Cobb Irvin Shrewsbury
The Glory of the Coming

At the outset it was estimated by experts among our allies that possibly we could land 20,000 troops and 6,000 tons of freight a month at this port – if we kept nonunion hours and hustled. In one day in the early part of the present summer 42,000 American soldiers were debarked and ferried ashore with their portable equipment, and on another day of the same week through one of the original French-built docks – not through the whole row of them, but through one of the row – our stevedores cleared 5,000 tons of freight. Five thousand tons in one day, when those Continental wiseacres had calculated that by straining ourselves and by employing to their utmost all the facilities provided by all the docks in sight we might move 6,000 tons in a month! For this performance and for so frequent duplication of it that now it has become commonplace and matter-of-fact and quite in accordance with expectations, a great share of the credit is due to thousands of brawny black American stevedores drawn from the wharves of Boston, New York and Philadelphia, Galveston, Savannah, New Orleans and Newport News. The victory that we are going to win will not be an all-white victory by any manner of means.

Besides the physical limitations there were certain others, seeming at first well-nigh insurmountable, which our military and civilian executives had to meet and contend with and overcome. I mean the Continental fashion of doing things – a system ponderously slow and infinitely cumbersome. When a job is done according to native requirements over here it is thoroughly done, as you may be quite sure, and it will last for an age; but frequently the preceding age is required to get it done. Europeans almost without exception are thrifty and saving beyond any conceivable standards of ours, but they are prodigals and they are spendthrifts when it comes down to expending what in America we regard as the most precious commodity of all, and that commodity is time. Some of our masters of frenzied finance could wreck a bank in less time than it takes to cash a check in a French one.

Not even the exigencies and the sharp emergencies of wartime conditions can cure a people, however adaptable and sprightly they may be in most regards, of a system of thought and a system of habit that go back as far as they themselves go as a civilised race. Here is a concrete instance serving to show how at this same port that I have been talking about the Continental system came into abrupt collision with the American system and how the American system won out:

The admiral in command of the American naval forces centring at this place received word that on a given day – to wit: three days from the time the news was wirelessed to him – a convoy would bring to harbour transports bearing about 50,000 Yank troopers. It would be the admiral’s task to see that the ships promptly were emptied of their passengers and that the passengers were expeditiously and safely put upon solid land. After this had been done it devolved upon the brigadier in command of the land forces to quarter them in a rest camp until such time as they would be dispatched up the line toward the Front.

The great movement of our soldiers overseas, which started in April and which proceeds without noticeable abatement as I write this, was then in midswing; and the rest camps in the neighbourhood were already crowded to their most stretchable limits. Nevertheless the general must provide livable accommodations for approximately 50,000 men somewhere in an already overcrowded area – and he had less than seventy-two hours in which to do it. He got busy; the members of his staff likewise got busy.

That same night he called into conference a functionary of the French Government, in liaison service and detailed to cooperate with the Americans or with the British in just such situations as the one that had now risen. The official in question was zealous in the common cause – as zealous as any man could be – but he could not cure himself of thinking in the terms of the pattern his nation had followed in times of peace.

“I must have a big rest camp ready by this time day after to-morrow,” said, in effect, the American. “So I went out this afternoon with my adjutant and some of my other officers and I found it.”

Briefly he described a suitable tract four or five miles from the town. Then he went on: “How long do you think it would take for your engineers to furnish me with a fairly complete working survey of that stretch, including boundaries and the general topography with particular regards to drainage and elevations?”

The Frenchman thought a minute, making mental calculations.

“From four to six weeks I should say,” he hazarded. “Not sooner than four weeks surely.”

“I think I can beat that,” said the American.

He turned to his desk phone and called up another office in the same building in which this conference was taking place – the office of his chief engineer officer.

“Blank,” he said when he had secured connection, “how long will it take you to give me the survey of that property we went over this afternoon? You were to let me know by this evening.”

Back came the answer:

“By working all night, sir, I can hand it to you at noon to-morrow.”

“Are you sure I’ll get it then?”

