Depending on Tours—The "front-sick" S. O. S.—Harbord not "BloisÉ"—Getting his men together—Building morale—Troops as freight—Brest to the front—Construction figures—Atterybury's job—Sorting supplies at GiÈvres—Hospitals and the product of war—Feeding the front from Is-sur-Tille—The point of the wedge at the railheads.

If one division at the front knew little of what another division was doing, how much less its men knew of what was doing in the capital of the Services of Supply at Tours, that ancient city in the center of France. Grand Headquarters in the town of Chaumont, and Army Headquarters in the village of Souilly, were relatively small office affairs, compared to Tours.

In place of tables of barrages, maps of trench sectors, photographs of combat areas, reports of hills and villages and lines of resistance taken, and the examination of prisoners, which formed the staple routine of a combat headquarters, there were tables of the daily amount of tonnage and the number of troops disembarked, maps of transportation systems and railroad yards, photographs of half-finished quays and vast piles of cargo, blue prints of the plans of a network of tracks running up to the doors of hospitals and warehouses, and reports from foresters getting out timber, from commanders of base sections and regulating stations.

One thing, however, Tours, Chaumont, and Souilly, and every other headquarters had in common. That was the call for more guns, rifles, clothing, shoes, machine-guns, ammunition, engineering tools, balloons, aeroplanes, ambulances, automobiles, motor-trucks, and other material, which was passed on from Souilly to Chaumont, from Chaumont to Tours, and then home. "We are sending them," home responded.

"But hurry!" Tours cried.

"Clear your ports," home replied.

"Stop wasting space! Fully load your ships," said Tours. "Equip the troops in the way we ask! Send things in the order we ask! Put them aboard with some kind of classification. Don't throw steel beams on top of automobile parts and chemical apparatus! Pack your sugar and flour in bags that don't tear open."

If there had been a long-distance telephone across the Atlantic, steam might have risen to the surface from the scorching messages; but the wires we had stretched from Paris to Chaumont and to Tours and to the coast were used with a prodigality which was an evidence of the distrust of our own postal system.

The barracks that had been turned into offices at Tours had office space equivalent to that of a New York "sky-scraper" or of the Army and Navy Building in Washington. A private was as distinguished a person in the streets of Tours as in the streets of Washington. Nowhere, not even in the ordnance department at home, were more leather puttees and boots with spurs circulating between offices to maintain liaison between the combat units and the business end of war than at the general offices of that huge corporation at Tours. The officers worked hard all day without feeling that they had accomplished anything like as much as they would have in their own occupation at home. They wondered sometimes why so many of them were there. Everyone was thinking how to secure material and labor, and everyone had a sense of struggling with his hands tied behind his back against walls of cotton wool. There was a pitiful look in their eyes as they stood before their senior officers, pleading for a chance to go to the front and fight. Was this sitting at your desk in your spurs going to war in France?

"Mother, take down your service flag, your son's in the S. O. S.," was the subject of a popular army song in France.

Not far from Tours was Blois—we shall have more to say about it—where officers whose seniors reported them unsatisfactory were re-classified and re-assigned. It was the channel of passage from the front to the S. O. S., and for officers in one branch of the S. O. S. who might do better in another. The danger of being sent to Blois was a shadow over every mind.

Where the fighters were "homesick," the able-bodied workers in the S. O. S. were "front-sick" and "heart sick." All their selfish interest centered in escaping the misfortune of having to return home without having heard a shot fired. If they did not do well, there was no chance of their reaching the front; if they did well, they became invaluable to a senior who refused to let them go. Their restlessness and their feeling of general helplessness in fits of despondency led to a few cases of suicide.

When Harbord came to Tours, it was not by the way of Blois. He was no major-general of engineers or of the Q. M. C. who, however specially capable for his task, had not been in combat service. Here was Pershing's favorite adjutant, fresh from victories in the field, come back from the limelight at the front to help "count the beans and rustle freight." This of itself gave him a prestige that affected the state of mind of the whole organization. He must be a man of action; and the S. O. S. wanted action. He knew his regulars and his reserves, and Headquarters at Chaumont, and the needs of the army from ship's hold to the fox-holes. The business men in uniform, with U. S. R. on their collars, did not care whether or not their chief was a Catholic or a Presbyterian. A regular or a reserve? Was he the man?

