Pershing's right-hand man—From the center of power to the field—Radical measures for the Services of Supply—Our own Goethals—Varied personnel united in discontent—Regulars and experts—Harbord's two problems of construction and morale.

As President, Theodore Roosevelt had made Pershing a brigadier over the heads of a small host of senior officers, and had likewise singled out Sims, who was to command in European waters. When he was forming his division, which destiny was not to allow him to lead in France, he chose for one of his brigade commanders James G. Harbord, then a major of regulars. Harbord was not a West Pointer; having begun his army career as a private, his rank was not high for his years when we entered the war. Had the competition of civil professions applied in the army, it is safe to say that he would have been a major-general already, and that some of the colonels who were his seniors would still have been lieutenants. It is only instruction that one receives at West Point or at any college; education is for the graduate to receive in after life, a detail he sometimes neglects. Harbord educated himself by study and observation in the leisure hours which army officers have for the purpose.

One's first thought upon meeting him was to wonder why he should have enlisted in the regulars. He seemed to be the type that would have become in another environment a judge of the Supreme Court or the president of a university. After one came to know him, it was evident that he was in the army because he was naturally a soldier. He was also to prove to be the kind of organizer who in civil life is a good mayor of a great city or the efficient head of a large corporation.

As Chief of Staff of the A. E. F., he was Pershing's right-hand man for our first ten months in France.

It was not long before observers began to appreciate that he was one of the officers capable of "growing" with the growth of his task. One of the acquirements of his self-education was lucid and concise English, whether dictated to a stenographer or written on his little folding typewriter. When you brought a question before him, there was action, unfettered by qualifying verbiage. He did not "pass the buck" to the other fellow, according to the habit which army regulations and restrictions readily develop. When he went into Pershing's room, adjoining his, with a bundle of papers, and returned with them signed, there was finality. He could be tart as well as brief, in the face of prolix and meandering reports or memoranda. "If this man really had something to say," he remarked one day after he had read ten typewritten pages, "I wonder how many more pages he would require."

Next to Pershing himself, Harbord was most familiar with the planning and forming of an organization which would be equal to handling an unprecedented problem, three thousand miles from home. That story about the old quartermaster, who said that everything was going beautifully until a war came along and ruined his organization, had a most palpable application when a department which had carried on the routine of supplying our small regular army had to design a service equal to our demands in France. It was unequal to the task. A new and comprehensive system which experience had demonstrated to be suited to our needs divided the activities of the army into two territorial departments. One, that of the zone of advance, running from the outskirts of our training area in Lorraine to the front, was to have charge of the fighting. The other was to see that the fighters reached the front and were supplied when they arrived. His headquarters at Tours, the Commanding General of the new Services of Supply—the "S. O. S.," as the army knew it—was to be the head of a principality, of almost the breadth of France itself, under the kingdom of Pershing.

One day, when at last our long period of drill and preparation was having the substantial result of making our pressure at the front felt in earnest, Pershing said: "I'm going to send Harbord to troops, but I shall have him back——" the plan being to have him back as Chief of Staff, I understood. Harbord had his desire, the desire of every soldier, for field service. A brigadier-general now, he was given the brigade of Marines in place of Brigadier-General Doyen, who had been invalided home, where he died, as the result of his hard service in France. One week I saw him in the barracks building at Chaumont, surrounded by hundreds of adjutants, in the direction of the whole, and the next week I found him in charge of one part—but that a very combatant part—of the whole: with no stenographer, but writing his reports and orders on the little folding typewriter.

His new command required the tact of a man of the world as well as of a soldier among soldiers. There are no better fighters than the Marines; none prouder in their spirit of corps. The only Marine brigade in France was not pleased at the thought of having a regular in command. It wanted one of its own corps. Harbord had not been about among the officers and men many times before the Marines were saying, "Well, if we had to have an army man, we're glad we've got Harbord." By the time they were fighting in Belleau Wood, they had put their globe insignia on his collar, which he was proud to wear. He was adopted into the Marines, while regular officers were saying that he had better make his transfer official.

His record of the battle was a model of military reports, which did not hesitate to acknowledge mistakes in detail, the point being that the Marines won the wood. Promoted to be a major-general and to command the 2nd Division (which included the Marines), he led the race-horse 2nd in the counter-offensive in the ChÂteau-Thierry operations, which was the turn of the tide against the Germans. After this success the next step for him seemed to be a corps command, and possibly the command of an army, in the course of the rapid promotions that were due to care for the immense forces now arriving in France. His division had only just been relieved, when he received a hurry call to go to Chaumont. When he arrived, Pershing looked him over to see how he had been standing the strain of two months of severe fighting, after his ten months of harassing strain as Chief of Staff. Harbord appeared fresh, and ready for another year's hard work.

"Harbord, I'm going to send you down to straighten out things in the S. O. S.," Pershing then told him....

"Well, you see what my general has done to me," Harbord remarked a few hours later in an outburst to a friendly ear. "He's taken me away from my division,—but," he added, "he's my general. He knows what he wants me to do——" Then a toss of the head, and from that moment his thought was concentrated on his new duties.