“Absolutely sure, sir.”

“Good,” said the general, and rang off. He faced the Frenchman.

“The survey will be ready at noon tomorrow,” he said. “Now, then, I want arrangements made so that construction gangs can take possession of that land in the morning early. They’ve got a good many thousand tents to set up and some temporary shacks to build, and I’m going to sick ‘em on the job at daylight.”

“But what you ask is impossible, mon général,” expostulated the Frenchman. “Days will be required – perhaps weeks. We must follow a regular custom, else there will be legal complications. We must search out the owners of the various parcels of land included in the area and make separate terms with each of them for the use of his land by your people.”

“And meanwhile what will those 50,000 soldiers that are due here inside of seventy-two hours be doing?”

The Frenchman shrugged his shoulders. “Very well then,” said the American. “Now here’s what we must do: I want you please to get in touch, right away, with your Minister of War at Paris and tell him with my compliments that at daylight in the morning I am going to take possession of that tract, and I want the sanction of his department for my authority in taking the step. Afterward we’ll settle with the owners of the land for the ground rent and for the proper damages and for all the rest of it. But now – with my compliments – tell the minister we’ve got to have a little action.”

“But to write a letter and send it to Paris even by special courier, and to have it read and to get a reply back, would take three days at the very quickest,” the Frenchman replied.

“I’m not asking you to write any letters. I’m asking you to call up the minister on the telephone – now, this minute, from this office, and over this telephone.”

“But, my dear general, it is not customary to call a minister of the government on the telephone to discuss anything. There is a procedure for this sort of thing – a tradition, a precedent if you will.”

“We’ll have to make a new precedent of our own then. Here’s the telephone. Suppose you get the minister on the wire and leave the rest to me. I’ll do the talking from this end – and I’ll take the responsibility.”

“But – but, general,” faltered the dum-founded Frenchman, “have you thought of the question of water supply? There are no running streams near your proposed site; there are no reservoirs. Of what use for me to do as you wish and run the risk of annoying our Minister of War when you have no water? And of course without water of what use is your camp?”

“Don’t let that worry you,” said the American. “The water supply has all been arranged for. In fact” – he glanced at his watch – “in fact you might say that already it is being installed.”

“But – if you will pardon me – what you say is impossible!”

“Not at all; it’s very simple. This town is full of vintners’ places and every vintner has – or rather he did have – a lot of those big empty wine casks on hand. Well, I sent two of my officers out this afternoon and bought every empty wine cask in this town. They rounded up 600 of them, and there’ll be more coming in from the surrounding country to-morrow morning. I know there will be, because I’ve got men out scouting for them, and at the price I’m willing to pay I’ll have every spare wine cask in this part of France delivered here to me by this time to-morrow. But 600 was enough to start on. I’ve had 800 of them set up at handy places over my camp site – had it done this evening – and at this moment the other 300 are being loaded upon army trucks – six casks to a truck. To-morrow morning the trucks will begin hauling water to fill the casks now on the ground.”

It was as he had said. The minister was called up at night on the telephone, and from him a very willing approval of the unprecedented step in contemplation was secured. The water hauling started at dawn, and so did the tent raising start. The survey was delivered at noon; half an hour later American labour battalions were digging ditches for kitchen drains and latrines, and in accordance with the contour of the chosen spot a makeshift but serviceable sewerage system was being installed. When the troops marched out to their camp in the late afternoon of the second day following, their camp was there waiting for them and their supper was ready.

CHAPTER XXIII. BRICKS WITHOUT STRAW

TAKE any separate project along our line of communication. Pick it out at random. It makes no difference which particular spot you choose; you nevertheless are morally sure to find stationed there a man or a group of men who have learned to laugh at the problem of making bricks without straw. If put to it they could make monuments out of mud pies. Brought face to face with conditions and environments that were entirely new to their own experience, and confronted as they were at the outset by the task of providing essentials right out of the air – essentials that were vitally and immediately needed and that could not be forthcoming from the States for weeks or even months – an executive or an underlying invariably would find a way out of the difficulty.