He found the S. O. S. working in a series of compartments rather than departments. Though each was most conscientiously striving for coÖrdination, different chiefs were in a mood that meant friction. Projects whose immediate completion was vital were not as far along as those whose completion could wait. Many were being constructed on too elaborate and lavish a scale by chiefs who had won a disproportionate amount of authority to carry out their ideas. They were enjoying the building of a plant that would last for twenty years, when the war might be won in another six months. Harbord did what Pershing would have done if the C.-in-C. had come to Tours; he was Pershing's man, as he had said. He grasped his problem, made his plan, and then set his adjutants to driving.

"The first time I went in to see Harbord," said one of them, "I knew that he knew his own mind, and that he was going to tell me what to do; and that I was going out to do it with the confidence that he would back me up. His 'no' to my suggestions was as convincing as his 'yes' that we were to have team-play—and that he was master."

His faculty of drawing men together was put in full play in some of the obvious methods of leadership which had been somewhat neglected in the S. O. S., where there had evidently been a policy that if you honestly follow the regulations all will come out well in the end. All the chiefs gathered at his house once a week for luncheon, where they found one another to be human. Instead of remaining at Tours, he left routine to his Chief of Staff, and spent three nights out of four on his railroad car in going and coming, with his office on board always in touch with Tours, while his inspections kept him informed of progress and aroused the enthusiasm of subordinates. The feeling passed that you were derelict if fate sent you to work in the S. O. S. The S. O. S. began to have the fighting spirit of corps of the front—that of an ambitious business concern. Harbord had not been a week in command before the S. O. S. was feeling a new force emanating from headquarters. They were calling to the fighters: "We're with you. Take more prisoners, so that we can set them to work. It means more supplies for you." That new commander who now had under him more than four hundred thousand men, and activities exceeding those of the largest of our trusts, would make every worker feel that he was contributing his part, not for his wage envelope, but for winning the war which had brought him to France.

Our cargo was now flowing into every one of the ports of France south of Cherbourg, and overflowing into Marseilles in the Mediterranean too. The less that had to go to Marseilles, the more shipping time would be saved from the longer trip through the Strait of Gibraltar. We Americans like competition. The different Atlantic ports were started on a "race to Berlin" unloading contest; the stevedores of the port which won would be the first to go home. No Americans in France were more homesick than our colored men. When one was asked whether he would rather work at Bordeaux than at Saint-Nazaire, he replied: "Is Bordeaux any nearer home?" The "rustling" of cargo now became a game in which joyous calls were heard in common urging against any shirking which might delay the return of the workers to the levees and the cotton fields of their own southland. In tune with the Herculean mechanical effort of the giant American cranes, their Herculean muscular effort in its impetuosity was in imminent danger of removing the stanchions from the ships as well as the cargo. A British skipper who thought that he would be two days in unloading, and found that only one day was required, returned home to say that he was lucky to escape without having his ship's plates torn off and started toward the front. When bags of sugar were piled so high on one dock that several tons went through the floor into the water, it was a tragedy to people on sugar rations at home and to the sugar-hungry men at the front, but in the fever of effort to win the war by supplying two million men with their requirements for battle it was only an incident of the wicked extravagance of war, which led one of the stevedores to say that the sugar must count in the record as cargo discharged, while he did not think that it would make that old sea that had made him seasick so much sweeter that you would notice it.

The impetus which the coming of Harbord gave to the S. O. S. implies no criticism of past accomplishment. His business was to "go through," as it had been at Belleau Wood and in the counter-offensive. An unfinished plant, preparing for an offensive in the spring of 1919, must be made equal to one in the fall of 1918. There had never been any lack of energy in the S. O. S. This was guaranteed by our national character, under the whip of war. All the while we had been making progress. The feeling of helplessness on the part of the workers had been due to ambition thwarted in gaining the full results of the supreme efforts which they were eager to exert. There had been no cessation of building; no cessation in striving to find in Europe every available article which would save transport, without reference to the cost—cost being the one thing that never made us hesitate. Every man accepted the idea that all the money in the world was ours.

There was already an end to the confusion of the early days when the parts of a piece of machinery arrived on different ships. Tables of priority for each month were sent ahead to Washington, which might well think that the A. E. F. considered that the War Department had the magical power of pulling anything that it required out of a hat. Instead of sending his requisitions for material through Chaumont, Harbord now sent them direct to the War Department; he was the great administrative agent for the chief of G-4 at Chaumont, who coÖrdinated combat and supply, holding the balance between the demands of the front and the wherewithal to meet them. There was increasing coÖrdination at home, too, under the indomitable authority of General March.