Things had been going badly in the Services of Supply. There was congestion at the ports; construction work was not proceeding. In view of the enormous demands which would arise when we should have two million men, instead of the million we had planned, in the autumn, the situation had suddenly become most serious. Washington, with our own ports sensitive to delays at those on the other side of the Atlantic, had about decided to send General Goethals to France to take charge of the Services of Supply as a co-ordinate commander with General Pershing. This was a radical departure. It meant two commanders in France instead of one, directly responsible to Washington. Such divided authority in such a crisis stirred the apprehension of every soldier lest in a great crisis the fighting branch should not be supreme over every other branch which served its will and necessities. The simplest of military principles required that the commander of the forces at the front must command the whole, or his fearful responsibility for needless loss of life rested on inadequate authority.

Harbord, Pershing's right-hand man, was the counter to Washington's suggestion; that major of cavalry, whom nobody knew in the days when Goethals was building the Panama Canal, would prove that we already had a Goethals of our own in France. Without going over the ground of the pioneer stages of the Services of Supply, covered in my first book, the requirement upon which all transport depended was construction. We must enlarge the plant which France offered us for our needs. This meant building new docks to accommodate the requisite shipping, webs of spur tracks, immense areas of warehouses at the ports and others inland to accommodate our supplies; plants for assembling our railroad locomotives and cars brought from home; repair shops for them, and for guns and gun carriages, ambulances and aeroplanes and automobiles, motor trucks, and all other vehicular transport. More important still, there must be repair shops for human beings—enormous hospitals for caring for the sick and wounded, who might come by the hundreds of thousands in a single month. Hospital trains must be ready for their transport from the front. Enormous bakeries must provide hundreds of thousands of loaves every day. There must be barracks for the nurses and all the workers; barracks for the aviators and helpers who were drilling; lighters for disembarking troops when they arrived; camps, where they could spend the night ashore. Railroad sidings must enlarge railroad capacity; more spur tracks must be built wherever we had railheads at the front, and regulating stations which should dispatch the trains to the railheads. Around quiet villages must arise temporary cities of our building, connected with all the other activities in a system which was punctual and dependable.

The S. O. S. had been arranged to meet the demands of an army in our own sector. Its plan was disrupted by the switching of our troops to ChÂteau-Thierry and Picardy to meet the German offensives. The mobilization for Saint-Mihiel brought us back to our own sector. After Saint-Mihiel came the Argonne concentration, called into being by the hope of a speedy end of the war through one supreme effort by all the Allies. Should our new troops, thrown in action without sufficient preparation, and the veteran troops, thrown in without time for recuperation after ChÂteau-Thierry and Saint-Mihiel, go without food and ammunition, we might have a disaster. The wisdom of our insistence that we could form and supply and fight an integral army, instead of infiltrating our men into the British and French armies, was on trial. Victory and our soldiers' lives were at stake.

The battle was to be fought not only against machine-gun nests, but in the sweating effort of stevedores, of mechanics, and laborers, in the roar of foundries, in the rattle of trains far from the sound of the guns. For officer personnel in the S. O. S. we had first, of course, the regulars, those of the old quartermaster department and of the engineers, who would not ordinarily command troops, and those who could be spared from the zone of advance where every able fighting officer was required. These must be few, compared to the numbers of the whole. Second, we had all the men in the thirties, forties, and fifties, experts in every calling, who had come to France in their enthusiasm, in answer to the summons, in the days when the thing was for every man to serve in uniform in France. These were too old for combat, even if they thought they were not. They could not stand the physical hardship of the front, however brave their spirit. The S. O. S. was the place for them. There, or in building the organization of supply at home—which was primarily important—the nation could make the best use of their training in civil life. Third were younger officers, from the Guard or a training-camp, caught by the card-index system classifying occupations, and separated from their regiments because they were experts in some line of activity which was short of personnel in the S. O. S. They knew how to fight; but their knowledge of something else, their superiors thought, not they, was more useful to the nation.

For mechanics we had all the men skilled in trades at home who were as ready to give up high wages for a soldier's pay, and to work double union hours, as they would have been to stick tight in a fox-hole against a counter-attack, if they had had the chance. These came in their thousands, living under conditions far more miserable, in contrast to their habits, than their officers—from railroad trains and shops, bakeries, cement factories, contractors' firms, and every industry on the list—the typical American army, which has made industrial America.

For labor we had all we could pick up abroad: able-bodied German prisoners, middle-aged and invalided French territorials, Senegambians, Turcos, Belgians, Spaniards, Chinese, Annamites. From home we had, aside from expert labor, chiefly the colored men, who had no rivals in "rustling" cargo. At the docks their giant strength and their good-natured team-play were supreme; but they were in evidence all the way forward to the shelled roads which they were repairing back of the front where their kinsmen had their place in line.