There was pressing need once for a receptacle in which rubber cement could be mixed in small quantities. Neither the local community nor the government stores yielded such a thing and there was no time to send clear back New York or Philadelphia for it. The man who was charged with the responsibility of getting that rubber cement mixed wait on a scouting tour. Somewhere he unearthed probably the only ice-cream freezer in rural Fiance outside of the immediate vicinity of Paris, and he acquired it at the proprietor’s valuation and loaded it into his car and hurried back with it to his shop, and ten minutes after he arrived the required cement was being stirred to the proper consistency in the ice-cream freezer.

At the main depot of automobile supplies they needed, right away, springs with which to repair broken-down light cars. As yet an adequate supply of spare parts had not been received from the base, nor was there any likelihood that a supply would be forthcoming at once. The colonel in charge of the depot sent men ranging through the countryside with instructions to buy up stuff that would make springs. They brought him in tons of purchases, and most unlikely looking material it was too – rusted chunks and strips and spirals of metal taken from the underpinnings of French market carts and agricultural implements; but the forces in the machine shops sailed in and converted the lot into automobile springs in no time at all.

This same colonel already had a plant which, exclusive of the value of buildings specially built, represents at this time a national investment of $35,000,000, and the outlay was growing every hour. He used to be the head of a big metal-working establishment at home. As a specialist in his line he joined the Army to help out. Now every month he does a volume of buying that would have made his average year’s turnover in times of peace look trifling in comparison. Just before he sailed to take over his present job he ordered $6,000,000 worth of motor parts at one fell swoop, as it were.

Because of the rapidity with which our forces on foreign service multiplied themselves there was a rush order from General Headquarters for more buildings and yet more buildings, at one of our warehouse depots, to provide for storage of perishable foodstuffs in transit from the rear to the Front. Between seven-thirty o’clock in the morning and five o’clock in the evening of a given day a gang of steel riggers accomplished the impossible by rearing and bolting together the steel frame – posts, girders, plates, rafters and crossbeams – for a building measuring 96 feet in width, 24 feet in height and 230 feet in length, the same being merely one of the units of a structure that very soon thereafter was up in the air and that measured 650 feet crosswise and 650 feet lengthwise, with railroad tracks stretching alongside and in between its various segments.

“When we laid out our original plans for this project the French said it would be entirely too large for our uses, no matter how big an army we brought over,” remarked to me a young ex-civilian, now wearing a captain’s markings on his flannel shirt, who had put through this undertaking. “Our people thought differently and we went ahead, trying to figure as we went along on all future contingencies. The result is that already we are enlarging upon the old specifications as rapidly as possible. Even so the supplies are piling up on us faster than we can store them. Look yonder.”

He pointed to a veritable mountain of baled hay – a regular Himalaya of hay – which covered a corner of the field whereon we stood. It towered high above the tops of the trees behind it; it stretched dear to the edge of the woodlands beyond, and it was crowned, as a mountain peak should be, with white; only in this instance the blanket was of canvas instead of snow.

“There are 80,000 tons of American baled hay in that pile,” he said, “and in a month from now if the present rate of growth keeps up it will be bigger by a third than it is now. It’s quite some job – taking care of this man’s army.”

In the midriff of the Intermediate Section is a project on which at this writing 10,000 men are at work, and on an air-service field adjoining it 3,000 more men are engaged. Exclusive of material for local construction purposes 500 carloads of strictly military supplies arrive here daily, and approximately 75 carloads a day move out. Later the ratio of outgoing equipment will increase, but the incoming amount is not liable to fall off very much. To house the accumulating mass here and elsewhere in the same zone, including as it does engineers’ stores, ordnance stores, fresh meats, salt meats, medical stores, harness, guns and quartermasters’ stores, there has been provided or will be provided 4,500,000 square feet of roof-covered space and 10,000,000 square feet of open storage space.

