Chapter II: Front Matter (2)

Little has been said about the work of pigeons in this country. Over a hundred lofts were established at the various camps and cantonments, the thousands of birds which they housed proving of no inconsiderable value in the training of the troops for fighting overseas. Everywhere that they were used the birds showed a dependability which won for them the enthusiastic admiration of all who were familiar with their work. Indomitable courage, a gameness which ends only with death, and a burning love of home are among the qualities most cherished by Americans, and nothing possesses them to a greater degree than the army carrier-pigeon.

Though the Belgians made extensive use of dogs for hauling machine-guns, and though the French used them to a certain extent for liaison work and the British for locating the wounded, they were not utilized by the American forces overseas. A considerable number of dogs, most of them police-dogs and Airedales, were trained at the various camps and cantonments in this country, however, and had the war continued they would undoubtedly have proved of real service in certain forms of work in France. The attitude of the American soldier toward the subject of dogs is best expressed by a story which I heard in France. An American officer, lost at night in No Man’s Land, sought refuge in a shell-hole. He found, however, that it already had an occupant, an American doughboy—from his accent evidently a product of the Bowery—who, it appeared, was lost like himself. In the periodic bursts of light afforded by the star-shells the officer noticed that the man had strapped to his back what appeared to be a large basket.

“What have you in there?” he inquired curiously.

“Boids, cap’n, boids,” the soldier answered in a hoarse whisper, adding disgustedly: “An’ that ain’t the woist of it, cap’n. I hear they’s goin’ to give us dawgs!”

* * * * *

Though Americans have always been the greatest photographers in the world, the Yankee abroad being readily distinguishable by his ever-ready kodak, it is a rather surprising fact that it needed the World War to convince the American military authorities of the vital importance to the army of the camera. Upon our entry into the war, however, the War Department, following the example of the European armies, established a photographic section, with a personnel of forty-odd officers and nearly 800 men, as a part of the Signal Corps. The duty of this section was to take pictures, both still and motion, of every phase of America’s participation in the war, both on the fighting front in Europe and in the training-camps at home; for the information of the intelligence officers of the A. E. F., for the guidance of the artillery, for purposes of instruction in the schools and cantonments, for propaganda use at home and in foreign countries, and for illustrating the official history of the great conflict.

The photographic section was divided into two branches, land and air, the latter being, perhaps, from a military standpoint, the more important of the two for the reason that airplanes were used primarily for reconnaissance work and were, when equipped with cameras, literally the eyes of the army. The airplane being the eye of the army, the camera may be said to have been the pupil of the eye. In order to provide the large and highly trained personnel required for this service, there was established at Rochester, New York, a School of Aerial Photography—the largest in the world—where candidates received, in addition to a thorough military training, a course of instruction in everything relating to modern photography, from the manufacture of plates and films through the selection and use of lenses, shutters, and light-filters, to the printing of the picture itself. In addition to becoming familiar with these details of commercial photography, they were instructed in all the special phases of military photography, such as map-plotting, mosaics, enlargements, and the study of topography from a negative made many thousands of feet in the air. As in that chapter dealing with the Air Service I have described in considerable detail the methods and instruments used in aerial photography, it is enough to say here that the aerial branch of our Photographic Service attained such a degree of efficiency that, in the closing months of the war, it became virtually impossible for the Germans to dig a dozen yards of new trench, to transfer a platoon, to change the position of a machine-gun, without being detected by the all-seeing eyes of our cameras.

The mother school for land photography was located at Columbia University, in New York, where the students received the same thorough training which was given to the aerial operators at Rochester, with instruction in motion-picture photography added. The students at this school were the pick of the newspaper photographers and motion-picture operators of America. Among them were men who had “snapped” presidents and potentates, celebrities and notorieties, prize-fighters, reformers, murderers, prelates, politicians and statesmen, leaders of society, Society and near-society; who had “filmed” presidential inaugurations, Newport weddings, railway disasters, yacht-races, South Sea cannibals, Mexican revolutions, and Heaven knows what besides. Their courage and resourcefulness were precisely the qualities which were required of army photographers, for there was nowhere that they would not go, nothing that they would not do, and the more danger there was in their work the more it appealed to them. When a new type of gun was being fired for the first time and the gun crew took refuge in the bomb-proofs as a precaution against accident, the army movie-men moved their machines up close in the hope that if the gun exploded they would get a picture of the explosion. One of the Signal Corps operators, Captain Edward N. Cooper, with his assistant, Sergeant Adrian Duff, while attached to the Twenty-Sixth Division, crawled out into No Man’s Land just before an attack was scheduled to take place, and, though exposed to both German and American fire, set up their machine in order that the people at home, seated comfortably in motion-picture theatres, might actually see the boys going “over the top.” On another occasion this same young officer became separated from the troops to which he was attached and found himself under the fire of a German machine-gun, but in spite of the hail of bullets he stuck to his work, made his pictures, and returned to the American lines herding in front of him a group of Germans whom he had captured single-handed at the point of an empty revolver. A camera-man whom the French Government detailed to accompany me along the Western Front in 1916 was seriously wounded by a German shell just as we were leaving Verdun. His assistant helped me to give first aid to his chief and then, though the road was being heavily bombarded, coolly set up his machine and turned the crank while the wounded man was being lifted into an ambulance. It is a striking commentary on the scepticism of American audiences that, when I showed that picture in the United States, fully half of the people who saw it insisted that it had been faked. Another officer of the photographic section who, before our entry into the war, as the representative of a Chicago newspaper had accompanied the German Armies during the invasion of Poland, was present at the capture of Warsaw. When the Kaiser reviewed the troops after his triumphal entry into the captured city, the American pushed his way through the cordon of soldiers and police agents which surrounded the imperial motor-car, set up his machine within six feet of the astonished Emperor, and proceeded to take a “close-up” of the All Highest, who was so amused by the effrontery of the performance that he insisted on shaking the photographer’s hand!

