its own emergency hospitals and dispensaries and surgeries, its own Y. M. C. A., its own Red Cross unit, generally its own K. of C. workers and its own Salvation Army squad; as likely as not its own newspaper and its own theatre. Always it has its own separate communal life.
Figure that in a score of places veritable cities have sprung up where last January the wind whistled over stubbled fields and snow-laden pine thickets. Figure that altogether 40,000,000 square feet of covered housing space are required and that more will be required as our expeditionary force continues to expand. Figure that in and out and through all these ramified activities our locomotives draw our cars over several hundred miles of sidings and yard trackage, which Uncle Sam has put down by the sweat of the brow of his excellent sons, supplemented by a copious amount of sweat wrung from the brows of thousands of German prisoners and thousands more of Indo-Chinese labourers imported by the French and loaned to us, and yet thousands more of native French labourers past or under the military age.
Figure that while the work of construction has been going on upon a scope unprecedented in the scheme of human endeavour the men charged with the responsibility for it have had to divide their energies and their man power to the end that the growing Army should not suffer for any lack of essential sustenance while the other jobs went forward toward completion. Figure at the beginning of last winter, nine months ago, scarcely a spadeful of earth had been turned for the foundations anywhere. Figure in with all of this mental pictures of the Children of Israel building the pyramids for old Mister Pharaoh, of Goethals at the Isthmus, of Cæsar's legions networking Europe with those justly celebrated Romanesque roads of his, of the coral insects making an archipelago in nine months instead of stretching the proceeding through millions of years, as is the habit of these friendly little insects; figure in all these things—and if your headache isn't by this time too acute for additional effort without poignant throbbings at the temples you may begin to have a shadowy conception of what has happened along our Service of Supplies over here in France since we really got busy.
So much for the glittering generalities—and Lawsie, how they do glitter with the crusted diamond dust of endeavour and stupendous accomplishment! Now for a few particularly brilliant outcroppings: There is a certain port at present in our hands. For our purposes it is a most important port—one of the most important of all the ports that the French turned over to us. When our engineers set up shop there the port facilities were very much as they had been when the Phoenicians first laid them out, barring some comparatively modern improvements subsequently tacked on by the Roman Emperors and still later by that famous but somewhat disagreeable old lady, Anne of Brittany. There were no steam cranes or electric hoists on the docks, and if there had been they would have been of little value except for ornamental purposes, seeing that by reason of harbourwise limitations ships of draft or of size could not range alongside but must be lightered of their cargoes at their mooring chains out in midchannel anywhere from half a mile to a mile and a half off shore. Moreover, there was but one railroad track running down to the water's edge. Even yet there are no steam cranes in operation; both freight and men must be brought to land in lighters. But mark you what man power plus brains plus necessity has accomplished in the face of those structural obstacles and those mechanical drawbacks.
At the outset it was estimated by experts among our allies that possibly we could land 20,000 troops and 6,000 tons of freight a month at this port—if we kept nonunion hours and hustled. In one day in the early part of the present summer 42,000 American soldiers were debarked and ferried ashore with their portable equipment, and on another day of the same week through one of the original French-built docks—not through the whole row of them, but through one of the row—our stevedores cleared 5,000 tons of freight. Five thousand tons in one day, when those Continental wiseacres had calculated that by straining ourselves and by employing to their utmost all the facilities provided by all the docks in sight we might move 6,000 tons in a month! For this performance and for so frequent duplication of it that now it has become commonplace and matter-of-fact and quite in accordance with expectations, a great share of the credit is due to thousands of brawny black American stevedores drawn from the wharves of Boston, New York and Philadelphia, Galveston, Savannah, New Orleans and Newport News. The victory that we are going to win will not be an all-white victory by any manner of means.
Besides the physical limitations there were certain others, seeming at first well-nigh insurmountable, which our military and civilian executives had to meet and contend with and overcome. I mean the Continental fashion of doing things—a system ponderously slow and infinitely cumbersome. When a job is done according to native requirements over here it is thoroughly done, as you may be quite sure, and it will last for an age; but frequently the preceding age is required to get it done. Europeans almost without exception are thrifty and saving beyond any conceivable standards of ours, but they are prodigals and they are spendthrifts when it comes down to expending what in America we regard as the most precious commodity of all, and that commodity is time. Some of our masters of frenzied finance could wreck a bank in less time than it takes to cash a check in a French one.