The wedges which our divisions were driving down the walls of the Aire and the Meuse rivers and against the Kriemhilde Stellung were only a part of the giant wedge of the supply system, with its bases as broad as the United States, which narrowed to the breadth of the Atlantic Coast of France from Brest to Bordeaux. Most of our troops arrived at Brest, where the harbor was deep enough for the draught of the mighty German liners which had been transformed into transports. Navy blue and army khaki swarmed on the docks where our sea and land forces met. Our destroyers sped out of the harbor to disappear on the horizon, and reappear as the protective scurrying guards of the transports which they brought safe into port before they slipped out to sea again, to see more freighters safe through the submarine zone under their agile husbanding.

During the height of that transatlantic excursion season of ours the men on board slept in three shifts of eight hours each; they had two meals a day. Their warm bodies were close-packed, breathing into one another's faces, in tiers of low-ceilinged rooms, for from seven to ten days, after the healthy life of the training camps which had accustomed their lungs to fresh air. When the transport passed into the harbor mouth, and the submarine danger was over, as ants might swarm out of their runways to the top of a hill they swarmed on deck, where first- and second-class passengers had sauntered and promenaded, in solid masses of khaki, who formed the most valuable and superior first-class passengers America had ever sent to Europe. They had arrived. They made the harbor echo with calls and hurrahs. Theirs had been a passage which money could not buy or would want to buy for more than one experience; a passage not for pay or adventure, whose glamour was a sight of the sea and of France and of all they had read about the war. They were man-power, man-power by its thousands and millions, formed in a common mold no less than egg-grenades, their clothes cut according to the same pattern no less than their gas masks, the man-power which we had to give if we did lack artillery and aeroplanes, automata who were sentient parts of a machine responding to the mechanism of orders rather than of levers. Equipped, disciplined, trained, hardened, the preparatory processes of the training camps sent them to us for the final processes in France.

Mighty lighters hurried alongside the transport, whose time must not be wasted while the hundreds of thousands of other passengers waited three thousand miles away. Swiftly, more swiftly than any but human cargo could be unloaded, they were disembarked, the decks and the hold becoming strangely empty with the resounding footsteps of the officers and crew in place of the hum of conversation and the atmosphere of human bodies crowded together.

Their confinement normally and charitably required that stiffened bodies and minds and suffocated lungs should have a period of relaxation and exercise. This indeed was a part of the original plans; but now when original plans had gone by the board in feeding in men to make the present the decisive offensive, though horses must be given rest, it was found that men who had been through a rÉgime to toughen their human adaptability for what four-legged animals could not endure, could do without such consideration when they were needed as the minute men of the Meuse-Argonne battle. Shipped as freight from camp to pier, from pier on to transport, and then from Brest across France, which they saw only through the doors of box cars where they were packed as close as on board the transports, the one idea at every point was to hurry them along until they were delivered f. o. b. at the front. There, after coming from comfortable barracks, after the devitalizing closeness of transport and train, in a merciless climatic change, they could remain in the fox-holes in the chill penetrating mists and rains as they were still being hurried against the enemy, until death or wounds or "flu" or pneumonia or the dizziness of fatigue reported them as "expended."

Caring for the passage of this human stream from the ports to the front was the first duty of the S. O. S. The next was to follow it up with supplies. Wherever men were they must be fed. La Pallice and La Rochelle were also being used; but the main Atlantic cargo ports were Saint-Nazaire and Bordeaux. Ships moved with a processional regularity to their places alongside the docks we had built. Our warehouses stretched out over the sandy reaches where an occasional vine appeared between spur tracks on the site of the vineyards for which we were paying, and which hardly brought as much wealth to Bordeaux as the money we were spending. Broken bags of flour, and broken crates of canned goods, were piled in separate warehouses; as they could not stand the journey to the front, they were used to feed the legions of the S. O. S. For there was an army larger than Grant had in the Appomattox campaign to be supplied between the ports and the front. Fields were filled with the parts of automobiles and trucks. Assembled, they started in long convoys across France to Saint-Mihiel or the Argonne, their drivers having a tour of the chÂteau country before passing over the CÔte d'Or of Burgundy. All the parts of the railroad locomotives and cars arriving were assembled in the vast shops which we had built and fitted out with machinery according to the latest American models.