There was nowhere they would not go, nothing that they would not do, and the more danger there was in their work the more it appealed to them.

_Photograph by Signal Corps, U. S. A._]

This instrument was so compact that it could be carried as part of the equipment of a soldier and quickly put into operation.

_Photograph by Signal Corps, U. S. A._]

Motion-pictures were used in the training of troops far more generally than the public realized. A series of pictures taken at the Military Academy at West Point and exhibited at every camp and cantonment in the United States did more in a few hours to acquaint the troops with military etiquette and the evolutions of the squad, the platoon, and the company than any number of drills and lectures could have done. “Animated drawings,” as they are called—like those of Mutt and Jeff and the Katzenjammer Kids—were made under the direction of the Signal Corps for the purpose of familiarizing the men with the mechanism of the service rifle, the automatic pistol, and the various types of machine-guns. By running these pictures slowly, every stage of the operation of loading and firing was made clear, from the insertion of the cartridge into the clip or belt to the bullet leaving the muzzle. But the greatest value of the motion-picture, when all is said and done, was in keeping up the morale of the American people by combating the insidious and undeniably clever propaganda which was carried on in this country by the Germans. Enemy agents spread reports that the drafted troops were being ill-treated in the camps, that they lived in wretched quarters, were poorly fed, and suffered from lack of proper clothing. To answer these charges a score of movie-men were despatched to the various camps, the pictures which they took and which were exhibited throughout the country showing the clean and comfortable barracks, the men seated at their bountiful and appetizing meals in the mess-halls, the football and baseball games, the camp theatres, and the other features of cantonment life, thus providing a convincing refutation of the German insinuations. Parents who had heard the widely circulated tales of the unsanitary and immoral conditions to which their boys were exposed in France could go to their local motion-picture houses and see for themselves the clean dormitories, the Y. M. C. A. and Knights of Columbus huts, the social gatherings, the splendidly equipped hospitals, incidents of life in the back areas and in the trenches, and not infrequently the faces of their loved ones themselves, sun-bronzed and happy, wearing “the smile that won’t come off.” If the photographic section of the army had accomplished nothing else, its existence would have been justified a thousand times over by the service which it performed in fighting the propaganda of the Hun and in bringing cheer and comfort to the parents, wives, and sweethearts whom the boys had left behind them.

* * * * *

As a result of the researches and experiments which it carried on during the war, the Signal Corps has, in addition to its countless other achievements, produced several devices which are of such an astounding nature as to strain almost to the breaking-point the credulity of the layman. I am not permitting myself to indulge in the slightest exaggeration when I assert that these devices place in the hands of the United States weapons which would render this country wellnigh invulnerable in the event of our ever becoming involved in another war. But—and herein lies their greatest significance and interest—they are, beyond all question, the most important inventions, so far as their effect on the peaceful interests of the nation are concerned, which have been produced since Morse invented the telegraph, Bell perfected the telephone, and Marconi amazed us with the wireless. Imagine the value of a device which permits of a conversation being carried on between a person on the ground and an aviator in the clouds as easily as though they were seated opposite each other at a dinner-table! Such is the radiotelephone, which I have described in detail in the chapter on the Air Service but which was suggested and brought to a state of perfection by officers of the Signal Corps. Conceive, if you can, of another device which permits of nineteen separate and distinct telephone and telegraph messages being transmitted simultaneously over a single copper wire! Picture the advance in world-communication made possible by the discovery, made by General Squier, the Chief Signal Officer of the Army, that growing trees can be used as natural antennæ for both sending and receiving radio messages! And, as a climax to this amazing list of achievements, let your imagination attempt to grasp the military and commercial significance of a device for the sending over telegraph wires or cables of cipher messages which, though they can defy any system of deciphering known to science, appear in plain language at the other end! You may think, perhaps, that I am overenthusiastic; that I have used too many adjectives and exclamation-marks. But suppose that I tell you something about these inventions. Then, unless I am greatly mistaken, you will be guilty of adjectives and exclamations yourself.