Not even the exigencies and the sharp emergencies of wartime conditions can cure a people, however adaptable and sprightly they may be in most regards, of a system of thought and a system of habit that go back as far as they themselves go as a civilised race. Here is a concrete instance serving to show how at this same port that I have been talking about the Continental system came into abrupt collision with the American system and how the American system won out:
The admiral in command of the American naval forces centring at this place received word that on a given day—to wit: three days from the time the news was wirelessed to him—a convoy would bring to harbour transports bearing about 50,000 Yank troopers. It would be the admiral's task to see that the ships promptly were emptied of their passengers and that the passengers were expeditiously and safely put upon solid land. After this had been done it devolved upon the brigadier in command of the land forces to quarter them in a rest camp until such time as they would be dispatched up the line toward the Front.
The great movement of our soldiers overseas, which started in April and which proceeds without noticeable abatement as I write this, was then in midswing; and the rest camps in the neighbourhood were already crowded to their most stretchable limits. Nevertheless the general must provide livable accommodations for approximately 50,000 men somewhere in an already overcrowded area—and he had less than seventy-two hours in which to do it. He got busy; the members of his staff likewise got busy.
That same night he called into conference a functionary of the French Government, in liaison service and detailed to cooperate with the Americans or with the British in just such situations as the one that had now risen. The official in question was zealous in the common cause—as zealous as any man could be—but he could not cure himself of thinking in the terms of the pattern his nation had followed in times of peace.
“I must have a big rest camp ready by this time day after to-morrow,” said, in effect, the American. “So I went out this afternoon with my adjutant and some of my other officers and I found it.”
Briefly he described a suitable tract four or five miles from the town. Then he went on: “How long do you think it would take for your engineers to furnish me with a fairly complete working survey of that stretch, including boundaries and the general topography with particular regards to drainage and elevations?”
The Frenchman thought a minute, making mental calculations.
“From four to six weeks I should say,” he hazarded. “Not sooner than four weeks surely.”
“I think I can beat that,” said the American.
He turned to his desk phone and called up another office in the same building in which this conference was taking place—the office of his chief engineer officer.
“Blank,” he said when he had secured connection, “how long will it take you to give me the survey of that property we went over this afternoon? You were to let me know by this evening.”
Back came the answer:
“By working all night, sir, I can hand it to you at noon to-morrow.”
“Are you sure I'll get it then?”
“Absolutely sure, sir.”
“Good,” said the general, and rang off. He faced the Frenchman.
“The survey will be ready at noon tomorrow,” he said. “Now, then, I want arrangements made so that construction gangs can take possession of that land in the morning early. They've got a good many thousand tents to set up and some temporary shacks to build, and I'm going to sick 'em on the job at daylight.”
“But what you ask is impossible, mon général,” expostulated the Frenchman. “Days will be required—perhaps weeks. We must follow a regular custom, else there will be legal complications. We must search out the owners of the various parcels of land included in the area and make separate terms with each of them for the use of his land by your people.”
“And meanwhile what will those 50,000 soldiers that are due here inside of seventy-two hours be doing?”
The Frenchman shrugged his shoulders. “Very well then,” said the American. “Now here's what we must do: I want you please to get in touch, right away, with your Minister of War at Paris and tell him with my compliments that at daylight in the morning I am going to take possession of that tract, and I want the sanction of his department for my authority in taking the step. Afterward we'll settle with the owners of the land for the ground rent and for the proper damages and for all the rest of it. But now—with my compliments—tell the minister we've got to have a little action.”
“But to write a letter and send it to Paris even by special courier, and to have it read and to get a reply back, would take three days at the very quickest,” the Frenchman replied.
“I'm not asking you to write any letters. I'm asking you to call up the minister on the telephone—now, this minute, from this office, and over this telephone.”
“But, my dear general, it is not customary to call a minister of the government on the telephone to discuss anything. There is a procedure for this sort of thing—a tradition, a precedent if you will.”
“We'll have to make a new precedent of our own then. Here's the telephone. Suppose you get the minister on the wire and leave the rest to me. I'll do the talking from this end—and I'll take the responsibility.”
“But—but, general,” faltered the dum-founded Frenchman, “have you thought of the question of water supply? There are no running streams near your proposed site; there are no reservoirs. Of what use for me to do as you wish and run the risk of annoying our Minister of War when you have no water? And of course without water of what use is your camp?”