We were supposed to have, but never had, ninety days' routine supplies in France for all our forces in France. Of these forty-five days were to be in the warehouses at the base ports. Sometimes trains were loaded at the ports and run straight through to the front. Normally, there were three changes in transit. At our service were all the arterial railroads of central France, and all the locomotives and cars that the French could spare, and all the broken-down French rolling stock which our mechanics could repair. Possibly no denial can ever overtake the report that we built a railroad clear across France; but we did nothing of the kind, and contemplated nothing of the kind. We built spur tracks and sidings and cut-offs; if all the track we laid, figured a statistician in G-4 at Chaumont, had been in line, it would have reached from Saint-Nazaire across France and Germany to the Russian frontier.

All our building construction, if it had been concentrated in one standard barrack building, would extend from Saint-Nazaire as far as the Elbe river in Germany. We erected and put in operation 18,543 American railroad cars, and 1,496 American locomotives. Besides producing enough firewood to form an unbroken wall around three sides of France, one meter high and one meter broad, we sawed 189,564,000 feet of lumber, 2,728,000 standard gauge ties, 923,560 narrow gauge ties, and 1,739,000 poles and pit props. If all the motor vehicles we brought to France were put end to end, they would form a convoy two hundred and ninety miles in length. On the day that the armistice was signed we were operating 1,400 miles of light railway, of which 1,090 miles had been captured from the Germans. They handled 860,652 tons of material.

These figures, put together in a paragraph in passing, give an idea of the magnitude of the business which the army of the S. O. S. was conducting. It was an army which knew no excitement in war except work. The problem of sea transport which faced our ports at home was no more trying than the problem of railroad transport from our ports in France; liaison between combat units in action no more trying than the liaison between our American railroad men with their American training and the French railroad system. We were used to long distances and long hauls; the French, in a country no larger than some of our states, were used to short distances and short hauls. Impatient at first with their methods, we saw how they had come to be applied in France. Amazed at first at ours, the French came to appreciate how well our long heavy trains suited the wholesale business of war. The French seemed unsystematic, yet their worn locomotives and rickety cars managed to carry on an enormous traffic. When we applied our home tracer system for the first time on the railroads of France, the central offices might know the location of every car under their authority.

Our railroad men, under Brigadier-General W. W. Atterbury, our railroad general, used to having at home all the supplies they needed, made victory possible by the way in which they patched and contrived in their energy and resource to meet the demands of the months of September and October, which were far beyond their calculations. They share the honors due to our pioneer railroad builders in the early days of the west, while they exemplified the type of men who operate our great systems of today, whether the engineer, the fireman or shop mechanic, the veteran superintendent, or the young fellow just out of a technical school. I wonder no less how they were able, with the rolling stock at their command, to forward all the tonnage we required at the front, than I wonder how we were able to take some of the positions of the whale-back.

In his office at Tours, surrounded by his adjutants, who, though in khaki, were railroad men in every word and thought, and in the discipline which our home systems have established in webbing our country, Brigadier-General Atterbury had a command which in numbers belonged to a major-general. His discipline was that of a leadership which won loyalty. In all his perplexing situations, when he was striving for authority and material for an undertaking so strictly technical, he never passed on any animus to a subordinate. It is something for an officer to return from France with the respect which he had from his subordinates.

The train that started on the steel trail across France, leaving behind the hectic labor and the piles of cargo and the warehouses built and building, when it passed out of the region of the base sections came to the intermediate zone. In the regular routine it lost its entity when it ascended the "hump" which we had built at GiÈvres,—that American hump, singularly characteristic of our system of labor-saving organization. Every car was loaded with material belonging to some branch of the army. One by one they were "dropped" down the incline, each being switched to a track, as its downgrade momentum, subject to the brakes, sent it—with the facility of letters tossed into mail bags by a railway mail clerk—where its contents belonged, whether to the door of an engineer, an ordnance, a signal corps, a medical corps, or a Y. M. C. A. or Red Cross warehouse, while the meat trains or others with perishable cargo went to our vast cold-storage plant. From the "hump" you looked out over a city of warehouses, of barracks, and other structures, with its guardhouse, its clubs, its motion-picture theaters, its military policemen, under a colonel who was mayor, common council, and king—all having been built in the open fields as a way station from the New York docks to the front.