Owing to the difficulty of constructing in France enough telegraph and telephone lines to meet the constantly increasing requirements of the American Expeditionary Forces, as well as to relieve the great congestion which prevailed on all of the existing lines, the scientists of the Signal Corps turned their attention early in the war to the possibility of sending several messages simultaneously over a single wire. Without entering into the details of the long series of experiments which were conducted by the Signal Corps, in conjunction with the American Telephone and Telegraph Company at Camp Alfred Vail, New Jersey, or attempting to describe in terms which would be intelligible to the non-technical reader the device which was finally perfected, it may be said that the result is accomplished through the application of radio, the wire serving as a guide for the radio currents and conducting them with a minimum of power and with a minimum of interference with other radio communications. This device has now been brought to such a state of perfection that eight telegraph messages and eleven telephone messages can be carried over a single wire at the same time, the Morse messages being transmitted by means of the multiplex telegraph apparatus—a system which was discovered as early as 1910 and is now in general use by the large telegraph companies—while the telephone conversations are guided by wireless waves, which serve as carriers for the voice currents. By placing on ordinary telegraph-wires wireless waves of very short length or of very great frequency, officers of the Signal Corps have successfully conversed over a line from Washington to Baltimore which was being used at the same time for the transmission of duplex telegraph messages. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the performance was its extreme simplicity, the feat being accomplished merely by placing on the line, through proper connecting condensers, a pair of radiotelephone sets such as are used for communicating between ground-stations and airplanes. Whereas it was believed, until very recently, that it was impracticable to hold more than four wired-wireless conversations over one wire or one pair of wires, in addition to whatever ordinary telephone or telegraph conversation might be on that wire, the Signal Corps has now demonstrated that it is not only possible but entirely practicable to hold ten or more extra telephone conversations without their interfering with each other. Had this system been perfected while the war was in progress it would have meant that ten telephone and two or more telegraph conversations could have been carried on simultaneously with a point served only by a single wire. In other words, by the application of this system one wire will take the place of ten.

Another phase of science uncovered by the Signal Corps which figuratively makes the mind of the layman stand still and gasp is the discovery, due to the experiments of the Chief Signal Officer, General Squier, that trees can be used as instruments in the receipt and transmission of electrical messages, both telegraph and telephone, both by wire and wireless. Think of it, my friends! The commonplace tree possesses those very qualities that men have spent centuries of effort to embody in a frail spider’s web of wire!

“From the moment an acorn is planted in fertile soil,” to quote the words of General Squier himself, “it becomes a ‘detector’ and a ‘receiver’ of electromagnetic waves, and the marvellous properties of this receiver, through agencies at present entirely unknown to us, are such as to vitalize the acorn and to produce in time the giant oak. In the power of multiplying plant-cells it may, indeed, be called an incomparable ‘amplifier.’ From this angle of view we may consider that trees have been pieces of electrical apparatus from their beginning, and with their manifold chains of living cells are absorbers, conductors, and radiators of the long electromagnetic waves as used in the radio art. For our present purpose we may consider, therefore, a growing tree as a highly organized piece of living earth, to be used in the same manner as we now use the earth as a universal conductor for telephony and telegraphy and other electrical purposes.”

Not only have telephone conversations, in which the voice is transmitted just as clearly as by the ordinary metallic circuit telephone, been carried on from tree to tree, up to a distance of three miles, in the outskirts of Washington, but while the war was still in progress the signal officers, using tree-tops as antennæ, read messages from ships at sea, from aviators in the sky, and from the great radio-stations in South America and Europe. As a result of this discovery, the lofty and costly towers which are now used for the sending and receipt of radio messages will no longer be a necessity. All that will be necessary is to drive a spike in a tree, attach a wire to the spike, and run the wire to a radio apparatus, whereupon messages can be received and sent, the distance covered depending upon the power of the instrument. The tree telegraph has been dubbed by General Squier a “floragraph” and the tree telephone a “floraphone,” while the messages transmitted over this arboreal system are to be known as “floragrams.” Though this discovery will in all likelihood result in an amazing expansion of the world’s system of communication, and though it will give radio-towers, thousands of them, in fact, to every village and to every farm, it does not necessarily mean that every man who possesses a vine and fig-tree will be able to sit on his front porch and gossip with his neighbors.

During the war the offices of the Chief Signal Officer were literally besieged by persons who claimed to have invented various systems of message transmission which could not be tapped, or which, if they were tapped, could not be understood. It was perfectly well known to us, of course, that the German Listening-In Service, particularly in the front-line trenches, was well organized and extremely efficient, and that telephone and buzzer conversations held over our wires were frequently intercepted. It was known, moreover, that Germany had spies, both in France and the United States, whose sole duty it was to tap the governmental telephone and telegraph systems for the purpose of obtaining military information. Scores of devices designed to secure the inviolability of the vitally important messages which were constantly passing over the wires were submitted to the Signal Corps. Anxious as they were to obtain a system of message transmission which could jeer at the efforts of the enemy’s spies, the experts of the Signal Corps steadily maintained that such a thing did not exist, for, as they said with truth, if an instrument could be devised which could transmit and decode a message, there was no reason why the Germans could not in time manufacture one like it, put it on the line, and thus obtain the information desired.

One of the inventors who approached the Signal Corps asserted that, though he did not claim to have a device which would render a message indecipherable, he had a system which made it impossible for an enemy agent to tap the wire over which messages were being transmitted without the sender and receiver being instantly notified that some one was eavesdropping upon them, whereupon their conversation would, of course, cease. “Prove it to us,” said the Signal Corps, and provided the inventor with an opportunity to demonstrate his system over a miniature line. Without the slightest difficulty the military experts tapped the line and, with the aid of a stenographer, recorded every message which was sent over it, the quantity of energy which they withdrew for the purpose being so minute that the delicate detectors failed to record the fact that the line had been tampered with.