“Don't let that worry you,” said the American. “The water supply has all been arranged for. In fact”—he glanced at his watch—“in fact you might say that already it is being installed.”
“But—if you will pardon me—what you say is impossible!”
“Not at all; it's very simple. This town is full of vintners' places and every vintner has—or rather he did have—a lot of those big empty wine casks on hand. Well, I sent two of my officers out this afternoon and bought every empty wine cask in this town. They rounded up 600 of them, and there'll be more coming in from the surrounding country to-morrow morning. I know there will be, because I've got men out scouting for them, and at the price I'm willing to pay I'll have every spare wine cask in this part of France delivered here to me by this time to-morrow. But 600 was enough to start on. I've had 800 of them set up at handy places over my camp site—had it done this evening—and at this moment the other 300 are being loaded upon army trucks—six casks to a truck. To-morrow morning the trucks will begin hauling water to fill the casks now on the ground.”
It was as he had said. The minister was called up at night on the telephone, and from him a very willing approval of the unprecedented step in contemplation was secured. The water hauling started at dawn, and so did the tent raising start. The survey was delivered at noon; half an hour later American labour battalions were digging ditches for kitchen drains and latrines, and in accordance with the contour of the chosen spot a makeshift but serviceable sewerage system was being installed. When the troops marched out to their camp in the late afternoon of the second day following, their camp was there waiting for them and their supper was ready.
CHAPTER XXIII. BRICKS WITHOUT STRAW
TAKE any separate project along our line of communication. Pick it out at random. It makes no difference which particular spot you choose; you nevertheless are morally sure to find stationed there a man or a group of men who have learned to laugh at the problem of making bricks without straw. If put to it they could make monuments out of mud pies. Brought face to face with conditions and environments that were entirely new to their own experience, and confronted as they were at the outset by the task of providing essentials right out of the air—essentials that were vitally and immediately needed and that could not be forthcoming from the States for weeks or even months—an executive or an underlying invariably would find a way out of the difficulty.
There was pressing need once for a receptacle in which rubber cement could be mixed in small quantities. Neither the local community nor the government stores yielded such a thing and there was no time to send clear back New York or Philadelphia for it. The man who was charged with the responsibility of getting that rubber cement mixed wait on a scouting tour. Somewhere he unearthed probably the only ice-cream freezer in rural Fiance outside of the immediate vicinity of Paris, and he acquired it at the proprietor's valuation and loaded it into his car and hurried back with it to his shop, and ten minutes after he arrived the required cement was being stirred to the proper consistency in the ice-cream freezer.
At the main depot of automobile supplies they needed, right away, springs with which to repair broken-down light cars. As yet an adequate supply of spare parts had not been received from the base, nor was there any likelihood that a supply would be forthcoming at once. The colonel in charge of the depot sent men ranging through the countryside with instructions to buy up stuff that would make springs. They brought him in tons of purchases, and most unlikely looking material it was too—rusted chunks and strips and spirals of metal taken from the underpinnings of French market carts and agricultural implements; but the forces in the machine shops sailed in and converted the lot into automobile springs in no time at all.
This same colonel already had a plant which, exclusive of the value of buildings specially built, represents at this time a national investment of $35,000,000, and the outlay was growing every hour. He used to be the head of a big metal-working establishment at home. As a specialist in his line he joined the Army to help out. Now every month he does a volume of buying that would have made his average year's turnover in times of peace look trifling in comparison. Just before he sailed to take over his present job he ordered $6,000,000 worth of motor parts at one fell swoop, as it were.
Because of the rapidity with which our forces on foreign service multiplied themselves there was a rush order from General Headquarters for more buildings and yet more buildings, at one of our warehouse depots, to provide for storage of perishable foodstuffs in transit from the rear to the Front. Between seven-thirty o'clock in the morning and five o'clock in the evening of a given day a gang of steel riggers accomplished the impossible by rearing and bolting together the steel frame—posts, girders, plates, rafters and crossbeams—for a building measuring 96 feet in width, 24 feet in height and 230 feet in length, the same being merely one of the units of a structure that very soon thereafter was up in the air and that measured 650 feet crosswise and 650 feet lengthwise, with railroad tracks stretching alongside and in between its various segments.
