Part 10 (2/2)

CHAPTER XIII

BEHIND THE LINES

The difficulty of describing the American organization behind the lines in France lies in the fact that the story is nowhere near finished. The end of the first year saw huge things done, but huger ones still in the doing, and the complete and the incomplete so blended that there was almost no point at which a finger could be laid and one might say: ”They have done this.”

But at the end of the first year all the foundations were down and the corner-stones named, and though much necessary secrecy still envelops the actual facts, something at least can be told.

America could no more move direct from home to the line in the matter of her supplies than she could in that of her men. And it was at her intermediate stopping-point, in both cases, that her troubles lay. It was, as Belloc put it, the problem of the hour-gla.s.s. Plenty of room at both ends and plenty of material were invalidated by the little strait between.

It was not a month from the time of the first landing of troops, in June, 1917, before the wharfs of the ports chiefly used by incoming American supplies were stacked high with unmoved cases.

The transportation men worked with might and main, but the s.h.i.+pping Board at home, under the goad of restless and anxious people, was sending and sending the equipment to follow the men. And once landed, the supplies found neither roof to cover them nor means to carry them on.

This was the point at which General Pers.h.i.+ng began to lament to Was.h.i.+ngton over his scarcity of stevedores, and labor units, and soon thereafter was the point at which he got them.

On September 14, 1917, W. W. Atterbury, vice-president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, was appointed director-general of transportation of the United States Expeditionary Force in France, and was given the rank of brigadier-general. General Atterbury was already in France, and had been offering such expert advice and a.s.sistance to General Pers.h.i.+ng as his civilian capacity would permit. With his appointment came the announcement of others, giving him the a.s.sistance of many well-known American railroad men.

When the First Division reached France it was discovered that it required four tons of tonnage to provide for each man. That meant 80,000 tons for each division, which, in the figures of the railroad man, meant eighty trains of 1,000 tons capacity for every division.

For the first 200,000 men in France, who formed the basis for the first railroad reckoning, 800 trains were necessary.

Obviously, these trains could not be taken from the already burdened French. Obviously, they could not tax further the trackage in France, though the trains and engines s.h.i.+pped had essential measurements to conform to the French road-beds, so that interchange was easy. Still more obviously, the trains could not be made in this country and rolled onto the decks of s.h.i.+ps for transportation.

So that before the first soldier packed his first kit on his way to camp the A. E. F. required railway-tracks, enormous reception-wharfs, a.s.sembling-plants and factories, and a.r.s.enals and warehouses beyond number.

The only things which America could buy in France were those which could be grown there, by women and old men and children, and those which were already made. The only continuing surplus product of France was big guns, which resulted from their terrific specialization in munition-plants during the war's first three years.

To find out what could legitimately be bought in France, and to buy it, paying no more for it than could be avoided by wise purchasing, General Pers.h.i.+ng created a General Purchasing Board in Paris late in August.

This board had a general purchasing agent at its head, who was the representative of the commander-in-chief, and he acted in concert with similar boards of the other Allied armies. His further job was to co-ordinate all the efforts of subordinate purchasing agents throughout the army. The chief of each supply department and of the Red Cross and the Y. M. C. A. named purchasing agents to act under this board.

It was not long till this board was supervising the spending of many millions of dollars a month, which gives a fair estimate of what the total expenditure, both at home and abroad, had to be.

As a case in point, a single branch of this board bought in France, the first fortnight of November, 26,000 tons of tools and equipment, 4,000 tons of railway-ties, and 160 tons of cars. The cost was something over $3,000,000. These purchases alone saved the total cargo s.p.a.ce of 20 vessels of 1,600 tons each.

The General Purchasing Board adopted the price-fixing policy created at Was.h.i.+ngton, in which it was aided by the shrewdest business heads among the British and French authorities.

This board also had power to commandeer s.h.i.+ps, when they had to--notably in the case of bringing s.h.i.+pments of coal from England, where it was fairly plentiful, to France, where there was almost none.

A second scheme for co-ordination put into effect by General Pers.h.i.+ng was a board at which heads of all army departments could meet and act direct, without the necessity of going through the commander-in-chief.

When the quartermaster's department made its budgets, the co-ordination department went over them and revised the estimates downward, or drafted work or supplies from some other department with a surplus, or redistributed within the quartermaster's stores, perhaps even granted the first requests. But there was a vast saving throughout the army zone.

The problem of America's ”behind the lines,” including as it did the creating of every phase of transportation, from trackage to terminals, and then providing the things to transport, not only for an army growing into the millions, but for much of civilian France, was one which, all wise observers said, was the greatest of the war. Just how staggering were these difficulties must not be told till later, but surmises are free. And the praise for overcoming them which poured from British and French onlookers had the value and authority of coming from men who had themselves been through like crises, and who knew every obstacle in the way of the Americans.

But if the preparatory stages must be abridged in the telling, there is no ban on a little expansiveness as to what was finally done.

Within a year American engineers and laborers and civilians working behind the lines had made of the waste lands around an old French port a line of modern docks where sixteen heavy cargo-vessels could rest at the same time, being unloaded from both sides at once at high speed, by the help of lighters. These docks were made by a big American pile-driver, which in less than a year had driven 30,000 piles into the marshy ooze, and made a foundation for enormous docks.

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