When I came that way the other day miles of the plain had been filled pretty thoroughly with buildings and with side tracks and wagon roads; and, scattered over a tract measuring roughly six miles one way and four miles the other, between 18,000 and 14,000 men were engaged. In January of this year, when a man who now accompanied me had visited the same spot, he said there was one building standing on the area, and that two side tracks were in use; all the rest was a barren stretch of snowdrifts and half-frozen mud and desolation. They were just beginning then to dig the foundations of our main cold-storage plant. It is finished and in operation to-day. Besides being a model plant it is the third largest cold-storage plant in the world, and yet it is to be distinguished from the sixty-odd buildings that surround it only by the fact that it is taller and longer and has more smokestacks on it than any of the rest.

At the principal depot of the Advance Section, where the chief regulating officer is stationed, one of the biggest jobs is to sort out the man provender as it flows in by rail and to fill up each of fifty or sixty track-side warehouses with balanced rations – so much flour, so much salt meat, so much of salt, sugar, lard, canned goods, pepper, vinegar, pickles, and so on, to each building; or else to load a building with balanced man equipment – comprising shoes, socks, underwear, shirts, uniforms and the rest of it down to shoe laces and buttons, the purpose of this arrangement being that when a warehouse is emptied the man who is in charge, even before checking up on the loading gangs, already knows almost to a pound or a stitch just how many rations or how many articles of apparel have gone forward.

In each warehouse the canned tomatoes, the vinegar and the stuff that contains mild acids are stored at the two ends of the building in crosswise barricades that extend to the roof. This disposal was an idea of the officer in control of the arrangement. He explained to us that in case of fire canned stuff bearing a heavy proportion of fluid would burn more slowly than the other foodstuffs, so there would be a better chance of confining the blaze to the building in which it originated and of preventing its spread to adjoining or adjacent buildings, which might be of brick or concrete or stone or sheet metal, but which are more apt to be of frame.

A British colonel on a visit of inspection to, our Service of Supplies visited this project on the same day that I came. Radiating admiration and astonishment at every step and at every stop, he accompanied the young first lieutenant who was in personal charge of the warehousing scheme on a tour of his domain, which covered miles. When the round had been completed and the lieutenant had saluted and taken himself away the Britisher said to the chief regulating officer:

“I have never seen anything so perfectly devised as your plan of operation and distribution here. I take it that the young man who escorted me through is one of your great American managing experts. I imagine he must have been borrowed from one of those marvellous mail-order houses of yours, of which I have heard so much. One thing puzzles me though – he must have come here fresh from business pursuits, and yet he bears himself like a trained soldier.”

The chief regulating officer smiled a little smile.

“That man,” he said, “is an old enlisted man of our little antebellum Regular Army. He didn’t win his commission until he came over here. Before that he was a noncom on clerical duty in the quartermaster’s department, and before that he was a plain private, and as far as I know he never worked a day for any concern except our own Government since he reached the enlisting age.”

In addition to doing what I should say at an offhand guess was the work of ten reasonably active men, the colonel who supervises our Advance Section has found time since he took over his present employment to organise a brass band and a glee dub among his personnel, to map out and stage-manage special entertainments for the men, to entertain visitors who come officially and unofficially, to keep several thousand individuals busy in their working hours and happy in their leisure hours, and at frequent intervals to write for the benefit of his command special bulletins touching on the finer sides of the soldier’s duties and the soldier’s discipline. He gave me a copy of one of his more recent pronouncements. He called it a memorandum; I called it a classic. It ran as follows:

“1. The salute, in addition to being a soldier’s method of greeting, is the gauge by which he shows to the world his proficiency in the profession, his morale and the condition of his discipline.

“2. For me the dial of a soldier’s salute has three marks, and I read his salute more accurately than he himself could tell me.

“3. The three gradations are:

(a) I am a soldier; I know my trade or will know it very soon, and I will be a success as a soldier or a civilian, wherever I may be put.

(b) I do not know what I am and do not care, I only do what I am forced to do, and will never be much of a success at anything.

(c) I am a failure and am down and out, sick, homesick and disgruntled. I cannot stand the gaff.