“When we laid out our original plans for this project the French said it would be entirely too large for our uses, no matter how big an army we brought over,” remarked to me a young ex-civilian, now wearing a captain's markings on his flannel shirt, who had put through this undertaking. “Our people thought differently and we went ahead, trying to figure as we went along on all future contingencies. The result is that already we are enlarging upon the old specifications as rapidly as possible. Even so the supplies are piling up on us faster than we can store them. Look yonder.”
He pointed to a veritable mountain of baled hay—a regular Himalaya of hay—which covered a corner of the field whereon we stood. It towered high above the tops of the trees behind it; it stretched dear to the edge of the woodlands beyond, and it was crowned, as a mountain peak should be, with white; only in this instance the blanket was of canvas instead of snow.
“There are 80,000 tons of American baled hay in that pile,” he said, “and in a month from now if the present rate of growth keeps up it will be bigger by a third than it is now. It's quite some job—taking care of this man's army.”
In the midriff of the Intermediate Section is a project on which at this writing 10,000 men are at work, and on an air-service field adjoining it 3,000 more men are engaged. Exclusive of material for local construction purposes 500 carloads of strictly military supplies arrive here daily, and approximately 75 carloads a day move out. Later the ratio of outgoing equipment will increase, but the incoming amount is not liable to fall off very much. To house the accumulating mass here and elsewhere in the same zone, including as it does engineers' stores, ordnance stores, fresh meats, salt meats, medical stores, harness, guns and quartermasters' stores, there has been provided or will be provided 4,500,000 square feet of roof-covered space and 10,000,000 square feet of open storage space.
When I came that way the other day miles of the plain had been filled pretty thoroughly with buildings and with side tracks and wagon roads; and, scattered over a tract measuring roughly six miles one way and four miles the other, between 18,000 and 14,000 men were engaged. In January of this year, when a man who now accompanied me had visited the same spot, he said there was one building standing on the area, and that two side tracks were in use; all the rest was a barren stretch of snowdrifts and half-frozen mud and desolation. They were just beginning then to dig the foundations of our main cold-storage plant. It is finished and in operation to-day. Besides being a model plant it is the third largest cold-storage plant in the world, and yet it is to be distinguished from the sixty-odd buildings that surround it only by the fact that it is taller and longer and has more smokestacks on it than any of the rest.
At the principal depot of the Advance Section, where the chief regulating officer is stationed, one of the biggest jobs is to sort out the man provender as it flows in by rail and to fill up each of fifty or sixty track-side warehouses with balanced rations—so much flour, so much salt meat, so much of salt, sugar, lard, canned goods, pepper, vinegar, pickles, and so on, to each building; or else to load a building with balanced man equipment—comprising shoes, socks, underwear, shirts, uniforms and the rest of it down to shoe laces and buttons, the purpose of this arrangement being that when a warehouse is emptied the man who is in charge, even before checking up on the loading gangs, already knows almost to a pound or a stitch just how many rations or how many articles of apparel have gone forward.
In each warehouse the canned tomatoes, the vinegar and the stuff that contains mild acids are stored at the two ends of the building in crosswise barricades that extend to the roof. This disposal was an idea of the officer in control of the arrangement. He explained to us that in case of fire canned stuff bearing a heavy proportion of fluid would burn more slowly than the other foodstuffs, so there would be a better chance of confining the blaze to the building in which it originated and of preventing its spread to adjoining or adjacent buildings, which might be of brick or concrete or stone or sheet metal, but which are more apt to be of frame.
A British colonel on a visit of inspection to, our Service of Supplies visited this project on the same day that I came. Radiating admiration and astonishment at every step and at every stop, he accompanied the young first lieutenant who was in personal charge of the warehousing scheme on a tour of his domain, which covered miles. When the round had been completed and the lieutenant had saluted and taken himself away the Britisher said to the chief regulating officer:
“I have never seen anything so perfectly devised as your plan of operation and distribution here. I take it that the young man who escorted me through is one of your great American managing experts. I imagine he must have been borrowed from one of those marvellous mail-order houses of yours, of which I have heard so much. One thing puzzles me though—he must have come here fresh from business pursuits, and yet he bears himself like a trained soldier.”
The chief regulating officer smiled a little smile.
“That man,” he said, “is an old enlisted man of our little antebellum Regular Army. He didn't win his commission until he came over here. Before that he was a noncom on clerical duty in the quartermaster's department, and before that he was a plain private, and as far as I know he never worked a day for any concern except our own Government since he reached the enlisting age.”