Here at GiÈvres other trains were made up to continue the journey forward in answer to the daily requisitions of the regulating stations upon the intermediate reserves. War being a one-way business, all expenditure and no income, all loaded cars were going one way except those bringing lumber and ties that we were cutting from the forests for construction, salvage from the battlefield, broken trucks, and vehicles—and the hospital trains. Here prevision must be most sure. Man was the most valuable piece of machinery; his repair the most important of all repairs. We had enormous hospitals in the intermediate zone as well as at the base ports; and indeed all over central and southern France. The medical corps used great hotels and other buildings to care for the hosts of broken, gassed, exhausted, sick men from the Meuse-Argonne battle; but when we had to build we ran out spur tracks—deep was our faith in spur tracks—into open fields upon which rose cities of standardized unit hospital buildings, all of a color, all of a pattern, and also operating rooms and Y. M. C. A. clubs and theaters, under the autocracy of some regular surgeon who looked up from his desk at the chart on the wall showing the number of his patients and the number of vacant beds. The hospital trains ran up on the spur tracks, and hobbling wounded descended, and wounded who could not hobble were carried on stretchers to their beds—each a card-indexed automaton, no less than when he entered the training camp, as he would remain until he was demobilized or buried in France.

So the trains of munitions passed the trains laden with the products of war, the knowledge of whose sacrifice is the only value of war. Right and left through the intermediate zone, from OrlÉans to the Mediterranean, were more repair shops, remount depots, training camps for aviators, tank crews, machine-gunners and carrier pigeons, each worker striving for the same purpose that shoveled the coal into the locomotive firebox or slipped a shell into a gun or a cartridge into a rifle. At Is-sur-Tille, near Dijon, was another "hump," which looked down on what seemed a training camp in its streets of mud: for there was mud in the S. O. S. as well as at the front—mud kept soft by the damp atmosphere when autumn rain was not falling, and deep by the trampling of many feet. Here, as at GiÈvres, the train sent its cars on their way to the warehouses to which their contents belonged; here you felt at first hand the breath of the front in all its hot and pressing demands; here was the largest bakery, with cement floors and all up-to-date apparatus, directed by the head of one of our large bakeries at home, rolling out the round loaves with the ease of peas shelled from a pod. All night long, as at GiÈvres and at the base ports, the switch engines coughed forth their growls as they shunted cars, and the laborers worked at loading and unloading. The officer in charge in his little office was directing as insistent an excursion business as ever fell to the lot of man. His nightmare, and the nightmare of all the regulating officers of the S. O. S., was moving cars. Every hour a car was needlessly idle was waste. This called for labor, and more labor—for more warehouse space, for more locomotives, for more sidings; but as they were not forthcoming, why, man and machine must be made to do more work. The excess strain on either was not considered. The pressure was the same as that for the relief of a city stricken by fire or earthquake.

Beyond Is-sur-Tille at Saint-Dizier was another, a supplementary, regulating station for the Meuse-Argonne battle, which during the battle fed, apart from the troops in the Saint-Mihiel and other sectors, 645,000 men and 115,000 animals. Regulating stations did the detail, while GiÈvres and the base ports did the wholesale. They saw that each division received its daily rations of food and ammunition. Each division had its "cut in" of cars, with all its daily supplies, which was made up a day in advance and sent to the divisional railhead. Knowing the needs of the divisions, a regulating station sent its requisition back to the big warehouse centers, while it always tried to keep on hand a small amount of all articles likely to be needed in haste. When we were swinging our divisions around for the ChÂteau-Thierry emergency, one division had seven railheads in eight days; its trains were on hand on each occasion. They must be; otherwise the divisions went hungry. All other demands must yield to the routine which brings the morning milk and the grocer's boy to the kitchen door.

At the railhead you felt not only the breath of battle but that throbbing suspense and intensity of purpose which is associated with men in action. Here came the empty trucks and wagons from the front, and the ambulances traveling in their convoys on the crowded roads up to the zone of fire, while men worked in darkness. Here the wedge from home was narrowing under the hammer strokes, until you could feel it splitting the oak—the hammer strokes of the hundred millions, their energy, their prayers and thoughts.

Those empty trucks seemed ever hungry, open mouths, the mute expression of the call for more, and still more, of everything with which to keep up the driving—more replacements as well as material.

When the front wanted anything, it was wanted immediately. Improvise it, purloin it, beg for it, but send it, was the command that admitted of no refusal. If this officer could not get it, put another in his place who could. Officers when they lay down for a few hours' sleep had their telephones at their elbow, ready as firemen to answer the call. Men worked until the doctors ordered them to the hospital—that they must do. They could do no more. The S. O. S. could not send guns or tanks when it had none from home; but American resourcefulness surpassed its own dreams of probabilities. Harbord could well say to Pershing: "I've straightened out things in the S. O. S."