Another system had as its basic principle the breaking up of the groups of Morse dots and dashes which represented the letters of the message, and routing these mangled fragments over widely separated wires to the receiving-station, where they were automatically joined together again so as to form the message as originally sent. If, for example, it was desired to send from Hoboken to Washington the message “_Transport Leviathan sails June twenty-fifth_,” it was proposed to make use of two lines, one running, let us say, through Harrisburg, the other via Wilmington. The message sent over the Harrisburg wire would be broken up something after this fashion: “t-a-s-o-t-e-i-t-a-s-i-s-u-e-w-n-y-i-t,” while the portion going by way of Wilmington would read: “r-n-p-r-l-v-a-h-n-a-l-j-n-t-e-t-f-f-h.” To create still further confusion in the mind of any one who might succeed in intercepting one of these sets of fragments, it was proposed to superimpose a “camouflage” message upon the disconnected letters, the characters of the camouflage message to occupy the spaces between the characters of the real message. By an exceedingly ingenious device, these apparently inextricably intermixed and unrelated letters were automatically sorted out at the receiving-station and pieced together, like a jigsaw puzzle, so that the message appeared precisely as it was sent. Going a step further, the inventors of this system proposed by the same means to install a system of telephone communication whereby the spoken words would be broken up just as the Morse characters were divided, certain sounds in each word going over one wire and the remaining sounds over another, to be joined together at the receiving-station into a perfectly intelligible conversation. Here again a wholly separate and extraneous conversation was superimposed over the sounds proceeding by each route, so that were either of the lines tapped the listener-in would be rewarded for his pains by hearing a torrent of sound which would convince him that he was listening to a combination of Choctaw, Chinese, the ravings of John McCullough, and the symptoms of a severe cold. Notwithstanding the undeniable ingenuity of this system, the Signal Corps experts demonstrated, to the unconcealed astonishment of the inventors, that they could overhear and understand these crazy-quilt conversations as readily as though they were being held across a dinner-table in plain English.

Early in 1918, however, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, becoming interested in the solution of this apparently insoluble problem, produced a device whereby a message could be transmitted over a wire in such a form that it was absolutely indecipherable to any one save the person for whom it was intended. As originally developed, this system was unable to do all that was claimed for it, but, thanks to the co-operation of the Signal Corps, there was finally produced an electrical device which will transform an ordinary message into cipher, transmit it with absolute secrecy, and decode it at the other end—all at the rate of from forty to seventy words a minute. This may be said to be the only cipher in existence which is absolutely indecipherable and at the same time practicable. As universal peace is not yet within sight, even with the aid of a telescope, and as this invention would prove of incalculable value to the United States in the event of our again becoming involved in war, it is obviously out of the question to discuss the principle on which it is based, much less the details of its construction and operation. It is enough to say that this nation is now the possessor of a system of code transmission which can defy all the experts in the world, a message sent by its means being absolutely indecipherable to the inventor himself.

Though before the signing of the Armistice this device was operating between several points in the United States with complete satisfaction, the apparatus could not be manufactured in time to permit of its use overseas before the end of the war. The engineers of the Signal Corps assert that this device will eventually be perfected to a degree of commercial practicability which will make it possible to transmit cipher messages over cables as well as land lines without the necessity of manual transmission and without the use of a recorder. As the machine codes and decodes messages automatically, the large code-room forces which were used in Washington during the war, and which are employed by many of the great banking and commercial institutions, would no longer be required, thus doing away entirely with the labor at present involved in coding and decoding messages and cutting down the time required for their transmission by many hours.

II

“ESSAYONS”

If, the next time you meet an officer of Engineers, you will observe his uniform closely, you will perceive that the buttons of his tunic, instead of being embossed with the arms of the United States, like all other branches of the service, bear a device consisting of an eagle, a castle, a rising sun, and the motto “_Essayons_.” Like the bow of black velvet, called a “flash,” which the Royal Welsh Fusiliers have sewn at the back of their collars to commemorate the fact that they were the last regiment in the British Army to wear the pigtail, so the buttons of the Engineers serve to remind their wearers that the famous organization is as old as the nation, tracing its history back to the Corps of Artillerists and Engineers of the Continental Army.

“_Essayons_”—“Let us try.” One likes the quiet confidence of the motto.

“Can you make roads for my guns through the swamps of the Wilderness?” asked Grant.

“Let us try,” replied the Engineers—and the roads were built.

“Can you build docks for disembarking ten thousand men a day and railways to carry those men to the front?” asked Pershing.

“Let us try,” the Engineers responded—and almost overnight miles of docks and networks of rails appeared as though at the wave of a magician’s wand.

“Can you locate the enemy’s guns by their sound? Can you keep our troops supplied with water? Can you print maps? Can you make dugouts? Can you operate search-lights? Can you dredge harbors for the entrance of our transports? Can you build highways and keep them in repair? Can you quarry the stone for those highways? Can you cut a million feet of lumber a day? Can you design better types of armored cars, sound-detectors, mobile cranes, portable sawmills, listening apparatus, mapping cameras, steel bridges, barbed-wire entanglements, than any in existence? And, if the necessity arises, can you fight?”