In addition to doing what I should say at an offhand guess was the work of ten reasonably active men, the colonel who supervises our Advance Section has found time since he took over his present employment to organise a brass band and a glee dub among his personnel, to map out and stage-manage special entertainments for the men, to entertain visitors who come officially and unofficially, to keep several thousand individuals busy in their working hours and happy in their leisure hours, and at frequent intervals to write for the benefit of his command special bulletins touching on the finer sides of the soldier's duties and the soldier's discipline. He gave me a copy of one of his more recent pronouncements. He called it a memorandum; I called it a classic. It ran as follows:
“1. The salute, in addition to being a soldier's method of greeting, is the gauge by which he shows to the world his proficiency in the profession, his morale and the condition of his discipline.
“2. For me the dial of a soldier's salute has three marks, and I read his salute more accurately than he himself could tell me.
“3. The three gradations are:
(a) I am a soldier; I know my trade or will know it very soon, and I will be a success as a soldier or a civilian, wherever I may be put.
(b) I do not know what I am and do not care, I only do what I am forced to do, and will never be much of a success at anything.
(c) I am a failure and am down and out, sick, homesick and disgruntled. I cannot stand the gaff.
“4. As Americans try to conceal your feelings from our Allies.
“Remember you are just as much fighters here as you would be carrying a pail of food to the fighting line or actually firing a gun.
“Every extra exertion is an addition to the firing line direct.
“Every bit of shirking is robbing the firing line.”
“Buck Up!”
For qualities of human interest no joints in the snake's spine, no twists in his manifold convolutions measure up, I think, to the salvage depots. Once upon a time, and not so very long ago, an army in the field threw away what it did not use or what through breakage or stress became unserviceable. That day is gone. In this war the wastage is practically negligible. Our people have learned this lesson from the nations that went into the war before we entered it, but in all modesty I believe, from what I have seen, that we have added some first-rate improvements to the plan in the few months that have been vouchsafed us for experiments and demonstrations. Moreover, to the success of our plans in this regard there have been difficulties that did not confront our Allies to the same extent. For instance our biggest motor-repair depot is housed in what formerly had been a French infantry barracks—a series of buildings that had never been devised for the purposes to which they are now put, and that at first offered many serious problems, mechanical and physical.
In tall brick buildings, under sheds and under tents and out in the open upon the old parade ground a great chain of machine shops, carpenter shops, paint shops, upholstery shops and leather-working shops has been coordinated and is cooperating to attain the maximum of possible production with the minimum of lost energy and lost effort. The scientist who reconstructs a prehistoric monster from a fossilised femur finds here his industrial prototype in the smart American mechanics who build up an ambulance or a motor truck from a fire-blackened, shell-riddled car frame, minus top, minus wheels, minus engine parts. What comes out of one total wreck goes into another that is not quite so totally so. And when a tool is lacking for some intricate job the Yank turns in and makes it himself out of a bit of scrap; and neither he nor his fellows think he has done anything wonderful either. It's just part of the day's work.
The salvage depot for human equipment and for lighter field equipment is established at this writing in what was, not so very long ago, a shop where one of the French railroad lines painted its cars. It began active operations last January with six civilian employees under an officer who four weeks before he landed in France was a business man in Philadelphia. In June it had on its pay rolls nearly 4,000 workers, mainly women and many of them refugees.
When all the floor space available—about 200,000 square feet of it—has been taken over the plant will have a personnel of about 5,000 hands, and it will be possible to do the reclamation work in clothing, shoes, rubber boots and slickers, harness and leather, canvas and webbing, field ranges, mess equipments, stoves, helmets, trenching tools, side arms, rifle slings, picks, shovels and metal gear generally for about 400,000 fighting men, with an estimated saving to Uncle Sam—exclusive of the vast sum saved in tonnage and shipping charges—of about $1,000,000 a month.
At this time 10,000 garments and articles of personal attire are passing through this plant every twenty-four hours, and coming out cleaned, mended, remade or converted to other purposes. A man could spend a week here, I feel certain, and not count his sight-seeing time as wasted. Among the men workers he would find invalided and crippled soldiers of at least six nations—America, Belgium, France, Greece, Serbia and Italy. Among the women workers, who average in pay seven francs a day—big wages for rural France—he would find many women of refinement and education hailing from evacuated districts in northern France and Belgium, whose faces bespeak the terrors and torments through which they have passed in the attempted implanting of the seeds of Kultur upon their homelands. Now they sit all day, driving sewing machines or managing knitting looms alongside their chattering, gossiping sisters of the peasant class.