“4. As Americans try to conceal your feelings from our Allies.

“Remember you are just as much fighters here as you would be carrying a pail of food to the fighting line or actually firing a gun.

“Every extra exertion is an addition to the firing line direct.

“Every bit of shirking is robbing the firing line.”

“Buck Up!”

For qualities of human interest no joints in the snake’s spine, no twists in his manifold convolutions measure up, I think, to the salvage depots. Once upon a time, and not so very long ago, an army in the field threw away what it did not use or what through breakage or stress became unserviceable. That day is gone. In this war the wastage is practically negligible. Our people have learned this lesson from the nations that went into the war before we entered it, but in all modesty I believe, from what I have seen, that we have added some first-rate improvements to the plan in the few months that have been vouchsafed us for experiments and demonstrations. Moreover, to the success of our plans in this regard there have been difficulties that did not confront our Allies to the same extent. For instance our biggest motor-repair depot is housed in what formerly had been a French infantry barracks – a series of buildings that had never been devised for the purposes to which they are now put, and that at first offered many serious problems, mechanical and physical.

In tall brick buildings, under sheds and under tents and out in the open upon the old parade ground a great chain of machine shops, carpenter shops, paint shops, upholstery shops and leather-working shops has been coordinated and is cooperating to attain the maximum of possible production with the minimum of lost energy and lost effort. The scientist who reconstructs a prehistoric monster from a fossilised femur finds here his industrial prototype in the smart American mechanics who build up an ambulance or a motor truck from a fire-blackened, shell-riddled car frame, minus top, minus wheels, minus engine parts. What comes out of one total wreck goes into another that is not quite so totally so. And when a tool is lacking for some intricate job the Yank turns in and makes it himself out of a bit of scrap; and neither he nor his fellows think he has done anything wonderful either. It’s just part of the day’s work.

The salvage depot for human equipment and for lighter field equipment is established at this writing in what was, not so very long ago, a shop where one of the French railroad lines painted its cars. It began active operations last January with six civilian employees under an officer who four weeks before he landed in France was a business man in Philadelphia. In June it had on its pay rolls nearly 4,000 workers, mainly women and many of them refugees.

When all the floor space available – about 200,000 square feet of it – has been taken over the plant will have a personnel of about 5,000 hands, and it will be possible to do the reclamation work in clothing, shoes, rubber boots and slickers, harness and leather, canvas and webbing, field ranges, mess equipments, stoves, helmets, trenching tools, side arms, rifle slings, picks, shovels and metal gear generally for about 400,000 fighting men, with an estimated saving to Uncle Sam – exclusive of the vast sum saved in tonnage and shipping charges – of about $1,000,000 a month.

At this time 10,000 garments and articles of personal attire are passing through this plant every twenty-four hours, and coming out cleaned, mended, remade or converted to other purposes. A man could spend a week here, I feel certain, and not count his sight-seeing time as wasted. Among the men workers he would find invalided and crippled soldiers of at least six nations – America, Belgium, France, Greece, Serbia and Italy. Among the women workers, who average in pay seven francs a day – big wages for rural France – he would find many women of refinement and education hailing from evacuated districts in northern France and Belgium, whose faces bespeak the terrors and torments through which they have passed in the attempted implanting of the seeds of Kultur upon their homelands. Now they sit all day, driving sewing machines or managing knitting looms alongside their chattering, gossiping sisters of the peasant class.

And every hour in this beehive of industry the man who looked close would come upon things eloquently bespeaking the tragedy or the comedy of war’s flotsam and jetsam. Now perhaps it would be a battered German bugle picked up by some souvenir-loving soldier, only to be flung into the camp salvage dump when its finder wearied of carrying it; and now it would be a khaki blouse with a bullet hole in the breast of it and great brown stains, stiff and dry, in its lining. A talking machine in fair order, the half of a tombstone and the full-dress equipment of a captain of Prussian Hussars were among the relics that turned up at the salvage depot in one week.