“_Essayons_,” answered the Engineers—whereupon all these things were done.

Whenever the army has had work to be done which no one else knew how to do, they have sent for the Engineers. Who designed, built, and operated our tanks before the organization of the Tank Corps? The Engineers. Who organized the Gas and Flame Regiment? The Engineers. The Camouflage Corps? The Engineers, of course. Who did the mining, quarrying, timber-cutting, well-driving, dock, bridge, road, railway, and camp building for our armies overseas? Again, the Engineers. Indeed, I doubt if any organization of any army in the Great War can show such a record of varied activities and successful accomplishments as the Corps of Engineers. One can say of the American Engineer, as Kipling said of the British Marine:

“There isn’t a job on the top o’ the earth the beggar don’t know nor do—
You can leave ’im at night on a bald man’s ’ead to paddle ’is own canoe;
...
They think for ’emselves, an’ they steal for ’emselves, an’ they never
ask what’s to do,
But they’re camped an’ fed, an’ they’re up an’ fed, before our bugle’s
blew.”

The immense importance attached to the work of the Engineers is strikingly illustrated by the fact that, whereas the army was increased to 19½ times its pre-war size, the enormous problems of field fortification, construction, and transportation, both with and behind the fighting forces, as well as the direction of many entirely new phases of warfare, necessitated an increase of the Corps of Engineers to 131½ times its strength at the beginning of the war. Prior to July, 1916, the corps consisted of only three battalions, with a total strength of not over 1,900 men, but when the Armistice was signed there had been organized, or were in process of organization, 500 Engineer units, with a strength of some 312,000 men, or more than 10 per cent of the entire army.

Now it must be kept in mind that in the original corps of pre-war days the men were trained only as sappers and not in the countless specialist branches which were developed by the great conflict. The fundamental use of sapper troops is, theoretically, at least, the supervision of technical work during tactical operations. One regiment of sappers is normally assigned to each division, is under the immediate command of the divisional commander, and operates as directed by him. To this regiment is given the work of organizing positions for defense, which includes the construction of trenches, gun-positions, ammunition-dumps, and dugouts, the repair and maintenance of roads in the divisional area, the construction of shelters where required, and the general direction of the work necessary to keep open the lines of communication and supply. In open warfare it is customary for the divisional commander to hold his sapper regiment in reserve to be used for applying the decisive pressure or resistance at the moment when it is most needed. When going forward with the infantry, sapper troops usually have a definite technical mission, such as the organization of captured ground, the destruction of obstacles and the bridging of streams. During a retreat they are attached to the rear-guard, being charged with the demolition of bridges, the obstruction of roads, and the cutting of railway communications. Though the ranks of the Engineers were filled, for the most part, with men who were experts and specialists in certain trades and professions, they were time after time thrown into the line as combat troops, fighting shoulder to shoulder with the infantry. On more than one occasion they showed that, destitute of combat training though many of them were, they could handle a rifle or a machine-gun as well as an axe or a spade. At Cambrai the 11th (railway) Engineers, caught in the German counter-push, offered a stubborn and heroic resistance against overwhelming numbers. At Amiens another railway regiment, the 11th Engineers, formed a part of the little force with which General Sandeman Carey blocked the gap in the British line and thereby prevented the Germans from breaking through to the Channel ports. For its behavior on that occasion the regiment was cited by the British and its commander was decorated. Perhaps you were not aware that two companies of Engineers fought alongside the Marines in the Bois de Belleau. And, when the gray hordes of Hindenburg were reeling back from the Marne, a report from the Rainbow Division ended: “Our advance troops, the 117th Engineers, are pressing the enemy closely.” But the story that will live longest in the annals of the famous corps is that of the sergeant of the railway regiment at Cambrai, who, surrounded by the enemy, refused to surrender and defended himself with his only weapon, a crowbar. When they found him, hours later, the crowbar was still clutched in his dead hand. About him, with crushed skulls, lay seven Germans.

The innumerable new devices produced by the Great War, however, required for their operation great numbers of specially trained men, so that the Corps of Engineers, from an organization consisting solely of sapper troops, found itself called upon to do more and more work in almost every branch of engineering. To meet these demands men were accordingly trained as specialists and assigned to specialist regiments and battalions, so that, when the war ended, the Corps of Engineers consisted of camouflage, car-repair, crane-operator, dock-construction, dredging, electrical and mechanical, forestry, general-construction, highway, inland-waterway, light-railway construction, shop, and operation, locomotive-repair, military-mapping, mining, pontoon park and train, quarry, railway-transportation, road, sapper, search-light (including antiaircraft), sound-and-flash-ranging, standard-gauge railway-construction, operation, shop and maintenance-of-way, supply, surveying and printing, trades and storekeepers, transportation and water-supply troops, organized as needed into companies, battalions, or regiments.