And every hour in this beehive of industry the man who looked close would come upon things eloquently bespeaking the tragedy or the comedy of war's flotsam and jetsam. Now perhaps it would be a battered German bugle picked up by some souvenir-loving soldier, only to be flung into the camp salvage dump when its finder wearied of carrying it; and now it would be a khaki blouse with a bullet hole in the breast of it and great brown stains, stiff and dry, in its lining. A talking machine in fair order, the half of a tombstone and the full-dress equipment of a captain of Prussian Hussars were among the relics that turned up at the salvage depot in one week.
There is no dump heap behind the converted paint bam, for the very good reason that practically there is nothing to dump. Everything is saved. The salvaged junk comes in by the carload lot from the Front—filthy, crumpled, broken, blood-crusted, verminous, tattered, smelly and smashed. Sorters seize upon it and separate it and classify it according to kind and state of disrepair. Men and women bear it in armloads to sterilisers, where live steam kills the lice and the lice eggs; thence it goes to the cleaning vats, after which it is sorted again and the real job of making something out of what seemed to be worse than nothing at all is undertaken, with experts, mainly Americans, to supervise each forward step in the big contract of renovation, restoration and utilisation.
After the body clothing has been made clean and odourless it is assigned to one of three classes, to wit: (a) Garments needing minor repairs and still sightly and serviceable, which are put in perfect order and reissued to front-line troops; (b) garments not so sightly but still serviceable, which are issued to S O S workers, including stevedores, labourers, railroad engineers, firemen and forestry workers; (c) garments that are not sightly but that will repay repairing. These are dyed green and given to German prisoners of war. Practically no new material is used for repair. Garments that are past salvation in their present shape are cut up to furnish patches. Three garments out of four are reclaimed in one form or another; the fourth one becomes scrap for patchings. Shoes are washed in an acid disinfectant that cleanses the leather without injuring its fabric, and then they are dried and greased before going in to the workers. Shoes that are worth saving are saved to the last one; those past saving are ripped apart and the uppers are cut into shoe strings, while the soles furnish ground-up leather for compositions. Thanks to processes of washing, cleansing and repairing, a salvage average of approximately ninety per cent, is attained in slickers and rubber boots.
Last spring the high military authorities decided to shorten the heavy overcoats worn by our soldiers, so it befalls that the lengths of cloth cut from the skirts of the overcoats are now being fashioned at the salvage plants into uppers for hospital slippers, while old campaign hats furnish the material for the soles. The completed article, very neat in appearance and very comfortable to wear, is turned out here in great numbers. Old tires are cooked down to furnish new heels for rubber boots. Old socks are unravelled for the sake of the wool in them. Tin receptacles that have held gasoline or oil are melted apart, and from their sides and tops disks are fashioned which, being coated with aluminum, become markers for the graves where our dead soldier boys have been buried. Smaller tins are smelted down into lumps and used for a dozen purposes. The solder from the cans is not wasted either. Even the hobnails of worn-down boot soles are saved for future use.
Master of theatrical trick and device that he is, none the less David Belasco could learn lessons at our camouflaging plant. He probably would feel quite at home there, too, seeing that the place has a most distinctive behind-the-scenes atmosphere of its own; it is a sort of overgrown combination of scenery loft, property room, paint shop and fancy-dress costumer's establishment, where men who gave up sizable incomes to serve their country in this new calling work long hours seeking to improve upon the artifices already developed—and succeeding—and to create brand-new ones of their own.
As a branch of military modernism camouflaging is even newer than the trade of scientific salvaging is and offers far larger opportunities for future exploitation. After all there are just so many things and no more that may be done with and to a pair of worn-out rubber boots, but in the other field the only limits are the limits of the designer's individual ingenuity and his individual skill.