There is no dump heap behind the converted paint bam, for the very good reason that practically there is nothing to dump. Everything is saved. The salvaged junk comes in by the carload lot from the Front – filthy, crumpled, broken, blood-crusted, verminous, tattered, smelly and smashed. Sorters seize upon it and separate it and classify it according to kind and state of disrepair. Men and women bear it in armloads to sterilisers, where live steam kills the lice and the lice eggs; thence it goes to the cleaning vats, after which it is sorted again and the real job of making something out of what seemed to be worse than nothing at all is undertaken, with experts, mainly Americans, to supervise each forward step in the big contract of renovation, restoration and utilisation.

After the body clothing has been made clean and odourless it is assigned to one of three classes, to wit: (a) Garments needing minor repairs and still sightly and serviceable, which are put in perfect order and reissued to front-line troops; (b) garments not so sightly but still serviceable, which are issued to S O S workers, including stevedores, labourers, railroad engineers, firemen and forestry workers; (c) garments that are not sightly but that will repay repairing. These are dyed green and given to German prisoners of war. Practically no new material is used for repair. Garments that are past salvation in their present shape are cut up to furnish patches. Three garments out of four are reclaimed in one form or another; the fourth one becomes scrap for patchings. Shoes are washed in an acid disinfectant that cleanses the leather without injuring its fabric, and then they are dried and greased before going in to the workers. Shoes that are worth saving are saved to the last one; those past saving are ripped apart and the uppers are cut into shoe strings, while the soles furnish ground-up leather for compositions. Thanks to processes of washing, cleansing and repairing, a salvage average of approximately ninety per cent, is attained in slickers and rubber boots.

Last spring the high military authorities decided to shorten the heavy overcoats worn by our soldiers, so it befalls that the lengths of cloth cut from the skirts of the overcoats are now being fashioned at the salvage plants into uppers for hospital slippers, while old campaign hats furnish the material for the soles. The completed article, very neat in appearance and very comfortable to wear, is turned out here in great numbers. Old tires are cooked down to furnish new heels for rubber boots. Old socks are unravelled for the sake of the wool in them. Tin receptacles that have held gasoline or oil are melted apart, and from their sides and tops disks are fashioned which, being coated with aluminum, become markers for the graves where our dead soldier boys have been buried. Smaller tins are smelted down into lumps and used for a dozen purposes. The solder from the cans is not wasted either. Even the hobnails of worn-down boot soles are saved for future use.

Master of theatrical trick and device that he is, none the less David Belasco could learn lessons at our camouflaging plant. He probably would feel quite at home there, too, seeing that the place has a most distinctive behind-the-scenes atmosphere of its own; it is a sort of overgrown combination of scenery loft, property room, paint shop and fancy-dress costumer’s establishment, where men who gave up sizable incomes to serve their country in this new calling work long hours seeking to improve upon the artifices already developed – and succeeding – and to create brand-new ones of their own.

As a branch of military modernism camouflaging is even newer than the trade of scientific salvaging is and offers far larger opportunities for future exploitation. After all there are just so many things and no more that may be done with and to a pair of worn-out rubber boots, but in the other field the only limits are the limits of the designer’s individual ingenuity and his individual skill.

We came, under guidance, to a big open-fronted barracks where hundreds of French women and French girls made screenage for road protection and gun emplacements. The materials they worked with were simple enough: rolls of ordinary chicken wire, strips of burlap sacking dyed in four colours – bright green, yellowish green, tawny and brown – and wisps of raffia with which to bind the cloth scraps into the meshes of the wire. For summer use the bright green is used, for early spring and fall the lighter green and the tawny; and for winter the brown and the tawny mingled. For, you see, camouflage has its seasons, too, marching in step with the swing of the year. Viewed close up the completed article looks to be exactly what it is – chicken wire festooned thickly with gaudy rags. But stretch a breadth of it across a dip in the earth and then fling against it a few boughs cut from trees, and at a distance of seventy-five yards no man, however keen-eyed, can say just where the authentic foliage leaves off and the artificial joins on.