Now it was realized, from the very beginning, that the success of our armies in France would depend upon transportation. And, thanks to the threats of Pancho Villa, we had at least the framework of a transportation organization, for when it became necessary to send troops to the Mexican border in 1916, the War Department had organized a transportation service of sorts and had placed Samuel M. Felton, president of the Chicago Great Western Railway, at the head of it. Thus it came about that upon our entrance into the Great War there devolved upon Mr. Felton and his staff the gigantic task of obtaining in the United States and shipping to Europe the enormous quantity of transportation equipment and supplies required for the use of our forces overseas. In order to ascertain just what was required in equipment and supplies, a commission, headed by Colonel William Barclay Parsons, president of the American Society of Civil Engineers, and Colonel (then Major) W. J. Wilgus, formerly vice-president of the New York Central system, was sent to Europe within less than thirty days after the declaration of war. Upon the completion of its preliminary survey of the situation the commission dispersed, leaving Colonel Wilgus as the sole nucleus of the American Transportation Service in France, with Captain L. A. Jenney, formerly chief draftsman of the New York Central, as his assistant. Sitting on soap-boxes in an office in the Boulevard Haussman in Paris, with packing-cases for desks, these two officers outlined the general policy with respect to military transportation for the A. E. F. which the conditions seemed to warrant, and which General Pershing later adopted, and drew up the first requisition for railway and port equipment, materials, and tools. Colonel Wilgus, himself a veteran railroad man, quickly realized the vastness of the problem which confronted us and the gravity of the situation resulting from the dilapidated condition of the French railways and the appalling shortage of French rolling-stock. He accordingly informed the War Department that the American Army must prepare to operate its own trains, made up of its own locomotives and cars, from the seaports to the front, over the French railways under trackage rights. I might add that the principle of trackage rights, so familiar in America, was entirely unknown in France, and at first the French railway officials did not know what Colonel Wilgus was talking about, for they found it difficult to understand how it was possible to operate two systems of transportation over the same tracks at the same time.

The story of how the Engineers, under the direction of Brigadier-General W. W. Atterbury, formerly vice-president of the Pennsylvania, Director-General of Transportation, with Colonel Wilgus as his deputy and Chief of Staff, built up in France a transportation system which was one of the marvels of the war, is outside the province of this narrative, while the story of the production of railway material in America and its shipment overseas would require, for its proper telling, a chapter to itself. It is enough to say that, when the Armistice was signed, 60,000 men were engaged on railroad work of various kinds in France; more than a thousand miles of standard-gauge railway (equal to the distance by the Pennsylvania from New York to Chicago) had been laid; upward of 1,300 locomotives (300 more than are owned by the Atchison system) had been shipped overseas, and, had the war continued, we would have had in France by July, 1919, enough American cars to make up a train the caboose of which would have been leaving Paris when the engine was entering Berlin.

The Transportation Department had in operation between Tours, which was the headquarters of the Services of Supply, and Chaumont, which was the Great Headquarters, an all-American train, drawn by an American locomotive, driven by an American engineer, and, as a final touch, with its sleeping-cars in charge of former Pullman porters, in khaki, it is true, but retaining their grins and their whisk-brushes. Every one in the A. E. F. was inordinately proud of that train, which stood as a sort of visible proof of American accomplishment in France. It had been officially christened the “Atterbury Special” in honor of the Director-General of Transportation, but the soldiers had disrespectfully dubbed it the “Attaboy Special.” One morning, as a group of American congressmen, on their way up to the front, were standing on the platform of the Tours station, the special came roaring in.

“There’s an example of American energy and promptness for you!” exclaimed one of the politicians proudly. “What a contrast to those wretched French trains! Not an hour or so late, as they are, but on time to the very minute.”

“Pardon me, sir,” said a military policeman who had overheard the conversation, “that is _yesterday’s_ train.”

* * * * *

When it was first proposed by the Transportation Department that locomotives should be shipped to Europe without being knocked down, the Ship-Building Board vigorously protested. There were no ships in existence, the board said, which could stand up under such an immense concentrated load. But the Engineers proved that they knew more about the strength of ships than did the ship-builders, and the locomotives—533 in all—were run out onto the wharves on their own wheels, picked up as easily as though they were baby-carriages by the giant gantry cranes, deposited in the hold—35 to a ship—together with their tenders, packed in baled hay, and upon arrival at the French ports were lifted out by the same method, lowered gently onto the rails, and a few hours later rolled off for the front under their own steam. The success with which the Engineers utilized business methods and revised specifications to meet American manufacturing conditions is strikingly illustrated by the fact that the cost of these locomotives, for which the French had been paying $51,000 each, was brought down to $37,000, thus saving to the American taxpayer some seven millions of dollars—a very tidy sum.

And, apropos of rolling-stock, here is a bit of secret history hitherto unpublished. When Villa’s raiders were threatening to destroy the railway-lines paralleling the Mexican border, the Engineer Corps designed and built a number of self-propelling armored railway-cars armed with 3-inch rifles, machine-guns, and search-lights. When the German submarines began their piratical operations along the Atlantic seaboard in the spring of 1918, these moving fortresses were secretly rushed up from the Rio Grande in order to afford protection to the undefended Jersey coast towns. It was well for the U-boat commanders that they did not attempt to shell Long Branch and Atlantic City as they shelled Scarborough and Broadstairs. If they had, the Engineers and their armored cars would have given them the surprise of their lives.