We came, under guidance, to a big open-fronted barracks where hundreds of French women and French girls made screenage for road protection and gun emplacements. The materials they worked with were simple enough: rolls of ordinary chicken wire, strips of burlap sacking dyed in four colours—bright green, yellowish green, tawny and brown—and wisps of raffia with which to bind the cloth scraps into the meshes of the wire. For summer use the bright green is used, for early spring and fall the lighter green and the tawny; and for winter the brown and the tawny mingled. For, you see, camouflage has its seasons, too, marching in step with the swing of the year. Viewed close up the completed article looks to be exactly what it is—chicken wire festooned thickly with gaudy rags. But stretch a breadth of it across a dip in the earth and then fling against it a few boughs cut from trees, and at a distance of seventy-five yards no man, however keen-eyed, can say just where the authentic foliage leaves off and the artificial joins on.
For roadsides in special cases there is still another variety of camouflage, done in zebra-like strips of light and dark rags alternating, and this stuff being erected alongside the open highway is very apt indeed to deceive your hostile observer into thinking that what he beholds is merely a play of sunlight and shade upon a sloped flank of earth; and he must venture very perilously near indeed to discern that the seeming pattern of shadows really masks the movements of troops. This deceit has been described often enough, but the sheer art of it takes on added interest when one witnesses its processes and sees how marvellously its effects are brought about.
In an open field used for experimenting and testing was a dump pile dotted thickly with all the nondescript débris that accumulates upon the outer slope of a dug-in defence where soldiers have been—loose clods of earth, bits of chalky stone, shattered stumps, empty beef tins, broken mess gear, discarded boots, smashed helmets, and such like. It was crowned with a frieze of stakes projecting above the top of the trench behind it, and on its crest stood one of those shattered trees, limbless and ragged, that often are to be found upon terrains where the shelling has been brisk.
Here for our benefit a sort of game was staged. First we stationed ourselves sixty feet away from the mound. Immediately five heads appeared above the parapet—heads with shrapnel helmets upon them, and beneath the helmet rims sunburnt faces peering out. The eyes looked this way and that as the heads turned from side to side.
“Please watch closely,” said the camouflage officer accompanying us. “And as you watch, remember this: Two of those heads are the heads of men. The three others are dummies mounted on sticks and manipulated from below. Since you have been at the Front you know the use of the dummy—the enemy sniper shoots a hole in it and the men in the pit, by tracing the direction of the bullet through the pierced composition, are able to locate the spot where Mister Sniper is hidden. Now then, try to pick out the real heads from the fake ones.”
There were three of us, and we all three of us tried. No two agreed in our guesses and not one of us scored a perfect record; and yet we stood very much nearer than any enemy marksman could ever hope to get. The lifelikeness of the thing was uncanny.
“Next take in the general layout of that spot,” said the camouflage expert, with a wave of his hand toward the dump pile. “Looks natural and orthodox, doesn't it? Seems to be just the outer side of a bit of trench work, doesn't it? Well, it isn't. Two of those stakes are what they appear to be—ordinary common stakes. The other two are hollow metal tubes, inside of which trench periscopes are placed. And the tree trunk is faked, too. It is all hollow within—a shell of light tough steel with a ladder inside, and behind that twisted crotch where the limbs are broken off the observer is stationed at this moment watching us through a manufactured knothole. The only genuine thing about that tree trunk is the bark on it—we stripped that off of a beech over in the woods.
“The dump heap isn't on the level either, as you possibly know, since you may have seen such dump piles concealing the sites of observation pits up at the Front. Inside it is all dug out into galleries and on the side facing us it is full of peepholes—seventeen peepholes in all, I think there are. Let's go within fifteen feet of it and see how many of them you can detect.”
At a fifteen-foot range it was hard enough for us to make out five of the seventeen peep places. Yet beforehand we understood that each tin can, each curled-up boot, each sizable tuft of withered grass, each swirl of the tree stump—masked a craftily hidden opening shielded with fine netting, through which a man crouching in safety beneath the surface of the earth might study the land in front of him. That innocent-appearing, made-to-order dump pile had the eyes of a spider; but even so, the uniformed invader might have climbed up and across it without once suspecting the truth.
For a final touch the camouflage crew put on their best stunt of all. Five men encased themselves in camouflage suits of greenish-brown canvas which covered them head, feet, body and limbs, and which being decorated with quantities of dried, grasslike stuff sewed on in patches, made them look very much as Fred Stone used to look when he played the Scarecrow Man in “The Wizard of Oz” years ago. Each man carried a rifle, likewise camouflaged. Then we turned our backs while they took position upon a half-bare, half-greened hillock less than a hundred feet from us.