The feeling between the regulars and reserves, which I shall describe in general terms elsewhere, was bound to be most acute in the S. O. S. Suffice it to say for the present that it was a gospel with the regulars that they should hold all the high commands in the S. O. S. as well as at the front. It was granted that the regulars must be absolute in the zone of advance, and all reserves their pupils or "plebes"; but how was the manager of a great railroad, of a bakery, of a contracting firm, a chemist, a civil engineer who had built tunnels and bridges, or a business organizer, to feel that a regular officer was his superior in his own line? The answer of the regular was that only he understood how to coÖrdinate all policy for military end,—the old, old answer of the inner temple of mystery, from the days of the Egyptian priests to the present. The regulars said, too: "How can we tell who is the real expert? These big men from civil life are jealous of one another. To appoint one over the heads of others would bring friction. We know war. Supply is a part of war. And we shall keep matters in our own hands——" and promotions, too, as the reserves might whisper.

A point which the regulars dwelt upon even more emphatically was that the reserve officers did not know discipline and army forms. Some of these reservists had directed thousands of men in organizations at home, without knowing how to drill a company. In their experience, building railroad yards and warehouses did not require military etiquette. The men under them held even stronger convictions on the subject. They were doing the same kind of work that they did at home, and amid peaceful surroundings. If they were workmen and not soldiers, why should they have to submit to all the distinctions between rank and file? Must they salute every man with a gold bar who happened to pass along, when he was no nearer the front than they? He was not their boss. What mattered, except that they were "on the job"? Why did not these officers pay more attention to getting the tools and material whose lack hampered progress? The officers could only turn to their seniors, who turned to other seniors, on through the channels of authority, to the lack of shipping, and to the plants at home, where the workmen were being driven equally hard, but did not have to wear uniforms and crook elbows in salute. As for army forms, the reserve officers were ready to comply with them if they could find that there was any settled system; but army forms seemed to change to meet the requirements, as the reservists sometimes thought, of delaying action, when that suited a commanding officer's idea.

Meanwhile, why should the assistant to the chief baker be an infantryman? Not that he wanted to be in the S. O. S.: he wanted to be at the front. Was the baking of bread taught only in the army? For the army, yes, thought the regulars. The complaints of the soldiers about the quality of the bread, which were warrantable, seemed to indicate that the regulars might have escaped blame by giving the responsibility to a civilian baker. A reserve officer whose business was automobile manufacture, serving in a repair shop under a cavalryman, did not deny that the cavalryman knew how to lead a squadron in a charge, but did he know about mending broken motor trucks? The civil engineer, who had once executed a contract for five millions, as he reported to a young West Point engineer who had been a lieutenant when we entered the war, might ponder the difference between theory and practice. A regular engineer lieutenant-colonel of twenty-nine said: "From what I have seen of the eminent civil engineers, I should think that they ought to be my subordinates." He was young; so was Napoleon at Marengo and Austerlitz. Both were soldiers.

When reserve officers, because of their expertness, were given authority, it did not mean that they were always able to exercise it. One who came to France under the express condition that he was to be supreme in his branch found that he was made a subordinate. What could he do? Resign? Resign in time of war? There was another to whom General Pershing said: "You go ahead. I give you carte blanche in your work." One day he was called on the carpet by his regular senior for acting on his own authority. "Who told you to do this?" asked the superior.

"General Pershing!"

"Well, then you better report to him. You go tell him you have been insubordinate, you haven't been doing things through channels, and see what he says."

This was putting the Commander-in-Chief himself to the test of regular loyalty.

"You tell that narrow-minded regular for me," said Pershing, "to leave you alone."

This did not mean that the reserve officer was left alone. He could not carry all his troubles to the busy Commander-in-Chief, as he struggled against the system.

The reservists, both officers and the whole force of workers, were not meeting as a rule the best class of regulars. A brigadier or a colonel in the zone of advance, who was wearing himself out physically and mentally, or who for less temporary reasons was not efficient, was relegated to the rear, with the idea that he might be good enough for the S. O. S. Yes, anything was good enough for the S. O. S., thought its pestered, nerve-racked workers. Was that colonel or brigadier, who had served his country for twenty or thirty years, to be made subordinate to some railroad man, civil engineer, or manufacturer, who had been in uniform only a few months? He might be sent home; but surely not on the invitation of General Peyton C. March, Chief of Staff in Washington, who had his own domestic problem in derelicts without the further annoyance of importations. So the colonel or the brigadier was cared for in the S. O. S., all the while feeling keenly his humiliation at not having command of a regiment or brigade in combat operations. If he were wise enough to serve his country and keep his health, he only signed the papers turned in by an energetic subordinate, be he regular or reserve; but if he were mischievous in his insistence upon authority, he clogged the wheels of organization,—which is not saying that he was not a worthy, honorable, and agreeable gentleman, even if he were not of much service in building a bridge or a warehouse in a hurry, or in forcing five days' rations through to a division at the front. Considering these things, and considering that every man tied to some humdrum task in the S. O. S. wanted to be up under fire instead of one, two, or three hundred miles away from the guns, it is not surprising that the spirit of corps of the S. O. S. was not good. It was well that Harbord arrived in July; or he might have been too late.