* * * * *

The non-military person does not ordinarily associate with war such prosaic occupations as lumbering, quarrying, and highway building. They seem, at least at first thought, to be in character essentially industrial. But it must be remembered that the workman played fully as great a part as the soldier in winning the Great War. In fact, the combat troops could not have held the line for a day had it not been for the labor battalions, which, without incentive or excitement, glory or reward, and in most cases without public appreciation, toiled so faithfully and unceasingly to build the wharves, to unload the ships, to lay the railways, to construct the roads, and to hurry forward, in an unending stream, the food for the men and the food for the guns. It is quite understandable, once you stop to think about it, that in order to maintain our great armies in the field, there were required immense quantities of lumber for building wharves, barracks, storehouses, hangars, and hospitals, and enormous amounts of stone, crushed rock, and gravel for metalling the roads, ballasting the railways, buttressing the bridges, and making concrete for the fortifications. When we entered the war the supply of lumber was not nearly equal to the demands of the Allied Armies, to say nothing of our own. And, though there was, of course, plenty of rock and gravel in this country, we could not spare the tonnage to ship it overseas, even had such a course been practicable. (Perhaps it has never occurred to you how vitally important an item gravel is in military operations. Yet at one time the Germans threatened the Dutch with war if the latter persisted in their refusal to permit German gravel to be shipped across Holland for the construction of concrete fortifications in Belgium.) In view of these conditions, it devolved upon the Engineers to organize and equip special forestry, quarry, and highway regiments, as well as numerous labor battalions, and hurry them overseas with orders to obtain the urgently needed materials from the forests and quarries of France.

Though Engineer officers of the regular establishment were, of course, given command of these specialist regiments, the other officers as well as the soldiers themselves were recruited from men trained in the particular sort of work which each regiment was expected to perform. How to obtain officers of sufficient experience in these various lines of industry, and in sufficient numbers, promised at first to be a serious problem, but it was quickly solved by the Personnel Division of the Engineers, which had had on file, ever since the war-clouds first appeared on America’s horizon, tens of thousands of letters from men trained in every branch of the engineering profession, offering their services to the government in case of war. Hence, when it was decided to raise a forestry regiment, it was a simple matter to turn to the files and find the names of thousands of men—mill-owners, forest-rangers, lumbermen—with their experience and qualifications carefully listed, who were intimately familiar with every phase of the industry, from tree to finished board. The best qualified of these applicants were offered commissions by telegraph and instructed to go out into the lumber country and recruit their companies and battalions from men who had worked under them or whom they knew. Soon the walls of every employment-office, bunk-house, and cook-shack from the pine woods of Maine to the spruce forests of Washington blossomed with posters calling for axemen, sawyers, log-drivers, timber-cruisers, mill-operators, cookees, teamsters, for immediate service overseas. The response was prompt and startling. From their camps on the Kennebec and the Androscoggin, from the Adirondacks, from the pine-clad shores of Superior and Huron, from the Michigan Peninsula and the North Woods of Minnesota, from the forested slopes of the Wind River, the Bitter Roots, and the Cascades, from the big timber of the Far Nor’west the lumbermen came pouring in, in mackinaws and parkas, in moccasins and shoepacks, in knitted toques and caps of fur, their scanty belongings wrapped in the blanket-rolls slung across their backs and often with their axes on their shoulders. Sinewy-limbed, saddle-colored, horny-handed, tough as the timber of the forests whence they came, these were the real pioneers, the conquerors of the wilderness, the last of the frontiersmen, and Europe will, in all likelihood, never see their picturesque like again.

The first of the forestry regiments, the 10th Engineers, sailed for Europe five months after the declaration of war, followed at short intervals by several similar organizations. Immediately upon their arrival in France lumbering operations were begun in the Vosges and the Pyrenees (so do not be surprised if the next time you go shooting in Maine or fishing in Michigan your guide interlards his conversation with French or Spanish phrases), using French mills at first but later installing plants of the American type. The enlisted men of the forestry outfits were, as I have said, for the most part lumbermen by trade, officered by men familiar with lumbering in all its details. The result was a striking illustration of what American energy and American methods can do, for the official reports show that mills which, under French management, were yielding 500 board feet a day, were made to yield ten times that quantity when operated by Yankee lumbermen. In the Vosges this work was carried on so close to the front that the plants were repeatedly bombed by enemy aircraft and shelled by enemy artillery, the forestry troops, though listed as non-combatants, frequently suffering heavy casualties. It took a high order of courage for these men to go unconcernedly about their business of tree-felling, hauling, and sawing with German shells yowling through the branches and bursting all about them. The sawmills were of the portable type, however, and when the fire of the German guns became too accurate and heavy, the whole plant was packed up and shifted to a new location. I don’t believe in letting loose upon my defenseless readers swarms of figures, but it will serve to give those of them who are familiar with lumbering some idea of what our forestry regiments accomplished when I mention that during the month of October, 1918, alone, they produced 50,000,000 board feet of sawed lumber, 80,000 cords of firewood, and enough standard-gauge ties to build a single-track railway from the Great Lakes to the Gulf.