This being done we faced about, and each knowing that five armed men were snuggled there against the bank tried to pick them out from their background. It was hard sledding, so completely had the motionless figures melted into the herbage and the chalky soil. Finally we united in the opinion that we had located three of the five. But we were wrong again. We really had picked out only one of the five. The two other suspected clumps were not men but what they seemed to be—small protrusions in the ragged and irregular turf. Yes, I am sure Mr. Belasco could have spent a fruitful half hour or so there with us.
Thanks to yet another crafty and deceitful artifice of the camouflage outfit it is possible to make the enemy think he is being attacked by raiders advancing in force when as a matter of fact what he beholds approaching him are not files of men but harmless dummies operated by a mechanism that is as simple as simplicity itself. The attack will come from elsewhere while his attention is focused upon the make-believe feint, but just at present there are military reasons why he should not know any of the particulars. It would take the edge of his surprise, even though he is not likely to live to appreciate the surprise once the trick has been pulled.
These details of the whole vast undertaking that I have touched upon here are merely bits that stand out with especial vividness from the recent recollections of a trip every rod of which was freighted with the most compelling interest for any one, and for an American with enduring and constant pride in the achievements of his own countrymen.
There are still other impressions, many of than, big and little, that are going always to stick in my brain—the smell of the crisp brown crusty loaves, mingling with the smell of the wood fires at the bakery where half a million bread rations are cooked and shipped every day, seven days a week; the sight at the motor reception park, where a big proportion of the 60,000 motor vehicles of all sorts that are called for in our programme, as it stands now, can be stored at one time; the miles upon miles of canned goods through which I have passed, with the boxes towering in walls upon either side of me; the cold-storage chamber as big as a cathedral, where a supply of 5,000 tons of fresh meat is kept on hand and ready for use; a cemetery for our people, only a few months old, but lovely already with flowers and grass and neat gravel paths between the mounds; a blacksmith riveting about the left wrists of Chinese labourers their steel identification markers so that there may always be a positive and certain way of knowing just who is who in the gang, since to stupid occidental eyes all Chinamen look alike and except for these little bangles made fast upon the arms of the wearers there would be complications and there might be wilful falsifications in the pay rolls; a spectacled underofficer hailing us in perfect but plaintive English from a group of prisoners mending roads, to say in tones of deep lament that he used to be a dentist in Baltimore but made the mistake of going back to Germany for a visit to his old home just before the war broke out; a Catholic chaplain superintending the beautifying of a row of graves of Mohammedans who had died in our service, and who had been laid away according to the ritual of their own faith in a corner of a burying ground where Christians and Jews are sleeping together; a maimed Belgian soldier with three medals for valour on his shirt front, cobbling shoe soles in the salvage plant; a French waiter boy in a headquarters mess learning to pick out the chords of Dixie Land on an American negro's homemade guitar; a room in the staff school where a former member of the Cabinet of the United States, an ex-Congressman, an ex-police commissioner of New York City and one of the richest men in America, all four of them volunteer officers, sat at their lessons with their spines fish-hooked and their brows knotted; nineteen-year-old Yankee apprentice flyer doing such heart-stopping stunts in a practice plane as I never expect to see equalled by any veteran airman; the funeral, on the same day and at the same time, of one of his mates, who had been killed by a fall upon the field over which this daring youth now cavorted, with the coffin in an ambulance and a flag over the coffin, and behind the ambulance the firing squad, the Red Cross nurses from the local hospital and a company of his fellow cadets marching.
And seeing all these sights and a thousand more like unto them I found myself as I finished my tour along the winding lengths of the great snake we call the Service of Supplies, wondering just who, of all the thousands among the men that labour behind the men behind the guns, deserve of their countrymen the greatest meed of credit—the high salaried executives out of civilian life who dropped careers and comforts and hope of preferment in their professions at home, to give of the genius of their brains to this cause; or the officers of our little old peacetime Army who here serve so gladly and so efficiently upon the poor pay that we give our officers, without hope ever of getting a proper measure of national appreciation for their efforts, since this war is so nearly an anonymous war, where the performances of the individual are swallowed up in the united efforts of the mass; or the skilled railway trainmen volunteering to work on privates' wages for the period of the war; or the plain enlisted man cheerfully, eagerly, enthusiastically toiling here, so far back of the Front, when in his heart he must long to be up there with his fellows where the big guns boom.