In raising the quarry, highway, and inland waterway regiments, the same method was adopted as in the organization of the forestry battalions. Enormous quantities of crushed rock were required for concrete and for the construction and repair of roads, but though numerous quarries were available in the American areas, experienced quarrymen and quarrying equipment were lacking. Accordingly a special quarry regiment, the 28th Engineers, was organized in the United States in November, 1917, with a strength of 60 officers and some 1,500 men. A skeleton organization was formed by transferring a few officers and a small detachment of men from a road regiment, the new unit being raised to strength by giving commissions to quarry managers and superintendents and filling up the ranks with drafted quarrymen.

Spreading over almost the whole of France is a veritable network of navigable rivers and canals, of which the Engineers availed themselves to the utmost in the transportation of material and supplies. Transportation by the inland waterways was in charge of the 57th Engineers, this regiment being largely recruited from men who had had experience on the canals and rivers of the United States. In the days to come many are the tales that will be told by skippers of stern-wheelers on the Mississippi and captains on the Erie Canal of the days when they and their huskies of the Inland Waterways battalions moved the supplies for Pershing’s men up the Seine and through the canals of the Marne and the Rhône.

To the dredging, dock construction, and stevedore regiments was assigned the gigantic task of dredging the channels and harbors of the seaports which the French placed at our disposal, of building wharves and berths for the reception of American ships, and of the transferring of the cargoes from ship to shore. The magnitude of their task is shown by the fact that cargo shipments grew from 20,000 tons in July, 1917, to 1,000,000 tons in November of the following year, while the 23 ship-berths which the French Government originally assigned to us had nearly quadrupled when the Armistice was signed.

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Unless you have marched with armies or trekked across hot and arid lands, you cannot know what it is to be thirsty—really thirsty, I mean; so thirsty that your tongue swells until it all but chokes you or lolls from your mouth like that of a panting dog. Water is infinitely more important to the success of a military operation than arms or ammunition; to a certain extent it is more important than food; for, though troops can fight for an amazingly long time on short rations, or even on no rations at all, they cannot fight without water. The vital importance of providing an adequate water-supply was learned by the French in Algeria and Morocco, by the British in India and the Sudan, where the deserts were strewn for miles with the bodies of soldiers who had died from thirst. In the Cuban campaign our armies had far more deaths from impure water than from Spanish bullets. During the Italian offensive on the Carso, that terrible plateau of sun-scorched rock which lies beyond the Isonzo, hundreds of men, Italians and Austrians alike, died from thirst, the Austrians being eventually compelled to retreat because the Italian artillery had destroyed the pipe-lines which supplied them with water. During the fighting on the Western Front during the last summer of the war, when the semitropic sun of eastern France beat down on the heavy-laden backs of the panting, sweating men, when millions of feet and hoofs ground the roads to powder and filled eyes, ears, throats, and nostrils with the yellow, choking dust, when the air reeked with the mingled stenches of leather, gasoline, sweating horse-flesh, and human perspiration, and when, as the canteens emptied, the men peered anxiously over their shoulders for the company water-carts, thousands realized as never before the truth of Kipling’s words:

“When it comes to slaughter,
You must do your work on water.”

Now, when a hundred thousand men and thirty-five thousand animals are crowded into a sector perhaps three miles wide and seven miles deep, the problem of keeping those men and animals supplied with water becomes tremendous. The responsibility for supplying with water the troops in the field fell upon the Army Water-Supply Service, which, as might be expected, was a branch of the Corps of Engineers. The Water-Supply Service was really a wholesaler of water, delivery being made at “water-points,” from which water was drawn directly by men and animals, the largest customers being, however, the ubiquitous two-wheel water-carts of the infantry and artillery. To supply these “water-points” every available source was utilized, springs developed, deep wells bored, village wells and cisterns cleaned out, streams purified and pumping-stations established, the aim being to provide water within a mile and a half of every consumer at the front. Ordinarily two gallons of water per man per day were furnished at the front, this quantity being sufficient for drinking, cooking, and lavatory purposes, but during the enormous troop concentrations incident to the St. Mihiel and Argonne offensives this quantity had to be materially reduced, during those periods of stress and action the men having scant opportunity for either cooking or bathing. It was impossible, however, to reduce the quantity for the animals, for each of which eight to ten gallons had to be provided daily.

Even under battle conditions the purity of the water was the first consideration, for impure water can work far more havoc with an army than enemy shell. In order to provide against this contingency, mobile laboratories for water-testing purposes moved in the van of the armies, and during the drives the Water-Supply troops were provided with poison-testing kits, for, warned by the experiences of the British in German Southwest Africa, where wells were systematically poisoned by the enemy, we took no chances. Sources of supply were, wherever possible, protected, it being considered almost as serious an offense for a soldier to contaminate a water-supply as for him to sleep on post. Where water was found to be polluted, the troops, no matter how thirsty, were under no circumstances permitted to use it until it had been filtered and sterilized. It is a curious fact that the chlorine used in gas-shell to kill Germans was used by the Water-Supply Service in minute quantities to kill an equally dangerous and far more insidious enemy—the microbic disease-carriers in the water. Special motor-trucks, equipped with pumping, filtering, sterilizing, and testing apparatus, time after time demonstrated that they were able to get into action and deliver pure water from a polluted supply _within thirty minutes_ after their arrival.